We are running out of poetic ways to say this: life in Gaza is as precious as anywhere else on this earth. It must be protected with the same commitment and rigor and devotion.
– Hala Alyan
while i am absolutely still engaged, i am also old. and tired. been at actively trying to avoid this brand of very specific eventuality for a very long time. i’m also loving all of this newer activist energy. people write me a lot, asking how i haven’t completely burned out over time. so. fwiw…
notes to newer activists (or) things i wish i would’ve known 30 years ago (or) what i’ve learned so far:
activism without community leads to burnout. find your people. stay engaged. cultivate community. if you don’t have it, build it.
while we’re all aligned, there will inevitably be differing ideas. anchor into your values. the infighting will happen. that’s just a given. esp on the left. we’re famous for it.
you don’t have to do everything – just do a one thing. something. anything. and then do the next right thing.
ask yourself often – is my reaction and movement rooted in trauma response? adjust accordingly. work from a place of wholeness, as close as you can get to that. rage is fine. incredibly valid. but also embrace grief, love, joy, imagination, creativity, vision. they last longer. feel it all.
rest is resistance. it’s not a detour. or betrayal. community is resistance.
take news breaks. let your nervous system reset, as best as possible.
before actions or organizing, make a little ritual. get grounded in the present. a breath. a mantra. a magical rock in your pocket. after, return to rest. a quiet walk. a nap. a cup of tea. reflect in a journal. create a playlist of songs that soothe you. this is a reminder to your nervous system that right now you are safe, whole, human.
celebrate small wins. joy is also resistance. there will be far more of these.
you’re likely feeling a great sense of urgency. hold that by the edges. none of this happened overnight and it’s not going to be undone overnight. urgency culture is real. what’s an emergency? triage it, emotionally and practically.
observe, don’t absorb. act where/when you can. it takes all of us. it takes every moment you are able to give.
your heart will break. a lot. you’ll feel frustrated. it’s part of being aware. take care of you. a lot of trauma lives in activist spaces. the basics: sleep, eat, hydrate, move. the not so basic but also vitals: somatic work, breathing – the intentional kind. therapy.
keep learning, keep unlearning. being teachable, being open, stepping outside your comfort zone is radical. you don’t need to be a flawless activist, just show up. know you’ll screw something up. own it. adjust. shift.
vision: what are you fighting for, not just against. imagine it. draw it. write it. collage it. build it in micromoments.
healthy activism means you’re leaving it better than you found it.
get cozy with grief. it’s part of justice work. it honors what hasn’t changed. what’s been lost. grieve alone, grieve collectively.
visibility isn’t impact. anchor to your why. return to it often. not all social media posts are effective. not all social media posts are performative. but some are. will it have an impact? is it effective? things to ask you.
justice is a practice, not a purity test. guilt and shame backfire and will not lead to action. teach. welcome. provide on-ramps to action.
go back and find the activists throughout history that bring the fire for you.
there are certain words i always return to when i’m feeling despair. collect them to have at the ready.
stay open to wonder. look at the stars. listen to old songs. look at the sky. a river. babies. there’s a lot of beauty to fight for.
authoritarianism wants you tired, scared, joyless. your delight is resistance fuel. joy is resistance.
never forget. we are all connected. what happens to one of us happens to all of us. we are wired for connection. fierce individualism is killing us.
empathy is not weakness. it’s a lifeline. no matter what they say. don’t let the bastards grind you down.
mostly, thank you, deeply and sincerely, thank you, for whatever it is you are doing to make the world a better place. for knowing we are all connected. for acting accordingly.
– Kara Joy
The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.
– Cormac McCarthy
In pursuing his perceptions of reality, he [the poet] must often sail against the currents of his time.
– John F. Kennedy
The artist’s fidelity has strengthened the fibre of our national life.
– John F. Kennedy
There is a visceral
reaction when you know
something’s good.
And it doesn’t have
to make sense.
It’s not intellectual.
It transcends intellect.
– Rick Rubin
Tomorrow means I might / have her forever. Yesterday means / I say goodbye, again. / Kal means they are the same.
– Fatimah Asghar
Intelligence is not normally distributed.
– @naval
Letting go of thoughts in meditation calms them—but it doesn’t uproot our habits of self-fixation.
– Lama Kathy Wesley
Do not hold back your love, your joy, and your exuberance. Only what you give becomes your quality, not what you hold back.
– Sadhguru
Once you deeply realize there’s nothing to stabilize, the attempts to stabilize things stop.
This stopping is the original stabilization you were seeking, though not the one you thought you were looking for.
– @VinceFHorn
They tried to siphon your energy. They tried to lower your vibration. They tried spiritual warfare. And look at you, glowing with life force energy. You transformed it all into love.
– Nika Solé
Psychologically you develop in a spiral, you always come over the same point where you have been before, but it is never exactly the same, it is either above or below.
– CG Jung
And the empty pages?
Should they ever be filled
Let it be with observed
Celestial recurrences,
The day the flowers come,
And when the birds go.
– Philip Larkin
A kite in the shape
of a map floats
over the land it depicts,
but at night no one sees
its roads at the end
of which a child feels
his hand tugged upward,
disappearing
in salutations.
– Bill Knott
Collapsing generational curses and passing forward generational blessings, a lifestyle.
– Nika Solé
If we understand anything of the unconscious, we know that it cannot be swallowed. We also know that it is dangerous to suppress it, because the unconscious is life and this life turns against us if suppressed, as happens in neurosis.
– Carl G. Jung
Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
– Anne Carson
It is not enough to live, to experience life.
To be fully alive, we must also reflect on life;
and go beyond reflection to integration.
– Jungian-Senoi Dreamwork Manual
I am a drunkard from another kind of tavern. I dance to a silent tune. I am the symphony of stars.
– Rumi
What’s important about poetry
in the context of leadership
is that most of the time,
power has to do with dominance.
But poetry is never about dominance.
Poetry is powerful
but it cannot even aspire to dominate anyone.
It means making a connection.
That’s what it means.
– June Jordan
Of such loves unwrit, at the boundary layer
between earth and air,
I feel most clear.
– Jenny Johnson
The Buddha realized that old age, sickness, and death are not problems in themselves. It is the mind that makes them problems—by believing they shouldn’t happen, by insisting on figuring them out, resisting, controlling.
– Matthias Birk
One could laugh at the world better
if it didn’t mix tender kindliness
with its brutality.
– D. H. Lawrence
They’re going to want you to come in a nicely wrapped package of small, quiet, and digestible. But you’re an entire multiverse and they’re just going to have to learn how to navigate that, or get lost.
– Nika Solé
The dusty war of day is past;
Its uncompanioned lonely fears
Of yearning toil and hopeless tears
Grow mellow as they fade at last.
– Tolkien
Simplicity does not mean poverty or austerity. It is the conscious choice to reduce the superfluous in order to focus on the essential – what truly matters in life.
The more we clutter our lives with distractions, the less space we have for genuine contentment. Happiness thrives in simplicity, in moments of quiet presence rather than in the relentless pursuit of more.
– Matthieu Ricard
We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
– Gaston Bachelard
One of the great surprises on the human journey is that we come to full consciousness precisely by shadowboxing, facing our own contradictions, and making friends with our own mistakes and failings. People who have had no inner struggles are invariably superficial and uninteresting. We tend to endure them more than appreciate them because they have little to communicate and show little curiosity. Shadow work is what I call “falling upward.” God hid holiness quite well: the proud will never recognize it, and the humble will fall into it every day—not even realizing it is holiness.
– Richard Rohr
Our lives are lived as stories
Though their intrapsychic actors
May play from scripts whose scripting comes
From key genetic factors;
Our lives are understandable
In terms of mental rules
Though they respond, like puppets,
To brain protein molecules.
– Samuel Barondes
I always imagined I would write a book, if only a small one, that would carry one away, into a realm that could not be measured nor even remembered.
I imagined a lot of things. That I would shine. That I’d be good. I’d dwell bareheaded on a summit turning a wheel that would turn the earth and undetected, amongst the clouds, I would have some influence; be of some avail.
– Patti Smith
And That Is Why
And that is why I paced the corridors
Of those great museums
Gazing at paintings of a world
In which David is blameless as a boy scout
Goliath earns his shameful death
While eternal twilight dims Rembrandt’s canvases,
The twilight of anxiety and attention
And I passed from hall to hall
Admiring portraits of cynical cardinals
In Roman crimson
Ecstatic peasant weddings
Avid players at cards or dice
Observing ships of war and momentary truces
And that is why I paced the corridors
Of those renowned museums those celestial palaces
Trying to grasp Isaac’s sacrifice
Mary’s sorrow and bright skies above the Seine
And I always went back to a city street
Where madness pain and laughter persisted-
Still unpainted
– Adam Zagajewski
[…] like any human practices, those of religions are not exempt from ethical questioning. Rituals and rites in groups change behavior, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. For the madness of crowds is a very close cousin to the fervor or congregations and the martial spirit of armies.
– Simon Blackburn
The book opened / like a future or a grave.
– Traci Brimhall
He who jumps into the
void owes no explanation to
those who stand and watch.
– Jean-Luc Godard
But I am, as I say, an amateur. And if that means that I have neglected parts of my large field, devoting myself mainly to those things that I personally like, it does also mean that I have tried to awake liking, to communicate delight in those things that I find enjoyable.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Our innate Buddha nature is awake and yet has no shape or form—it is empty, and therefore cannot be tainted.
– Haemin Sunim
People cut off feeling by entering the rarefied world of intellect without extending down to contact the rest of the body that drags along like a unacknowledged guest.
– John P. Conger
Don’t chase the man away too quickly from the cabin where his childhood was spent.
– Friedrich Hölderlin
May your vibration, aura, and heart be so full of love, that any unkind or untrue criticisms or judgments from those that claim to love you (and those that don’t), never reach you. And may your grace protect you always.
– Nyle Beck
All a poet can do today is warn.
– Wilfred Owen
Lies cannot nourish or protect you. Only freedom from fear, freedom from lies, can make us beautiful, and keep us safe.
– Anne Lamott
Just be very careful about whose lead you’re following into the future. The majority of people leading, are lost.
– Nika Solé
winter stars
our meeting
un-arranged
– Tom Clausen
Each book creates its own system, because each comes from a different obsession, a different question that needs to be answered.
– Javier Cercas
When inward life dries up, when feeling decreases and apathy increases, when one cannot affect or even genuinely touch another person, violence flares up as a daimonic necessity for contact, a mad drive forcing touch in the most direct way possible.
– Rollo May
the shortest straw
in his hand
winter solstice
– El Coyote
Whatever your bar is for working with people, raise it.
– @naval
Never get discouraged when you lose awareness. Every time you recognize that you have lost awareness, be happy. The fact that you have recognized that you lost awareness means that you are now aware. Just keep looking at this process of losing and regaining awareness and learn from it.
– Sayadaw U Tejaniya
Is there anything we can do to alter the flow of things as they are? Whatever is happening is happening independent of us. Our feeling of control is utterly illusory. If we are honest we know this to be true. So we might as well stop resisting and accept it.
– Plato
Fasting focuses the mind – it replaces all desires with a single desire.
– @naval
The reading public bothers me, though. They don’t want to read about the blood and bones and guts of an issue. They want to read about something they’re not going to have to think about, and if it does hurt them… it won’t last very long. What has happened in this country is a failure of the imagination.
– Harry Crews
Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming … an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.
– John O’Donohue
Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming?
– Sylvia Plath
Compassion is not weakness and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism.
– Hubert Humphrey
At any point as an artist—like the universe itself—if you’re not expanding, you’re contracting.
– Jim Harrison
I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fade out, the real world evaporates. I’m alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world.
– Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Oppy, where
do we go when our work is done
and how will we know when it’s time?
– Neil Hilborn
Hate, it appears to me, is the heresy.
– Madeleine L’Engle
A writer or any artist can’t expect to be embraced by the people. I’ve done records where it seemed like no one listened to them. You write poetry books that maybe 50 people read. And you just keep doing your work because you have to, because it’s your calling.
– Patti Smith
If absolute truth exists, it must be available to everyone, everywhere, at all times.
Therefore, the path to truth cannot require any knowledge or effort.
– @naval
Any time you pay somebody to tell you what to do you’re going to be a loser. And this includes your psychiatrist, your psychologist, your broker, your workshop teacher and your etc.
There is nothing that teaches you more than regrouping after failure and moving on. Yet most people are stricken with fear. They fear failure so much that they fail. They are too conditioned, too used to being told what to do. It begins with the family, runs through school and goes into the business world.
– Charles Bukowski
Almost everyone has 10,000hr+ mastery of imaginal practice.
Mostly they use it to torture themselves, is the thing.
– River Kenna
I hope June
will bring us together.
– Jane Austen
To create an outside situation, you need the cooperation of other people and forces. To create an inner situation, you only need yourself.
– Sadhguru
Something new is brewing. Times are changing in a massive way. Power is being reclaimed. The real is remembering itself after having been forgotten for so long. The tables have officially turned.
– Nika Solé
My father, I seek no crowns,
But unspoken praise from thee;
For thy people’s good, and thy renown,
I will die to set them free.
– George MacDonald, Phantastes
Certainty lies on the far side of humanity, and to embrace it is to build a fortress that the winds in time will overturn.
– Pico Iyer
pitter/patter
by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes
(for a.g., you & yours)
the night is silver in its silence moon-pop echoes of the day raked up rubble of the hours spent
my, the children slumber a thousand tomorrows bubbling at their lips the dream projections lighting up the clouds’ ample cotton
relish the silence
as you’ll relish tomorrow and the honesty of such raucous noise, thick child feet of our unfeathered breasts, beasts we cherish
hallway run, sprints to smash the mash of food tumbling, rolling right into these arms charmed in their amnesia regarding where one begins or ends
reminding us of the joy of first step and the storm after the holler: mama see, mama watch
pitter/patter
pitter/patter
thunder on a hardwood, heartbeat this sole and counted rhythm
every generation a temporal fugitive running from the death grip every death ship’s watch, yesterdays we weren’t meant to make it through relish the memory ingrained in the sound how these tiny, tiny feet grip the floor, say
tomorrow, tomorrow
I make you
tomorrow
If your potential doesn’t make you at least a little bit nervous, you’re not looking at it closely enough.
– Nika Solé
Spirituality needs a beer and a loud burp. Sensuality needs a rough blanket and a hard bed and a cold night with the stars.
– Alan Watts
People think too much about eating.
Always ready to stuff something into their mouths.
Making pictures of their meals.
Even talking of food pron.
But when it comes to moving they have no clue what to do.
Tell someone to “just move”.
See what happens.
– @moveorperish
But when the great fall, the less must lead.
– Aragorn (Tolkien, The Two Towers)
To know how much there is to know is the beginning of learning to live.
– Dorothy West
Misfortune allows us to grow tired of beautiful things and shows us new ones with its outstretched fingers.
– Robert Walser, The Tanners (tr. Susan Bernofsky)
i love saturday night
he said then began
crying into his beer
– Chris Torrance
Germanic men believe that there resides in women an element of holiness and a gift of prophecy; and so they do not scorn to ask their advice, or lightly disregard their replies.
– Tacitus, 98 AD
I think that if at seventeen I’d known there’d be twelve books of poems (at that time I never imagined novels at all), I would feel pretty good. I’d say, ‘You did what was in you to do.’
– May Sarton
And it came to him then that it should never be taken lightly, the essential loneliness of people, that the choices they made to keep themselves from that gaping darkness were choices that required respect…
– Elizabeth Strout
Every time I think I have turned the page, he re-enters my life, awkward as a postscript.
– Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Sister of My Heart
He couldn’t seem to get his teeth into anything. Except books. The things in books was darn near more real to him than the things breathing and eating.
– Ken Kesey
This is what families do for each other — hide a few uncomfortable truths, allow a few self-deceptions. Little kindnesses… And little cruelties.
– Anne Tyler, French Braid
One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
– Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
The city shimmered in summertime like gemstone jewelry under a relentless sun.
– A. T. Steel, Honey Buns and Cream Soda in the Stairwell
Books covered every available surface and much of the floor. Leah loved books more than she loved anything in the world, but this . . . this seemed like a sickness, like an infestation of words.
– Jess Walter, So Far Gone
You don’t simply force yourself to become calm and equanimous regardless of events. You first have to find an inner sense of joy that comes from virtue, concentration, and discernment.
– Thānissaro Bhikkhu
Citizens should be governed and lead, not so as to become slaves, but so that they may freely do whatsoever things are best.
– Baruch Spinoza, Ethics
In fact, as you know, the first geisha were men (jesters and drummers). Their risky patter made the guests laugh. But by 1780 ‘geisha’ meant woman and the glamorous business of the tea houses had been brought under government control.
– Anne Carson
At midnight, in the month of June, I stand beneath the mystic moon.
– Edgar Allan Poe
Nothing ever becomes real till experienced – even a proverb is no proverb until your life has illustrated it.
– John Keats
To be true to myself, to be the person that was on the inside of me, and not play games. That’s what I’m trying to do mostly in the whole world, is to not bullshit myself and not bullshit anybody else.
– Janis Joplin
Theory is taught so as to make the student believe that he or she can become a Marxist, a feminist, an Afrocentrist, or a deconstructionist with about the same effort and commitment required in choosing items from a menu.
– Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
– T.S. Eliot
Do not disturb yourself by imagining your whole life at once.
– Marcus Aurelius
Failure can be the information you need to get where you’re going.
– Rick Rubin
No matter how much parents and grandparents may have sinned against the child, the man who is really adult will accept these sins as his own condition which has to be reckoned with. Only a fool is interested in other peoples guilt since he cannot alter it. The wise man learns only from his own guilt. He will ask himself: Who am I that all this should happen to me? To find the answer to this fateful question, he will look into his own heart.
– C.G. Jung
Like everything in life, if you are willing to make the short-term sacrifice, you’ll have the long-term benefit. ‘Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.’
– @naval
Admissions Essay I am a good student. Voted most likely to try harder. Not voted most likely for fairy tales, though I have been both hooded and wolfed. My honors thesis on the role of motherlessness and love hunger brought the candied
house down. I could’ve been valedictorian if the metrics were ardor and potential for transformation. I recognize the chemical structure of serotonin and how to calculate my best chance for a free drink from across the room, and both have strong angles.
I know how it feels when that hormone unlatches my ribs, silks my legs. I don’t confuse that with love, because in each unit of intimacy, I enter slow. Adjust my breath. Recognize the accusations that are confessions. I excelled in the serious ethics of kissing, how it makes the body more image than idea, but I admit that sometimes I like to lick mezcal and grapefruit from a hero’s morally ambiguous mouth. I’m sorry.
That’s how I know I’m a successful candidate. The temptations. The failures. The ever afters of forgiveness I have already lived. For so long, I offered others the love I wanted to receive, the cursive letters and lost slippers. The balanced equations and checkbooks. Years of service in the scales of care. Change my story. Accept me.
– Traci Brimhall
A Supermarket in California
by Allen Ginsberg
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I
walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-
conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the
neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping
at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in
the tomatoes!—and you, García Lorca, what were you doing
down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking
among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork
chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following
you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary
fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and
never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour.
Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add
shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue
automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what
America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you
got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear
on the black waters of Lethe?
You are the temple of God. You are the abode of the ultimate. So the question is not where to find truth, the question is: how have you lost it? The question is not where to go; you are already there – stop going.
– Osho
It’s shocking how many important life decisions I make by scouring Internet forums.
– @naval
Being on your phone in public is the most stupid you can do.
You miss out on potential beauty.
And you let down the only thing that guards you against potential danger.
There is nothing more idiotic than this.
– @moveorperish
Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
– John Updike
Joy is a physical experience. Thoughts may follow, but they are secondary.
– Jon Aaron
It is very dangerous when a wound is so common in a culture that hardly anyone knows that there is a problem. There is general discontent with our way of life but almost no one knows specifically where to look for its origin.
– Robert A. Johnson
Everything that you throw at me I will transform into a blessing, a boon.
– Epictetus
The thing I want and love in art is life force — experience is very nice too, but if you don’t have that yet (too young) it’s life force.
– Elisa Gabbert
Social media is a force multiplier for mass hysteria and mass greed.
– @naval
Ideally, the ultimate retreat is to retreat from the past and the future, to always remain in the present.
– Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche
Problems of passage arise here: magical lore must be forgotten, for it will be deceptive once the cosmic chase begins.
– Ernst Jünger
All a man has to do, is to better what he can.
– George MacDonald, Phantastes
Years ago, I worried that we were beginning to misuse the word “friend” to denote shallow online relations, to name-drop people we’ve met and admire who we wish were actual friends, and to otherwise commodify one of the most sacred relations in life.
I often puzzle over the nature, structure, and function of friendship in human life — a function I have found to be indispensable to my own spiritual survival and, I suspect, to that of most human beings. But during a recent interview on Think Again, I found myself concerned with the commodification of the word “friend” in our culture. We call “friends” peers we barely know beyond the shallow roots of the professional connection, we mistake mere mutual admiration for friendship, we name-drop as “friends” acquaintances associating with whom we feel reflects favorably on us in the eyes of others, thus rendering true friendship vacant of Emerson’s exacting definition. We have perpetrated a corrosion of meaning by overusing the word and overextending its connotation, compressing into an imperceptible difference the vast existential expanse between mere acquaintanceship and friendship in the proper Aristotelian sense.
– Maria Popova
be inspired by poetry
be perfected by music
– Confucius
If one is alive right now and, hopefully, trying to write about being alive right now, one can’t not write about the dark digital ponds into which we’re always looking for answers, diversions, and reassurances of our own beauty.
– Chris Ware
When a man sees his end, he wants to know there was some purpose to his life.
– Richard Harris
If you don’t want to go to the meeting right now, your future self won’t want to go to it later, either.
– @naval
“Measured Silence” … is sometimes what is needed …
– Dr Anish K Gupta
i
am
only
these jangling
night lights
fixed
to a spirit
pleading
for the next
break of dawn
– Dior J. Stephens
Your worldview is your world.
– @naval
They flung a mirror at me,
more magical than a witch’s wand,
more potent than a sorcerer’s hand.
Splintered into infinite cracks of choices
I had made, good or bad-
a door left ajar,
– @g_kotsakis
Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.
– Kurt Vonnegut
The best compete against nature, not against other humans.
– @naval
“competing against nature” is an autoimmune disease
– River Kenna
…Philology rescued the surviving documents from oblivion and ignorance, and presented to lovers of poetry and history fragments of a noble past that without it would have remained for ever dead and dark.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
I am restless and would rather sail a boat than crack a book.
– E. B. White
Greta Thunberg has more courage in her little finger than most Western leaders put together.
– Alan MacLeod
We practice learning that we can show up differently than the way that our habitual patterning often suggests that we should.
– Justin von Bujdoss
after graduation
still fresh
with regret
– Yu Wai
CREDO
after C. Miłosz
What good is poetry
if it doesn’t stand up
against the lies of government,
if it doesn’t rescue us
from the liars that mislead us?
What good is it
if it doesn’t speak out, denounce what’s going on?
It’s nothing
but harmless wordplay
to titillate and distract –
the government knows it,
and can always get rid of us if we step out of line.
That I believed in poetry,
even when I betrayed it,
that I came back to its central meaning
– to save the world –
this and only this
has been my salvation.
– Edward Field
What is a Wanderess? Bound by no boundaries, contained by no countries, tamed by no time, she is the force of nature’s course.
– Roman Payne
Everything you do reverberates throughout a thousand destinies. As you walk, you cut open and create that river bed into which the stream of your descendants shall enter and flow.
– Nikos Kazantzakis
Being a Lake
He has never dreamed of being a lake
in the high mountains, and now he wonders why.
Surely there could be no better, in the way
of dreamy aspirations: to be clear and cold
and swum through by trout. To allow the sunlight
far into your depths, to have depths no one
will ever visit. To be ceilinged by ice
and many feet of snow in winter, to shine pure blue
into the pure blue of the sky, to show the stars
the stars, to be drunk by wild animals.
And to admit an occasional human,
who, because of the memory of having been there,
might dream of being there. Being there.
Not a visitor but a dreamer, dreaming
this very lake is what he’s always wanted to be.
– Robert Wrigley
“I missed you,” she said, “until the day we met.”
– Atticus
Even if you’ve read through countless books
You’re better off sticking to a single phrase
If anyone asks which one, tell him:
‘Know your own mind just as it is.’
– Ryokan
Often it seems we must undertake the longest of journeys to arrive at what has been nearest all along. Mornings rarely find us so astounded at the new day that we are unable to decide between adventures. We take on days with the same conditioned reflex with which we wash and put on clothes each morning. If we could be mindful of how short our time is, we might learn how precious each day is.
– John O’Donohue
You can’t speak anything truly worth hearing until you transcend your humanity and receive words from above.
– Eugene Terekhin
Civilized comfort
attracts barbarian
conquest.
– Will Durant
The older the problem, the older the solution. How to eat well is one of the oldest problems.
– @naval
“Enter eagerly into the treasure-house that lies within you,” wrote St. Isaac the Syrian, “and so you will see the treasure-house of heaven.”
– Pico Iyer
you build a vast apparatus to suppress & malform entire regions of your life-force; over time, this turns your life into a grey little war of you-vs-you
Kali comes along, wrecks the apparatus, liberates all that life force — & you’re what, *scared* of her? *resentful* of her??
– River Kenna
A strait between his heart and mine
is lined with dandelions,
each wish holding us together—
fragile threads of longing.
But it’s only a dream
I see with open eyes.
– @chandanas
I prefer loneliness to alternatives I can envision. […] I’d rather read a book, or better bits and pieces of about ten books.
– Alice Notley
The inner critic wants control, but real transformation arises beyond our grasp.
– Gavin Milne
Most people are unhappy; and they are unhappy because there is no love in their hearts. Love will arise in your heart when you have no barrier between yourself and another, when you meet and observe people without judging them….
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
He thinks history starts fresh every day, every minute, that time itself begins with the feelings he’s having right now. That’s how he keeps betraying us, why he roars at us with such conviction.
– Jane Smiley
I’ve seen far more people’s lives ruined from psychiatric drugs than street drugs. Those who were negatively affected by street drugs could be admitted to rehab centres with endless support. Those facing damage from psychiatric drugs do not have such an outlet, they’re ignored.
– Brad Schipke
It was a fine cry — loud and long — but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.
– Toni Morrison
Well-being is like a virus. One self-assured person at home in this world can infect dozens of others. Wouldn’t you like to see an epidemic of infectious well-being?
– Richard Powers
The educated person lives entirely for the future. His life is struggle; his sustenance and purpose: learning and art. The more one learns to live no longer in moments but in years etc., the nobler one becomes. The hurried unrest, the petty doings of the spirit are transformed into great, calm, simple, and comprehensive activity, and splendid patience arrives.
– Novalis, Last Fragments
If my block is my sangha, then the stoop provides two opportunities for seeking refuge: privacy and participation. Seeking refuge, in this sense, is an emergence into the belief that privacy and participation are sincere and courageous choices that can lead to freedom.
– Lauren Krauze
Mysteries abound where most we seek for answers.
– Ray Bradbury
What I fear is not the enemy’s strategy, but our own mistakes.
– Thucydides
When things seem to have reached that stage, merely say I won’t play any longer, and take your departure; but if you stay, stop lamenting.
– Epictetus
Covid has receded in people’s minds. But not completely in mine. I still grieve for what we all lost during that dark time—a sense of connection, a fabric of community, the feel of a hug or of shaking hands.
– Lewis Richmond
In politics, an absurdity is not a handicap.
– Napoleon Bonaparte
Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man.
– Maurice Merleau-Ponty
My journal has become the journal of
you.
It is full of you – brimming full.
– Anais Nin in a letter to Henry Miller
The student continued, “How long must one remain in the dark” and I replied, “Until one can see in the dark,” and “Casting the burden enables one to see in the dark.”
– Florence Scovel Shinn
Man’s only enemies are within himself.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
The most potent transformations occur in silence, beneath the surface.
– Esoteric Aphorism
Beneath worry, fear, stress, and anger, there is something beautiful waiting to arise and be transformed.
– Hiral Nagda
Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.
– José Saramago
A good conscience is a continual feast.
– Robert Burton
The knight is…not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth.
– C.S. Lewis, The Necessity of Chivalry
It’s ok to want to get into states.
That’s just not awakening.
– @VinceFHorn
It’s also not not awakening, for those that catch the drift.
– @VinceFHorn
Health is
adding a level
of intention to
every area of
your life.
– Miranda Anderson
TO THE QUISLINGS
to the quislings,
to the cowards,
to those thirsting
after power: heaven and history
will record
what you do.
to the obsequious, to the toadies,
to the lackeys, to the yes-men.
to the go-along-to-get-along,
return-on-your-investment,
in the fall of Rome
you call your home
heaven and history
are witnessing
to the Bezos and Zucks
to the Murdochs and Musks
controlling our thoughts
with trolls and bots
to the fascists who would ruin
all the world
to rule the ashes.
to the vote suppressors, disenfranchisers, and Jim-Crow-Juniors:
heaven and history are recording what you do.
to those filled with rage
who can’t tell this will
not
age
well.
to the tuned-out, apathetic,
“both-sides”-ers in the middle
who won’t do a thing
‘cause you can only do a little.
to the 80 million folks
with better things to do than vote
but especially to all of you
in powerful positions.
the editors-in-chief,
the billionaires,
the politicians:
heaven and history are recording
what you do. the whole world is watching
and the little ones, too.
history and heaven
are recording your example
and the downtrodden,
trampled-upon masses
never
stay
trampled.
so, to the powers of the hour:
don’t be shocked to see
a hundred million folks
standing up for democracy.
we can win—
we’ve got to begin, though.
the climate’s cooked—
the window’s closing.
now is the time
we need dreaming—
not dozing
to everyone around the world
who won’t cease
to work for workers, solidarity,
the planet, justice, peace
heaven and history
are supporting
what you do
to those who,
in the spirit of love,
are steadfast and brave,
history and heaven
will remember your name.
– Drew Dellinger
Hippies. They make them out to be bad. I’m not bad. I love everybody. Well, I like everybody.
– Michael J. Pollard
The big thing no one was expecting to happen, that no one had ever imagined could happen, was happening in all the unexpected and unimaginable ways that big things tend to happen.
– Paul Auster
Not everything needed to rise to converge: It could just drift together into the indiscernible middle, and bewilder you.
– Jonathan Lethem
Philosophy is an even more down-trodden occupation than poetry these days. But since every skill-type has its distinct glories, many still philosophize on their own recognizance, groping toward the enduring mysteries of existence, any of which could lead to those revelations of transcendent truth that tend to catalyze identity mutations, both personal and social. All of the living go through identity mutations involving new ways of seeing one’s self or world, whatever you like to call it. Yet such conceptual shifts of perspective are rarely describable in scientific or pragmatic terms. There’s no way to make a clear-cut school or equation for developing these genuine truths, which are not necessarily religious, because, who knows? Not that everything “wise” is intuitive. But we do know that, when lacking the intuitive spirit of wisdom known and valued throughout the ages there is less potential for significant and enduring developments.
As the metaphysical seed of one’s being, one’s intuition is the vision quester, the overarching sense of a continuity that, transcending all the details of impulse, interpretation, desire, memory, and judgment, still ties them together in ways that can never be mapped, a package never packaged, a name that cannot be named. Thus the mystic needs to be free to romance the whole buzzing, blooming cosmos of potentialities still asking to be born from a mustard seed of hope.
– George Gorman
It is time for us to take off our masks and admit we are lovers, engaged in an erotics of PLACE. We love the land. It is a primal affair, and it leads to a politics of place.
– Terry Tempest Williams
At the end of the day, or the end of my life, what will give me the most satisfaction is if I’ve participated in this small piece of heavenly earth in a way that made it healthier, more complex and biodiverse, more of a refuge.
– Helen Whybrow
A Toad, can die of Light –
Death is the Common Right
Of Toads and Men –
Of Earl and Midge
The privilege –
Why swagger, then?
The Gnat’s supremacy is large as Thine –
Life – is a different Thing –
So measure Wine –
Naked of Flask – Naked of Cask –
Bare Rhine –
Which Ruby’s mine?
– Emily Dickinson
The grammar of animacy teaches us that all the world is alive. Rocks and mountains, plants and rivers, fish and birds—all are spoken of with the same respect as humans.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
THE VIEWPOINT OF HEALTH
According to the Buddhist perspective there are problems, but they are temporary and superficial defilements that cover over one’s basic goodness (tathagatagarbha). This viewpoint is a positive and optimistic one. But, again, we should emphasize that this viewpoint is not purely conceptual. It is rooted in the experience of meditation and in the healthiness it encourages. There are temporary, habitual neurotic patterns that develop based on past experience, but these can be seen through. It is just this that is studied in the abhidharma, the Buddhist teachings on psychology: how one thing succeeds another, how volitional action originates and perpetuates itself, how things snowball. And, most importantly, abhidharma studies how through meditation practice this process can be cut through.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The more I wrote, the more I remembered. The more I remembered, the more I returned to myself.
– Zoë Bossiere
People tell you the world looks a certain way. Parents tell you how to think. Schools tell you how to think. TV. Religion. And then at a certain point, if you’re lucky, you realize you can make up your own mind. Nobody sets the rules but you. You can design your own life.
– Carrie-Anne Moss
War is a mere continuation of politics by other means.
– Carl von Clausewitz
Education . . . has become an institution whose purpose in the modern world is not to make culture, not to serve the living cosmos, but to harness humankind to the dead forces of materialism.
– Robert Sardello
The tension here is that a lot of creativity is bound up in some sense of not doing consensus, being a little dangerous, sometimes being blunt. These are also qualities that people worry about giving superintelligence. But you probably can’t get smart, helpful partners if you don’t allow them some level of freedom here in exactly this domain.
– Jack Clark
The rebrand after coming out of a dark night of the soul is the realest one of all. You’re not even in the same lifetime anymore.
– Nika Solé
If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.
– Thomas Ligotti
More important than finding out who you are may be finding out who you are not and in fact cutting through the illusion of a self.
– Pico Iyer
God likes to play hide-n-seek, but because there is nothing outside of God, he has no one but himself to play with! But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself.
– Alan Watts
If you have a body, you are entitled to the full range of feelings. It comes with the package.
– Anne Lamott
Leave the world alone, mentally. Physically you will gravitate to where you’re supposed to be and go through the experiences that you’re supposed to go through. Yet do not react to them, leave everything alone.
– Robert Adams
Art is an instrument of such delicate construction that its hypersensitive and delicate antennae can detect the light that ‘shineth in darkness’, the ‘light that never was on sea or land’.
– Kenneth Grant
I don’t think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.
– Margaret Atwood
Books are a way of learning to feel more acutely.
– Marguerite Yourcenar
It’s not activity that disturbs people, but false conceptions of things that drive them mad.
– Seneca
…as it lightened, a vast and magnificent landscape unfolded. I turned away; it was immensely satisfying.
– J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country
(Distorted memories) keep calling,
like an invisible thread,
and I have no time to understand…
– Land of Iron
stone buddha not the church-going type
– Karma Tenzing Wangchuk
Meditation means
Remaining unrelated with your thought process.
Utterly unrelated, cool, calm.
Watching whatsoever is passing.
– Osho
Those who do not observe the movements of their own minds must of necessity be unhappy.
– Marcus Aurelius
The free market, according to some, is a meritocracy, and unworthy corporations or people get weeded out. To put it another way, only the strong survive.
– Anthony Tshering
We have been taught that the going-away of life is against life, but as a matter of fact, life is entirely something that always goes away. Going away–dissolving–is the same thing as living. But if we are taught that dying is against life, then we can’t live.
– Alan Watts
We are stronger, gentler, more resilient, and more beautiful than any of us imagine.
– Mark Nepo
a quiet kind of love
autumn crocus
– Greg Piko
There is nothing more revealing than to see a thinking person walking, just as there is nothing more revealing than to see a walking person thinking… Walking and thinking are in a perpetual relationship that is based on trust.
– Thomas Bernhard
If only America would realize that the art of Europe is finished – dead – and that America is the country of the art of the future, instead of trying to base everything she does on European traditions!
– Marcel Duchamp
May the wind under your wings bear you where the sun sails and the moon walks…
– Gandalf (Tolkien, The Hobbit)
pouring rain;
the dog looks away
from the open door
– Kurt Brobeck
echoes
from a mountain waterfall
flickering sunlight
– Chen-ou Liu
There are no safe paths in this part of the world. Remember you are over the Edge of the Wild now, and in for all sorts of fun wherever you go.
– Gandalf (Tolkien, The Hobbit)
VALUE
the weapons I purchased
didn’t finish off the fascists
the love I sold my own for
did not put paid to them either
why’d I never think to try
whatever it was I got free
– Bill Knott
hydrangeas
resemble a crowd
of demon faces
– Taijirō Amazawa
No matter what fools one’s children were, as long as they did not slap land deeds on a gambling table they were safe.
– Eileen Chang
If you call yourself a mushroom you must go into the basket.
– Russian proverb
Destiny can extinguish me…
– Tomaž Šalamun
Anger has a peculiar quality of isolation. Like sorrow, it cuts you off, and for the time being, all relationship comes to an end.
– Krishnamurti
Mindfulness helps us slow down, gain awareness, and buffer our reactive tendencies.
– Valerie Brown
Each of us has a so-called masculine task, and each of us has a so-called feminine task. . . Our summons is both to be and to do; it is to nurture and to define; it is to be at home and to journey.
– James Hollis
Freedom ought not to be a declaration of the rights of man; it ought to be a declaration of man’s obligations, of the duty of man to be a personality, to display the strength of the character of personality.
– Nikolai Berdyaev
It’s… amazing to realize I’m the last one left from my little nuclear family. It’s like being a lighthouse keeper on an empty island, trying to keep the flame alive.
– Anderson Cooper
All rivalry is stupid; it looks to the harm of one’s enemy instead of to one’s own advantage.
– Democritus
In the center of an irrational universe governed by an irrational Mind stands rational man.
– Philip K. Dick
I am x in an indeterminate equation.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Within, within. This is where the world’s treasure has always been.
– Lao Tzu
Where the poet can sing, the people can live.
– James Baldwin
Spend your time in the company of geniuses, sages, children, and books.
– Naval Ravikant
Arm yourself with specific knowledge
– Naval Ravikant
Do not argue even when you are right.
– Imam Ali
Regrets are as personal as fingerprints.
– Ernest Hemingway
Fiction writers write — we write — inwardly, as if the novel were, really, the long echo of a repressed poem.
– Alejandro Zambra
America is the only country whose path from barbarism to decadence doesn’t lead through culture.
– George Clemenceau
The reason some people get lost in thought is because it is unfamiliar territory.
– Paul Fix
All culture, whatever significance it may have, just as all education, civilization, development, is absolutely powerless to renew the inner man.
– Herman Bavinck
It is spiritless to think that you cannot attain to that which you have seen and heard the masters attain.
– The Book of the Samurai
Prayer is telephoning to God, and intuition is God telephoning to you.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
I love to go and see all the things I am happy without.
– Socrates on going to the market
The true and solid peace of nations consists not in equality of arms, but in mutual trust alone.
– Pope John XXIII
self-esteem is the reputation that you have with yourself. You’ll always know.
– Naval Ravikant
I write to escape. I haven’t managed it yet, but I’m working on it.
– William Meikle
Virtually everything that is ‘wrong with you’ started as a survival mechanism in childhood. Therefore it deserves nothing but respect and compassion.
– Gabor Mate
If Israel deserves a minute of silence then Palestine deserves the world to never speak again.
– Karim Wafa Al-Hussaini
The opposite of knowledge is not ignorance, but deceit and fraud.
– Post-Modernism: A Graphic Guide
My treasure lies in my friends.
– Alexander the Great
Having a vast amount of unconsidered knowledge is of less value than a smaller, fully considered amount. True comprehension comes from combining knowledge and comparing truths.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
You’re not just a soul in a body. You’re a body in a story …ready to be rewritten by the soul.
– Jared Brandall
If art disappears, people will have to face reality even more. And let me tell you—reality does not care about our feelings. There would be more violence, more pain, more discomfort.
– Frederick Phoenix
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in, some of us just go one god further.
– Richard Dawkins
The want to dominate and diminish is rooted in ignorance of God as Father.
– Rowan Williams
TOGETHER
I remember learning about the underground network of fungi that allows trees to communicate silently, to exchange water and nutrients with one another, to sense when a weakened or sick fellow needs assistance; what look like discrete trees to those of us standing on the soil above is actually one interconnected entity. Are we humans really any different? Do our emotions truly live within each of us, encased in these crenulated blobs of brain like we’ve been told? Or do they pulse and flow and surge between us, in this tumultuous, sensate ocean in which we all swim? I was right all along: I have no individual self.
And what wonderful news that is. We’re born sensitive and vulnerable; this is for a reason. We are designed to tell stories and bear witness and see ourselves in others. To absorb, and reflect, and mimic; to give, and receive, and commune. We need one another to be alive. We’re built for tribes and villages and neighborhoods and potluck dinners. We’re meant to feel it all, and bear it all, together.
– Laura Delano
There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
Purple sadness is the sadness of classical music and egg- plant, the stroke of midnight, human organs, ports cut off for part of every year, words with too many meanings, in- cense, insomnia, and the crescent moon. It is the sadness of play money, and icebergs seen from a canoe. It is possible to dance to purple sadness, though slowly, as slowly as it takes to dig a pit to hold a sleeping giant. Purple sad- ness is pervasive, and goes deeper into the interior than the world’s greatest nickel deposits, or any other sadness on earth. It is the sadness of depositories, and heels echo- ing down a long corridor, it is the sound of your mother closing the door at night, leaving you alone.
– Mary Ruefle
After Many Springs
by Langston Hughes
Now,
In June,
When the night is a vast softness
Filled with blue stars,
And broken shafts of moon-glimmer
Fall upon the earth,
Am I too old to see the fairies dance?
I cannot find them any more.
The Dancing
In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture
and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots
I have never seen a postwar Philco
with the automatic eye
nor heart Ravel’s “Bolero” the way I did
in 1945 in that tiny living room
on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did
then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming,
my mother red with laughter, my father cupping
his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance
of old Ukraine, the sound of his skin half drum,
half fart, the world at last a meadow,
the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us
screaming and falling, as if we were dying,
as if we could never stop – in 1945 –
in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburg, home
of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away
from the other dancing – in Poland and Germany –
oh God of mercy, oh wild God
– Gerald Stern
From my experience I cannot doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrial consciousness, is indeed sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different nature from the life we know, and of which only the slightest and most indistinct memories linger after waking. From those blurred and fragmentary memories we may infer much, yet prove little. We may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.
– H. P. Lovecraft
THE WILD IRIS
At the end of my suffering
there was a door.
Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.
Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.
It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.
Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.
You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:
from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.
– Louise Gluck
BE NOT INHOSPITABLE TO STRANGERS
LEST THEY BE ANGELS IN DISGUISE
This is the upstairs at Shakespeare and Company Bookstore on the left bank in Paris facing Notre Dame. It’s a riff on the Bible’s “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” I was thinking about the inscription the other day, and realizing that I no longer thought it quite so inspiring. Be hospitable to strangers, whether or not they might be angels in disguise, and perhaps if they’re demons your hospitality will disarm them, or perhaps your acts of grace and generosity will make you an angel in disguise yourself. Whoever they are, you have the option of which version of yourself to bring forth.
That is, it’s your own angelic or asshole nature at stake here. We should do what we do because of who we ourselves are rather than who other people are. There are definitely people who are outright menaces approaching, but toward others unknown and known most of how we conduct ourselves is about who we are, not who they are. It is better to be kind than unkind to someone who didn’t deserve it, and it’s not necessarly kindness that makes you a sucker. Hospitality is an old-fashioned virtue and necessary to survival in some of the more remote and harsh parts of the world, but it also exists in everyday interactions, or doesn’t, anywhere and everywhere. Including here, online.
Here’s a version of the great story of Milarepa and his eventual hospitality to demons: O “One day, the yogi Milarepa was chopping firewood in the Red Rock Jewel Valley, high up in the mountains of Tibet. After a long day in the cold, he returned to his cave to find a troop of nasty demons. They were eating his food, sleeping in his bed, and reading his books.”
“Now, Milarepa was a yogi and he understood that these demons were really only projections from his own mind: all of his bad habits, jealousies, and anxieties. So, he sat down on the cave floor and started to preach the Dharma to the demons, but they didn’t listen and continued their mischief. Fed up and tired, Milarepa attacked the demons with his fists and tried to force them from his cave. But, when the yogi’s fists did nothing, the cave echoed with the demon’s laughter.”
“Exhausted, Milarepa sat back down on the cave floor and announced that, since he couldn’t get rid of them, he would let the demons stay and he asked them if they wanted anything to eat. When he said this, all but one of the demons vanished into thin air. Then Milarepa understood.”
“The last demon in the cave was the biggest of the troop. He flashed his pointed teeth and taunted Milarepa. Then, Milarepa said, “Well, you can eat me, then!” and he put his head inside the demon’s mouth. Then, even that demon disappeared and Milarepa enjoyed peace and quiet for the first time in his life.”
– Rebecca Solnit
Then the storm broke, and the dragons danced.
– George R.R. Martin
The wonder of a moment in which there is nothing but an upwelling of simple happiness is utterly awesome. Gratitude is so close to the bone of life, pure and true, that it instantly stops the rational mind, and all its planning and plotting. That kind of let go is fiercely threatening. I mean, where might such gratitude end?
– Regina Sara Ryan
The generally expressed desire of “America first” cannot be criticized. It is a perfectly correct aspiration for our people to cherish. But the problem which we have to solve is how to make America first. It cannot be done by the cultivation of national bigotry, arrogance, or selfishness. Hatreds, jealousies, and suspicions will not be productive of any benefits in this direction. Here again we must apply the rule of toleration. Because there are other peoples whose ways are not our ways, and whose thoughts are not our thoughts, we are not warranted in
drawing the conclusion that they are adding nothing to the sum of civilization. We can make little contribution to the welfare of humanity on the theory that we are a superior people and all others are an inferior people. We do not need to be too loud in the assertion of our own righteousness. It is true that we live under most favorable circumstances. But before we come to the final and irrevocable decision that we are better than everybody else we need to consider what we might do if we had their provocations and their difficulties. We are not likely to improve our own condition or help humanity very much until we come to the sympathetic understanding that human nature is about the same everywhere, that it is rather evenly distributed over the surface of the earth, and that we are all united in a common brotherhood. We can only make America first in the true sense which that means by cultivating a spirit of friendship and good will, by the exercise of the virtues of patience and forbearance, by being “plenteous in mercy,” and through progress at home and helpfulness abroad standing as an
example of real service to humanity.
– Calvin Coolidge
If you think about it seriously, all the questions about the soul and the immortality of the soul and paradise and hell are at bottom only a way of seeing this very simple fact: that every action of ours is passed on to others according to its value, of good or evil, it passes from father to son, from one generation to the next, in a perpetual movement.
– Antonio Gramsci
Everyone, in some small sacred sanctuary of the self, is nuts.
– Leo Rosten
Castilian
by Elinor Wyle
Velasquez took a pliant knife
And scraped his palette clean,
He said, “I lead a dog’g own life
Painting a king and queen.”
He cleaned his palette with oily rags
and oakum from Seville wharves,
“I am sick of painting painted hags
And bad ambiguous dwarves.”
“The sky is silver, the clouds are pearl,
Their locks are looped with rain
I will not paint Maria’s girl
For all the money in Spain”
H washed his face in water cold,
His hands in turpentine;
He squeezed out colour like coins of gold
And colour like drops of wine.
Each cooler lay like a little pool,
On the polished cedar wood,
Clear and pale and ivory-cool
Or dark as solitude
He burnt the rags in the fireplace
and leaned from the windows high;
He said, “I like that gentleman’s face
Who wears his cap awry.”
This is the gentleman, there he stands,
Castilian, sombre-caped,
With arrogant eyes, and narrow hands
Miraculously shaped.
Why did men worship in churches, locking themselves away in the dark, when the world lay beyond its doors in all its real glory?
– Charles de Lint
It’s so interesting that AI is supposedly “getting better at everything” at an exponential rate. Because I haven’t been able to get any of the AI programs I have tested to produce one haiku that would make it past my first cut for any of the challenges or contests that I oversee. And I mean, not one. Even when I told it what to read. Even when I coached it on the basics of “haiku humor,“ the so-called “turn of thought,” and capturing the essential spirit of the “season word” that is the focus of all traditional haiku. It just can’t grasp the basic gestalt of the form.
And so, at least for now, my job seems to be secure. Which is ironic, since more than a few CEO’s of major companies have said their jobs could be on the line in the near future. Who knew it was harder to teach haiku than to be a CEO.
– Clark Strand
If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.
– Michael Crichton
Love is anterior to life,
posterior to death,
initial of creation,
and the exponent of breath.
– Emily Dickinson
The unintended consequence of scrubbing Harvey Milk’s name from a Navy ship is now everyone’s talking about him. Keep talking.
– Dan Rather
I can’t tell you what prayer is,
but I can take the breath
of the meadow into my mouth,
and I can release it for the leaves’
green need. I want to tell you
your life is a blue coal, a slice
of orange in the mouth,
cut hay in the nostrils. The cardinals’
red song dances in your blood
Look, every month the moon
blossoms into a peony,
then shrinks to a sliver of garlic.
And then it blooms again.
– Barbara Crooker
Sometimes love looks like small things. Gentle gestures rich with import. We give such things to one another at times without even realizing it. Tiny soul-saving acts.
– Tracy K. Smith
What Orwell failed to predict was that we’d buy the cameras ourselves, and that our biggest fear would be that nobody was watching.
– Keith Jensen
A heart that loves and
forgives is stronger than one
that hates.
– Anne Frank
You think I asked for
this dream
spanning an entire known world.
– CA Conrad
HOW WE HUNT
Ain’t it silly? How we toil
day & night? Callused hands
cramp for such uncertainty. Ever
the beaver bustling, making dam-
nation, a wall of sticks
meant to stop tsunamis. So
impractical how we hunt
sunken chests with no promise
of glittering insides. Ever seaside
shoveling, cracking clams, we oughta
slow down. Enjoy the song
the ocean sings. Relish
the last breaths
of a planet. The sweetest
death rattle never heard.
– Ty Chapman
If It’s the Last Thing I Do
by Dorianne Laux
This green-lit world in autumn, falling
to red, to rust, Midas-touched, as fuses
are torched and rockets flare into blue
over the Pacific, two grown men squaring
off in the schoolyard, too stupid to fear,
too numbed by power to feel the air
riding over the bare skin of their soft
hands, not a lick of a good day’s work
between them, TV host of sleepless nights,
childhood’s parents fighting in the kitchen,
someone throwing a pot of gold against a wall.
Equal as all get out in giving in to their lesser
angels, those seraphim that tumbled through
clouds of coal ash and acid rain and landed
on their feet, miraculously unscathed, but
with an unworldly ability to hate. Of late,
the trees are turning skeletal in preparation
for the shivery winter, pall of snow
laid down on the earth like a funeral cloth.
We may not live to see another spring,
another yellow summer, another flood,
another famine, another war. Maybe this
is that time when we wished them dead, our
parents, go ahead we thought as we lay
in our beds, just get it over with, and do
what you keep promising with a raised fist
will be the last goddamned thing you ever do.
Concentration of power in a political machine is bad; and an Established Church is only a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and does no good which it could not better do in a split-up and scattered condition.
– Mark Twain
One day the iceman came no more.
Neither did the coalman with his telescopic chute.
– Prartho Sereno
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.
– Miguel de Unamuno
Narcissism denotes an investment in one’s image as opposed to one’s self. Narcissists love their image, not their real self. They have a poor sense of self . . . Their activities are directed toward the enhancement of their image, often at the expense of the self.
– Alexander Lowen
The sins of the ancestors continue down the generations until one person comes to consciousness and redeems the curse.
– Sally Kester
Tell me about despair, yours,
and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
– Mary Oliver
Protocols are great but making some of them (that you deem best for you) into rituals is especially transformative, because it makes them non-negotiable. What are your daily rituals? What do you never fail to do?
– Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D.
Our experience of the world is not the world itself—it’s a perceptual image created by the mind.
– Guo Gu
Isolation and loneliness are not the same. I can be isolated…without being lonely; and I can be lonely…without being isolated.
– Hannah Arendt
sadly
humanity
has not gotten
so bad
that we decide
to do better
– Andy Perrin
People get absolutely intolerable when they have a creative idea in their womb and can’t bring it out. They’re neurotic, aggressive, irritable, and depressed. So then one has to help them bring the child out.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
This season is all about burning the path that ties you to the past and allowing a whole new timeline to wake itself up through you.
– Nika Solé
The body is the medium through which the soul enacts itself. No matter how blocked the medium is, unless it is completely destroyed the body will still register the soul’s activity. [Whether the signals are picked up or rejected is another question.]
– Marion Woodman
This is a Wonderful Poem
by David Wagoner
Come at it carefully, don’t trust it, that isn’t its right name,
It’s wearing stolen rags, it’s never been washed, its breath
Would look moss-green if it were really breathing,
It won’t get out of the way, it stares at you
Out of eyes burnt gray as the sidewalk,
Its skin is overcast with colorless dirt,
It has no distinguishing marks, no I.D. cards,
It wants something of yours but hasn’t decided
Whether to ask for it or just take it,
There are no policemen, no friendly neighbors,
No peacekeeping busybodies to yell for, only this
Thing standing between you and the place you were headed,
You have about thirty seconds to get past it, around it,
Or simply to back away and try to forget it,
It won’t take no for an answer: try hitting it first
And you’ll learn what’s trembling in its torn pocket.
Now, what do you want to do about it?
The future belongs to people who are good at creating things, not people who are good at dividing them up.
– @naval
Arise for our help, and redeem us for thy mercies’ sake.
– Psalm 44:26
in the middle of a field
with nothing to hold onto
a bird sings
– Basho
after a long while
the shade of the bodhi tree
begins to take shape
– Jennifer Howse
a little house
lost in a tangle of
purple morning glories
– Issa
Armed with a mirror,
Opinions to hide my hunger,
I inhabit the stones of the road.
If I keep on going I will reach the end,
My skin falling off,
My bones individually laughing.
– Paul Zweig
Don’t you understand anything? Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done.
– Miss Hardcastle (C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength)
i used to think my husband was exceptionally kind and angelic (even wrote a series of “angel poems” after him) but after visiting Canada i now realize he’s just Canadian.
– @moonandmouth
Just like a low resting heart rate is the byproduct of intense exercise, low anxiety is the byproduct of intense self-examination.
– Naval Ravikant
You grow up hearing two languages. Neither fits your fits
Your mother informs you “moon” means “window to another world.”
– John Yau
…I should say that you need a little thickening of the outer skin, if only as a protection for the more sensitive interior; and if you acquire it, it will be of permanent value in any walk of later life in this tough world (which shows no signs of softening).
– Tolkien
Two Tigers cannot Hide on the Same Mountain
– Chinese Proverb
the cooling air…
nothing as lovely
as the bluebirds blue
– @lafcadiopoetry
When you are traveling on a road, there must be an end; but when astray, your wanderings are limitless.
– Seneca
Your true Self
is the silent observer
behind all experiences.
– Zensho W. Kopp
reincarnation
each raindrop
lost at sea
– Martha Magenta
talking to the tree
outside the window
about rain, about the war
– Marlina Rinzen
It was extinguished but not
extinguished at all—
Who knows what kind
of thirst this is?
Peace even to this very day—is—
neither near nor far from the heart.
– Hasan Kamal
The great viruses of our time spread through minds, not through bodies.
– @naval
I think that a writer who cannot find the right metaphor is not worth the name, neither under a dictatorship nor a democracy.
– Luisa Valenzuela
Democrats, some advice: when the worst person you know gets bitten by a snake, you don’t try to befriend the snake. You observe said biting from a considerable distance and enjoy the schadenfreude.
– Charlotte Clymer, On Elon Musk and Trump Feud
Charisma. Gentleness, a kind of acceptance of people for who they are. That’s rare, you know?
– Lauren Groff
Practice being there while getting there.
– Lama Surya Das
For years I’ve felt I didn’t know what I was doing; I had to watch my activities and deduce, like an outsider, what I was up to. My novels, for example. They are said by readers to depict the same world again and again, a recognizable world. Where is that world? In my head? Is it what I see in my own life and inadvertently transfer into my novels and to the reader?
– Philip K. Dick
Wisdom doesn’t come when we’ve grasped the ladder’s highest rung but when, looking down on our illusions, we no longer need a ladder.
– Kurt Spellmeyer
The victor of the moment feels himself invincible, even though, only a few hours before, he may have experienced defeat; he forgets to treat victory as a transitory thing.
– Simone Weil
When you practice meditative concentration, your thoughts may flow very strongly—like a stream rushing down a steep mountain— and it may be difficult for the mind to be still. At that time, you must not become discouraged.
– Khenpo Sherab Sangpo
the train easing / through the ancient countryside, / into the blackness / of nightfall, Etruscan, unknowable. / Sleet / outside his own window, / he wasn’t afraid now, // he was a part of the performance
– Kevin Prufer
This gentleman is a sage… Life and death are great affairs, and yet they are no change to him. Though heaven and earth flop over and fall down, it is no loss to him. He sees clearly into what has no falsehood and does not shift with things. He takes it as fate that things should change, and he holds fast to the source.
– Zhuangzi
It is easier to turn a mountain into dust than to create love in a heart that filled with hatred.
– Imam Ali
They had no curiousity about him at all. As if they knew all that they needed to know. They stood and watched him pass and watched him vanish upon that landscape solely because he was passing. Solely because he would vanish.
– Cormac McCarthy
If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
– Leo Tolstoy
When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstance, revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help.
– Marcus Aurelius
The devil ain’t a red demon. He’s your indecision. Your delay. Your self-doubt dressed in logic. If hell exists—it’s you never becoming who you came to be.
– @voyageofsource
it is perhaps a psychological one that conscripts the body into its workings. It is as though I was born imprisoned in a block of stone from which it has been both a necessity and an obligation to free myself.
– Rachel Cusk
What’s missing in our world isn’t just justice – it’s the recognition that healing is a collective process, not an individual one.
– Gabor Maté
The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.
– Salvador Dali
He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave.
– Louis de Saint-Just
The more I wrote, the more I realized that fear wasn’t me: fear was a parasite clinging to me for survival, a leech sucking the life from my body.
– Greta Morgan
Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness.
– Walter Brueggemann
The burden of a poet is not explanation, because explanations never satisfy or convince. Rather the burden of a poet is to disclose, to reveal, to show what has not been seen or said until that instant.
– Walter Brueggemann
I do think no story has ever been read properly unless it’s read twice. So it’s a longer book, you see, than you think it is, because it needs to be read twice.
Double the page.
– Claire Keegan
The wicked become even worse when they are tolerated.
– Leo Tolstoy
You will freeze in place if you remain this way. You must not, dear. You have to move.
– Rainer Marie Rilke
The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning, but without understanding.
– Justice Louis
Pure philanthropy is all very well in its way, but philanthropy plus 5 percent is a good deal better.
– Cecil Rhodes
There were two classes of charitable people; one, the people who did a little and made a great deal of noise; the other, the people who did a great deal and made no noise at all.
– Charles Dickens
Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it’s time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.
– Bill Moyers
To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.
– Albert Camus
I can’t explain my work, I just write stories. I’ve never thought about a theme. I never once have. I just think about the text.
– Claire Keegan
Elegance is saying just enough. And I do believe that the reader completes the story.
– Claire Keegan
When you only live in the comfortable, you begin to live life by default, not design.
– Tim Storey
Don’t know how I kept going. You just do. You have to, so you do.
– Elizabeth Wein, Code Name Verity
The whole reason of prosperity is so you can protect people.
– Scott Galloway
Life appears to me too short to be spending nursing animosity, or registering wrongs.
– Charlotte Brontë
Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway.
– J.R.R Tolkien
Sometimes history takes things into its own hands.
– Justice Thurgood Marshall
I don’t like love as a command, as a search. it must come to you, like a hungry cat at the door.
– Charles Bukowski
Anxiety’s like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you very far.
– Jodi Picoult
Knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing; without a story, it’s all just information.
– Jennifer Egan
To be an artist, you have to escape reality now and then, because the average person will tell you everything you want to do is impossible.
– Frederick Phoenix
Poets and writers are witnesses to everything around them. That is why, it’s imperative that they are in happy environments. Otherwise they suffer in witnessing.
– Pushkar Sanyal
It is the glistening and softly spoken lie; the amiable fallacy; the patriotic lie of the historian, the provident lie of the politician, the zealous lie of the partisan, the merciful lie of the friend, and the careless lie of each man to himself, that cast that black mystery over humanity, through which we thank any man who pierces, as we would thank one who dug a well in a desert.
– John Ruskin
There’s so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us that it hardly becomes any of us to talk about the rest of us.
– Vince Stegall, Move Mountains
In truth, what am I looking for? I don’t know.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
The moon rose itself up on its elbows and shook out its long hair.
– Connie Voisine
Permit yourself to change your mind when something is no longer working for you.
– Nedra Glover Tawwab
Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.
– Emile Coue
To the artist, everything can be changed—everything.
– Frederick Phoenix
My words are colours
To paint my feelings for you
Why won’t you listen?
– CJ
I look like every queer barista in Brooklyn merged into one body during a lunar eclipse.
– Emma Willmann
We cannot preach the world to the world to win the world. Nonsense!
– Mark T. Barclay
To dream of the person you wish to be is to waste the one you are.
– Tim Minchin
Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.
– Antonin Artaud
If I could give you one thought, it would be to lift someone up. Lift a stranger up – lift her up. I would ask you, mother and father, brother and sister, lovers, mother and daughter, father and son, lift someone. The very idea of lifting someone up will lift you, as well.
– Maya Angelou
Your writing
may need to be
ruthless or amoral
to be original.
– Rick Bass
‘Finding yourself’ is not really how it works. You aren’t a ten-dollar bill in last winter’s coat pocket. You are also not lost. Your true self is right there, buried under cultural conditioning, other people’s opinions, and inaccurate conclusions you drew as a kid that became your beliefs about who you are. ‘Finding yourself’ is actually returning to yourself, an unlearning, an excavation, a remembering who you were before the world got its hands on you.
– Emily McDowell
The beast in me
Is caged by frail and fragile bars
Restless by day
And by night rants and rages at the stars
God help the beast in me.
– Johnny Cash
No therapist, no medication healed me, I healed myself…and only you can heal yourself.
– Brad Schipke
Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.
– Seneca
Christianity has adjusted itself much too easily to the worship of power.
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer
For us to be fully alive, we must be present, and when we are, we resist hate in ourselves and in the world around us.
– Kaitlin B. Curtice
But here is the nature of life. That we must love things with our whole selves, knowing they will die.
– Charlotte McConaghy
I think that disability and not being disabled—the line between them is so much fuzzier than any of us think…The unpredictability is the one thing we all share.
– Jessica Slice
Psychoanalysis is a terribly efficient instrument, and because it is more and more a prestigious instrument, we run the risk of using it with a purpose for which it was not made for, and in this way we may degrade it.
– Jacques Lacan
The mind wants things not to change, and that’s how the mind and life are in conflict.
– Osho
Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person’s life.
– Eavan Boland
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… 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 it is so.
– Nick Cave
You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.
– Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes
The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
I think more guys need to assume the position of student than teacher that’s what I think.
– Helena Seleste
We think of the other dimensions as vast
Is it possible that other dimensions
Are very small.
– Dorothea Lasky
I would rather write 10,000 notes than a single letter of the Alphabet.
– Ludwig van Beethoven
It is in
changing
that we find
purpose.
– Heraclitus
In the university they don’t tell
you that the greater part of the
law is learning to tolerate fools.
– Doris Lessing
Such Silence
by Mary Oliver
As deep as I ever went into the forest
I came upon an old stone bench, very, very old,
and around it a clearing, and beyond that
trees taller and older than I had ever seen.
Such silence!
It really wasn’t so far from a town, but it seemed
all the clocks in the world had stopped counting.
So it was hard to suppose the usual rules applied.
Sometimes there’s only a hint, a possibility.
What’s magical, sometimes, has deeper roots
than reason.
I hope everyone knows that.
I sat on the bench, waiting for something.
An angel, perhaps.
Or dancers with the legs of goats.
No, I didn’t see either. But only, I think, because
I didn’t stay long enough.
There was a whole, large vocabulary involved, a conceptual vocabulary that was completely alien to me. I couldn’t comprehend a thing that was said, and my solution to this problem was to stay in bed.
– Deborah Eisenberg
One parent could get my poetry banned from classrooms. And yet one country can’t ban assault rifles from massacring them.
– Amanda Gorman
The sign of a healthy
economy should be a
drinkable river.
– Li An Phoa
Being gay is like being left-handed—some people are, most people aren’t, and nobody really knows exactly why. It’s not right or wrong; it’s just one of the many natural ways to be. The world works best when everyone gets to live as they truly are. So if you ever feel out of place, remember: you’re not broken, you’re just beautifully different—and that’s something the world needs.
– Jodie Foster
If your profession requires mental processing speed or significant analytic capabilities, noticeable decline is probably going to set in earlier than you imagine.
– Arthur Brooks
It is simply this: do not tire, never lose interest, never grow indifferent…lose your invaluable curiosity and you let yourself die. It’s as simple as that.
– Tove Jansson
The most powerful poetry is birthed through cracks in history, through what is broken and unseen.
– Joy Harjo
A system of possible movements, or “motor projects”, radiates from us to our environment. Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument, and when we wish to move about we do not move the body as we move an object. We transport it without instruments as if by magic, since it is ours and because through it we have direct access to space. For us the body is much more than an instrument or a means; it is our expression in the world, the visible form of our intentions. Even our most secret affective movements, those most deeply tied to the humoral infrastructure, help to shape our perception of things.
– Maurice Merleau-Ponty
They looked like people-shaped clay in the moments before God breathed out.
– China Miéville
Everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places.
– Joseph Conrad
Perhaps the easiest way to appreciate Hegel’s point is to imagine situations of greatly heightened alienation. I apply for a job to be a telemarketer. However, my role in the job seems to me more like a theatrical performance. I don’t believe any of the people I call should buy the condo time-share I am supposed to be selling, and it is dispiriting to be hung up on and yelled at so often. In such a case, the actions I undertake are all non-coercively performed by me, but I do not experience them as “mine.” Another form of alienation would be when I find that what I take myself to be doing (say, what I take to be showing hospitality to others, my description of the act I give myself), is shared by none of the others in my new circle, so much so that I begin to doubt I actually understand what I’m doing. Or, even worse, when I am asked why I am doing what I am doing, and I present my reasons, no one understands me, or, if they do, they refuse to believe anyone could have such reasons. This does not mean that a non-alienated situation is one of mass conformism, and therein arises the most controversial point in Hegel: that this relation between individual self-understanding and self-worth and some objective “reflection back” from the social world of such a content is a “dialectical” rather than a disjunctive or reductive one. Meaningful action requires a proper recognition by others, but that condition cannot be directly sought or demanded. An artist whose first goal is to produce what a commercial or critical audience wants would not be genuinely producing “her” work, any more than one with no concern for the intelligibility and impact of her work on others.
The larger point is that this requirement that one’s self-understanding be reflected in the social world—in the way one is seen and treated by others—is not primarily a psychological need (for reassurance, say) but is rather an acknowledgement that the social world is always already implicated in the formation and experience of my deeds as “mine”; deeds I can render intelligible and justifiable both to myself and to others; that is, as freely undertaken. This is the basis of Hegel’s larger worries about a capitalist economy, and of course it has a lot of resonances in what Marx inherited from Hegel, especially the early Marx, for whom the realization of the human species-being and solidarity with fellow workers were so important. (It also underlies a Hegelian principle that is often not well understood: that no one individual can be said to be free unless all are.)
– Robert Pippin
We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer. The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
The most perfect synthesis of theory and practice is the vanishing of thought into the actual course of the world.
– Jean Baudrillard
She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust.
– Simone de Beauvoir
Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there.
That is the banality of evil.
– Hannah Arendt
Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles
and pulls you back into childhood
and you are passing a crumbling mansion
completely hidden behind old willows
or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks
and giant firs standing hip to hip,
you know again that behind that wall,
under the uncut hair of the willows
something secret is going on,
so marvelous and dangerous
that if you crawled through and saw,
you would die, or be happy forever.
– Lisel Mueller
For all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Every time we train our most sophisticated tools upon the central questions of our existence – Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? – the answer comes back clearer: Everyone and Everywhere.
– James Bridle
No poetry concerning the people is authentic if fatigue does not figure in it, and the hunger and thirst which come from fatigue.
– Simone Weil
Beyond a given point man is not helped by more “knowing,” but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way. As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes.
– Ernest Becker
Not so much because many occupations would not permit of a loving attitude, but because the spirit of a production-centered, commodity-greedy society is such that only the non-conformist can defend himself successfully against it. Those who are seriously concerned with love as the only rational answer to the problem of human existence must, then, arrive at the conclusion that important and radical changes in our social structure are necessary, if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon.
– Erich Fromm
Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one.
– Ursula LeGuin
Optimism is radical. It is the hard choice, the brave choice. And it is, it seems to me, most needed now, in the face of despair—just as a car is most useful when you have a distance to close. Otherwise it is a large, unmovable object parked in the garage. These days, the safest way for someone to appear intelligent is being skeptical by default. We seem sophisticated when we say “we don’t believe” and disingenuous when we say “we do.” History and fable have both proven that nothing is ever entirely lost. David can take Goliath. A beach in Normandy can turn the tide of war. Bravery can topple the powerful. These facts are often seen as exceptional, but they are not. Every day, we all become the balance of our choices—choices between love and fear, belief or despair. No hope is ever too small.
– Guillermo Del Toro
Every conception that a man can find
is in the stone itself, already there
concealed in excess, but will still require
a hand to free it that obeys the mind.
And you, like marble, lady without peer,
hold possibilities of every kind;
you hold the good I want and pain I fear,
– Michelangelo
Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
– Wendell Berry
River runs always
On its own way, curved or straight
Whether light or dark
– Trailakya Roy
I’ve been thinking about something for a long time, and I keep noticing that most human speech – if not all human speech – is made with the outgoing breath. This is the strange thing about presence and absence. When we breathe in, our bodies are filled with nutrients and nourishment. Our blood is filled with oxygen, our skin gets flush; our bones get harder – they get compacted. Our muscles get toned and we feel very present when we’re breathing in. The problem is, that when we’re breathing in, we can’t speak. So presence and silence have something to do with each other.
– Li-Young Lee
Like the ancient prophets,
we are dispatched back to the good work entrusted to us.
It is the work of peace-making.
It is the work of truth-telling.
It is the work of justice-doing.
It is good work, but it requires our resolve to stay it, even in the face of the forces to the contrary that are sure to prevail for a season.
– Walter Brueggemann
I carry within me
the heart of a warrior,
the mind of a pharaoh,
the soul of a goddess
and the wisdom of
my grandmothers’ grandmothers.
– grace gegenheimer
No Self stands alone. Behind it stretches an immense chain of physical and – as a special class within the whole – mental events, to which it belongs as a reacting member and which it carries on. Through the condition at any moment of its somatic, especially its cerebral system, and through education, and tradition, by word, by writing, by monument, by manners, by a way of life, by a newly shaped environment… by so much that a thousand words would not exhaust it, by all that, I say, the Self is not so much linked with what happened to its ancestors, it is not so much the product, and merely the product, of all that, but rather, in the strictest sense of the word, the SAME THING as all that: the strict, direct continuation of it, just as the Self aged fifty is the continuation of the Self aged forty.
– Erwin Schrödinger
To me it seems that it is madder never to abandon oneself, than often to be infatuated; better to be wounded, a captive, and a slave, than always to walk in armor.
– Margaret Fuller
Once in a while, we all succumb
to the merely personal.
Those glass shards and snipped metal
That glitter and disappear and glitter again
in the edged night light
Of memory’s anxious sky.
– Charles Wright
And in that day […] [Gnosis] is in danger of becoming a burden to all men. Therefore, it will be despised – the beautiful world of God, the incomparable work, the energy that possesses goodness, the man-formed vision. Darkness will be preferred to light, and death will be preferred to life. No one will gaze into heaven. And the pious man will be counted as insane, and the impious man will be honored as wise. The man who is afraid will be considered as strong. And the good man will be punished like a criminal. And concerning the soul, and the things of the soul, and the things of immortality, along with the rest of what I have said to you- not only will they be considered ridiculous, but they will also be thought of as vanity. But believe me (when I say) that people of this kind will be endangered by the ultimate danger to their soul.
– Asclepius
Queueing for an Ice Cream
although he didn’t smoke, grandad never went anywhere
without the old tobacco tin in his pocket
one day me and my brother asked him what he kept in it
some sand, grandad said
why do you keep some sand in a tobacco tin, we asked
where else would I keep it, he said
but why keep sand at all, we asked
it’s special sand, grandad said, it’s come all the way from France
we peered into his tin and stared for a while
French sand didn’t look very special, it looked like ordinary sand to us
why’s it so special, we asked
each grain represents an old friend of mine, he said
grandad must have had a lot of friends, we thought
did you go to the beach with them when you were a boy, we asked
yes, something like that, grandad said, snapping the lid shut,
asking the man for three 99s, two with red sauce
– Brian Bilston
Strive for work so good
that someone will care
about it 20 years from
now.
– Rick Rubin
You want to spend all your time either learning, earning, or relaxing.
– @naval
If you think the world is selfish and rotten, go to the cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer overlooking Omaha Beach. See what one group of men did for another on D-Day, June 6th, 1944.
– Andy Rooney
I praise my mortal love. I praise their only / violation: being born a pike / who flies among the stars;
– Natasha Oladokun
IDYLL
In the grey summer garden I shall find you
With day-break and the morning hills behind you.
There will be rain-wet roses; stir of wings;
And down the wood a thrush that wakes and sings.
Not from the past you’ll come, but from that deep
Where beauty murmurs to the soul asleep:
And I shall know the sense of life re-born
From dreams into the mystery of morn
Where gloom and brightness meet. And standing there
Till that calm song is done, at last we’ll share
The league-spread quiring symphonies that are
Joy in the world, and peace, and dawn’s one star.
– Siegfried Sassoon, 1918
Times of great transition are, in fact, the best opportunities to renew the search for meaning. As our old stories fall away, we begin to see new possibilities. When most empty, we’re most able to be filled anew.
– Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft
a butterfly joins me
sharing a tree’s shade
like old friends
– Issa
We tend to judge by the past record; by and large, if the thing has a lousy past record and a bright future, we’re going to miss that opportunity.
– Charlie Munger
He’s unfazed and untouchable in the physical world. She’s unfazed and untouchable in the spiritual. Together they’re a fortress.
– Nika Solé
Most of our good ideas have come from the bottom up rather than the top down. And they’ve come from creative people working in some part of the company that no one was paying attention to and were just tinkering. And then stuff evolves out of that.
– Jack Clark
Stop treating your body like you’ve got a spare one in the closet.
– Dan Go
The Sufi masters knew that any great illusionary passion was the unrecognized beginning of the love of God; and we today see it as the vehicle of the process of individuation, as behind all human love lies ultimately the fascination with.. the Self.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
Oblivion is the container from which the inexhaustible, intermediate world in Kafka’s stories presses towards the light.
– Walter Benjamin
Increasing efficiency of communication and of controlling human behavior can, instead of liberating us into the air like birds, fix us to the ground like toadstools.
– Alan Watts
It’s time for initiation reform for young women. We need to institute something like the Artemis bear-clan to protect young girls from the pressures of the junk culture . . . and institute, as well, rituals to honor their associations with the divine world.
– Robert Bly
Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam;
Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know:
Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.
– Hart Crane
Because I love you, I love the whole world and that includes your left shoulder.
– Franz Kafka
i were a wildflower
bloom
unshaken by gusty winds
undaunted by the noise
– Nitu Yumnam
The only spiritual life you need is not to react.
– Robert Adams
Horror is the removal of masks.
– Robert Bloch
You don’t want to damn your characters, but you do keep quite a skeptical distance from them.
– Ann Beattie
Habit is a rope. We weave a thread every day, and eventually we can’t break it.
– Thomas Mann
How you feel in any one moment is more important than anything else, because how you feel right now is creating your life.
– Rhonda Byrne
the more time i spend around inner work/psych/meditation/etc people,
the more certain i am that there’s some critical period where you HAVE to get out of your head, into your body, into practice, out of your rational-brain,,
before a window closes and you’re kinda doomed
– River Kenna
Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
– @naval
Nothing ever happened between us but it was love and it was what made school bearable.
– Chantal Akerman
The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.
– Salvador Dali
Language has both strengthened imagination and been freed by it.
– Tolkien
The mind analyses & remembers, the body experiences & feels, the soul observes & knows.
– Neale Donald Walsch
He would come, sooner or later, ruffled and drenched dark with rain, one wing broken by the storm, his feathers tattered and filthy, his tail black with tar, a castaway crippled by the sea’s fury, a deposed, greedy sovereign: he would return to rule over that shattered realm.
– Monica Pareschi, The Seagulls
It’s not enough for two people to meet; it’s also very important for them to meet at the right time and celebrate deep, silent celebrations where their desires merge, so that they can battle all storms as one.
– Rilke
The waning of any deep interaction with the natural world is the abiding sadness in Anima. It is less the lament for a wounded earth than for human separation from it.
– Colin Thubron
It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses […] more confident, farseeing, capable, and prudent—
– Carl Sagan
It’s entirely possible that the world will have one taxi dispatcher.
– @naval
When you know that every problem is only a false problem, you are dangerously close to salvation.
– Emil Cioran
I hope poetry is a support to ideas of democracy, humanity … That’s why I’m writing poetry.
– Durs Grünbein
I return a can of paint to the store
because I can’t manage any more
pain, I meant paint. I mean pain.
I keep going back for pain samples
I don’t need.
– Deborah Hauser
The cars go by in a bluish light.
– Weldon Kees
Your suffering is designed to awaken you out of your story. Some wake up out the story. But most stay in the story, trying to make it better.
– Leonard Jacobson
The writing experience felt like someone was holding a silver gravy boat and pouring silver liquid down the inside of my spine.
– Suzan-Lori Parks
The stateless state transcends & includes all states.
– Vince Fakhoury Horn
What is an artist. It was her world, then mine, willed into existence through the sheer force of her aim. What she wanted became what I wanted.
That’s how it works: what is yours first belonged to someone else.
– Johanna Hedva
Confusion, anger, depression, violence, and conflict arise when humans forget who they are.
– Eckhart Tolle
The doctrine of human supremacy, which waxes strong in the current administration, portrays life as a hierarchy with humans at the top, rather than a web within which humans are entangled.
– Robert Macfarlane
It has long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sit back and let things happen. They go out and happen to things.
– Leonardo da Vinci
If you are not
personally free to
be yourself in that
most important of
all human
activities-the
expression of love
—then life itself
loses its meaning.
– Harvey Milk
Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.
– Flannery O’Connor
For medieval theologians, it was an essential aspect of divine intention that everything should fit together. It wasn’t a coincidence…that the basic dimensions at the foundation of built things—height, width, and length—were a trinity.
– Lauren Kane
Sacredness is not trying to look on the bright side of life and using that as a stepping-stone, but it is unconditional cheerfulness that has no other side.
– Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Others are bound to have
What we are bound to lose.
Others are apt to find
What in our discoveries
Was found, or not found,
In accord with Destiny.
But what they cannot have
Is the Magic of the Faraway
Which makes it history.
For this reason their glory
Is a tempered brilliance, given
By a borrowed light.
– Fernando Pessoa (tr. Richard Zenith)
the old pond
rippling with sunlight
poets come and go
– Chen-ou Liu
Polycrisis Genesis
Poly-crisis stems from our inability to
balance between mechanistic
methodologies and holistic systems
approach.
The solution?
Comprehensive Anticipatory Design
Science. A practise championed by
late Bucky Fuller.
A practise where you think global and
act local. Engineering “Spaceship
Earth” to work for all it’s inhabitants
Doing more with less.
– @IrthuSuresh
Comics are a complicated ballet of words and images and rhythm and gesture and color and imaginary sound that at their best synesthetically recreate on the page the sensation of life.
– Chris Ware
there are two (complementary) ways of effecting an irreparable scission between the sensory and the spiritual, between the exoteric and the esoteric: namely, by an exclusive attachment to one or the other; the catastrophe is the same in either case.
– Henry Corbin
Karma means positive interdependent connection—good actions lead to good results, bad to suffering.
– Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
It’s becoming easier and easier to be social, but exceptional people are built in solitude.
– @naval
There are no genuine Uruks, that is folk made bad by the intention of their maker; and not many who are so corrupted as to be irredeemable (though I fear it must be admitted that there are human creatures that seem irredeemable short of a special miracle…).
– Tolkien
As for me, I always hung around in the street after school because of love. Love makes you hang around. I used to walk a girl a couple of years above me to the Gare du Luxembourg. We would talk for a long time, she would miss one train, sometimes two, to talk to me for longer, even when it was raining. I can’t remember what we talked about. Whenever it rained her long blonde hair became darker but it didn’t matter. She always ended up getting on a train and I would always return home. I didn’t know what love was at the time. But that was surely it. Nothing ever happened between us but it was love and it was what made school bearable.
I would wake up at the crack of dawn every day to get to school early to meet her. We would rush to meet in- between our classrooms to talk just for five minutes. We had so much to say to each other. So it was worth it, even for five minutes. But it was never enough.
– Chantal Akerman
A poem is essentially embedded in a matrix of silence. So that even if the words celebrate what is, each line end acknowledges what is not.
– Rosmarie Waldrop
Dharma is not something we are fated to, or stoic about, but the very set of practices that can lift us out of our conditioning, out of an assumed set of limits and away from what is often a pervasive resignation.
– Sharon Salzberg
The most important thing in practice is to be natural and spontaneous.
– Master Sheng-Yen
There was a star danced, and under that was I born.
– William Shakespeare
A senior dharma teacher once asked me what I was willing to die for, adding that I couldn’t respond with self-defense or to protect my family. I found it difficult to respond at all.
They then pointed out that modern people generally can’t answer this question.
Well, you know who can?
Greta-fucking-Thunberg.
Respect to anyone willing to put themselves in actual harms way in order to enact their values. Y’all are the high-level bodhisattvas.
– Vince F. Horn
We want our sound to enter the soul of the audience, and see if it can awaken something in their minds…
Because there are a lot of people sleeping.
– Jimi Hendrix
How we hold the simplest of
our tasks speaks loudly
about how we hold life itself.
– Gunilla Norris
As people are learning all over again in the modern world, when people who will not acknowledge their own woundedness are given power, they will make new wounds and possibly wound everyone because of their need to deny their own woundedness. The word heal means to cure and specifically to make whole. It turns out that being a whole person means we have to accept our vulnerable parts, and that we have to accept and learn to face our original inner wounds. For in this old, mythological understanding, the fateful event of being wounded early in life creates the need for a deep healing process that becomes the path of awakening for each person.
The path of the wounded healer leads to a connection to the deep self within, which is our connection to wholeness, which is the root of the human capacity to heal. There’s an old idea that says that in the same way that something greater than ourselves wounds us early on, something greater than ourselves seeks to awaken through the specific wounds we carry. In that sense, denying the inner wound means also denying the presence of the deep soul or the centering self, which holds the exact medicine we are looking for.
In some mythic stories, the wound inside a person is called the sacred affliction, or the holy wound. There’s another play on words in which the wound which can be seen as a hole, can also be seen as a holy element that secretly holds the natural antidote, the inner medicine that we also brought to life.
The wounded healer is ever wounded, and ever able to find ways of healing. It’s an archetypal condition. The point has never been to become perfect, or perfectly healed, or completely whole. The point has always been to become holy. That is to say, complete with our vulnerabilities and our wounds, because the wound becomes a womb from which we are intended to be reborn again and again. And that’s why the old saying was, the afflicted are holy.
– Michael Meade
Marie-Louise von Franz…wrote that individuation makes one ‘capable of choosing its own path and self-reliantly remains true to its own inner law. Especially in times of collective neurosis, the existence of such mature people is of crucial importance.
– Gary Bobroff
What is in the imagination is not a picture, but a picture can correspond to it.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.
– Chuck Palahniuk
Freedom is, both in itself and in its relation to these other goods, the best thing that political and economic conditions can secure.
– Bertrand Russell
Finding a right relation to the unconscious is finding the middle path between extremes.
– David Tacey
The good news, from a Buddhist point of view, is we don’t actually have to be hateful. We don’t have to be prejudiced. We can dissolve our hate, born of ignorance—by bringing in sunshine, education, empathy, and heart connection.
– Waylon Lewis
Let go of everything, but don’t be indifferent. Let go with reason. Be neutral with mindfulness and wisdom.
– Ajaan Suchart Abhijato
There’s no hidden message in anything, no fairy tale ending. There is just disease. And when we’re lucky, a cure.
– Emilie Pascale Beck
It’s so weird to me that people are separating caring about the environment and the climate to caring about humans… There can be no climate justice without social justice.
– Greta Thunberg
To live in community with a place creates a sense of collective coherence….The absence of it: trauma.
– Bridget Crocker
libraries could actually be profitable if they simply sold coffee.
– Karla Mendoza
Some things aren’t supposed to generate a profit. Which is pretty easy to understand for anyone who doesn’t worship money.
– Anna Zarves
Poetry
makes nothing happen.
It survives
in the valley of its saying.
– Maxine Kumin
Praxis precedes theory.
– John Simon
Calmness is the absence of unnecessary complexity.
– Donald Barthelme
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
– Thomas Mann
There is infinite nonsense in the world on all of these matters; hence blame me not if I contribute my mite.
– Herman Melville
Because subjectivity is always alienated, far from mastering the world, it is necessarily in a skewed relation to the world. To be a subject is always to relate to one’s world from a distance.
– Todd McGowan
The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it.
– Terry Pratchett
There is no avant-garde: only some people a bit behind.
– Varèse
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof was to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
– Douglas Adams
We do not serve our children, our friends and partners, our society by living partial lives, and being secretly depressed and resentful. We serve the world by finding what feeds us, and, having been fed, then share our gift with others.
– James Hollis
I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.
– Howard Zinn
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
– Henry David Thoreau
We are infinitely more than we think.
– Khalil Gibran
The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us – the poet – whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.
– Audre Lorde
Boredom’s useful too though, because it’s when you disengage from everything else that you can engage in creativity. Boredom tells you when you should do something different. Boredom teaches you what matters to you.
– Dr. Dacher Keltner
There is only a stream of sensations, perceptions, memories and ideations. The body is an abstraction, created by our tendency to seek unity in diversity….It is like seeing the surface of the ocean and completely forgetting the immensity beneath.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying “there are only facts,” I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.
– E. M. Forster
It is the explanation, the verbalization, whether silent or spoken, that sustains anger, and gives it scope and depth.
– Krishnamurti
The worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its love.
– Henry Scougal
But if you take your stand on the prevalent view, how long do you think it will prevail?… All you can say about my view is that it is old fashioned; yours will soon be the same.
– C.S. Lewis
Sometimes your purpose isn’t in changing the world loudly—it’s in loving deeply, listening closely, and living with gentle intention.
– Prince Ea
I am constantly dealing with people who are not themselves, and I need friends who have a certain degree of ripeness.
– Carl Jung
You’d think the years
would change some first sense
of whatever it is—
but it comes again and again.
– fr. Circle, Robert Creeley
Every person you meet knows something you don’t; Learn from them.
– H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
The unconscious mind sees correctly even when conscious reason is blind and impotent.
– Carl Jung
It is of no importance whether evil is here or there, but one can deal only with the evil in oneself, because it is within one’s reach, elsewhere one trespasses.
– Carl G. Jung
Capitalism runs on consumption, even when it’s consuming itself.
– Tina Campt
When I say work I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs.
– Margaret Laurence
God-consciousness is experienced by how much you love not by how much you believe.
– unkown
In some people, the vice is seen in the same way as in the prize horse – the breed.
– Ernest Hemingway
The spiritual infant should live more in the realm of the will, for we are what we choose, not what we feel.
– J. Oswald Sanders
The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.
– Steve Jobs
Yesterday, we were missing freedom.
Today, we miss love.
I’m afraid of tomorrow for we will miss humanity.
– Mahmoud Darwish
Only one thing worse than Dragons and that’s Americans.
– Gerard Butler
Most people do not mind being surpassed in good fortune, character, or temperament, but no one, especially not a sovereign, likes to be surpassed in intelligence.
– Baltasar Gracián
Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche.
– Carl Jung
We evolved for scarcity but live in abundance.
– Naval Ravikant
The body forgets
what it meant to do.
I lie there,
like an unspoken word.
I don’t rest,
I just stop moving.
– DeanePoetry
At the age of twelve I knew how to lose myself in a book. That’s almost impossible now because I’m always thinking analytically, about how this or that effect is achieved, why it works or doesn’t work. But I think that’s why I write, because writing is such an immersive experience (on the good days). I can leave myself behind.
– Monica Ali
He who wants everything every time will lose everything any time.
– Vikrant Parsai
All delay is a waste of time. You can skip all the preparation and go directly for the ultimate search within.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Work to become, not to acquire.
– Elbert Hubbard
It has been my experience that every dream without exception deals with oneself. Dreams are absolutely self-centred.
– Sigmund Freud
If the only way they can appear innocent is by making you look guilty, they were never innocent.
– Zurayan ittesaf
A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
– Alan Bennett
I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.
– Sir Isaac Newton
Chance is always powerful. Let your hook always be cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be fish.
– Ovid
Before it is born the child is assigned a name and is son or daughter of — ; it has to learn to fit into this already ascribed place. Whatever the child does, whatever the specific accidents of its individual history, all take place within the larger framework of this human order. It is within the Freudian unconscious that the laws of this order speak.
– Juliet Mitchell
Since the meds
and therapy started working we don’t get to
kiss each other goodnight anymore. He is
turning off the light while I’m getting up
to feed the chickens.
– Neil Hilborn
Movies make you think civilization will end fast, like with aliens and explosions, but really it’ll end slow. Ours is already ending, it’s just ending too slow for people to notice.
– Anthony Doerr
What has America become but the Fourth Reich
– Danny Krikorian
I write because I can’t not write. Often it’s more lumbering than loping. But like running, my strength is my need to write. And if I keep putting one foot in front of the other I still cross the finish line at the end.
– Christine Wiese
When you’re outnumbered by trees your perspective shifts.
– Jessica Marie Baumgartner
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil.
– Marcus Aurelius
Is it not an old truth that woman loves the weaknesses of the strong man more than his strength, and the stupidity of the clever man more than his cleverness?
– Carl Jung
The big lie is writers actually know what they’re going to do and they set out to do. They realise that afterwards, after they’ve struggled and like sat there and shaped and reshaped and tried to put some story together.
– Colum McCann
Love is the most sensitive organ of perception. Only love lets you read your own soul and the souls of others. Nothing else will do. It is will be, it is, and it passes, hiding an infinite meaning in itself.
– Carl Jung
This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.
– Philip K. Dick
If you can stand yourself, then you might be
capable of loving somebody else; otherwise,
it is a mere excuse, just a lie. And that cannot
be repeated often enough.
– Carl Jung
We all know that humility is the opposite of pride, but humility is also one of the opposites of fear. Humility is not a lack of confidence, but the utmost expression of confidence, because humility is confidence in God, rather than oneself.
– Steven Elmore
Fruitful introversion is possible only when
there is also a relation to the outside.
– Carl Jung
All people on the planet are children, except for a very few. No one is grown up except those free of desire.
– Rumi
Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.
– Primo Levi
Out of my ignorance, I called you a homeland and I forgot that homelands are taken away.
– Mahmoud Darwish
Nothing can exist without its opposite; the two were one in the beginning and will be one again in the end.
Consciousness can only exist through continual recognition of the unconscious.
– Carl G. Jung
No wonder the Western world feels uneasy, for it does not know how much it plays into the hands of the uproarious underworld and what it has lost through the destruction of its numinosities.
It has lost its moral and spiritual values to a very dangerous degree. Its moral and spiritual tradition has collapsed, and has left a worldwide disorientation and dissociation.
– Carl G. Jung
If nostalgia holds you hostage,
the ransom is the present.
– Khang Kijarro Nguyen
For it is really true that if one creates a better relation to the unconscious, it proves to be a helpful power, it then has an activity of its own, it produces helpful dreams, and at times it really produces little miracles.
– Carl G. Jung
When it comes to the purpose of the Socratic method, Socrates had colossal ambitions. He believed that all of the trouble we have leading our lives, all of our dissatisfactions, all of our failures to progress, all of our moral imperfections, all of the injustices we commit, large and small, stem from one source: ignorance.
– Agnes Callard, Open Socrates
Never, never pin your whole faith on any human being: not if he is the best and wisest in the whole world. There are lots of nice things you can do with sand; but do not try building a house on it.
– C.S. Lewis
Insanity is rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.
– F. W. Nietzsche
We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves.
– Paul Gauguin
Once you have heard certain expressions, sentences, you almost never forget them. It’s like sending a bucket down the well and it always comes up full. You don’t know you’ve remembered, but you have.
– Eudora Welty
Although I have a regular work schedule, I take time to go for long walks on the beach so that I can listen to what is going on inside my head. If my work isn’t going well, I lie down in the middle of a workday and gaze at the ceiling while I listen and visualize what goes on in my imagination.
– Albert Einstein
Our will is a function regulated by reflection; hence it is dependent on the quality of that reflection.
– Carl Jung
Generosity is essential to life. All of life is a generosity. If you get nervous, thinking you’d better nail down who you are, and this is mine and this is mine, then the dance jams up.
– Joanna Macy
I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well.
– Alexander the Great
Everything is changing, everything is interdependent—and there is no one to whom any of it belongs.
– Andrew Olendzki
There is not any kind of existence that is free of suffering.
– Buddhadasa Bhikkhu
No one could look at him without conceiving a strong dislike…. There was such an intolerable air of conceit about this man that it was almost as much as one could do to refrain from running up and affronting him.
– Herman Melville, Omoo
Only a life lived in a certain spirit is worth living. It is a remarkable fact that a life lived entirely from the ego is dull not only for the person himself but for all concerned.
– CG Jung
Trauma is so arresting that traumatized people will focus on it compulsively. Unfortunately, the situation that defeated them once will defeat them again and again.
– Peter A. Levine
It wasn’t that I hadn’t known these things, but that at some point, without realizing it, I had persuaded myself that I was different — that my honesty and non-lameness wouldn’t be punished like that, because I had some special skill, some self-sufficiency, an ability to be alone.
– Elif Batuman, Either/Or
If one doesn’t know his mistakes, he won’t want to correct them.
– Seneca
Whoever is educated by possibility remains with anxiety; he does not permit himself to be deceived by its countless falsifications.
– Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety
It was marvelous to cross borders, to let oneself go within other cultures, discover the provisional nature of what I had taken for absolute.
– Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child
To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth. In the depths, being is not an unconditional persistence but an endlessly slow growth. You think you are standing still like swamp water, but slowly you flow into the sea that covers the earth’s greatest deeps, and is so vast that firm land seems only an island imbedded in the womb of the immeasurable sea.
– C. G. Jung
Those in power write the history, while those who suffer write the songs.
– Frank Harte
The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.
– Walter Benjamin
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
– Jean Cocteau
If you want to be a clear thinker you cannot pay attention to politics because it’ll destroy your ability to think.
– @naval
Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error of judgment.
– Philip Dick
When I radiate love and good wishes, I create an energy field of kindness around me. What I give, I receive — often in even greater measure. Every pure thought sown becomes a blessing returned.
Every thought of goodwill uplifts someone, somewhere.
– Brahma Kumaris
A divine woman will be like, I wanna show you something. And then she supercharges your potential and multiplies your bank account.
– Nika Solé
Attachment can only bear the nice things—when we don’t get what we crave, anger follows.
– Robina Courtin
Let us remember that you don’t have to be lost to be found. Vulnerability is not the only key to the Kingdom.
– Pico Iyer
Who are you if you don’t refer to a single thought or feeling to tell you who you are?
– Adyashanti
a brief stay at
a mountain cabin
restful sleep
– Issa
She was always to be found on the nearest sofa.
– Franz Kafka
Passivity increases exponentially as the educational system turns out ‘products’.
– Robert Bly, Iron John
Education . . . has become an institution whose purpose in the modern world is not to make culture, not to serve the living cosmos, but to harness humankind to the dead forces of materialism.
– Robert Sardello, Facing the World with Soul
Let us go back together to the hills.
Weary am I of palaces and courts,
Weary of words disloyal to my thoughts,—
Come, my belovèd, let us to the hills.
– Vita Sackville-West
We must hurl literature into an abyss of sensuality from which it can emerge only completely regenerated.
– Andre Gide to Andre Ruyters
True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.
– Eckhart Tolle
If the free-traders cannot understand how one nation can grow rich at the expense of another, we need not wonder, since these same gentlemen also refuse to understand how within one country one class can enrich itself at the expense of another.
– Karl Marx
The vocation is to be embarrassing
The vocation is to follow your own embarrassment to beauteous hell
– Alice Notley
Thinking is just a recycling of data that you have gathered in the past.
– Sadhguru
To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron; it burns into you and that is very painful.
– Carl Jung
Precisely because you stand on our shoulders is why you can see further than we did.
– Angela Davis
Being content makes the poor feel rich, and being discontent makes the rich feel poor.
– Benjamin Franklin
bicycle rattles by
tiny speakers tucked in ears
and she’s laughing at a joke
from another continent
– @SeptimusBrown
My idea of writing is of unflinching and continual effort.
– James Salter
I admit I wish for a love
that spreads like a swallow of honey
that you can still feel in your body
long after the first spoonful.
– Chelsea Guevara
The mind I love must have wild places.
– Katherine Mansfield
The greater the practitioner, the smaller their eight worldly concerns.
– Chamtrul Rinpoche
The eight worldly concerns:
Attachment to gain, pleasure, praise, and fame.
Aversion to loss, pain, blame, and bad reputation.
BRAVERY INVOKES MAGIC
The essence of this way or path is transcending cowardice and manifesting bravery. That is the best and only way to invoke drala, or magic, is by creating an atmosphere of bravery. The fundamental aspect of bravery is being without deception. Deception in this case is self-deception, doubting yourself so that you are cut off from the vision of the Great Eastern Sun. The dralas can only desend onto your existence when you have properly prepared the ground. If there is the slightest deception, you will dispel drala. From that point of view, deception is the magic of the setting sun.
Usually if we say someone is brave, we mean that he is not afraid of any enemy or he is willing to die for a cause or he is never intimidated.The Shambhala understanding of bravery is quite different. Here bravery is the courage to be–to live in the world without any deception and tremendous kindness and caring for others. You might wonder how this can bring magic into your life. The idea of magic is that you can conquer the elements so that you can turn earth into fire or fire into water or ignore the law of gravity. But true magic is the magic of reality, as it is – the earth of earth, the water of water–communicating with the elements so that in some sense, they become one with you. When you develop bravery, you make a connection with or ignore the law of gravity and fly. But true magic is the magic of reality, as it is: the earth of earth, the water of water–communicating with the elements so that, is some sense they become one with you. When you develop bravery, you make a connection with the elemental quality of existence. Bravery begins to heighten your existence; that is, to bring out the brilliant and genuine qualities of your environment, and of your being.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The Books May Not Remember This
The blue flying note of the left-out wind
Sang this day like a long-lost sea
Dressed only in its long blue song.
The trees knew well why it sang, what it did
When it stripped the sky of lounging clouds
And the birds, whose sport it was, flew far
And high on the doubtless sound.
And we walked, you and I, to the top of a hill
Speaking softly of what cannot be seen
Though it chills and sings.
The books may not remember this
But you and I will.
– George Gorman
And the air was full of thoughts and things to say. But at times like these, only the small things are ever said. Big things lurk unsaid inside.
– Arundhati Roy
In the labyrinth of the mind,
the shortest distance
between two thoughts
is rarely a straight line.
– Fa Hsing Jeff Miles
Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and with- holds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things; it is as the odor and the color of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the form and splendor of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley
An Open Life: Joseph Campbell in Conversation with Michael Toms
There’s a wonderful question Schopenhauer asks: How is it that an individual can so participate in the danger and pain of another that, forgetting his own self-protection, he moves spontaneously to the other’s rescue, even at the cost of his own life? Schopenhauer’s answer is that a metaphysical realization is showing its force in action, namely, the realization that you and the other are one, and that the sense of separateness is simply a function of the way we experience things in space and time.
All compassion, all sympathy is irrational. That’s the point. Love is irrational. The rational is stressing I-thou opposites. The mind is in the world of separateness and angular structures. It’s a world put together in a way that can be calculated. Compassion, love–these jump mathematics.
There are two ways of living a mythologically grounded life. One way is just to live what I call “the way of the village compound,” where you remain within the sphere of your people. That can be a very strong and powerful and noble life. There are, however, people who feel this isn’t the whole story. And today, all historical circumstances are changing, and we no longer have the enclosing horizons that shut us in from knowledge of other people — new worlds are breaking in on us all the time. It’s inevitable that a person with any sense of openness to new experience will say to himself, “Now, this won’t do, the way we’re living.” Do you see what I mean? And so, one goes out for one’s self to find a broader base, a broader relationship.
On the other hand, there’s plenty of reason for those who don’t have this feeling to remain within the field because our societies today are so rich in the gifts that they can render. But if a person has had the sense of the Call — the feeling that there’s an adventure for him — and if he doesn’t follow that, but remains in the society because it’s safe and secure, then life dries up. And then he comes to that condition in late middle age: he’s gotten to the top of the ladder, and found that it’s against the wrong wall.
If you have the guts to follow the risk, however, life opens, opens, opens up all along the line. I’m not superstitious, but I do believe in spiritual magic, you might say. I feel that if one follows what I call one’s “bliss” — the thing that really gets you deep in the gut and that you feel is your life — doors will open up. They do! They have in my life and they have in many lives that I know of.
The problem of the grail quest is the revivification of what is known as the Waste Land. The Waste Land is a world where people live not out of their own initiative, but out of what they think they’re supposed to do. People have inherited their official roles and positions; they haven’t earned them. This is the situation of the Waste Land: everybody leading a false life. T. S. Eliot used that idea in his poem, The Waste Land, and he actually quotes several lines from Wolfram’s Parzival. The Waste Land is a place where the sense of the vitality of life has gone. People take jobs because they have to live, and then they find in mid-life that the job doesn’t mean a thing.
I don’t know what your impression is, Michael, but mine is that the majority of my friends are living WasteLand lives. In teaching, you have people who haven’t come into the Waste Land yet. They’re at the point of making the decision whether they’re going to follow the way of their own zeal — the star that’s dawned for them — or do what daddy and mother and friends want them to do. The adventure is always in the dark forest, and there’s something perilous about it. Now, since retiring I’ve been lecturing for the most part to adults, many of whom feel they need a new start; they have to find a center in what they do that really meets their lives. And my impression is that many of my friends just are baffled; they’re wandering in the Waste Land without any sense of where the water is — the source that makes things green.
You have to strive every minute to get rid of the life that you have planned in order to have the life that’s waiting to be yours. Move. Move. Move into the transcendent. That’s the whole sense of adventure, I think.
That’s the whole mystery: to have the mind submit. It must serve, not dominate, life. That’s a major point in so many mythologies. The mind dominating life is really Satan, and life speaking through the mind is the power of Christ. That’s basic, that’s the Buddha.
The work of poets and artists is to know what the world-image of today is, and to render it as the old seers did theirs. Today we lack poets and artist who speak of the mystery. The function of the poet to open the mystery dimension has been, with few great exceptions, forgotten. We have science, but we lack poetry that reveals what the heart is ready to recognize.
The human being is a biological phenomenon. He has a body which is like the body of the grass or the tree: a product of this good earth. And, on the other hand, in contrast to the tree and the grass and the little bug, he has this great brain which has a structuring character that is not of nature. It has this rational thinking of the mathematical kind. IT is rectangular, lets say, whereas corporal thinking is circular. One is the wisdom that digests our meals, which brings the grass up, and which we share with the whole world of nature. But then there is this intelligence which has plans for how life should be, and its not always the way life wants to be. So there’s conflict between these two worlds.
There are two aspects of the hero, I think. The hero is somebody whom you can lean on and who’s going to rescue you; he is also an ideal. To live the heroic life is to live the individual adventure, really. One of the problems today is that with the enormous transformations in the forms of our lives, the models for life don’t exist for us. In a traditional society — the agriculturally based city — there were relatively few life roles, and the models were there; there was a hero for each life role. But look at the past twenty years and what has come along in the way of new life possibilities and requirements. The hero — as-model is one thing we lack, so each one has to be his own hero and follow the path that’s no path. It’s a very interesting situation.
As I grow older, more and more of the economic and political details keep pushing in, and I wonder what became of that early inner quietness that allowed me to move out of my own center.
When the world seems to be falling apart, stick to your own trajectory; hang onto you own ideals and find kindred spirits. That’s the rule of life.
Spengler has an image of the ideal when all’s falling apart; he says it’s the soldier in Pompeii who stayed right at his post when the volcanic ash was coming down. Even at the worst moment, if you are holding on to your trajectory, you’ve won. It’s those who get thrown off track who are lost.
The whole thing in marriage is the relationship and yielding. Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair has to do with immediate personal satisfaction. Marriage is an ordeal; it means yielding, time and again. That’s why it is a sacrament: you give up your personal simplicity to participate. And you are not giving to the other person, you are giving to the relationship. Because you are not giving to the other person, it is not impoverishing–it is life building, life fostering, enriching.
The beautiful thing is the growing; each helping the other to flower. We often want to freeze the other person, but you can’t have that and love too. Wherever love takes you, there you are.
I see marriage in two stages. One is that wonderful impulse stage of youth where everything is “coming up roses” and the birds are singing and all of that. Then there comes the time when the vital energies aren’t there, but at the same time there is an awakening of the spiritual relationship. When that doesn’t happen, you see people getting divorced. I’ve been shocked at the number of my friends who brought up a family, everything seems wonderful, the kids are gone, and they get divorced!
The story about the priest, the minister and the rabbi who try to answer the question: When does life begin?
The priest says at conception. The minister says after twenty days or something like that. The rabbi says: When the kids have graduated and the dog has died. That is when people grow apart. With everything gone, what’s next?
The window of time between now / and universal heat death is enough / for one real apology, so we’d better / make it a good one.
– Tom Snarsky
All things are already said; but since no one is listening, you always have to start over.
– Andre Gide
My greatest skill has been to want but little.
– Thoreau
I feel for those of you who don’t see the direct connection between dharma, meditation, awakening, wisdom, & compassion AND raising your voice against governments that are bank-rolling and enacting a live-streamed genocide. Without this connection, you’re just playing spiritual.
– @VinceFHorn
first celebrate
the flowers in
your heart
– Basho
Man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.
– Rachel Carson
Clasp me in your handkerchief like a tear, trumpet
of early afternoon! in the foggy autumn.
– Frank O’Hara
Philosophy is not just about talking or lecturing, it is about action. It is for solving problems and becoming better.
– Ryan Holiday
[Jesus’s] message is that we’re all sort of nuts and suspicious and petty and full of crazy hungers, and everything feels awful a lot of the time, but even so—one’s behavior needs to be better. One needs to be decent.
– Anne Lamott
Poetry outlasts everything. It’s a primeval spirit. It’s probably the first speech. It comes with speech. It’s what children do, when they play with their first words. And it comes from nowhere, and it always goes on. And there’s no way to lose it, but people don’t know how to find it. People think they don’t know how to read it, and that they don’t have any need for it. Maybe they don’t have any need for it. I don’t know. The world has poetry inside it anyway.
– Alice Notley
The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through love — by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him.
– James Baldwin’s essay on Shakespeare
The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life…
The man who cannot create wants to destroy.
– Erich Fromm
deep
rivers
run quiet
– birdie
setting sun . . .
finally
the window AC
goes silent
– @ruralitalics
I’d give a bit for a time-machine.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Tsongkhapa teaches that genuine compassion requires inner strength and leads to joy, not burnout.
– Justin Whitaker
What a story is, is devious.
– Joy Williams
The Lord of the Rings could only have been written in the 20th century and, more important, for the 20th century. The work may draw on ancient myths for its truth but it speaks directly to the modern age
– Verlyn Flieger, Splintered Light
The vocation is to destroy yourself for it over time
The vocation is to destroy time, exactly
The vocation is not to go through time, it is not to be
In a local place It is not to be anything a teacher can pin down
– Alice Notley
I think what you have to do in translation is translate the dynamic, the essential structure that is separate from the words.
– Frank Bidart
Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.
– Aldous Huxley
AI researchers are generally terrible philosophers–ex: by-and-large they reduce all forms of intelligence to cognitive intelligence–so why should I believe a damn word they say about what AGI is and when it will be achieved?
– @VinceFHorn
Early works are always better than anyone thinks they are: they genuinely tremble, and they loom with futurity.
– Alice Notley
book in my lap~
sunlight dapples
the margins
– @joy_pops
The master observes the world but trusts his inner vision. He allows things to come and go. He prefers what is within to what is without.
– Lao Tzu
As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.
– Josh Billings
As the planet gets progressively less innocent, you need a more innocent eye to see it.
– Martin Amis
The Spirit teaches us to read Scripture with a gaze of love. Contemplative practice helps us develop a third eye that reads between the lines and finds the thread always moving toward inclusivity, mercy, and justice.
– Richard Rohr
REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #96
POEM AT DAWN
Empire
is its own
undoing
– Diane di Prima
The better you get at reading, the better you get at writing
The better you get at writing, the better you get at reading
– Brecht De Poortere
Art for the sake of truth, for the sake of what is beautiful and good – that is the creed I seek.
– George Sand
From the FDR in Early Evening the Light Along
the River Seems Like More Than What It Is
The sky, a rectangle, hovers with lit edges.
It is the same all over town. Along Fourth Avenue
the low white walls of gas stations and repair shops
hold the last light while everywhere,
above the cool and uniform green of baseball fields
and parks the streetlights are coming on.
I have told you everything I know.
– Kristen Case
I try to swallow
the rough fragments
of spring
– Tsuno Shiina
Our inability to obtain a particular article does not prevent us from becoming aware of the empty space that it should fill, and by which we perceive its shape while being unable to identify it.
– Jean Cocteau
Going for refuge is placing awakening—not the person of Buddha, but what he attained—at the center of our lives.
– Valerie (Vimalasara) Mason-John
The Cabbage
by Ruth Stone
You have rented an apartment.
You come to this enclosure with physical relief,
your heavy body climbing the stairs in the dark,
the hall bulb burned out, the landlord
of Greek extraction and possibly a fatalist.
In the apartment leaning against one wall,
your daughter’s painting of a large frilled cabbage
against a dark sky with pinpoints of stars.
The eager vegetable, opening itself
as if to eat the air, or speak in cabbage
language of the meanings within meanings;
while the points of stars hide their massive
violence in the dark upper half of the painting.
You can live with this.
A religion is finished in the moment when it no longer generates heresies.
– Emil Cioran
Nobody can be completely honest. You will try, and you’ll have a great deal of success in exploring your motivations and your dark, unconscious depths, but there will be a certain point at which you will say, “Well, I’ve had enough of that!” You know?
– Alan Watts
When with it I give up the insanely hid
The airless secret I strangle not to share
With all the others as others share the air.
– Edwin Denby
The imaginary dual relationship is based on the conviction that it is possible to give/find/get ‘it’. In practice, this turns into…a swing to the other extreme, the conviction that nothing is possible, there is no point in anything, and everything is the same.
– Paul Verhaeghe
A Measuring Worm
This yellow-striped green
Caterpillar, climbing up
The steep window screen,
Constantly (for lack
Of a full set of legs) keeps
Humping up his back.
It’s as if he sent
By a sort of semaphore
Dark omegas meant
To warn of Last Things.
Although he doesn’t know it,
He will soon have wings,
And I too don’t know
Toward what undreamt condition
Inch by inch I go.
– Richard Wilbur
In love, we do not find satisfaction in the other that we aim at, we find it in the space, or gap, between, to put it bluntly, what we see and what we get.
– Alenka Zupancic
Ode to moment following endless reading and study when one finally begins to see what the writer or artist is doing. Ode to the humility that falls on one’s head, knowing that nothing you write can apprehend the work completely. Ode to tentative strolls in the sidereal.
– Alina Stefanescu
Handwriting or typing or word processing—they’re not like sticking your hands into clay.
– Donald Hall
Whose country slaughters foreigners. Who must always appease a stupid deity, follow the dictates of a benighted even stupid male leader. And survive. And take it, take it, take it.
– Alice Notley
Jack you were wrong (or not
the radio is not from Mars
it is sitting here it has
the world
by its short
wavy hairs, home.
– Pierre Joris, (addressing Jack Spicer
in Short Wave Radio #2)
sleepless night
my address book full
of cross-outs
– Chen-ou Liu
It ceased to hurt me, though so slow
I could not see the trouble go –
But only knew by looking back –
That something – had benumbed the Track –
Nor when it altered, I could say,
For I had worn it, every day,
As constant as the Childish frock –
I hung opon the Peg, at night.
But not the Grief – that nestled Close
As Needles – ladies softly press
To Cushions Cheeks –
To keep their place –
Nor what consoled it, I could trace –
Except, whereas ’twas Wilderness –
It’s better – almost Peace –
– Emily Dickinson
st. thomas aquinas, in his poem called “we are fields before each other”, wrote these words: “our hearts irrigate this earth. we are fields before each other.” yes, each one of us is the ground of being for everyone of us, the ground is not in heavens, nor on earth, it is everywhere we embrace the other. we don’t exist except in relationship. there is a field of life on earth where i was born, and i must walk on it. there is a field of life in the sky where i was born, and i must fly in it. and you are this green earth on which i walk, and this blue heavens in which i fly, only through a thou i become an i.
– Hune Margulies
Pruning in Frost
by Alice Oswald
Last night, without a sound,
a ghost of a world lay down on a world,
trees like dream-wrecks
coralled with increments of frost.
Found crevices
and wound and wound
the clock-spring cobwebs.
All life’s ribbon frozen mid-fling.
Oh I am
stone thumbs,
feet of glass.
Work knocks in me the winter’s nail.
I can imagine
Pain, turned heron,
could fly off slowly in a creak of wings.
And I’d be staring, like one of those
cold-holy and granite kings,
getting carved into this effigy of orchard.
You have a part to play in the overall picture. It may be only a very small part; nevertheless it is essential for the completion of the whole.
– Eileen Caddy
what the thief left behind:
my old dog and wall-to-wall
poetry books
– Chen-ou Liu
What did love mean if it was doled out so carelessly, with no thought of consequence?
– Damon Galgut, Arctic Summer
In every life, there are a great number of small emotions and a small number of great emotions. If you make a choice: two lives and two types of literature.
– Albert Camus
If we save the sea, we save our world.
– David Attenborough
Whatever we see could be other than it is. Whatever we can describe at all could be other than it is. There is no a priori order of things.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Love is the very human quality that allows us to welcome everything, not just what we prefer most. Love is the motivation that enables us to move toward fear – not in order to conquer it, but in order to include it so that we might learn from it. In love, there is no separation. Caring for all things is a natural action of love. Nothing remains isolated from its care.
Why is love the quality that allows us to welcome everything? When we view reality from the vantage point of our personalities – from a small separate self – we are constantly looking for what distinguishes us from one another. But when we live from the vantage point of boundless love, we begin to see all the points of connection that join us together.
Love breeds love.
– Frank Ostaseski
Forward! Ever so! Where you were is dangerous! Where you go is dangerous! Different reasons, both to your advantage! Leap! Then leap again! Looking is for witnesses, not the disaster!
– From Of Storms: Notes on the Tempest
in Practice, Dragon Age: Inquisition
The desire to go deep: to the depths of the night, the depths of love.
– Marina Tsvetaeva
To be deeply known is ecstasy.
– Myss Bradley
I love the other, not according to his (accountable) qualities, but according to his existence; by a movement one might well call mystical. I love, not what he is, but that he is.
– Roland Barthes
…We travelers, walking to the sun, can’t see
Ahead, but looking back the very light
That blinded us shows us the way we came,
Along which blessings now appear, risen
As if from sightlessness to sight, and we,
By blessing brightly lit, keep going toward
That blessed light that yet to us is dark…
– Wendell Berry
They did not complain; for those who are down do not complain. Nor did they know they were down. Or, knowing it, they did not admit their downness. For to front so final a fact is to face with naked hands a lion; and to admit is to give in. Is to be washed away. To be lost and drowned. To be anonymous; unhelpable; alive no more; but debris, or a straw which the wind takes and sails, or tears, or drifts, or rots, to powder and forgetfulness.
A bone in a world of bones! And they gnawed these bones until it seemed that nothing moved in the world except their teeth.
– James Stephens
The body has been designed to renew itself through continuous self-correction. These same principles also apply to the healing of psyche, spirit, and soul.
– Peter A. Levine
You get beyond the suffering. And you focus on the sweetness of your vision.
– Laura Nyro
Everything that is dead quivers. Not only the things of poetry, stars, moon, wood, flowers, but even a white trouser button glittering out of a puddle in the street … Everything has a secret soul, which is silent more often than it speaks.
– Wassily Kandinsky
Proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you have always known.
– Frank Herbert
The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them.
– P.D. Ouspensky
As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
The ego is a monkey catapulting through the jungle:
Totally fascinated by the realm of the senses,
it swings from one desire to the next,
one conflict to the next,
one self-centered idea to the next.
If you threaten it, it actually fears for its life.
Let this monkey go. Let desires go. Let conflicts go.
Let the fiction of life and death go.
Just remain in the centre, watching.
– Hua Hu Jing
THIS ACCORDING TO Novalis: “The greatest magician would be the one who would cast over himself a spell so complete that he would take his own phantasmagorias as autonomous appearances. Would not this be our case?” I recognize that we are all magicians in some way. We are complicit in all we see and comprehend that what we see will never coincide with absolute reality. As a result, the human brain must make a narrative. This I can say with certainty, and yet each narrative we choose will reach a point at which it no longer suffices. One narrative must inevitably be abandoned for another. In this way, any narrative sequence defers meaning, even beyond the point at which it appears to end.
– Frederick Reiken, Day for Night
Personality encloses us like a shell. We like to believe that inside that shell is our ‘true self’, the ‘real me’. In fact, says Guidjieff, we are full of thousands of little ‘I’s. They could be compared to the crystalline fragments that a windscreen shatters into when struck with a hammer. But every time we make some tremendous effort, two of the crystals fuse together. If we could make enough efforts, we would finally obtain one solid block of crystal. If that could happen, man would be virtually a god.
Our aim, then, is to make the kind of effort that will create enough ‘friction’ to fuse two crystals together. These efforts Gurdjieff calls ‘intentional suffering’. This does not mean flogging ourselves or seeking out misery, but simply making efforts of will instead of drifting along in a robotic or mechanical state.
– Colin Wilson
i see myself thrown heart first into this ruin
not for any crime
but being
– Wanda Coleman
I have been bent and broken, but — I hope — into a better shape.
– Charles Dickens
I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.
– Lillian Hellman
It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble, how hopeless the outlook how muddled the tangle, how great the mistake. A sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all.
– Emmet Fox
The Four Minds
Hawaiians say “na’au” for your gut knowledge.
Science calls na’au the enteric system:
a low sheaf of nerve cells near your stomach
where values are chosen and saved.
So keeping is in your stomach mind
where practicality makes stability.
But morphing is in your head mind
where wonder outgrows itself.
The heart mind is for new beginnings
where instinct dares to be yourself.
And connecting is the genital mind
where empathy keeps getting in touch.
– George Gorman
Note to self:
Take Chances, on purpose /
Them, like all the others,
don’t standa a chance.
– Ebony Stewart
We grow accustomed to the Dark –
When Light is put away –
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Good bye –
A Moment – We uncertain step
For newness of the night –
Then – fit our Vision to the Dark –
And meet the Road – erect –
And so of larger – Darknesses –
Those Evenings of the Brain –
When not a Moon disclose a sign –
Or Star – come out – within –
The Bravest – grope a little –
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead –
But as they learn to see –
Either the Darkness alters –
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight –
And Life steps almost straight.
– Emily Dickinson
the answer is more products.
More candles.
More journals.
More five-step morning routines.
Self-care has been weaponized into a consumer performance,
pitched as the universal fix for a world that is fundamentally sick.
Because as long as we are told to heal alone,
we will forget that healing was always supposed to be collective.
Sometimes what we need isn’t more self-discipline,
or more self-soothing,
or more time alone.
Sometimes what we need is community care.
We need food banks that aren’t begging for donations.
We need childcare that doesn’t cost a second mortgage.
We need neighbors who show up without being asked.
We need mutual aid.
We need networks of care that aren’t built to profit off our exhaustion.
And yet—those structures are disappearing.
Deliberately.
Strategically.
Because a person who thinks she must heal herself in isolation
is a person too tired to organize,
too drained to resist,
too burned out to build anything new.
This is how white supremacy culture sustains itself:
by convincing us that self-responsibility is the only responsibility,
that needing others is weakness,
that suffering in private is noble,
that purchasing healing is the same as receiving care.
It isn’t.
Self-care matters.
But it will not fix what community neglect has broken.
It was never meant to carry the whole weight of our healing.
So yes—take the bath.
Say no.
Rest.
Feed yourself like you are something worth saving—because you are.
But also:
Demand better.
Reach out.
Tear down the lie that healing is a solo act.
Refuse the story that says you must be your own village.
Build new structures of care, messy and human and alive.
Because we were never meant to do this alone.
We survive through each other.
We heal together.
We resist together.
And together is the future they never wanted us to remember.
– Lisa M. Hayes
One cannot level one’s moral lance at every evil in the universe. There are just too many of them. But you can do something; and the difference between doing something and doing nothing is everything.
– Daniel Berrigan
Music is a fantastic friend and reflects, like a mirror, how far you’ve come. You briefly enter a realm which you can’t live in. When you’re lost in it, you discover powers you didn’t know you have. It’s a chance to be more than you might have been.
– Colin Davis
TRADESCANTIA
from the mundane root. an oyster plant.
a spiderwort. its variegated purple across
nearly every flowering inch of the world.
sweet Moses-in-the-cradle-lily. amethyst
Angel of Doubt. o Lucy, Saint of Sight,
blind me to etymology, the perse plum pit
in every story about G-d. what wildflower
deserves this wandering? to be buried in
a grave so violet? a name so violent
it once curbed the crucifixion. yes, cursed
to roam until Christ returns. sisyphean
in our ignorance. my aunt gave cuttings
away each winter as a Hanukkah gift
(we all need a little Jew in our lives)
terracotta exodus. tangles of it end-
lessly growing. creeping across oceans.
spreading over continents. the lurking
of a lesser theology. o Lord, leave us
to our legs, our purple leaves. Lord,
where we grow, so do the conditions
for surrender. look us in the root. o Lord,
Lord, let even the seed of a curse bloom
into a blessing.
– Zach Goldberg
If I accept the lowest in me, I lower a seed into the ground of Hell. The seed is invisibly small, but the tree of life grows from it and conjoins the Below with the Above. At both ends there is fire and blazing embers. The Above is fiery and the Below is fiery. Between the unbearable fires grow your life.
You hang between these two poles. In an immeasurably frightening movement the stretched hanging welters up and down. We thus fear our lowest, since that which one does not possess is forever united with the chaos and takes part in its mysterious ebb and flow. Insofar as I accept the lowest in me — precisely that red glowing sun of the depths, the upper shining sun also rises. Therefore he who strives for the highest finds the deepest.
– Carl Jung
Don’t wait for the light
to appear at the end of the tunnel;
stride down there . . .
and light the bloody thing yourself.
– Sara Henderson
I never was a person that thought because some person was doing one thing, and seemed to be making out better, that I should be doing the same thing… I’ve never wished for anybody else’s job. I enjoy what I do and I’m myself all the time. And I’ll continue to be me.
– Thelonious Monk
Be driven. Be curious. Write to connect. Write to explore. Write to make sense of that which you don’t know or remember. Write to discover. But never think something is good just because you wrote it.
– Kiese Laymon
eruption imminent
quiet for all this time,
i can no longer hold this lava
to scorch my insides
instead of yours.
– Najya Williams
The story is the thing. Without literature — books, blogs, movies, great TV, plays , all of it — the authoritarianisim of the world would crush us all. Keep reading, watching, talking…..
– Steve Saroff
I was so long in the outer brightness,
I am not used to this upheaval:
Being at home in my own soul,
Never to be led elsewhere.
I want nothing, I long for nothing,
I hum gently the sounds of childhood,
And I reach home astounded
In the warm beauty of dreams.
– Hermann Hesse (tr. James Wright)
I quiet the noise within and rest in the power of silence. In that sacred stillness, I find clarity, strength, and the wisdom to respond — not react. Silence is not the absence of sound, but the presence of peace.
– Brahma Kumaris
is everyone’s life just like, intensely following energetic threads, occasionally zooming out and going “what the fuck is going on?” and then going back to the threads? Or is that just everyone I know?
– River Kenna
The fun thing about AI is that it both kills the white collar jobs college students think they are training for and deprives them of the critical thinking necessary to get those jobs in the first place.
– Jonathan Fine
“You don’t realize it,” came the whisper, “but, one day, this too will be the past and you will come to mourn it.”
– Sue Zhao
The practice of ‘metta,’ loving-kindness, tenderizes the heart, soothes the body, and opens the mind. It is not a cop-out or denial by pretending to feel a certain way but rather a commitment to unconditional positive regard no matter the circumstances—a radical and heart-opening way to meet this moment of harshness.
– Zeenat Potia
CAVE PAINTING OF A DUN HORSE
He is stretching on the wall, appears to be in motion.
He cannot turn his head, but you can glean his eye
By candlelight, a catastrophe of ochre hope.
I know little else having shook loose from my own mane
All that would be true if I said it to be so.
White canes humble through the night.
In the years, most of what I made I made up. The etching of your dying is as cutting as it was
That many years ago, when I chose its acid touch for you.
There have been two wars.
I have read religiously, mostly texts which have red spines.
I had dreams that were inhumane to me.
The smaller the light to write to becomes, the more
I have to say to you.
– Lucie Brock-Broido
The Mounting Summer, Brilliant and Ominous
A yellow-headed, gold-hammered, sunflower-lanterned
Summer afternoon: after the sun soared
All morning to the marble-shining heights of the marvellous blue
Like lions insurgent, bursting out of a great black zoo,
As if all radiance rode over and roved and dove
To the thick dark night where the fluted roots clutched and grasped
As if all vividness poured, out poured
Over, bursting and falling and breaking,
As when the whole ocean rises and rises, in irresistible, uncontrollable
motion, shaking:
The roar of the heart in a shell and the roar of the sea beyond the
concessions of possession and the successions of time’s continual
procession.
– Delmore Schwartz
I mourn my other selves / My stupid body in the dirt / This ritual tide this blue myth This / indictment I rent
– Morgan Parker
Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. Make your life worth living.
– Albert Einstein
Who alone are peace and freedom to the river and the stream,
Only another winding will this stream make, only another murmur in this glade,
And then shall I come to you, a boundless drop to a boundless ocean.
– Kahlil Gibran
We may study history and translate historical facts according to our prejudices, but to be certain of the future is to be in illusion.
– Krishnamurti
Spiritual development is a long and arduous journey, an adventure through strange lands full of surprises, difficulties and even dangers. It involves a drastic transmutation of the ‘normal’ elements of the personality, an awakening of potentialities hitherto dormant, a raising of consciousness to new realms, and a functioning along a new inner dimension.
– Roberto Assagioli, Psychosynthesis
In this cold, scary world, whenever possible, we pick up after ourselves and turn up the flame of our lanterns just a smidge.
– Anne Lamott
When waiting to hear about Projects A, B, & C, the only thing to do is work on project D.
– Timothy Boudreau
Sylvia
Across a space peopled with stars I am
laughing while my sides ache for existence
it turns out is profound though the profound
because of time it turns out is an illusion and
all of this is infinitely improbable
given the space, for which I gratefully lie
in three feet of snow making a shallow grave
I would have called an angel otherwise and
think of my own rapturous escape from
living only as dust and dirt, little sister.
– Gerald Stern
THE GODDESS WHO CREATED THIS PASSING WORLD
The Goddess who created this passing world
Said Let there be lightbulbs & liquefaction
Life spilled out onto the street, colors whirled
Cars & the variously shod feet were born
And the past & future & I born too
Light as airmail paper away she flew
To Annapurna or Mt. McKinley
Or both but instantly
Clarified, composed, forever was I
Meant by her to recognize a painting
As beautiful or a movie stunning
And to adore the finitude of words
And understand as surfaces my dreams
Know the eye the organ of affection
And depths to be inflections
Of her voice & wrist & smile
– Alice Notley
The thing that bothers her is the smallness of his mind – not its entirety, just the bit he choose to use.
– E.D. Clarke
Within you now exists the same power that moves oceans.
– Sandy Newbigging
There’s a burning coal inside of us—the poet’s job is to unearth it.
– Edward Hirsch
Haiku [i count the morning]
i count the morning
stars the air so sweet i turn
riverdark with sound.
– Sonia Sanchez
When you perform an act of genuine service, giving your time, energy & resources as an act of love, the universe will multiply what you do.
– Iyanla Vanzant
What if the whole barrel of apples is rotten
– Lisa Lucas
Even people who adhere to different religions should assist one another. We should remember our common humanity and help one another on the human level.
– Ajaan Lee
Many things can fry your nervous system and that doesn’t make them bad. It’s just the chaotic nature of the human experience. Your work is not to avoid chaos. It’s to learn how to hold your energetic frame no matter what’s happening.
– Nika Solé
the neighbourhood’s changed so much
that your heart hesitates
at even the smallest
expectation
– Septimus Brown
Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself profoundly.
– Eckhart Tolle
I want the language to be as pellucid as possible, but the content psychologically complex.
– Henri Cole
… and remember to the last, that while there is life there is hope.
– Charles Dickens
There is grief in accepting someone won’t change.
– Nedra Tawwab
I don’t know who I am. Does one ever?
– Marguerite Yourcenar
Not everyone is given to be kind,
this is the same talent
as an ear for music or clairvoyance,
only more rare.
– Strugatsky brothers
People often say, “Riots aren’t revolutions.” That’s true. The vast majority of riots never become revolutionary. On the other hand, show me the revolution that started without a riot.
– Joshua Clover
The river that once gave life will drown the village that prayed for rain, its mercy will turn to vengeance on the third generation.
– The prophecy
Even if we jokingly type ourselves, it’s another thing to be typed by others.
– B. D. McClay
So, to reiterate our problem: Given that people often say and do different things, and say and want different things, how are we to read them?
– B. D. McClay
bad case of mono
someone smacked the stereo
single speaker left
– @SheilaBDuncan
Limited in his nature,
infinite in his desire,
man is a fallen god who
remembers heaven….
– A. De Lamartine
Ode to the Melting of I.C.E.
Just leave already. You’re too old in your ways.
No one likes you. How do you look yourself in the mirror?
Why do you treat people like that? Have you no conscience?
It is foolish to even suggest you might have one.
You do not own the land. You can never own the land.
Why don’t you melt away in the summer sun?
Why don’t you melt away in the summer sun?
You incite hate in the eyes of your citizens.
You justify murder and rape and cages.
Go away and never come back.
Go away, it’s better like that.
– Jose Hernandez Diaz
Self-Portrait as a Pair of Great Tits
by Chelsea McGlynn
When my friend moved for a season of field work
onto a rocky Galapagos island,
she told everyone she got a boob job,
just to watch their eyes drop down
to her B-cup breasts in confusion.
Red-footed Boobies, specifically,
she would explain.
I’m more fond of peckers myself—
Hairy, Red-Cockaded, or Nuttall—
they all bring me pleasure.
Although, I’ll let you in on my secret:
I believe that the largest one is still out there;
the one that makes even the prudes among us
shout out “Lord God” when they see it.
Scientists may doubt those fine specimens
still exist, after the denuding of their bush
and old-growth forest habitats,
but there’s a chance those birds
still penetrate the bark with their ivory bills
in the deep interior of Cuba.
I’ve yet to check a European Shag
off my life list and now that I’m married,
I’m not sure when I’ll get a chance,
although I think if I help my husband bag
a Horned Screamer, he might just forgive me.
You Came, Too
I came to the crowd seeking friends
I came to the crowd seeking love
I came to the crowd for understanding
I found you I came to the crowd to weep
I came to the crowd to laugh
You dried my tears
You shared my happiness
I went from the crowd seeking you
I went from the crowd seeking me
I went from the crowd forever
You came, too
– Nikki Giovanni
AKRIEL’S CONSOLATION
This morning I wrote a poem
on the sadness of this street:
loud new youths, rude new neighbors,
rot in the walls, ruts in the pavement.
Said my angel Akriel,
invisible, soft-tongued:
“Stop your griping, Bill Pillin!
All things grow old and rotten.
At least your derelict street possesses
a bracing authenticity
unlike the illuminated stage-sets
of the bourgeois boulevards.
You may even grow fond
of rotted planks and decaying plaster
and include them in one
of your mist-ridden night poems
which do, after all, make some sense;
whereas reality is random and misleading
unless changed in the eye: golden
flickers of dust in a lighted window.”
– William Pillin
And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner – no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.
– C.S. Lewis
AS MUCH AS YOU CAN
And even if you cannot make your life the way you
want it, this much, at least, try to do
as much as you can: don’t cheapen it
with too much intercourse with society,
with too much movement and conversation.
Don’t cheapen it by taking it about,
making the rounds with it, exposing it
to the everyday inanity
of relations and connections,
so it becomes like a stranger, burdensome.
– C.P. Cavafy
Rupture precedes revolution.
– Ruth Allen
I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do.
– Haruki Murakami
We are the seeds of a new dawn yet to rise,
Cracked open beneath soft and fluffy skies.
We rise like forests where green grasses lay,
Building tomorrow from the shards of today.
We are the seeds of tomorrow, not waiting to be,
But shaping the world we are destined to see.
– @UtyWrites
OUR BIRTHS
…we—not just poets—
are perhaps agents
of a will to knowing
that walks the universe.
oh, how those nine
months
shine.
– Jack Foley
The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love…just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil.
– Nick Cave
THE WORLD THROUGH YOUR WINDOW
For each of us, home affords a small view onto the great wide world. From the vantage point of your back porch, your kitchen window or from the top of your driveway, your view maybe small but immense. When you look out to the open tree, peer into the garden, or stare into a slice of sky above, you can travel for miles. Like in a Zen garden, a glimpse of stone or an arcing maple branch expresses the truth and order of things. Through the frame of your kitchen window, one single tree stands for the vast forest, the vertical rock in your garden embodies the entire mountain range, a sliver of light, the sun. From your one finite perspective, you get a glimpse of the great beyond.
For this reason you really needn’t go anywhere. The world comes to you, arriving at your doorstep as the call of morning bird song, the passing of cloud and in the ever changing angle of light. How each of us finds contentment and joy in our small and humble patch! We cherish our limited perspective, each day it brings us a feeling of belonging. By looking out the window while washing dishes or gazing outward in a moment of silence between phone calls, we reset our nerves and our mind. We fall into moments of reverie, suspended in time. Each time we pause, we slip into the great beyond where our temporal self and eternal self merge. Whether in a city apartment, a coastal home, or at the end of a suburban cul-de-sac, know that your small line of sight continues with mine and that together we share in the one great body of the world.
– Tias Little
“To dream is to know,” I remember my grandfather telling me on more than one occasion. I realize that this phrase must have meant many things to him, not all of which I’ll ever know. But I do feel the vibration of these words of his in reminding me always that when your existence is poised on various kinds of precarity, the substance of visions is as real as the earth, the air, the water. It is not easy to situate oneself, if even for brief moments, on the other side of time, the other side of somewhere […].
– Carter Mathes
The cosmos is a vast configuration of words telling a coherent story (for those who understand), and hence it is a book. So also the human being is a book, but human beings, by and large, have forgotten the story line (nowadays, many of them exult in their forgetfulness and tell us that all stories are arbitrary anyway, so take your pick).
– William C. Chittick
There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.
– Zora Neale Hurston
There were so many complex emotions for which poems did not exist. I had to find a secret way to express my feelings. I used to memorize poems. I would say them out; I didn’t use to write them down. I had this long fund of poetry in my head.
– Audre Lorde
But that alone, my speaking, is not even the point; I wanted to be silent with you too.
– Paul Celan
Because there are times when a soul has to leave a body, times that are not death. Some people know this like a hymn.
– Lidia Yuknavitch
Infinite systems! A mentat could not function without realizing he worked in infinite systems. Fixed knowledge could not surround the infinite. Everywhere could not be brought into finite perspective. Instead, he must become the infinite—momentarily.
– Frank Herbert, Dune
Levinas says: The proximity of others is ethics, the proximity of things is poetry.
– Gerard L. Bruns
I longed with all my heart for a fresh green silence between living water and forests.
– Renée Vivien, (tr. Jeanette H. Foster)
Between two musical notes there exists another note, between two facts there exists another fact, between two grains of sand, no matter how close together they are, there exists an interval of space, there exists a sensing between sensing—in the interstices of primordial matter there is the mysterious, fiery line that is the world’s breathing, and the world’s continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.
– Clarice Lispector
Flesh both inscribes and incorporates cultural memory and history… Knowing is corporeal. One mimes to understand. We copy the world to understand through our bodies.
– Paul Stoller
We may judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
When the storm is over and night falls and the moon is out in all its glory and all you’re left with is the rhythm of the sea, of the waves, you know what God intended for the human race, you know what paradise is.
– Harold Pinter
Quo magis in dubiis hominem spectare periclis
convenit adversisque in rebus noscere qui sit;
nam very voces tum demum pectore ab imo
eliciuntur et eripitur persona, manet res.
So it is more useful to watch a man in times of peril,
and in adversity to discern what kind of man he is;
for then at last words of truth are drawn from the depths of his heart,
and the mask is torn off, reality remains.
– Titus Lucretius Carus
Where can I free myself of the homeland in my body?
– Mahmoud Darwish
How much do I have left of the loyalty to earth, which human shame, and dislike of our own lives, and others’ deaths that take part of us with them, wear out of us, as we go toward that moment when we find out how we die: clinging and pleading, or secretly relieved that it is all over, or despising ourselves, knowing that death is a punishment we deserve, or like an old dog, off his feed, who suddenly is ravenous, and eats the bowl clean, and the next day is a carcass. There is an unfillableness in us — in some of us, a longing for that blue-shaded black night where the beloved dead, and all those others who suffered and sang and were not defeated — the one who hushed them by singing “Going Home” when they lynched him on Bald Mountain, the klezmer violinists who pressed bows across strings until eyes, by near-starvation enlarged, grew wet and sparkled – have gone. Yet I know more than ever that here is the true place, here where we sit together, out of the wind, with a loaf of country bread, and tomatoes still warm from the distant sun, and wine in glasses that are, one for each of us, the upper bell of the glass that will hold the last hour we have to live.
– Galway Kinnell, The Striped Snake and the Goldfinch
Don’t you know, there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight? Awkwardness and stupidity can. The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn’t do the thing he ought to.
– Mark Twain
You can be sad and clean and pure, if you go far
enough inside yourself you are against yourself, or under
yourself, like the Metro, the train cars tunneling life under life.
– Gillian Cummings
At each moment the state of self is constructed, from the ground up,” writes Antonio Damasio. “It is an evanescent reference state, so continuously and consistently reconstructed that the owner never knows it is being remade unless something goes wrong with the remaking.”
– Gabor Maté
All struggle, all resistance is – must be – concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.
– Susan Sontag
Apostle Town
After your death
It was windy every day.
Every day.
Opposed us like a wall.
We went.
Shouting sideways at one another.
Along the road it was useless.
The spaces between.
Us got hard they are.
Empty spaces and yet they.
Are solid and black.
And grievous as gaps.
Between the teeth.
Of an old woman you.
Knew years ago.
When she was.
Beautiful the nerves pouring
around in her like palace fire.
– Anne Carson
How do you survive even one morning even one day
With no mother to tell you
Time to change
– Kazim Ali
When life is no longer seen from a perspective of beginnings through a fantasy of continuous expansion and growth, but rather from the perspective of ends and of death through a fantasy of fate and limitations, midlife has arrived.
– Murray Stein
It is not you who will speak; let the disaster speak in you, even if it be by your forgetfulness or silence.
– Maurice Blanchot (translated by Ann Smock)
Broken Sonnet
by John Yau
The world weeps. There are no tears
To be found. It is deemed a miracle.
The president appears on screens
In villages and towns, in cities in jungles
And jungles still affectionately called cities.
He appears on screens and reads a story.
Whose story is he reading and why?
What lessons are to be learned from this story
About a time that has not arrived, will not arrive, is here?
Time of fire and images of fire climbing toward the sun
Time of precious and semi-precious liquids
Time of a man and a woman doused in ink
Rolling across streams and down valleys
Trying to leave some string of words behind.
As someone once pointed out to me, when you become conscious, the first thing you discover is why you stayed unconscious all those years. Being conscious means you really have to feel what you feel, which is frequently very vulnerable and raw.
– Pema Chödrön
The problem is, most of us spend our entire life going from one promise of relief to another, never staying with the pain long enough to learn anything from it.
– Pema Chodron
What gets upon cloudes, comes down in water, the earth swallows up all, and like that philosophicall dragon eats her own tayle. The wise poets saw this, and in their mystical language caled the earth Saturne, telling us withal shee did feed on her own children.
– Thomas Vaughan
No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
– Viktor Frankl
Sometimes the people you’re most mad at are actually the ones who executed their role perfectly so that you could learn the lesson that they were sent to you to teach you.
– Nika Solé
Thinking of home sometimes reminded me of the difficult relationships that could make me glad I was so far away.
– Stephanie Colwell
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!)
– Frank O’Hara
Some people are well adjusted to a spiritually sick society. Others of us are so deep in the quantum reality that we’re building a new society.
– Nika Solé
I have come to accept the bumpy roads of life; they seem to lead to the best places.
– Steve Maraboli
Whether on the cushion or in the laboratory, Buddhism and science resist an easy fit.
– Linda Heuman
Someday
people will see all of this
for what it really is.
Someday.
– Andy Perrin
crayon scrawl
on the back of a bill
spring dusk
– @NituYumnam
If your mind is happy then you are happy anywhere you go. When wisdom awakens within you, you will see truth wherever you look. It’s like when you learned how to read, you can then read anywhere you go.
– Ajahn Chah
People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.
– Saul Bellow
Writing, for me, is almost another way of reading, except one level deeper. Almost as soon as I began to read – and I read very early – I began to write.
– Donna Tartt
With a cluther of limbs and organs, all that is needed to live again, to hold out a little time, I’ll call that living, I’ll say it’s me, I’ll get standing, I’ll stop thinking, I’ll be too busy, getting standing, staying standing, stirring about, holding out, getting to tomorrow, tomorrow week, that will be ample, a week will be ample, a week in spring, that puts the jizz in you.
– Samuel Beckett
Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.
– Arthur Rimbaud
I learned “to cultivate my circle of friends to be mostly creatives
Others just don’t seem to understand the demands of an artist’s call to
explore their field
so it’s best to be around like-minded artists.
– Kim Fahner
We hear endlessly…that we are the richest and strongest nation of all time. If this is true, ought there not to be presumptive respect for the political achievements of the generations whose effort and ingenuity brought us here?
– Marilynne Robinson
You have at any rate paid me the compliment of taking me seriously; though I cannot avoid wondering whether it is not ‘too seriously’, or in the wrong directions.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
I hope that real love and truth
are stronger in the end
than any evil or misfortune
in the world.
– Charles Dickens
Great revolutions are born from countless small miseries,
just as great rivers are born from countless small streams.
– Victor Hugo
Meditation is like placing a vase in a muddy river—over time, the water settles and becomes clear.
– Willa Blythe Baker
is human spiritual evolution speeding up in general out there, or does it just look like that in my social circles?
– River Kenna
Reading and books are medicine.
– River Kenna
aquamarine –
the many facets
of her fantasy world
– Paul Callus
Many people want the feeling of being someone special but don’t want to do the work of becoming someone safe, present, or honest.
– @EarthToGazelle
It may look as if the situation is creating the suffering, but ultimately this is not so – your resistance is.
– Eckhart Tolle
Reflecting on your actions works only if you act on your best intentions.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu
The Romans believed the mind operated like an aqueduct.
Descartes believed the brain was essentially a hydraulic pump.
Contemporaries said it worked like a clock.
Freud compared the mind to a steam engine.
Other Victorians said it was like a telephone.
But of course, this time we’re definitely right – the human mind is in all respects exactly like our most recently invented technology.
No doubt about it.
– @TVachaW
Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
– Martin Luther King Jr.
alone again
making an event
of a sandwich
– John Stevenson
There was something beautifully lonely about Hemingway’s characters, they were like poems trapped in flesh.
– Patti Smith
I can step outside my comfort zone with the knowledge that I kind of know who I am by now and sort of know what I’m doing.
– David Byrne
Human beings are not our enemy. Our enemy is not the other person. Our enemy is the violence, ignorance, and injustice in us and in the other person. When we are armed with compassion and understanding, we fight not against other people, but against the tendency to invade, to dominate, and to exploit.
– Thích Nhất Hạnh
We are all on this wild and beautiful ride together. The truest joy of all existence is this very interconnectedness. And the more we honor it by sharing our stories and our energy and our light with the world, the more our existence is enriched.
– Laura Lynne Jackson
If even one link is off a zipper won’t zip. I’ve come to respect how a small move to be in alignment with something I believe in makes a difference. But the opposite is also true. To stop a takeover many small moves to be out of alignment must be dared. Either way the small and little needs respect for they have power.
– Gunilla Norris
The human heart is like a night bird. Silently waiting for something, and when the time comes, it flies straight toward it.
– Haruki Murakami
The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature; its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos.
– William Irwin Thompson
we scorched the cold metal
of our mental illnesses until
they softened together into
sparkling silver charms on
our friendship bracelets.
– Blythe Baird
Insomnia
by Emily Jo Scalzo
Gravitational brainwaves ripple
& supernova ideas jolt me awake—
my thoughts travel lightyears
through the dusty nebulae of exhaustion
as I lie in the universe of my darkened bedroom
and listen through the white noise of my fan
There’s a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.
– William Adama
The real is what resists symbolization absolutely.
– Jacques Lacan
You must live in a living world
Which you can neither understand,
Nor refrain from loving.
Having survived riots and pogroms,
Hidden in closets and raised by spies,
You think about suing Jesus,
But would rather talk about fuzzy ownership,
Instead of entropy when symbiosis fails.
Enough with parables of knowledge
In which superstition wears cloaks of reason,
And science is the biggest fantasy.
I’d rather explore fuzzier boundaries,
Where entropy yields to symbiogenesis.
The resilience of grass and spirit.
The leap of my heart when you call
And the doves flock around you!
Forget Narcissus and the Zombie.
Everyone has multiple personalities, you whisper.
Water knows its way in the dark,
And love is how we no longer fool one another.
– George Gorman
Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
– Walter Benjamin
one step away
from history
the mosquito
– Shimaneko-kun
The farther and more deeply we penetrate into matter, by means of increasingly powerful methods, the more we are confounded by the interdependence of its parts.
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
We know today that the greatest danger of tyranny is from the executive.
– Hannah Arendt, 1973
When stability (uniformity) is achieved, there is no more harmony.
– Jacques Ellul
It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man’s head, will sometimes act like an obstruction in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty.
– Charles Sanders Peirce
It was a riverside meadow, lush from before the hay harvest,
On an immaculate day in the sun of June.
I searched for it, found it, recognized it.
Grasses and flowers grew there familiar in my childhood.
With half-closed eyelids I absorbed luminescence.
And the scent garnered me, all knowing ceased.
Suddenly I felt I was disappearing and weeping with joy.
– Czeslaw Milosz
There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
– Milan Kundera
Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.
– Wendell Berry
In a life properly lived, you’re a river.
– Jim Harrison
The Afterlife
by Billy Collins
They’re moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
you go to the place you always thought you would go,
the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.
Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.
Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.
Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.
There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals—eagles and leopards—and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,
while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.
There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld
by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.
The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.
Sometimes when I’m asked to describe the Buddhist teachings, I say this: Everything is connected; nothing lasts; you are not alone. This is really just a restatement of the traditional Three Marks of Existence: non-self, impermanence, and suffering.
– Lewis Richmond
Intoxication, like sexual euphoria, is the privilege of the human animal.
– Roman Payne
Of all the things I wondered about on this land, I wondered the hardest about the seduction of certain geographies that feel like home — not by story or blood but merely by their forms and colors. How our perceptions are our only internal map of the world, how there are places that claim you and places that warn you away. How you can fall in love with the light.
– Ellen Meloy
We can think of affect as the universe of our ideas transmuted in feeling, and it is also helpful to think of feelings in music terms. Feelings perform the equivalent of a musical score that accompanies our thoughts and actions.
– António Damásio
Great abuses in the world are begotten, or, to speak more boldly, all the abuses of the world are begotten, by our being taught to be afraid of professing our ignorance, and that we are bound to accept all things we are not able to refute: we speak of all things by precepts and decisions. The style at Rome was that even that which a witness deposed to having seen with his own eyes, and what a judge determined with his most certain knowledge, was couched in this form of speaking: “it seems to me.” They make me hate things that are likely, when they would impose them upon me as infallible.
– Michel de Montaigne
He felt that taking naps was much more beneficial than confronting catastrophes.
– Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow
The most important office is office of citizen.
– Louis D. Brandeis
our sins would wash away in the nearest puddle without the need for verse.
– Alvin Pang
…confusion / is a kind of worldly rigor.
– Mary Helen Callier
All that is made here hides another making;
Even this water shows a magic surface.
Sky is translated; dragonfly and iris
Rise from the grey sheath; unremembered shadows
Cling, where the bloom breaks.
– Vernon Watkins
Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing. Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn’t the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us.
– Henry Miller
I cannot find it,
That very first violet
Seen from my window.
– Richard Wright
Take the word
of my pulse, loving and ordinary
Send out your signals, hoist
your dark scribbled flags
but take
my hand
– Adrienne Rich
Few people have the wisdom to prefer the criticism that would do them good, to the praise that deceives them.
– La Rochefoucauld
When you don’t pay attention to emotional signals, your body says, ‘Okay, here are some physical signals for you.’ If you don’t pay attention to them either, you really are in deep trouble.
– Gabor Maté
If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.
– C.S. Lewis
Tears, sorrow, and disappointment are bitter, but wisdom is the comforter in all psychic suffering.
– C. G. Jung
Just saw a woman walk up to the Angelus Novus painting bow her head make the sign of the cross turn around and leave.
– Samantha Rose Hill
i believe poetry happens to a poet long before they ever write it.
– Enzo Silon Surin
The soul throbs like the sea for
a larger life. No thought
which I have ever had has
satisfied my soul.-‘The Story of my
Heart.’
– Richard Jefferies
The world will try and make you think that what you do is all that matters. That as long as you have the finer things to show for it then you have won. Not realizing that the whole point is who you are while you’re doing it. That’s what really shows.
– Nika Solé
in the forge
the blacksmith
drinks whole milk
– @HaikuDaily575
Stories are written and told by and for people who have been broken, but who have risen up, or will rise, if attention is paid to them. Those people are you and us. Stories and truth are splints for the soul.
– Anne Lamott
Clarity comes easy for a person who knows what they want. Remember this when dealing with those who come with a lot of confusion.
– Nika Solé
Love is misinterpreted as an emotion; in reality, it is a state of consciousness, a way of being in the world, a way of seeing oneself and others.
– Dr. David R. Hawkins
Mediocrity is just not a part of the program.
– Nika Solé
Though there is a great similarity between us all, we are dissimilar, and this dissimilarity gives each of us a sense of importance in being separate.
– Krishnamurti
As I often tell my students, the two most important phrases in therapy, as in yoga, are “Notice that” and “What happens next?” Once you start approaching your body with curiosity rather than with fear, everything shifts.
– Bessel van der Kolk
The moon’s the same old moon,
The flowers exactly as they were,
Yet I’ve become the thingness
Of all the things I see!
– Shidō Bunan
The modern city is ugly not because it is a city but because it is not enough of a city, because it is a jungle, because it is confused and anarchic, and surging with selfish and materialistic energies.
– G.K. Chesterton
Brian Wilson said, Be My Baby by the Ronettes is as important as Einstein’s theory of relativity (he was right).
People really think they’re casting negative energy towards high powered beings and the whole time they’re just making us more abundant and more magnetic.
– Nika Solé
The more you chase after something the more you are indicating to yourself that you do not have it. The key is to move yourself into the vibration of having it. You get there a lot faster.
– Nika Solé
Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.
– Alan W. Watts
It is never late to ask yourself “Am I ready to change my life, am I ready to change myself?”. However old we are, whatever we went through, it is always possible to be reborn. If each day is a copy of the last one, what a pity!
– Shams Tabrizi
For it is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supernatural; whereas they are natural, far more natural than he.
– Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories
This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games. All games are basically hostile. Winners and losers. We see them all around us: the winners and the losers. The losers can oftentimes become winners, and the winners can very easily become losers.
– William S. Burroughs
WORKSONG
The little we know or do doesn’t make the form
and nature of things. The form and nature of things
is something we’ll never know. How shall we show
our respect for something we’ll never know? Let it be
in the nature and form of that little we know and do.
– William Bronk
the darkness came
it confiscated the light
and intentional thoughts
Sweet dreams poets
– @poetscott37
Americano
by Emanuel Xavier
I look at myself in the mirror
trying to figure out what makes me an American
I see Ecuador and Puerto Rico
I see brujo spirits moving
across the backs of Santeros
splattered with the red blood of sacrificed chickens
on their virgin white clothes
and blue beads for Yemaya
practicing religions without a roof
I see my own blood
reddening the white sheets of a stranger
proud American blue jean labels
on the side of the bed
I see Don Rosario in his guayabera
sitting outside the bodega
with his Puerto Rican flag
reading time in the eyes of alley cats
I see my mother trying to be
more like Marilyn Monroe
than Julia De Burgos
I see myself trying to be more like James Dean
than Federico García Lorca
I see Carlos Santana, Gloria Estefan,
Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopez
More than just sporadic Latin explosions
More like fireworks on el Cuatro de Julio
as American as Bruce Springsteen, Janis Joplin,
Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin
I see Taco Bells and chicken fajitas at McDonald’s
I see red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple
I see Chita Rivera on Broadway
You see, I am as American as lemon meringue pie
as American as Wonder Woman’s panties
as American as Madonna’s bra
as American as the Quinteñeros,
the Abduls, the Lees,
the Jacksons, the Kennedys
(Mostly) all of us immigrants to this soil
since none sound American Indian to me
as American as television snow
after the anthem is played
and I am not ashamed
Jose, can you see…
I pledge allegiance
to this country ’tis of me
land of dreams and opportunity
land of proud detergent names and commercialism
land of corporations
If I can win gold medals at the Olympics
If I can sign my life away
to die for the United States
Ain’t no small-town hick
gonna tell me I ain’t an American
because I can spic in two languages
coño carajo y Fuck You
This is my country too
where those who do not believe in freedom and diversity are
the ones who need to get the hell out
I used to carry around the idea of “wouldn’t it be nice to live together in the kind of world where we belong” as a sort of mantra that a better life was possible.
– Brian Wilson
Art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.
– Saul Bellow
Worse, it was traditional to feel this way.
– John Ashbery
I have always made it a point of honor to write as though I had a million dollars; that is, I try to write in the most original way I know how, and that feels like a risk each time you do it.
– Edmund White
white bird—
a distant journey
to myself
– @lafcadiopoetry
I relax and cast aside all mental burdens, allowing God to express through me His perfect love, peace, and wisdom.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
I remember persuading a friend who ended up going into the real estate business to swap me Kafka’s Selected Stories for War and Peace—he calculated that it was a good deal to get four times the amount of book for the price of one.
– Yu Hua
California is a desert and I am a woman inside it.
– Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
There are few people in England I suppose, who have more true enjoyment of music than myself, or a better natural taste. If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.
– Jane Austen, Lady Catherine de Bourgh
Feel better on purpose by shifting your focus and thoughts in the direction of your True-Divine Self.
– Michael LeBlanc
I look for you in everything just to see that you’re still there, in my field of dreams.
– Nika Solé
What fiction does is sneak up on the truth by telling it six different ways and finally releasing it.
– John Gardner
Nothing says fascismo more loudly than this hysterical focus on the “invisible internal enemy” that taints the “purity” of the body politic. This is how American fascism looks. Every fascism is different and this is ours. Neoliberalism helped till the soil for it.
– Alina Stefanescu
Be the Self. That is Bliss.
What is not permanent is not worth striving for. The only ‘goal’ worth seeking is the Supreme Bliss of Self-Awareness.
– Ramana Maharshi
Well, I see that saying and doing are two things, and hereafter I shall better observe this distinction.
– Faithful (John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress)
I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up.
– Frank O’Hara
This culture is not alive, it’s just a televised imitation of a live culture that people just sit around watching. Unable to fully live, people’s minds and bodies atrophy and die in masses–from the weather, from epidemics, I’m not trying to save this broadcast but just keep alive seeds so that some of the people have something from which to regrow some memory of what real culture might and could be and actually how to live knowing and doing something besides just being entertained on a sinking ship. It’s not about trying to get to Shangri-La. It’s the deliciousness of giving heaven to someone else. That is heaven. We’re trying to learn that our health is the health of the whole thing.
– Martin Prechtel, Rescuing The Light
My sadness was at least
sometimes a defense mechanism.
A person couldn’t make you cry
if you were already crying.
– Ollie Schminkey
Jingging asked a monk, “What’s that sound outside?”
The monk said, “The sound of rain drops.”
Jingqing said, “Sentient beings are all topsy-turvy. They
delude themselves pursuing things outside themselves.”
I am circling
the hole in the world of my imagination.
– Cameron Awkward-Rich
Meditative people will find a charm in a certain consonancy between the aspect of the city and its odd and stirring history.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
The world is advanced only by those who more than fill their present places.
– Wallace D. Wattles
The beginning of infinity is the point where we realize explanations can always be improved.
– David Deutsch
It is as much a matter of course to decry the New Town as to exalt the Old; and the most celebrated authorities have picked out this quarter as the very emblem of what is condemnable in architecture.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
Almost all great fortunes are based upon one cracking good idea and the guts to go with it.
– Frederick Forsyth
We’re artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don’t we?
– Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives
Perhaps the way one tells how alive a particular art form is, is by the latitude it gives for making mistakes in it, and still being good.
– Susan Sontag
Someone of note, in the early days, called my work prolix. I had to look it up. It was useful not because I stopped being prolix, but because I realized that a writing teacher could be wrong.
– Jo Ann Beard
Triviality is evil — triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.
– Theodor W. Adorno
Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas.
– Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education
What makes us most human is the possession of a unique and irreproducible story, that we take place over time and leave behind our traces.
– Olga Tokarczuk
Tao endures without a name, yet nothing is left undone.
– Laozi
You get used to it, not in the good way, to the extent of the entire world oftentimes feeling like a place where you weren’t invited. If you’ve been here, you know. If not, must be nice.
– Barbara Kingsolver
A thought-form of self-pity is one of the most dangerous you can have.
The more you pity yourself, the worse things get.
Be above the worry belt, in consciousness, and then you will have instantaneous manifestations.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
The deeper you go, and the closer you get to the final realization, the heavier the resistance. You are coming down to those areas that are the ones that are repressed, and it’s that repression system that you have to pass through.
– Joseph Campbell
Embracing this limited human being and living this life fully is the only way. I don’t think it is different for monks; awakening is fully embracing our ordinary life.
– Anshin Devin Ashwood
The New York of the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s was by no means even close to utopia, especially for folks of color. But there were glimmers of possibility that we can mine for a politics of the utopic.
– Marcos Gonsalez
Our Western inheritance, then: the concept of the deep underground as wasteland, dump, terminus of the unredeemable.
– Justin Hocking
Wisdom is knowledge which has become a part of one’s being.
– Orison Swett Marden
Sometimes you just gotta know stuff.
– Socrates, c. 435 BC
Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.
– John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
An artist discovers his genius the day he dares not to please.
– Max Jacob
When we hold tightly to views without turning to our own wisdom mind, we develop a sort of ego-based faith that you might call patriotic faith. We have faith in ‘my’ country! ‘My” people! ‘My’ religion! ‘My’ teacher and lineage! We have faith in things because they belong to ‘me.’ In truth, such faith doesn’t do much for us personally except give us a stronger identity to flash around. When we fall on hard times, this kind of faith doesn’t serve us, because it’s no more substantial than a puff of smoke in the air. We were so full of ourselves that there really wasn’t any room to respect anyone or anything in the first place, it turns out. We get hit hard with the hollowness of our faith and find ourselves as groundless as ever before. Patriotic faith is divisive and produces a lot of zealots. It doesn’t have much of a connection to our inner intelligence. It just likes to wave a flag.
Genuine faith isn’t based on me and mine. It is an inclusive and open intelligence that is searching for positivity, a sense of ease, an answer to the many questions we have about suffering and happiness. It brings warmth to the heart and makes us feel at home. It is a resting place. It allows us the courage to openly question experience and the world around us. Genuine faith does not require us to put on blinders and believe what we are told. It is an open question. And we can stay open because we trust in something bigger.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, Light Comes Through
My daily activity is not unusual;
I just remain in spontaneous harmony.
Not grasping or rejecting,
nothing left to assert or oppose.
What use are fancy titles
and expensive clothes of vermilion and purple?
This entire mountain is free
of even a speck of dust.
Supernatural powers and miraculous activity:
fetching water and carrying firewood.
– Layman Pang
However apparently insignificant the event, whether it be the ring of tobacco ash surrounding the table, the direction from which the wild geese first appeared, or a series of seemingly meaningless human movements, he couldn’t afford to take his eyes off it and must note it all down, since only by doing so could he hope not to vanish one day and fall a silent captive to the infernal arrangement whereby the world decomposes but is at the same time constantly in the process of self-construction.
– László Krasznahorkai
You’re missing the main point. We don’t arrange things in an order (that’s the function of the utilities). Quite simply, we are facilitating the processes so that anything may happen.
– John Cage
“Under conditions of terror,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her classic treatise on the normalization of evil, “most people will comply but some people will not…No more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.” Under such conditions, counting ourselves among the few who refuse to comply has less to do with whether we believe ourselves to be good than it does with the deliberate protections we must place between unrelenting evil and our own sanity and goodness, for among the most insaning aspects of tyrannical regimes is the Stockholm syndrome of the psyche they inflict upon us — upon ordinary people, not-evil people, people who consider themselves decent and good, but who slowly, through a cascade of countless small concessions, lose sight of the North Star of their native moral compass.
You can make a spiritually irresponsible statement about evil. For example, I’ve heard people say that Hitler was crying out for love. That may be true. But there was a massive anti-ecological, anti-evolutionary act that he brought into existence, and one could call that evil.
There’s a danger in using the deepest level to excuse the other levels. So it seems to me that there is evil. There are acts that oppose the flow of life and growth and human dignity. They must be dealt with courageously. They must be dealt with by warriors.
– Stephen R. Schwartz
Personality encloses us like a shell. We like to believe that inside that shell is our ‘true self’, the ‘real me’. In fact, says Guidjieff, we are full of thousands of little ‘I’s. They could be compared to the crystalline fragments that a windscreen shatters into when struck with a hammer. But every time we make some tremendous effort, two of the crystals fuse together. If we could make enough efforts, we would finally obtain one solid block of crystal. If that could happen, man would be virtually a god.
Our aim, then, is to make the kind of effort that will create enough ‘friction’ to fuse two crystals together. These efforts Gurdjieff calls ‘intentional suffering’. This does not mean flogging ourselves or seeking out misery, but simply making efforts of will instead of drifting along in a robotic or mechanical state.
– Colin Wilson
I’ve always been haunted by choice. I want the city and the forest. Freedom but also babies. A home and the open highway.
I love it when other people choose anything for me— dinner spots, weekend plans, hiking trails. It’s one tiny decision I’m absolved from making. To choose is to be culpable and as a former evangelical kid, there are few things I hate more than being culpable.
But being unable to choose becomes its own choice.
When you don’t decide, a decision still arrives.
– Joy Sullivan
Attention is malleable. We can intensify it, shift it either voluntarily or involuntarily. We can soften it, diffuse it. We can deploy global attention toward tangible external objects, or to their intangible attributes. We can direct attention internally to retrieve items that we have stored in memory. We can sustain attention by infusing a component of motivation, either from the top-down (by intention) or by much more subtler means related to our habitual ongoing attitudes.
– James H. Austin
Those who live nobly, even if in their day they live obscurely, need not fear that they will have lived in vain. Something radiates from their lives, some light that shows the way to their friends, their neighbors—perhaps to long future ages. I find many men nowadays oppressed with a sense of impotence, with the feeling that in the vastness of modern societies there is nothing of importance that the individual can do. This is a mistake. The individual, if he is filled with love of mankind, with breadth of vision, with courage and with endurance, can do a great deal.
– Bertrand Russell
He was moving through a new order of creation, of which few men had ever dreamed. Beyond the realms of sea and land and air and space lay the realms of fire, which he alone had been privileged to glimpse. It was too much to expect that he would also understand.
– Arthur C. Clarke
One day men will learn to think of sanity as an aesthetic achievement.
– Adrian Stokes
Medicine rests upon four pillars—philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and ethics. The first pillar is the philosophical knowledge of earth and water; the second, astronomy, supplies its full understanding of that which is of fiery and airy nature; the third is an adequate explanation of the properties of all the four elements—that is to say, of the whole cosmos—and an introduction into the art of their transformations; and finally, the fourth shows the physician those virtues which must stay with him up until his death, and it should support and complete the three other pillars.
– Paracelsus
I want to sleep for a while, a moment, a minute, a century; but let everyone know that I am not dead.
– Federico Garcia Lorca
The textures of the world are an outline of the infinite. [Wallace] Stevens said, or at least I seem to remember that he said, the thing seen becomes the thing unseen. He also said that the reverse way was impossible. [Theodore] Roethke wrote that all finite things reveal infinitude. What we have, and all we will have, is here in the earthly paradise. How to wring music from it, how to squeeze light out of it, is, as it has always been, the only true question. I’d say that to love the visible things in the visible world is to love their apokatastatic outline in the invisible next.
– Charles Wright
I KNEW AN ECCENTRIC
I once knew an eccentric electrician.
We had a lot in common.
He wrote poetry and I did.
We both liked pasta.
His poems were complex.
Reading them was like riding a funnel-shaped wind inward.
Finally, I said, “Don’t show me any more of them
and don’t keep talking about unknown galaxies
and how small we are.
I already know that,” I said.
“And fragile,” he added.
– Helen Conkling
Jung said in a letter once that life is a short pause between two great mysteries. Beware of those who offer answers. They may be sincere, but their answers are not necessarily yours.
– James Hollis
One minute you’re young and wild, the next you’re searching the house for the pair of glasses that are on top of your head.
– Very British Problems
Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.
– C.S. Lewis
Peace is within oneself to be found in the same place as agitation and suffering. It is not found in a forest or on a hilltop, nor is it given by a teacher. Where you experience suffering, you can also find freedom from suffering.
– Ajahn Chah
Everyone wants the fountain of youth…
No one wants to drink 3 liters of water a day.
– Dan Go
One year / in the middle of my life // I asked how full do I want to be.
– Asa Drake
Soul is resonance. . . . We often use the language of soul phenomena without realizing we are doing so. We speak of ‘being in tune’ with someone, or ‘being on the same wavelength’. Something about a connection with another person just feels right. It clicks.
– Robert Sardello
When we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.
– Alan Watts
a journey
for moon viewing
departs at dawn
– Basho
Mindfulness is whole-person awareness—being present in the fathom-long body, not just the mind.
– Sebene Selassie
When you listen, not to the superficial meaning of words of Truth, but in such a way, that the listener in you disappears, along with the speaker, then the real meaning of the words can sink in deep and your misunderstanding will disappear by itself.
– Ramesh Balsekar
beyond the old gate
the wind loses its voice ~
silent shadows
– @joy_pops
The expansion of your own consciousness, capacity for love, humility and compassion—this is the path; this is the way.
– Bryant McGill
This world is not enough.
– Jose Esteban Munoz
I used to think that in order to be a “serious writer” I had to write about trauma all the time. So in case no one has told you, dear writer, you can also write about joy, about wonder, about hope. In fact, the world needs you to! See also: Mary Oliver, Brian Doyle, Ross Gay.
– Bethany Jarmul
The wrong thing takes up so much of your energy, that finding the right thing will have you feeling like a whole new person.
– Nika Solé
Spiritual friendship is the foundation of the holy life—it broadens our perspective and helps us grow.
– Gregory Kramer
It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone.
– Vita Sackville-West
Psychedelics are not suppressed because they are dangerous to users; they’re suppressed because they provoke unconventional thought, which threatens any number of elites and institutions that would rather do our thinking for us.
– Dennis McKenna
Don’t look for me in human shape. I am inside your looking.
– Rumi
All conflicts are economic
disequilibriums shrouded
in ideological conundrums.
– Andy Perrin
I do best on an island in the middle of nowhere where time doesn’t exist and life flourishes and I can luxuriate in peace by the sea.
– Nika Solé
You have everything in you that Buddha has, that Christ has. But only when you start to acknowledge your own beauty.
– Ram Dass
I don’t want to beautify our collective trauma.
…
As your guest, I trained myself
To beautify
Our collective trauma.
…
Hold a funeral for the imagination,
I thought.
– Bhanu Kapil, from How To Wash A Heart
If all your energies are focused in one direction, enlightenment is not far away. After all, what you are seeking is already within you.
– Sadhguru
how fun
to be a dandelion
waiting
for the wind to blow
all your wishes true
– @lafcadiopoetry
There is a principle that says whatever we do to someone else, we actually do to ourselves. Why? Because we are connected by the one Creative source. This source creates a responsibility for, accountability to and dependence on one another.
– Iyanla Vanzant
I feel a fever coming
scrolling through Merriam Webster’s
youngest words—until I hit jorts, remember
June. Soon I’ll shed these wools
of my first winter in Upstate New York,
where cold damp clusters under
skin.
– Jen DeGregorio
The debt to life has to be paid somehow; one has to be a hero in the best and only way that he can.
– Ernest Becker
Description begins in the writer’s imagination but should finish in the reader’s.
– Stephen King
Give us help from trouble,
For the help of man is useless.
Through God we will do valiantly,
For it is He who shall tread down our enemies.
– Psalm 60:11-12
I fill the void
of my heart in exile
with word after word
from a jar of pickles …
the absence breaks in me
– Chen-ou Liu
“It is what you read when you don’t have to,” observed Oscar Wilde, endless source of surreptitious wisdom, “that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.”
– Pico Iyer
If you desire to be good, begin by believing that you are wicked.
– Epictetus
To everyone I ever invited to / a poetry reading, I’m sorry.
– Dobby Gibson
We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self.
– William Gibson
Disgust and passion are intertwined. Our antipathies are simultaneously a record of our desires, our sublimated wishes, our deepest envies.
– Zadie Smith
I dove in and decided that I would rather fail at poetry than succeed at anything else. Looking back at it now, I feel that it all had an air of desperation—as if I were drowning and saw an oar going by and grabbed on for dear life.
– Edward Hirsch
Passions often engender their opposites. Avarice sometimes breeds profligacy, and profligacy avarice: we are often strong out of weakness, and bold out of timidity.
– François de La Rochefoucauld
What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.
– Roland Barthes
The secret of successful living is to build up the mental equivalent that you want; and to get rid of, to expunge, the mental equivalent that you do not want.
– Emmet Fox
Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all his laws.
– John Adams
Narcissists, fascists, and authoritarian rulers never uplift a nation. They leave behind only wreckage, fear, and the ruins of what could have been.
– Michael Perlin
we call it sunrise
but the earth does all the work
by rolling over
– Clark Strand
The great artists always have this ability to start over.
– Naval Ravikant
True intellect lies not in what you know, but in how deeply you observe your own thoughts.
– Albert Camus
The Wilderness holds answers to more questions than we have yet learned to ask.
– Nancy Wynne Newhall
THE WORLD OF WORK
By 2000, the machines will be producing so much that everyone in the U.S. will, in effect, be independently wealthy. With government benefits, even nonworking families will have, by one estimate, an annual income of $30,000-$40,000 (in 1966 dollars). How to use leisure meaningfully will be a major problem.
– Time, February 25, 1966
By the year 2000, people will work no more than four days a week and less than eight hours a day. With legal holidays and long vaca- tions, this could result in an annual working period of 147 days [on] and 218 days off.
– New York Times, October 19, 1967
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
There are things of strange aspect in the world, things that you come upon without expectation, and they are the more meaningful for that.
– N. Scott Momaday
There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.
– Voltaire
No one knows you like a person with whom you’ve shared a childhood. No one will ever understand you in quite the same way.
– Alice Hoffman
Since we tend to see ourselves primarily in the light of our intentions, which are invisible to others, while we see others mainly in the light of their actions, which are all that’s visible to us, we have a situation in which misunderstanding and injustice are the order of the day.
– J.G. Bennett
In many ways, the felt sense is like a stream moving through an ever-changing landscape. It alters its character in resonance with its surroundings. When the land is rugged and steep, the stream moves with vigor and energy, swirling and bubbling as it crashes over rocks and debris. Out on the plains, the stream meanders so slowly that one might wonder whether it is moving at all. Rains and spring thaw can rapidly increase its volume, possibly even flood nearby land. In the same way, once the setting has been interpreted and defined by the felt sense, we will blend into whatever conditions we find ourselves. This amazing sense encompasses both the content and climate of our internal and external environments. Like the stream, it shapes itself to fit those environments.
– Peter A. Levine
The answer to the so-called riddle of the world is ecstatic internalization of the world’s mystery.
– Ludwig Klages
In its true state, mind is naked, immaculate; not made of anything, being of the Voidness; clear, vacuous, without duality, transparent; timeless, uncompounded, unimpeded, colourless; not realizable as a separate thing, but as the unity of all things, yet not composed of them; of one taste, and transcendent over differentiation.
– Padmasambhava
He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.
– Gabriel García Márquez
We are presently dealing with the accumulation of a whole society that has worshiped its light side and refused the dark, and this residue appears as war, economic chaos, strikes, racial intolerance. The front page of any newspaper hurls the collective shadow at us.
– Robert A. Johnson
The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. “I am no such thing, it would say; I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.”
– William James
Today, all time-consuming practices, such as trust, loyalty, commitment and responsibility, are disappearing. […] I think trust is a social practice, and today it is being replaced by transparency and information. Trust enables us to build positive relationships with others, despite lacking knowledge. In a transparency society, one immediately asks for information from others. Trust as a social practice becomes superfluous. The transparency and information society fosters a society of distrust.
– Byung-Chul Han
The work of preservation demands that the feelings playing about in one’s guts not be turned into action. Just watch their passing like cherry blossoms.
– Maxine Hong Kingston
When you find a writer who really is saying something to you, read everything that writer has written and you will get more education and depth of understanding out of that than reading a scrap here and a scrap there and elsewhere. Then go to people who influenced that writer, or those who were related to him, and your world builds together in an organic way that is really marvelous.
– Joseph Campbell
A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns…The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up…In the destructive element immerse.
– Joseph Conrad
I ask god to send a swordsman / and god says ‘look at your hands’
– Melissa Broder
There is no less holiness at this time – as you are reading this – than there was on the day the Red Sea parted, or that day in the 30th year, in the 4th month, on the 5th day of the month as Ezekiel was a captive by the river Cheban, when the heavens opened and he saw visions of god. There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree at the end of your street than there was under Buddha’s bo tree. In any instant the sacred may wipe you with its finger. In any instant the bush may flare, your feet may rise, or you may see a bunch of souls in trees.
– Annie Dillard
Let your loyalty to another human being come about in this way: there will be moments — quickly passing by — when he will seem to you filled and illumined by the true, primal image of his spirit.
Then can come, yes, will come, long stretches of time when your fellow-being seems clouded, even darkened. But learn at these times to say to yourself: The spirit will strengthen me; I will remember the true, unchanging image that I once saw. Nothing at all — neither deception nor disguise — can take it away from me.
Struggle again and again for the true picture that you saw. The struggle itself is your faithfulness.
And in those efforts to be faithful and to trust, a human being will come close to another as if with an angel’s power of protection.
– Rudolf Steiner
A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
responsibility, n. A detachable
burden easily shifted to the
shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune,
Luck or one’s neighbor.
In the days of astrology it was
customary to unload it upon a
star.
– Ambrose Bierce
There are worlds beyond worlds and times beyond times, all of them true, all of them real, and all of them (as children know) penetrating each other.
– P.L. Travers
No longer in a merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art and religion are parts of this universe. They are varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience. No longer can man confront reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face. Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man’s symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself. He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of this artificial medium.
– Ernst Cassirer
I believe that the spirits are your parents and their parents and their parents and their parents and they are in your bloodstream, and they run through your body constantly. Because they want you to live on, because they want to live on. And they’re trying all the time to tell you shit and if you just spend a few minutes listening to yourself, you would hear them.
– Gil Scott-Heron, “Parents,” I’m New Here
Hope devoted to despair,
despair delivered from hope.
The leaves of this sea scattered,
its only tree
buffeted by a gale
that blew from an ancient manuscript.
The sea: hope embroidered with despair,
despair distilled from hope.
– Najwan Darwish
Character in many ways is everything in leadership. It is made up of many things, but I would say character is really integrity. When you delegate something to a subordinate, for example, it is absolutely your responsibility, and he must understand this. You as a leader must take complete responsibility for what the subordinate does. I once said, as a sort of wisecrack, that leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower
Most people are convinced that as long as they are not overtly forced to do something by an outside power, their decisions are theirs, and that if they want something, it is they who want it. But this is one of the great illusions we have about ourselves. A great number of our decisions are not really our own but are suggested to us from the outside; we have succeeded in persuading ourselves that it is we who have made the decision, whereas we have actually conformed with expectations of others, driven by the fear of isolation and by more direct threats to our life, freedom, and comfort.
– Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom
How small life is here and how big nothingness. The sky, tired of light, has given everything to the snow. The two trees bow their heads to each other. Clouds cross the world’s silence in a circle dance.
– Robert Walser
The first revolution is when you change your mind.
– Gil Scott-Heron
Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth–penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.
– Joseph Campbell
We’re in a freefall into future. We don’t know where we’re going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you’re going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It’s a very interesting shift of perspective and that’s all it is… joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes
– Joseph Campbell
No one gives a damn about a poem / until they need a poem.
– Omotara James
Go to the library. Live in the library. Fall in love with old movies. Look closely at everything. Don’t be a snob. Be joyful; writing is not a serious business—it’s a
celebration.
– Ray Bradbury
Psychoanalysis is about what two people say to each other if they agree not to have sex.
– Adam Phillips to Leo Bersani
I enjoy breakfast, the morning light on a church steeple, or on a modern building which looks Grecian against the sky. The summer glow, and my ability to not hear trivial conversation. A sense of space, serenity, and stylization.
– Anais Nin
The next war …
may well bury Western
civilization forever.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Emptiness is a great feminine secret. It is something absolutely alien to man; the chasm, the unplumbed depths, the yin.
– CG Jung
I bless the people that I struggle against. They are in my life to give me the chance to deepen my awareness and love.
– We Are Human Angels
How stupid everything is!, and war multiplies the stupidity by 3 and its power by itself: so one’s precious days are ruled by (3x)² when x = normal human crassitude (and that’s bad enough).
– J.R.R. Tolkien
There are no kings in America
by Aileen Cassinetto
we are not that kind of country.
We are sanctuary for the hungry,
the homeless, the huddled,
held together by an idea
our immigrant fathers believed in.
Rendered, it meant independence.
Pursued, it kindled war, ordinance,
a fighting chance. Forty thousand
musket balls, by themselves, did not
shape the boundaries on which we
map our days. To draw our borders,
we needed more than firecakes.
More than a pound of meat
with bone and gristle,
or salt fish and a gill of peas.
We needed the faith and grit of people
who were not yet Americans.
To be an American is to
recognize the sacrifice
of the widow and the orphan;
it is to understand the weft of tent
cities expecting caravans,
and the heft of a child in a camp
not meant for children, or sitting
before a judge awaiting judgement.
What do we say to the native
whose lands we now inhabit?
What do we say to our immigrant
fathers who held certain truths
to be self-evident?
Do we now still pledge to each
other our lives, our fortunes,
our sacred honor.
There are no kings in America.
Only gilded men we can topple
again and again.
Someone just cancelled plans on me for this evening. I’m wondering if I should send them a thank you card.
– Very British Problems
Fitting in feels like failure to those who have a divine assignment to stand out.
– Nika Solé
all I have ever been––
another long stone
for the sun to point with
– Ian Buckley
No planet knows that this
Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave,
Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss,
Bears, as chief treasure, one forsaken grave.
– Alice Meynell
A mind is a strange place, strange and solitary — the only place where, with all our passions of reason and all our calculations of emotion, we render reality what it is; the only place where truth is won or lost, where beauty means anything, where mathematics, God, and the color of your mother’s eyes exist. That out of such solitude and such strangeness one mind can touch another, touch a constellation of others, touch the spirit of its time and the soul of the future — this is the great miracle that makes the loneliness bearable and life more alive.
– Muriel Rukeyser
[Remember] what happens in fairy tales: The helper always appears in a form that doesn’t look very helpful, yet that’s who’s going to get you out of the woods. In fairy tales you have to stay open to the search, and to goodness and generosity.
– Anne Lamott
a hot sun
taken into the sea
by the river
– Basho
with a new pair of eyes
I will too join the
moon watchers
– Issa
The autotextual is a writing tactic that’s actually been around for a long time, under various names, but if you only get your information about book culture from publicity handouts, it seems that autofiction is a recent trend.
– McKenzie Wark
An enlightened you is still you. Personal uniqueness, preferences, and styles can be developed and accentuated by awakening rather than eliminating them.
– Dale S. Wright
Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence…a way of being fully human.
– Susan Sontag
There are hardly any good poets I don’t like.
– Helen Vendler
Goodbye
The abandoned bonfire kills its own light.
A bird in love lifts up its song.
So many eager creatures in my silence
and this small rain at my back.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
God give us bread; we’ll make the circuses.
– Anthony Hecht
Both poverty and riches are a bondage.
– Krishnamurti
If you as a human being transform yourself you affect the consciousness of the rest of the world.
– J. Krishnamurti
I am not predicting doom. But I am stating that if we ignore evil, we will move closer to doom, and the growth and triumph of evil may well result.
– Rollo May
If the world were ending all I’d know for sure, is that I’d want to be yours in every world that comes next.
– Nika Solé
…set your faces like a flint, you have all power in heaven and earth on your side.
– John Bunyan
I love how you turn your head which turns my head which turns your head.
– Alan Summers
Please explain one ‘woke’ policy that was not intended to further someone’s access to social, economic, civil, and political equality and human dignity.
I’ll be here waiting.
– Andy Perrin
Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not ‘yours,’ not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.
– Eckhart Tolle
…joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live.
– G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
In the words of the great David Byrne…Same as it ever was.
Right now we are creating our tomorrow.
– Vernon Howard
On both fronts, you could say, in the end love won—but at what cost? Austen is a cynic, after all.
– Whitney Mallett
I choose to think of love as the mutual recognition of our vulnerability. It renders despair and joy legible, but it also allows us to partake in something greater than ourselves, [. . .].
– Wes Matthews
Mind is consciousness which has put on limitations. You are originally unlimited and perfect. Later you take on limitations and become the mind.
– Ramana Maharshi
I can tell that some of you are having an emotional response to art, and I want you to know that you’ve angered critical theorists. Hope you’re happy.
– Jonathan Fine
Develop aspirations that support not just personal healing, but the healing of community and society.
– Lama Rod Owens
I think there was a period when external signifiers of dissent (long hair, not wearing a tie) were much clearer than now, and that made it harder for ideas to cross from one milieu into another.
– Hari Kunzru
Universal goodwill is not only possible, it’s necessary for our own survival: the survival of our goodness.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu
I see an effect of light and make a note of it. I see a plant in a meadow and try not to forget it. I make lists of words, I write down phrases I hear on the street.
– Elena Ferrante
Words are partly thoughts, but mostly they re music, deep
down. Thinking itself is, perhaps, orchestral, the mind con-
ducting the world. Conducting it, constructing it. I sense this
instinctively.
There is no language for this, not then, not even now, this
inner glide, articulation of the wordless, plotless truth of exis-
tence. Life is not made up of stories, much as I adore them-
– Patricia Hampl
It is when it destabilizes the global economy. Every war is everyone’s war, unfortunately.
– Andy Perrin
two in the morning
maybe the comments section
will take my side
– Kotone Kikawa
Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that!
– Marilynne Robinson
But This is not a Story by Tommy Dean
They say you can’t start a story with a character waking up, with them crying, or knowing so much about themselves that they would never act against their own interest. But what if this isn’t a story, what if it’s a string of beautiful, covalent adjectives and adverbs, that sound of the bell of a heart chilled by the lack of notice, for him waking, for the first gasp of acknowledged breath in the morning, for the spill of cigarette smoke that blends with an unpolished sunset, that blends wit the smog of molten metal harvested down the street, the one that floods every time that it rains, and we let the kids wade in up to their waists, shoeless, and naïve to the dangers that swirls between their toes, that nature will bite and thrash, to survive in the droughts to come? Don’t ask questions, don’t dwell into the guts of anxiety and fear and loathing, and let us guess and judge, so that we, the dear reader, can feel a moment of mercury on the tongue, that quicksilver succor that keeps us projecting and never reflecting, for the light can never enter, otherwise it would bleach us to bone, and from bone to dust, to earth returned, and we have just awakened, and refuse to sleep, for we can’t admit to ourselves or to others one more death, for the sunsets only appear if we are a witness, the cast across our pupils the victory.
unseasonal heat …
one stray chasing the other
chasing its shadow
– Chen-ou Liu
overheard:
“In a life-time of a regime, a moment arrives when vulgarity isn’t a personal failing — it’s a state policy. Kitsch is armor against ethics; it’s collective anesthesia, pumped through every glowing screen and marching chant.”
– Ilya Kaminsky
I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me.
– Dudley Field Malone
a red light
flashing at the crossroad …
I’ve been living
too long for a single dream
echoes in the winter air
– Chen-ou Liu
The bifurcation of the life we came from and the one we create seems so common in high-achieving artists from dysfunctional backgrounds.
– Nina St. Pierre
Don’t underestimate the importance and power of cultivating an oasis of peace in troubled times.
– Darion Gracen
The best poetry
Isn’t even aware
Of everything it means
– George Gorman
The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!
– Albert Einstein
One time I was visiting with my relatives the clouds,
the mountains,
the sky,
the trees
My relatives touched my spirit nudged it
lovingly
Listen to us impatient one
We are forever
You must remember the gentleness of time
You are struggling to be who you are
You say you want to learn the old ways
Struggling to learn when all you must do is remember
Remember the people
Remember sky and Earth
Remember the people have always struggled to live in harmony in peace
Struggle against selfishness and weakness so the people may live as nations
The old ways are hard
The people have always had to work together
Remember impatient one
Remember and live
Do not be afraid of truth
respect
discipline
Share your life so the people may live
Honor sky and Earth
Honor yourself
Honor your relations
Remember impatient one
the gentleness of time so the people may live
– John Trudell, Living in Reality
America this is quite serious.
– Allen Ginsberg
Overheard:
“In the history of most empires, you end up having two valid complaints, they take all sorts of forms, but in the end always these two: the busses don’t run on time, and the state despises the individual”
– Ilya Kaminsky
There is no therapist, mentor, or friend that can heal you the way you can. The purest form of humanity can reflect back what you deserve, but healing your relationship with you is the goal. Life, past & present, will make more sense when your mind & body feel like home.
– Nate Postlethwait
I skip
a stone of words
across the lake
of another time
another place
– Chen-ou Liu
The West destroyed
the shapes of this world
and we continue
to pay the price.
– Andy Perrin
The distraction disguise keeps us busy, avoiding intimacy with ourselves by chasing one desire after another.
– Ruth King
For Gillian Rose, the work of philosophy was to confront the myths and blind spots that sustain capitalism and dignify injustice. The result was a Marxism hostile to political dogmas of all kinds.
– Robert Lucas Scott
Buddhahood exists without meditation, whether we encounter it or not.
– Zenju Earthlyn Manuel
Performative fascism is still fascism. And the majority of fascists in history since Mussolini first defined his political position and movement have not been Nazis. The populist wannabe fascists (Federico Finchelstein’s term) in the United States as of today have made clear to anyone who doubted that they intend to remove the ‘wannabe’ as soon as possible.
– Clifton Lee
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
All modes of government are failures… High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
– Oscar Wilde
Do not be afraid of demons; it is the living we should fear. Human horrors trump anything that Hollywood or the afterlife can conjure.
– Shehan Karunatilaka
A well governed appetite is the greater part of freedom.
– Seneca
Identify where you came from, where you are, and where you wish to go.
– Russell Chatham, Advice for a Young Painter
In recompense for a mind that was able to retain everything, every memory, perhaps it was necessary that the body gradually fade away.
– Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police
The old men spoke with accents. They had fled pogroms, or ten years of military service, or bad marriages. They checked Other on government forms because they did not consider themselves White. That was for gentiles.
– Edward Hirsch, My First Bookstore
Fairy tales don’t tell children that monsters are real. Children KNOW monsters are real. Fairy tales show them that monsters can be slain.
– G.K. Chesterton
I divide thousands of times into as many times as the number of instants running by, fragmented as I am and the moments so fragile — my only vow is to life born with time and growing along with it: only in time itself is there room enough for me.
– Clarice Lispector
It is not our task to create awareness, awakening, or liberation through practice or meditation. We are not to force these things upon ourselves by manipulating our breath and our bodies. Buddhahood exists without meditation, whether we encounter it or not.
– Zenju Earthlyn Manuel
Just wanted you to know that the No Kings protest in Boston is coinciding with the Pride parade so the city just decided to lump everything together and call it “NO KINGS, but YAAAAS Queen!” and that is why I love my city.
– Beth Santos
It doesn’t matter what spiritual ideas we hold or even what past awakenings we’ve had. It only really matters how we devote ourselves to this moment. The means we use are the ends we achieve.
– Justin Michelson
Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
– Delmore Schwartz
If mankind is to escape its programmed self-extinction the God who saves us will not descend from the machine: he will rise up again in the human soul.
– Lewis Mumford
People who think they are better than others because they happen to have been born in America or their family have been here for generations are the most simple-minded people, really. Go take pride in something you actually had to work at. Random luck of birthplace is just arbitrary and out of our control. Instead, go try to work at something with your entire body, like bending in a sweaty field for the crops of an ungrateful nation. Go read a book at an underfunded library…something that will hopefully open your mind and eyes to empathy, critical thinking, and gratitude.
– Jose Hernandez Diaz
“One person’s loud is another person’s expression of joy,” Xochitl Gonzalez wrote in 2022. “As my grandmother used to say, ‘I’m not yelling, this is just how I tawk!’”
I can’t make the
world be peaceful
I can’t stall tanks
from roaring down roads
I can’t prevent children
from having to hide in bunkers
I can’t convince the news to
stop turning war into a video game
I can’t silence the sound of bombs
tearing neighborhoods apart
I can’t turn a guided missile
into a bouquet of flowers
I can’t make a warmonger
have an ounce of empathy
I can’t convince diplomats
to quit playing truth or dare
I can’t deflect a sniper’s bullet
from turning a wife into a widow
I can’t stave off a schoolyard being
reduced to ash and rubble
I can’t do any of that
the only thing I can do
is love the next person I encounter
without any conditions or strings
to love my neighbor
so fearlessly that
it starts a ripple
that stretches from
one horizon to the next
I can’t force peace
on the world
but I can become a force
of peace in the world
because
sometimes all it takes
is a single lit candle
in the darkness
to start a movement
oh, Spirit,
let me be a candle
of comfort in this world
let me burn with peace
– john roedel
After all, the best plan would probably be in some clever way to raise a certain amount of money, and to go south with you forever to some island or lake.
– Franz Kafka, 1913.
Why does society
boast
about hearts made of stone?
Like something
unfeeling and frozen
is superior
to something
warm and beating.
— I will keep my bleeding beart
– L.E. Bowman
THE WORLD CRUMBLES
And still, we keep it together.
Rebuild, replenish, love, hope, dream.
The weight settles, and still, we keep breathing.
The pain growls, and still, we find ways to quiet the ache.
Open arms, hands reaching for each other.
How are you?
Me too.
I’ll help you carry the day.
– L.E. Bowman
Don’t worry about being a
poet or trying to write great
poems and instead work on
acquiring the mind of a
poet. The mind of a poet is one
that collects anything that might
be useful, even if its use is not
apparent at the time.
– David Kirby
At any given moment
there are at least 2,000 storms happening on Earth,
and today I am one of them.
– L.E. Bowman
Poetry is a way to give the
intensity of a moment its due.
– John Barr
There is nothing
more beautiful than a heart
that stitches its own wounds
and then teaches itself not to flinch
at the sound of new love.
– Lauren Levi
All feelings come and go, and are by their nature ephemeral. But if we don’t train our minds to see that, we end up riding life like the old roller coaster at Coney Island that threatened to hurl people from their seats every now and again.
– Pilar Jennings
The holy person welcomes all that is earthly.
– Hildegard von Bingen
One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these — to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés
All the Dachaus must remain standing.
The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes — all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the earth into a graveyard, into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its rememberance. Then we become the grave diggers.
– Rod Serling
Something inside it reminds me of childhood— it is the light of the stalled time after lunch, when clocks tick, and hearts shut, and fathers leave to go back to work, and mothers stand at the kitchen sink pondering something they never tell.
You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where can I put it down?
She shifted to a question about airports.
– Anne Carson, The Glass Essay
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
– C.G. Jung, Aion
Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.
– C.G. Jung, Psychology and Religion
SHORT TALK ON
LE BONHEUR D’ÊTRE BIEN AIMÉE
Day after day I think of you as soon as I wake
up. Someone has put cries of birds on the
air like jewels.
– Anne Carson
It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.
– Philip K. Dick
If honesty were suddenly
introduced into American
life, everything would
collapse. It would destroy this
country, because our system is
based on an intricate and
delicately balanced system of lies.
– George Carlin
Moonlight in the kitchen is a sign of God.
– Anne Carson
Looking forward to the emergence of a mainstream political movement that is pro-science, pro-technology, and pro-environment.
– @naval
I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.
– C.S. Lewis
My secular father’s only strong spiritual directive: Don’t be an asshole, and make sure everybody eats.
– Anne Lamott
i’ve traveled through more lands than those i set foot in. i’ve seen more landscapes than those i laid eyes on. i’ve experienced more sensations than all the sensations i’ve felt, because however much i felt, i always wanted to feel more.
– Álvaro de Campos
The great problem of consciousness is that all it knows is itself, and only dimly. We can override this elemental self-reference only with constant vigilance, reminding ourselves again and again as we forget over and over how difficult it is — how nigh impossible — to know what it is like to be anybody else. It does not come naturally to us, this recognition that every other consciousness is a different operating system governed by different needs and different responses to the same situations, encoded by different formative experiences. This is why the Golden Rule, a version of which is appears in all major spiritual and ethical traditions, may be the most narcissistic of our moral codes, with its assumption that others want done unto them the same things we ourselves want. One measure of love — perhaps the greatest measure — may be the understanding that another’s needs, as incomprehensible as they may appear to us and as orthogonal to our own, are a fundamental part of who they are; that to love someone is to love whatever they need to be their fullest, truest self rather than a projection of who we imagine or desire them to be.
– Sandol Stoddard
the psychosis in western governmental language and statements is no longer psychotic; it is the language of the zombies, the living dead who seek to turn everyone into them, including their own societies.
– Fady Joudah
It is the desire for success that prevents humility, and without humility how can there be understanding?
– Krishnamurti
You are not always in control of what goes into your mind, but only you can determine what stays there. Nothing has a hold on your mind that you cannot break free of.
– Iyanla Vanzant
The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up.
– Hannah Arendt
The poet is like a mouse in an enormous cheese excited by how much cheese there is to eat.
– Czeslaw Milosz
“Work of the Enemy!” said Gandalf. “Such deeds he loves: friend at war with friend; loyalty divided in confusion of hearts.”
– Tolkien, The Return of the King
Music is the moonlight in the gloomy night of life.
– Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
It is not the still vision and a gold frame, it is not the
measured and treasured sentences of sentiments;
It is cat knowledge, deer knowledge, knowledge of the
Full-grown foliage, of the snowy blossom and the rounding fruit.
– Delmore Schwartz
This afternoon, discomfortable dead
Drift into doorways, lounge, across the bridge,
Whittling memory at the water’s edge,
And watch. This is what you inherited.
– John Berryman
The best men that I know are not serene, a world in themselves. They dwell in form. They flatter and study effect, only more finely than the rest. The world to me appears uninhabited. My neighbors select granite for the underpinning of their houses and barns; they build their fences of stone; but they do not themselves rest on an underpinning of granite. Their sills are rotten. What stuff is the man made of who is not coexistent in your thought with the purest and subtlest truth ? While there are manners and compliments we do not meet. I accuse my finest acquaintances of an immense frivolity. They do not teach me the lessons of honesty and sincerity that the brute beasts do, or of steadiness and solidity that the rocks do. I cannot associate with those who do not understand me.
– Thoreau
my life alone
cold mornings
cold nights
– Issa
nudged
by a spring breeze
I remember
– @lafcadiopoetry
The system is broken. We need to fix the system.
We need to fix the system. The system is broken.
– Keston Sutherland
Knowledge is as lifeless as things of the past—awareness, or presence, is life in its totality.
– Charles Genoud
Sometimes a situation feels confusing only because you’re trying to make it into something it’s not. It is what it is. Look at what it is and meet it there. It just makes it easier.
– Nika Solé
Love takes care of everything. Love is the same as absolute awareness, pure intelligence, or the power of God. When you have enough love inside, there are truly no problems. Problems only arise when you believe you are separate and lacking love.
– Robert Adams
his is all part of our circulatory system
light and shadow of blood flow through
life-lines through the celestial interlocking
of flesh and causality
– Don Domanski
Please don’t be like ordinary people, who always act petty and mean. Don’t turn your head when I pass by, and don’t harbor a grudge in your remembrance of me. Let us be like lifelong friends who loved each other a bit when they were children, only to pursue other affections and other paths as adults, but who nevertheless retain, in some corner of the heart, the vivid memory of their old and
useless love.
– Fernando Pessoa, (tr. Richard Zenith)
Each age unwinds the thread another age had wound… all things dying each other’s life, living each other’s death.
– W. B. Yeats
Would I be persuaded by anyone else’s opinion? Fat chance!
– Gordon Lish
Real love doesn’t keep score. It doesn’t hold on to pain or punish with silence. It flows freely, forgives quickly, and remembers that we’re all doing our best.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
Poet, poet, you are the people’s trumpet;
golden and clean, put yourself to their lips,
tear yourself apart to shout their word
so that no gun is louder, no fear is louder,
no frightening bell is louder in its steeple;
till all the sunlight shines on all the people.
– Joy Davidman, Peter the Plowman
All is a play in consciousness.
All divisions are illusory.
You can know the false only.
The true [Truth] you must yourself be.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Do not scorn pity that is the gift of a gentle heart…
– Faramir (Tolkien, The Return of the King)
talking to each other
in English
summer trees
– Ichilow In
I’ve found that there is always some beauty left –
in nature, sunshine, freedom, in yourself;
these can all help you.
– Anne Frank
You know your nervous system best. Listen to it.
– Kathy Cherry
The lie described my life better than the truth… Until it became a kind of truth.
– Ben Lerner
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.
– Thomas Paine
The right response to being treated badly is anger.
Quit smiling through it.
Quit apologizng for it.
Anger is healthy.
– Dr. Bob Beare
My friends who pursued academic careers in English – no more apocalyptically disillusioned class of person exists – feel they are heirs to a ruined inheritance. They were preparing to take possession of great mansions of learning only to find the windows have been smashed, the furniture looted and the electricity cut off.
– James Marriott
blue wisteria
cascades down the bluff
a flash of hummingbird
– Elizabeth Howard
Sometimes you can do things for others that you can’t do for yourself.
– A. M. Homes
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 and that’s again what goes wrong in an interview: It focuses too much on what’s said.
– James Hillman
What is true or false is what human beings say; and it is in their language that human beings agree. This is agreement not in opinions, but rather in form of life.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
The generations steeped in the virtual will never have known the Real. But that is not so serious if we accept that the Real is merely a referential illusion.
– Jean Baudrillard
Psychotherapists and psychoanalysts have to be “silence experts.” Through their training and with their third ear, they try to listen to the symphony of what is not being said.
– Henry Abramovitch
Jung says: If God is dead … then God appears in the place where one would expect to find him least, and that is in the shadow,” and the negative qualities of a god denied become the “armour of a new and more terrible god”.
– Russell Lockhart
It’s not even a question of no kings. It’s more a matter of carny barkers and clowns with counterfeit currency dropping out of their pockets impressing fools perched like parrots in pews and on bar stools dreaming they too can someday sit on a gilded shitter.
– Clifton Lee
This eternal way,
a Tao of its own.
Stolen from Kerouac,
who stole it from Buddha.
Who received it from the clouds,
who are made of the Tao.
Without beginning,
without end.
– Words by Andō
I laid awake / in my underwear, upside / down in bed, to stare // at the black lines / of the heifer, the curly-haired / god.
– Emilia Phillips
What he’d never understood about men in his position, in all the books he’d read and movies he’d seen about them, was clearer to him now: you couldn’t keep expecting wholehearted love without, at some point, requiting it. There was no credit to be earned for simply being good.
– Jonathan Franzen, Freedom
Healing is constantly occurring and coming toward us from the earth, and just like the urushi tree, we are also capable of self-healing if we learn how to face our emotions and embrace them with love and compassion.
– Christiana Figueres
The rainbow tints from the colored suns fell upon the glass city softly and gave to the buildings many delicate, shifting hues which were very pretty to see.
– L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Most people cannot reach their destinies anyway without a streak of craziness, and so long as they haven’t, it is better not to exorcize their demons.
– Carl Jung
If a man who has no property refuses but once to earn nine shillings for the State, he is put in prison for a period unlimited by any law that I know, and determined only by the discretion of those who put him there; but if he should steal ninety times nine shillings from the State, he is soon permitted to go at large again.
– Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
Many Americans yearn for the day when we stop fighting each other and realize that diversity is our promise—not our problem.
– Elijah Cummings
Do not try to transform yourself.
Move into yourself.
Move into your human unsuccess.
Perfection blinds the soul.
– Abraham Garcia
How do you define wisdom? Understanding the long-term consequences of your actions.
– @naval
Ironic that the two o’s in “cooperate” insist on having their
own separate sounds.
– Nathan W. Pyle
The most beautiful thing in the world is you
– Alvin Ailey
When the war is over
We will be proud of course the air will be
Good for breathing at last
The water will have been improved the salmon
And the silence of heaven will migrate more perfectly
The dead will think the living are worth it we will know
Who we are
And we will all enlist again
– W.S. Merwin
Human beings must involve themselves in the anguish of other human beings. This, I submit to you, is not a political thesis at all. It is simply an expression of what I would hope might be ultimately a simple humanity for humanity’s sake.
– Rod Serling
Tomorrow is a Place
by Sanna Wani
for Maya
We meet at a coffee shop. So much time has passed and who is time? Who is waiting by the windowsill? We make plans to go to a museum but we go to a bookshop instead. We’re leaning in, learning how to talk to each other again. I say, I’m obsessed with my grief and she says, I’m always in mourning. She laughs and it’s an extension of her body. She laughs and it moves the whole room. I say, My home is an extension of my body and she says, Most days are better with a long walk. The world moves without us—so we tend to a garden, a graveyard, a pot on the windowsill. Death is a comfort because it says, Transform but don’t hurry. There is a tenderness to growing older and we are listening for it. Steadier ways to move through the world and we are learning them. A way to touch your own body. A touch that says, Dig deeper. There, in the ground, there is our memory. I am near enough my roots. Time is my friend. Tomorrow is a place we are together.
So attend wholly to the one thing before you. And the radiance of the entire universe will dwell in that one small thing.
– Gerald Grow
The world suddenly vanished from view like a morning mist. I was left alone with Reality.
– Paul Brunton
A miracle is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A miracle is when one plus one equals a thousand.
– Frederick Buechner
Take it from me: memory is your greatest ally and your primary source material, because memory is your body as it was in the world and the world as it was and will be; memory is the people you have loved or wanted to love in the world, and what are we if not bodies filled with reminiscences about all those ghosts in the sunlight?
– Hilton Als
When it comes to the Dhamma, we have to understand that our opinions are one thing… the Dhamma is something else.
– Ajahn Chah
I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.
– Julian Barnes
Nobody is gonna care
about what you silently
believed in your houses.
– Glennon Doyle
They eyed us dancing under June’s full moon / and said, They must be happy. / Who can blame them for believing / what they saw?
– Arielle Hebert
To me, the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely, who don’t even play the game, who rise above it. Those are the people who have such internal mental and self-control and self-awareness, they need nothing from anybody else.
– @naval
A human being – what is a human being? Everything and nothing. Through the power of thought it can mirror everything it experiences. Through memory and knowledge it becomes a microcosm, carrying the world within itself. A mirror of things, a mirror of facts.
– Guy de Maupassant
Wisdom happily lives with mystery, doubt, and “unknowing,” and in such living, ironically resolves that very mystery to some degree. I have never figured out why unknowing becomes another kind of knowing, but it surely seems to be.
– Richard Rohr
Essentially, you have to go through your life replacing your thoughtless bad habits with good ones, making a commitment to be a happier person. At the end of the day, you are a combination of your habits and the people who you spend the most time with.
– @naval
If you want to know where your heart is, watch where your mind goes when you daydream.
– Walt Whitman
When things appear to us to be only what they appear to be, soon they appear to be even less.
– Nicolás Gómez Davila
in a field of grass
every flower is
an achievement
– Basho
…a father is a young man’s divinely appointed source of wisdom and counsel. If the young man cannot suck a little wisdom from his father, then he is a fool, or the father is (not uncommon), or both are.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
The terrible beauty is more than one could ever hope to assimilate, order, and explain.
– Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
You’re going somewhere that no one has ever been before. It’s important to remember that when other people try to give you directions.
– Nika Solé
In the course of a walk we usually find out something about our companion, and this is true even when we travel alone.
– Thomas A Clark
The machine wants to learn you.
The artist becomes unlearnable.
– Laura Kerr
Our interpretations—not reality—drive our desire to grasp what we want and avoid what we don’t.
– John Dunne
You will have dug deep, blazed a new path, spent years in the fire of self mastery, swam to the edge of your own consciousness, and stretched the comfort zone of humanity. And those who only ever let the tv tell them what to think will say that you got lucky.
– Nika Solé
Style becomes signature.
Signature becomes signal.
And signals can be learned.
remain unlearnable
– Laura Kerr
There is something peculiarly gracious and empriding (to coin a word) about being the father of a daughter.
– Tolkien
But it is difficult for people living in their busy, and troubled homes to understand the position of a refugee, unless, of course, that refugee is a class which cooks or so or looks after children.
– Sylvia Townsend Warner
You need not go to heaven to see God… nor need you speak loud as if he was far away, nor need you cry for wings like a dove so as to fly to Him, settle yourself in solitude and you will come upon God in yourself.
– Teresa of Avila
The sky changes morning to night, energies change, minds change, life changes. Nothing around you is ever the same. And still somehow you remain.
– Nika Solé
I was never capable of writing. Writing is a miracle.
– Aharon Appelfeld
I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.
– J. M. Coetzee
Read a lot of stories, listen to a lot of music, and think about what the stories you encounter mean for your own life and lives of those you love. In that way, you will not be alone with an empty self; you will have a newly rich life with yourself, and enhanced possibilities of real communication with others.
– Martha Nussbaum
The more we seek the light, the more darkness forms in compensation, in an attempt to make us whole.
– Robin Robertson
A work of art can be half-intoxicated — but in a state of complete intoxication the work of art will dissolve.
– Novalis
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
There are so many ways to live and die, so many ways to tell that same story, over and over, but everyone keeps trying to find a better way to tell it, a more real way to look into someone else’s face to say, ‘I am alive like you, was born without my consent like you, will someday die and be dead in the same way you’ll be dead’. What did we want from this? What did we really want from it?
– Catherine Lacey
Love is a fever. And when you come out of it you’ll discover whether you’ve been lucky — or not.
– Lorrie Moore
Do not start a plan unless you really think it is worthwhile, and if you are convinced that it is worthwhile, do not rest until you have brought it to fruition.
– Emmet Fox
Why should we constantly demand an explanation to everything from it when we could simply enjoy the nectar of the flowers we can reach.
– Vadim Zeland
Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.
– Bertrand Russell
This meaning of events is the supreme meaning, that is not in events, and not in the soul, but is the God standing between events and the soul, the mediator of life, the way, the bridge and the going across.
– Carl Jung
The god must not enter too far into matter, or the human being perishes. A human being has to walk the narrow path:
“erit via et semita sancta”
– Carl Jung
The psychiatrist knows only too well how each of us becomes the helpless but not pitiable victim of his own sentiments. Sentimentality is the superstructure erected upon brutality.
– Carl Jung
Through excess of longing, man can draw the gods down into the murk of his passions. He seems to be raising himself up to the Divine, but in so doing he abandons his humanity.
– Carl Jung
Shakespeare is the lighthouse in the future of the mind.
– @souzley
When truth is near, it does not shout. It wraps you in silence and sings to your bones.
– Amara Deva
When I gave up needing to be right, the Beloved walked in and handed me peace.
– Jaya Ananda
It doesn’t matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.
– Anne Sexton
Two paradoxes are better than one; they may even suggest a solution.
– Edward Teller
The mystic does not pierce the veil—they become it.
– The Scribe of the Threshold
No man is hindered by another; he is only hindered by himself. No man suffers because of another; he suffers only because of himself.
– James Allen
Reality moves unnoticeably in the alternatives space like the minute hand on a watch, but that does not mean it is not moving!
– Vadim Zeland
SELF-PORTRAIT AS TUNING FORK
I am what continues.
– Joi Sharp
There is, perhaps you’ve felt it,
a moment when the day falls away
and your name falls away and
everything you thought you knew
falls away and for a moment
you know yourself only
as whatever it is
that continues—
your whole body abuzz
with the eternity of it—
and you quiver
as if struck by the great hand
of what is true,
becoming pure tone,
a vibration, a wave,
a human-shaped resonator
tuned to the frequency
of life itself,
and though later you might try
to dissect what happened,
in that moment you’re too abloom
to wonder how or why,
you simply are
this ecstatic unfolding
knowing the self as I am,
so alive and so infinite
you tremble like a song.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Everything had changed suddenly–the tone, the moral climate; you didn’t know what to think, whom to listen to. As if all your life you had been led by the hand like a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself. There was no one around, neither family nor people whose judgment you respected. At such a time you felt the need of committing yourself to something absolute–life or truth or beauty–of being ruled by it in place of the man-made rules that had been discarded. You needed to surrender to some such ultimate purpose more fully, more unreservedly than you had ever done in the old familiar, peaceful days, in the old life that was now abolished and gone for good.
– Boris Pasternak
In our yearning to be perfect, we have mistaken perfection for wholeness. We think we cannot love ourselves until we and others meet some external standard. Depression, anxiety – in fact, most neuroses and compulsions – are ultimately a defence against loving our selves without condition.
We are afraid to look at the damp, dark, ugly yet exquisite roots of being that stretch deep into our survival chakra. We are fearful of finding that the spirit is not there, that our Home is empty, even as our outer home is empty. Yet it is in that place of survival, where the dark mother has been abandoned, that spirit longs to be embodied so that the whole body may become light.
– Marion Woodman
“Everywhere I go,” wrote the great Greek poet, George Seferis, “Greece wounds me.” For Seferis, the wounds were metaphorical, inflicted by longing. But for millions of Iranians, the wounds of loss have been further compounded by 47 years of literal wounds. A nation with 2,500 years of civilization has been reduced to a pariah state-its brightest minds have been executed, assassinated, or are languishing in prisons. Its women have been driven into the shadows or are routinely hauled off into vans by immoral thugs who assume themselves guardians of morality. Its youth, who have peacefully poured into the streets demanding a future other than martyrdom, have been hanged, fled the country, or are plotting their escape. In every other part of the world, the sight of a crane is the sign of new construction. In Iran, it often signals an imminent hanging. All marks of beauty, like music, or the simple joys of life, like pet dogs, are banned.
And yet-and yet—a resilient people have fiercely fought on for decades. For all the wounds the regime has inflicted, it deserves this eve of bloodletting. May it stop quickly to make way for the arrival of the long-awaited season of woman, life, freedom.
– Roya Hakakian
I found that it was all right to have Martians saying things Democrats and Republicans could never say.
– Rod Serling
New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it – once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.
– John Steinbeck
I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.
– Joan Didion
So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn’t like my parents. I didn’t have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philosophical value than in the United States…. and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with it’s lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.
– Kurt Vonnegut
…the Holy Spirit seems sometimes to speak through a human mouth providing art, virtue and insight he does not himself possess: but the occasions are rare.
– Tolkien
Spiritual growth involves giving up the stories of your past so the universe can write a new one.
– Marianne Williamson
We have become a country that you wouldn’t want to leave your children alone with.
– Anne Lamott
With the advancement of technology, suddenly we will start to see what cannot be replaced by machine. Intuition. Human connection. The spiritually gifted. Those who have already been blazing a new path. Mastering the timeline split. The ones who see in advance.
– Nika Solé
May you fall. May you shatter into a million pieces when you hit the ground. May it take you long to regather yourself, relearn redemption.
– Fady Joudah
Have only love in your heart for others. The more you see good in them, the more you will establish good in yourself.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
Are we still
the primordial stew
for what this planet
is truly intended for?
– Andy Perrin
Medicine Buddha asks us to offer what people need, not just what we want to give.
– Lama Rod Owens
Hold no grudges, and practice forgiveness. This is the key to having peace in all your relationships.
– Dr. Wayne W. Dyer
My favorite thing is the sound of my calling when it calls me in a totally new direction. Into the next level we go.
– Nika Solé
I’m always banging my students over the head with Frank O’Connor’s definition of the short story, as the moment after which nothing else is ever the same.
– Alice McDermott
UPS just told me it’d cost $130 to ship a small package to Alaska, so I went to USPS and they did it for $10.
You really have to have God-like faith in “free markets” to think that The Privatization of Everything is a good idea.
– @VinceFHorn
Everything is born from change.
– Marcus Aurelius
I believe that when you come face-to-face with your mortality—whether you’re meditating or not, whether you’re calm or not—you’re actually practicing the Buddha’s core teaching.
– Lewis Richmond
I understand the song when it screams
and I hear the scream when it sighs
– Frank O’Hara
How an older person looks back at their own life, maybe reassessing or reinventing, is a key thing in all biography.
– Richard Holmes
in the corner
a spider weaves its web
morning tai chi
– Mueder Krieger
You have to develop a certain ease of delivery and make your writing agreeable to read.
– James Salter
If Christianity is only a mythology, then I find the mythology I believe in is not the one I like best. I like Greek mythology much better, Irish better still, Norse best of all.
– C.S. Lewis
Our distance from the source of our food enables us to be superficially more comfortable and distantly more ignorant. Eating is a sacrament, the grace that we say clears our hearts and guides the children and welcomes the guest, all at the same time.
– Gary Snyder
It’s not the size of the organization in the fight, but rather the size of the fight in the organization.
– Gary Wockner
there are people with
bombs falling out of the sky
onto their heads and
here I sit
chocolate and vanilla
ice cream for breakfast
– Kathy Watts
We are not headed toward a single goal: we are on a pilgrimage toward the
center of our hearts.
– Barbara Holmes
The old Cartesian idea of a split between an ethereal mind and a mechanistic body is increasingly (and thankfully) going the way of bleeding with leeches. The mind influences both how ill health is experienced and how that illness evolves.
– Dr. Gavin Francis
St. John of the Cross wrote, ‘Beloved, all that is harsh and difficult I want for myself, all that is gentle and sweet for thee.’ Amidst the urgent eternal amidst, it is very good to be in love.
– Kaveh Akbar
I believed that books might save him because I knew they had so far, and because I knew the people books had saved. They were college professors and actors and scientists and poets. They got to college and sat on dorm floors drinking coffee, amazed they’d finally found their soulmates.
– Rebecca Makkai, The Borrower
Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.
– John Keats
Grief is dangerous to empire. Because if we truly felt the heartbreak of disconnection, supremacy, genocide, ancestral harm, and ecological collapse, we would break out of the numbness and the spell of domination would begin to dissolve.
– Holly Truhlar
I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.
I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always.
But today It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.
– Seamus Heaney
fucked up I want to be that stone Buddha
over there in the corner of the garden
– Ikkyū
today’s priests are wooden swords seen in a room look real
but outside in
sunlight split bamboo not good for fighting or anything
– Ikkyū
The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.
– Robert Anton Wilson
You learned to stay small, silent, safe.
As you heal, may you discover and reclaim your right to take up space and speak truth.
– Dr. Thema
The revolution is spiritual. It’s personal. It’s ancestral. It’s vibrational. It’s sick and tired of being used as pawns in their game. It’s us taking the world back.
– Nika Solé
Heat is not
Responsible
For the heart of this
Song unanswerable.
– Virgil Geddes
the leaders of the past were insufficient,
the leaders of the present are unprepared.
we curl up tightly in our beds at night and wait.
it is a waiting without hope, more like
a prayer for unmerited grace.
– Charles Bukowski
Not one person in a hundred knows how to be silent and listen
– Samuel Beckett
I’m against schedules. Write when you feel excited by the prospect. Otherwise, don’t bother.
– Rick Moody
WRONG
I wish to be misunderstood;
that is,
to be understood from your perspective.
– Bill Knott
Feeling compassion is not the end of the path. The next step is love in action.
– Devin Berry
No Kings protest:
chant after chant of fried truth
eggflation
scrambled justice, poached rights,
cracked democracy…Trump, Fuck Off
– Chen-ou Liu
If there were such a society in existence and you or I visited it, I think we should come away with a curious impression. We should feel that its economic life was very socialistic and, in that sense, ‘advanced,’ but that its family life and its code of manners were rather old fashioned – perhaps even ceremonious and aristocratic. Each of us would like some bits of it, but I am afraid very few of us would like the whole thing.
– C.S. Lewis
delicate shades
of blue fluttering
into the night’s embrace
– Ogawa
Back in imagination land rather than working land. I did have an awakening that there are things that we can change, that we can indeed control, and that we can focus on those things and see the positive capability of making changes for the good in our lives and therefore the lives of others. We really are little good to others if we are not taking care of ourselves. Once again, I slipped into fantasy. It seems to be where I go lately, an imaginary world of success and privilege. It is illusory. Power is an illusion, a wound, weakness, a darkness. But empowerment, this is something else.
– Sheryl Luna
you and I will come to an end
somewhere
the most beautiful poem in the world
falls quiet
– Parnia Abbasi
Certainly, when one person in a room is more conscious, it changes the consciousness of everyone in that room. And in a family, if one person is coming into consciousness, everyone in the household is going to be changed.
– Marion Woodman
I keep forgetting to close the doors of my poems. / You keep sneaking in.
– Sarah Mills
The vast bulk of men are not pure individuals, and never will be, for the pure individual is a rarity, almost a kind of freak. The vast bulk of men need to belong to a self-governing group, a tribe, a nation, an empire. It is a necessity like the necessity to eat food.
– D.H. Lawrence
The aspiration to ‘save’ the world is the morbid phenomenon of a people’s youth…The more we are dispossessed, the more intense our appetites and our illusions become.
– Emil Cioran
Remember, happiness doesn’t depend upon who you are or what you have; it depends solely upon what you think. So start each day by thinking of all the things you have to be thankful for. Your future will depend very largely on the thoughts you think today.
– Dale Carnegie
In the long haul, grace will win out over everything, over the misery, the stupidity, the dishonesty.
– Anne Lamott
You are not married to this body. Find yourself outside of it.
– Kenneth Fok
Surely men of low degree are vanity, and men of high degree are a lie: to be laid in the balance, they are altogether lighter than vanity.
– Psalm 62:9
If some day Benjamin lectures on philosophy in a substantial way, not a soul will understand him, but his course could be tremendous if there were true questioning instead of label-sticking.
– Gershom Scholem
Desire is ever transient, it has no fixed abode. It may perpetuate for a time the object to which it clings, but desire in itself has no permanency.
– Krishnamurti
Reading should serve the goal of attaining peace; if it doesn’t make you peaceful, what good is it?
– Epictetus
We are in denial of the sacred today, and as a result, we cut ourselves off from the very forces that can provide perspective, orientation and health. Apparently, to develop our logos, we had to cast mythos aside as we progressed in scientific enlightenment.
– David Tacey
There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
– Anaïs Nin
There is no pleasure as complex as thought, and we surrendered ourselves to it.
– Jorge Luis Borges
These days,
I’m so full of rocks
that the water keeps spilling.
– L.E. Bowman
When we practice deep listening, we can help the person we’re listening to remove the perceptions that are making them suffer. We can restore harmony in our partnerships, our friendships, our family, our community, our nation, and between nations. It is that powerful.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
NEWS
Life isn’t so confusing
when you turn off the news.
Are you afraid you might
miss something?
Maybe your hunger and lack
is what really needs healing.
A goldfinch and his bride
return to my birdbath.
Blossoming forget-me-nots
are fine with the drizzle.
Weeds aren’t choosy.
They welcome both sun and rain.
Brazen rabbits loaf
among the rhododendrons,
mother and babies equally fat.
Stand barefoot in wet grass.
Close your eyes.
This moment is the season
of abundance.
You don’t need information.
A Swanson’s Thrush song
spirals into cedar silence.
And that’s the way it is
this Sabbath morning.
The gentle news
of the earth.
– Alfred K. Lamotte
In Taiji Quan, a gentle martial art that includes much qigong training, there is a saying, ‘A feather cannot be added; a fly cannot alight.’ This means that the posture is held so precisely, so delicately that if a feather rests on the shoulder the knees will need to bend because of added weight. If a fly alights on the extended arm, the arm will drop.
– Ken Cohen
But when first the two black dragons sprang out of the fog upon the small clerk, they had merely the effect of all miracles – they changed the universe. He discovered the fact that all romantics know – that adventures happen on dull days, and not on sunny ones. When the cord of monotony is stretched most tight, it it breaks with a sound like song.
– G. K. Chesterton
We have, all of us, an impulse to improve ourselves, an impulse toward actualizing more of our potentialities, toward self-actualization, or full humanness or human fulfillment, or whatever term you like. Granted this, then what holds us up? What
blocks us?
One such defense against growth that I’d like to speak about specially-because it hasn’t been noticed much-I shall call the Jonah complex.
In my own notes I had at first labeled this defense the “fear of one’s own greatness” or the “evasion of one’s destiny” or the “running away from one’s own best talents.” I had wanted to stress as bluntly and sharply as I could the non-Freudian point that we fear our best as well as our worst, even though in different ways. It is certainly possible for most of us to be greater than we are in actuality. We all have unused potentialities or not fully developed ones. It is certainly true that many of us evade our constitutionally suggested vocations (call, destiny, task in life, mission). So often we run away from the responsibilities dictated (or rather suggested) by nature, by fate, even sometimes by accident, just as Jonah tried-in vain-to run away from his fate.
We fear our highest possibilities (as well as our lowest ones). We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments, under the most perfect conditions, under conditions of greatest courage. We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves in such peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe, and fear before these
very same possibilities.
– Abraham Maslow
In this specific exercise (of self-observation), what was important was to see oneself, to observe one’s mechanical, automatic, reactionary behavior without comment, and without making any attempt to change that behavior. “If change,” he said, “then will never see reality. Will only see change.”
– Fritz Peters
The thousands stand and chant. Around them in the world, people ride escalators going up and sneak secret glances at the faces coming down. People dangle teabags over hot water in white cups. Cars run silently on the autobahns, streaks of painted light. People sit at desks and stare at office walls. They smell their shirts and drop them in the hamper. People bind themselves into num- bered seats and fly across time zones and high cirrus and deep night, knowing there is something they’ve forgotten to do.
The future belongs to crowds.
– Don DeLillo, MAO II
The greater the identification, the more your conflict and pain are covered over, and so there is the everlasting struggle to be identified with something.
– Krishnamurti
Peace is not a utopian ideal. Peace is a humble path made up of daily actions, and is woven with patience, courage, listening, and action. Today more than ever, peace requires our vigilant and creative presence.
– Pope Leo XIV
Let’s not forget that leaders are the embodiment of ideas. Neither the blessing, or curse, of charisma nor the instinctual surety of decisiveness assures a leader of the following necessary for effective accomplishment. What ultimately gives one the power of leadership is a capacity to embody visionary ideas, to be unafraid of ideals. Strong personality traits are given to many, but the representation and
expression of ideals is given to few.
– James Hillman
Stress is not created by other people’s actions, but by our reactions to their actions.
– James Blanchard Cisneros
Your energy alone will open doors that nothing else about you can.
– Nika Solé
It is insane that members of the working class have been convinced that the social safety net has a negative impact on their standard of living.
We are the richest country in the history of the world. We should be doing more to lift the working class.
– Andy Perrin
medicines don’t do the work for me. they help me do the work myself
– daniel brottman
Fasting focuses the mind – it replaces all desires with a single desire.
– @naval
O shit,
I left my heart in the 7th arrondissement
a good bit South of here, apparently.
Forget it. I’ve left my heart everywhere,
walk around collecting bits and shards.
– Paul Blackburn
So now as I’m leavin’
I’m weary as Hell
The confusion I’m feelin’
Ain’t no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
If God’s on our side
He’ll stop the next war.
– Bob Dylan
Humanist critique just keep snapping at the world as if the whole point of being and thinking is just to catch it in a lie.
– Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart
What if your markers for success were how well you slept at night? How many books you read? How easily you laughed? How much time you spent storytelling, feeling warm in the arms and homes of people you adore.
– Emmie Rae
Don’t hope that events will turn out the way you want, welcome events in whichever way they happen: this is the path to peace.
– Epictetus
Beautify your inner dialogue. Beautify your inner world with love light and compassion. Life will be beautiful.
– Amit Ray
If you’re not metabolically healthy you are nowhere near your full potential.
– Dan Go
I am no longer as certain as I used to be about the constituents of attraction and desire; the less certain I become, the more interesting, the more like art-making, the practice of love and lust seems to me.
– Bertha Harris
You sabotage your own vibe when you spend too much time in places you don’t belong and with people who can’t see who you are.
– Nika Solé
The utter stupid waste of war, not only material but moral and spiritual, is so staggering to those who have to endure it. And always was (despite the poets), and always will be (despite the propagandists)…
– J.R.R. Tolkien
The riot, the dialectic, not giving up, showing up.
– Joshua Clover
That’s another prejudice—about cobwebs. They’re actually quite beautiful in a certain light.
– Marguerite Duras; tr. Alison Strayer
Before you can lie to another, you must first lie to yourself.
– @naval
There are two possibilities for thought: either to go outwards in the direction of objects or states, in which case it takes the form of suffering, or to go inwards towards the heart of experience, in which case it dissolves in peace.
– Rupert Spira
Accustomed as I was to observing and studying myself, the whole thing was clear and visible, as though I were watching it happen in someone else; and yet I was aware the whole time that I was being swayed by material subjective factors, that I was transforming purely personal motives into universal reasons.
– Alberto Moravia
We desire passionately that there should be another life in which we would be similar to what we are here below. But we do not reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, but in this one, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we had wanted to remain immortally.
– Marcel Proust
The Albatross’s Sonnet to Western Civilization
as the Madleen Sets Sail for Gaza
by Tishani Doshi
Now that you are coming to an end, how does it feel
lying side by side in the breach with your friends?
When your compass is found malfunctioning in the kitchen
drawer, and the unveiling of the seesaw reveals it was always
rigged, will you show up to court in your sheepskin coat,
and say, I only did what I was told. When we’ve circumnavigated
the globe and seen the extent of the terror fields. When we’ve seen
what we’ve seen what we’ve seen what we’ve seen—
will you still ask, What can one boat do for the besieged?
What can one bird do, except show up in a poem or two,
hang around your neck as a symbol of your tyrants
and transgressions. Remember, when all of this was going on,
there were some who were homesick for the world
and what it could have been, and others who were silent.
It may be necessary to climb back into the heat of the moment.
– August Wilson
In the silence, I can feel the love of our Creator.
That which is a part of me.
That which is a part of you.
We are all connected.
– April Peerless
Healing isn’t about erasing the past. It’s about unwinding from it. It’s about reclaiming the space within us that trauma occupied.
– Maraya Rodostianos
I consider the loss of silence extremely serious. For twenty-five years I lived in hotels in Paris, and the noise! I could have killed someone. I consider the disappearance of silence as one of the symptoms of the end of humanity.
– E.M. Cioran
TO LARRY RIVERS
You are worried that you don’t write?
Don’t be. It’s the tribute of the air that
your paintings don’t just let go
of you. And what poet ever sat down
in front of a Titian, pulled out
his versifying tablet and began
to drone? Don’t complain, my dear.
You do what I can only name.
– Frank O’Hara
Christianity’s condemnation of degradation has also been responsible for the attitude that the whole of eroticism is something evil.
– Georges Bataille
Shore-Bound
Circling sea birds cry:
you’ve been shore-bound in this life –
wade in, take the risk.
– Louise Machen
Realization is the medicine given to the disease of suffering and it’s the only medicine there is.
– Adyashanti
This planet is run by crazy people. Remember what they have to do to get where they are. Their perspective is so narrow, so…brief. A few years. In the best of them a few decades. They care only about the time they are in power.
– Carl Sagan
The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me,
And I cannot, cannot go.
– Emily Brontë
The world needs sensitive, intuitive people—but not ones who are depleted and lost in other people’s pain. The most powerful thing you can do for others is stay in your own energy.
– Christina Lane
I have no plans
No dates
No appointments with anybody
So I leisurely explore
Souls and cities
– Jack Kerouac
I’ve learned over the years to free-fall into what’s happening… Things start to happen under your pencil that you don’t want to happen, or don’t understand. But that’s when the work starts to have a beating heart.
– Andre Dubus III
A few quiet generations in the ‘free world’ have produced leaders who don’t seem to grasp what extraordinarily brutal and ugly things had to be done to make them free, or what must be done to stay that way.
– Matti Friedman
No Kings vs. Tanks
Green-eyed monster, laser-plated,
cloaked in self-importance, gazes on
protesters, complains of crowd size.
– Gayle J. Greenlea
Music is a language. It’s a memory of the cosmic system, a memory of past and future. Above all it’s science not entertainment.
– Vangelis
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
– Frank O’Hara
Writing is thinking; writing is a form of thought. It’s difficult for me to believe that real thought is possible without writing.
– William Langewische
Why won’t you kiss me,
she asked. To which I replied,
self-preservation.
– Septimus Brown
I have a theory that everyone consumed a piece of media between 9-13 years old that is the foundation of their entire worldview. Everything they learnt since was stacked on top of this. It’s a great dinner question to ask people.
– George Mack
My favourite genre of literature is gossip. My second favourite is prayer. But sometimes those are one and the same.
– Aurora Mattia
When I finish my project, if I continue writing, I would love to write sheer nonsense.
– Henry Miller
Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.
– St. Thomas Aquinas
The more that freedom of choice came to be celebrated, the more it generated anxiety. How could society hold together if millions of individuals went about making whatever choices they pleased?
– David Avrom Bell
Those who dwell at earth’s ends will fear Your signs.
The portals of morning and evening You gladden.
– Psalm 65:9
There is a fire in you
older than words
older than prophets
primordial
before the veil of the world
It rises when blood runs hot
when strangers become enemies
and love forgets its own meaning
No hidden light is in this flame
No lesson
No mercy
Only
destruction
– Nils Olsen
day moon
as if Gods could be
mistaken
– Eva Limbach
The second arrow is our reactivity to pain—our disguises, the mad mind, the habit of clinging to suffering.
– Ruth King
when I traced
the spider’s thread
you were there
– hibari katahane
The Dharma must be as relational as it is individual—suffering includes harm from others and family.
– Gregory Kramer
for ten days
onslaught after onslaught
of writer’s block …
I look out the window
at the moon, its fullness
– Chen-ou Liu
Knowledge is the death of learning. If you already know, you’ve stopped listening, and are receding at light speed into the past.
Consider instead that there is no place to plant your feet.
– Kenneth Folk
I didn’t know I was queer, but I also did know, and I started to realize that I needed to find a bohemian milieu of some kind. There was a promise of safety in the beauty of writing and art.
– Robert Glück
In the shadows where silence bides,
You emerge, a radiant tide,
A beacon cutting through the gray,
Illuminating hidden soul ways.
– Amy Christie
We Are Not Responsible
by Harryette Mullen
We are not responsible for your lost or stolen relatives.
We cannot guarantee your safety if you disobey our instructions.
We do not endorse the causes or claims of people begging for handouts.
We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.
Your ticket does not guarantee that we will honor your reservations.
In order to facilitate our procedures, please limit your carrying on.
Before taking off, please extinguish all smoldering resentments.
If you cannot understand English, you will be moved out of the way.
In the event of a loss, you’d better look out for yourself.
Your insurance was cancelled because we can no longer handle
your frightful claims. Our handlers lost your luggage and we
are unable to find the key to your legal case.
You were detained for interrogation because you fit the profile.
You are not presumed to be innocent if the police
have reason to suspect you are carrying a concealed wallet.
It’s not our fault you were born wearing a gang color.
It is not our obligation to inform you of your rights.
Step aside, please, while our officer inspects your bad attitude.
You have no rights we are bound to respect.
Please remain calm, or we can’t be held responsible
for what happens to you.
escaping
an awkward silence
at the singles party
my mind slips outside
to chitchat with the moon
– Chen-ou Liu
A world of grief and pain
Flowers bloom
Even then.
– Kobayashi Issa
I ask myself: is every story that has ever been written in this world, a story of suffering and affliction?
– Clarice Lispector
When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions removed by death, and could I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I should be entirely annihilated…
– David Hume
A man who is unconscious of himself acts in a blind, instinctive way and is in addition fooled by all the illusions that arise when he sees everything that he is not conscious of in himself coming to meet him from outside as projections upon his neighbour.
– CG Jung
I am one of the searchers… I search for love, for identity, for meaning.
– James Kavanaugh, There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves
Anger is what happens when something you value is at stake; it is the voice of your heart saying, ‘This matters.’ Listen before you silence it.
– Dan Allender
Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them.
– Constantin Brâncuși
When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.
– Paulo Coelho
I would rather be a little nobody, then to be an evil somebody.
– Abraham Lincoln
I am both exile and arrival, all at once.
– Warsan Shire
Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.
– Sholom Aleichem
Bravery never goes out of style.
– William Thackeray
I feel like a defective typewriter—I skip a lot of letters.
– Anne Sexton
In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted.
– C. G. Jung
Everyone is still looking for words. Words are meaningless. When you listen to words, you’re essentially giving away your power. You have all the answers. All you have to do is to become still long enough and everything will be revealed to you.
– Robert Adams
I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.
– Virginia Woolf
I do not understand how anyone can live without one small place of enchantment to turn to.
– Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves.
– Henri Frederic Amiel
Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow.
– Janet Fitch
My heart is at stake— but fuck a sticky heart when there’s a shot at a good long talk between a you and me.
– Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart
We are against genocide and the architects of genocide.
We are in favor of poetry and the creators of poetry.
– Zeeshan Jaanam
Self-writing [is] that exercise of thought on itself that reactivates what it knows, calls to mind a principle, a rule, or an example, reflects on them, assimilates them, and in this manner prepares itself to face reality.
– Foucault
We carry our homes within us which enables us to fly.
– John Cage
light of dawn
I inhale and exhale
the silence
– Chen-ou Liu
what’s a sign of very low intelligence?
Government should be run like a business.
– James T Carter
Ah look, there’s the river again.
Reappeared, strong as ever, on
its natural course. Graceless
people believe everything is
racing itself.
– Bud Smith, Shades
new moon
another vow
of silence
– Jenny Mattern
it touches the line
of my fishing pole –
this summer moon
– Chiyo-ni
embracing the boundless —
an empty boat
closer to the moon
– Steliana Cristina Voicu
One who descends is one who is called beyond the known structures of the society in which they live. The one who descends is foraging for another way.
– Carly Mountain
The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at.
– Guy Debord
If you always think about what the worst can happen, you should not fight for ideals.
– Erich Maria Remarque
These seasons of dryness and darkness are not punishments but purifications.
– kenneth boa
I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a Poem and to be given away by a Novel.
– John Keats
There may be times when what is most needed is, not so much a new discovery or a new idea as a different ‘slant’; I mean a comparatively slight readjustment in our way of looking at the things and ideas on which attention is already fixed.
– Owen Barfield
If you want to be rich, don’t allow yourself the luxury of excuses.
– Robert Kiyosaki
Oh Lord, let me not live to be useless.
– John Wesley
The best ideas often look like bad ideas at first.
– Seth Godin
The healing knowledge of ‘Our Ancestress’ is central to our survival. The veneration of our foremothers is essential to our self-respect.
– Luisah Teish
Pain initially stings, igniting transformation within us. It’s a catalyst for evolution.
– Paulo Coelho
You must own equity to gain your financial freedom.
– Naval Ravikant
It is bad when one thing becomes two. One should not look for anything else in the way of the Samurai. It is the same for anything else called a way. If one understands things in this manner, he should be able to hear about all ways and be more and more in accord with his own.
– Hagakure
Black clouds roll in, lightning dances in the sky, torrential rains drench the hillside.
– Marcy Kelly, Seek Higher Ground
Altitude
by Airea D. Matthews
Icarus, he advised,
heed the warning: don’t fly
too near the sun or sea;
stay the path.
But I mistook the sky for an iris,
and entered at the northern horizon,
where map edges blister,
and the compass wasps.
I was dutiful but unwooed
by chisel and bench, contracts
scribbled in fig sap, or watching
Ariadne ungold time.
What awe is there
in earthen labyrinths?
Wax molds itself sublime,
shapes wings each night.
Light refracts my name in
dialect only moths comprehend.
I belong elemental, where trees
chance to become constellations,
where the bar-headed goose flies
past with the heart of a clock and
Zeus is a silver kite tethered
to Olympus by harp strings
trembling an offering.
Of bliss? To remember
the why of it all.
Bliss is a body absconding
warp speed toward
a dwarf star whispering,
Unsee the beheld.
My fall, well, yes,
those depths matter less.
What I learned by height—
that’s the story.
What do gods know of wisdom? Wisdom is the balancing of lacks, and they lack nothing.
– Marc Kannon
No one could call him a liar. And this was mainly because the lie was in his head, and any truth coming from his mouth carried the color of the lie.
– John Steinbeck, East of Eden
I am a collection of dismantled almosts.
– Anne Sexton
so much of a life’s work is about spending an unjustifiable amount of time & energy on something you can *sense* holds a key,,
so that by the time you’re old, you can distill what you found, making sure others can have it without repeating your truly insane effort.
– River Kenna
Refuse to lip sync someone else’s anthem.
Reclaim your melody. Remember your lyrics. Sing your heart’s song.
Remain an original.
– Dr. Thema
The worst way to build a relationship is to try to build a relationship.
– @naval
We don’t stop practice when we make a mistake, we don’t stop to think it should be otherwise. We keep practicing and let go of each mistake—apologizing when necessary.
– Grace Schireson
WEATHER PATTERN
The water in your body is just visiting. It was a thunderstorm a week ago. It will be the ocean soon enough. Most of your cells come and go like morning dew. We are more weather pattern than stone monument. Sunlight on mist. Summer lightning. Your choices outweigh your substance.
– Jarod K. Anderson
I think I grow tensions
like flowers
in a wood where
nobody goes.
Each wound is perfect,
encloses itself in a tiny
imperceptible blossom,
making pain.
Pain is a flower
like that one,
like this one,
like that one,
like this one.
– Robert Creeley
As we begin the healing process we use what is known as the “felt sense,” or internal body sensations. These sensations serve as a portal through which we find the symptoms, or reflections of trauma. In directing our attention to these internal body sensations, rather than attacking the trauma head-on, we can unbind and free the energies that have been held in check. The Felt Sense Our feelings and our bodies are like water flowing into water. We learn to swim within the energies of the (body) senses.
– Tarthang Tulku
The mind seems to grow fidgety and uncomfortable cooped up in a body 24/7. Mentally, dreaming is like taking off a pair of tight shoes at the end of the day: the liberated mind is no longer constrained by somatic sensory and motor processes. [D]reaming unfetters the mind from the world of matter; and, having vacated the body, consciousness is free to pandiculate, ponder and play. The dreaming mind stretches, yawns and reawakens in a strangely familiar place where it can time travel, dialogue with demons, get trapped in a mundane loop of doing dinner dishes or soar with angels.
– Rubin Naiman
The self is a repeatedly reconstructed biological state.
– Antonio R. Damasio
The immune system, the hypothalamus, the ventro-medial frontal cortices, and the Bill of Rights have the same root cause.
– Antonio Damasio
…We talk
Ceaselessly to things that can’t respond
Or won’t respond. What are we talking for?
We’re talking to coax hope and love from zero.
We’re talking so the brain of the geode
Will listen like a garden heliotrope
And open its quartz flowers. We are talking
Because speech is a sun, a kind of making.
– Mark Jarman
Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation.
– Wendell Berry
And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise. Things keep going on, they overlap and blur, your story is part of your sister’s story is part of many other stories, and there is no telling where any of them may lead.
– Erin Morgenstern
Man’s feeling of homelessness, of alienation has been intensified in the midst of a bureaucratized, impersonal mass society. He has come to feel himself an outsider even within his own human society. He is trebly alienated: a stranger to God, to nature, and to the gigantic social apparatus that supplies his material wants. But the worst and final form of alienation, toward which indeed the others tend, is man’s alienation from his own self. In a society that requires of man only that he perform competently his own particular social function, man becomes identified with this function, and the rest of his being is allowed to subsist as best it can – usually to be dropped below the surface of consciousness and forgotten.
– William Barrett
Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death’s face. […] On each one of these days the soul suffers violence. Regularly, every morning, the soul castrates itself of aspiration, for thought cannot journey through time without meeting death on the way. Thus war effaces all conceptions of purpose or goal, including even its own “war aims”. It effaces the very notion of war’s being brought to an end. To be outside a situation so violent as this is to find it inconceivable; to be inside it is to be unable to conceive its end.
– Simone Weil
Your words are you. You are them and not much more. The Description: the fieldness of fields, the weediness of weeds … When is description mere? Never. A freshness in the seeing, an innocency in the vision, the angle of perception, the bringing together of details, not necessarily as metaphors, even, just as objects. Be one of those on whom nothing is lost. Don’t strain for arrangement. Look and put it down and let your sensibility be the sieve.
– Theodore Roethke
Beyond the wall of the unreal city … there is another world waiting for you. It is the old true world of the deserts, the mountains, the forests, the islands, the shores, the open plains. Go there. Be there. Walk gently and quietly deep within it. And then — May your trails be dim, lonesome, stony, narrow, winding and only slightly uphill. May the wind bring rain for the slickrock potholes fourteen miles on the other side of yonder blue ridge. May God’s dog serenade your campfire, may the rattlesnake and the screech owl amuse your reverie, may the Great Sun dazzle your eyes by day and the Great Bear watch over you by night.
– Edward Abbey
The Ancient Desert Fathers, when they were disconsolate and without hope, would repeat one word, over and over, as a kind of soothing mantra. And the word wasn’t “Jesus” or “God” or “Love.” The word was “Today.” It kept them where they needed to be.
– Gregory Boyle
You’ve got to shake your fists at lightning now,
you’ve got to roar like forest fire
You’ve got to spread your light like blazes all across the sky
They’re going to aim the hoses on you, show ‘em you won’t expire
Not till you burn up every passion, not even when you die
Come on now, you’ve got to try, if you’re feeling contempt, well then you tell it
If you’re tired of the silent night, Jesus, well then you yell it
Condemned to wires and hammers, strike every chord that you feel
That broken trees and elephant ivories conceal.
– Joni Mitchell
If I accept the lowest in me, I lower a seed into the ground of Hell. The seed is invisibly small, but the tree of life grows from it and conjoins the Below with the Above. At both ends there is fire and blazing embers. The Above is fiery and the Below is fiery. Between the unbearable fires grow your life. You hang between these two poles. In an immeasurably frightening movement the stretched hanging welters up and down. We thus fear our lowest, since that which one does not possess is forever united with the chaos and takes part in its mysterious ebb and flow. Insofar as I accept the lowest in me — precisely that red glowing sun of the depths, the upper shining sun also rises. Therefore he who strives for the highest finds the deepest.
– Carl Jung
The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.
– R.D. Laing
The most fortunate are those who have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder and even ecstasy.
– Abraham Maslow
These Poems
by June Jordan
These poems
they are things that I do
in the dark
reaching for you
whoever you are
and
are you ready?
These words
they are stones in the water
running away
These skeletal lines
they are desperate arms for my longing and love.
I am a stranger
learning to worship the strangers
around me
whoever you are
whoever I may become.
These wars teach us nothing, not even how to conquer our fears. We are still cave men. Democratic cave men, perhaps, but that is small comfort. Our fight is to get out of the cave. If we were to make the least effort in that direction we would inspire the whole world.
– Henry Miller
True solace is finding none, which is to say, it is everywhere.
– Gretel Ehrlich
No matter how you do it, remember this: Writing your truth in a terrible world is, indeed, resistance. It is how we preserve beauty, resist erasure, and remind ourselves—and the world—that we can do better.
– Susan Muaddi Darraj
Be not sucked into the whirlpool of conflict and distress that is in the world at this time; but find that haven of peace within.
– Eileen Caddy
A large part of the evil that man unleashes on himself and his world stems not from a wickedness in his heart, but from the way he was conditioned to see the world and to seek satisfaction in it. He blindly follows out his unconscious urges in the frantic activity of daily life…He fits himself into the bureaucratic- industrial machines of our day and gives his uncritical allegiance to the nation-states that
run these machines.
– Ernest Becker
How to swallow a colonizer
by No’u Revilla
after Kathleen Lynch
with lines repeating from Haunani-Kay Trask
1. Brindle your throat.
2. Metabolize the twitching
eyes, tongue, feet.
3. Hold your stomach
with both hands while
his teeth dissolve and recite:
you will be undarkened
you will be undarkened.
This acid, medicine.
4. Always rub your piko.
When the settler breaks down
stick your finger in your mouth
to beckon flowers.
5. Kaulana nã pua.]
He stared and talked at the girl’
red hair and amused face for what
seemed to be a few minutes; and
then, feeling that the groups in such a
place should mix, rose to his feet. To
his astonishment, he discovered the
whole garden empty. Everyone had
gone long ago, and he went himself
with a rather hurried apology. He left
with a sense of champagne in his
head, which he could not afterwards
explain. In the wild events which
were to follow this girl had no part at
all; he never saw her again until all
his tale was over. And yet, in some
indescribable way, she kept recurring
like a motive in music through all his
mad adventures afterwards, and the
glory of her strange hair ran like a red
thread through those dark and ill-
drawn tapestries of the night.
– G.K. Chesterton
(The Man Who Was Thursday)
In every man sleeps a prophet,
and when he wakes there
is a little more evil in
the world.
– Emil Cioran
Don’t take kind souls for granted. Behind that softness is a story. A storm. A walk through hell… and a decision to be light in a world that hasn’t always been kind to them.
– Caroline Middelsdorf
We’ll be remembered more
for what we destroy
than what we create.
– Chuck Palahniuk
homesickness—
that bend of the frond
toward its roots
– @NituYumnam
I am saying no to your proposal of marriage as I would say no to any proposal of marriage. This is not a rejection of you. Our illusion systems simply do not coincide.
– William S. Burroughs
The key thing is that there’s nothing interesting about my story. It’s not like I’m a celebrity whose life people are interested in.
– Geoff Dyer
I’ve learned to live simply, wisely.
– Anna Akhmatova
what’s a good way to post poetry online? tweeting it feels off, substack feels off, blog on my website feels off…
some sense that poetry being digital is almost intrinsically non-optimal
– River Kenna
All a woman really needs is a man who’s monitoring the situation, so she can turn her brain off and slip back into her magical fairyland.
– Nika Solé
When I went to war in World War II, we had two fears. One was we would be killed. The other was that we might have to kill somebody. And now killing is Whoopee. It does not seem much anymore. To my generation, it still seemed like an extraordinary thing to do, to kill.
– Kurt Vonnegut
People spend too much time doing and not enough time thinking about what they should be doing.
– @naval
It’s hard enough to be actively awakening in a world that hardly knows what that means. But pair that with having to go up against a system that is intentionally disempowering its own people, and you find yourself on the true hero’s journey.
– Nika Solé
Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering — rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer’s words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.
– Susan Sontag
a cloud waiting
for lightning or
a sign from the Gods
– Basho
Poetry disperses me, unties me from myself and the world.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
I would rather be an authority on myself than on Cicero.
– Michel de Montaigne
Trust because it’s good for you—not because others are consistent enough to earn it.
– Dawa Tarchin Phillips
If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small.
– C.S. Lewis
I hear the ringing of the bluebells, the bobcat said. We are approaching the fairy realm. Stay on the path, or we will be lost in the green.
– @voimaoy
I think the novel has to stay attached to life somehow. It has to share the terrain of life.
– Rachel Cusk
no one colonizes innocently…no one colonizes with impunity either…a civilization which justifies colonization—and therefore force–is already a sick civilization.
– Aimé Césaire
Now shall I praise the cities, those long-surviving
(I watched them in awe) great constellations of earth.
for only in praising is my heart still mine, so violently
do I know the world. And even my lament
turns into a paean before my disconsolate heart.
– Rilke
Our inability to obtain a particular article does not prevent us from becoming aware of the empty space that it should fill, and by which we perceive its shape while being unable to identify it.
– Jean Cocteau
Flow is always there. You’re just in the way.
– @naval
If your mind is liberated, your heart floods with compassion.
– Thich Nhat Nanh
The larger the group, the worse the conversation.
– @naval
Intentions don’t matter. Actions do. That’s why being ethical is hard.
– @naval
Lest there be any doubt: extreme wealth is not a result of nor a corollary to ethical behavior or intellectual cleverness. Nor are inverse circumstances the result of the converse.
Rockets explode. Worlds end. Fortune, luck, etc. play a greater role than most Westerners believe, regardless of the Puritan cultural subconscious that argues the opposite in our sleep.
– Clifton Lee
Flipping the Bird
by Ann-Margaret Lim
Holding his stare in mine, I flip the bird
at a grown man
on a stool in front of the street bar
on the left shoulder of Red Hills Road
where big aluminum pots with crab, or soup
tell you when its Friday, or Wednesday.
He’d just pssst and winked at me—
a 12-year-old in the back seat
of a Buick Skylark
being driven by my Chinese stepmom.
Couldn’t be my hair
—hot-combed for graduation
styled in two limp pigtails
and a too-big bang
my teacher christened a bang-ga-rang
so, of course, me being a kid
I flip the bird at him, telling him
with my eyes, what the finger says.
Don’t think my stepmom—eyes on the road—
sees him, or me, flipping out
and flipping the bird at him.
Don’t think she hears him, flipping out
how a little “black gal” like me
pass mi place, damn renk an’ fiesty.
At a certain point, it’s between you and your conscience. You go as close to the line as your conscience will permit in terms of producing material that pleases you. You’re working at the edge of risk, if you’re lucky.
– Hanif Kureishi
Half of me is filled with bursting words and half of me is painfully shy. I crave solitude yet also crave people. I want to pour life and love into everything yet also nurture my self-care and go gently. I want to live within the rush of primal, intuitive decision, yet also wish to sit and contemplate. This is the messiness of life – that we all carry multitudes, so must sit with the shifts. We are complicated creatures, and ultimately, the balance comes from this understanding. Be water. Flowing, flexible and soft. Subtly powerful and open. Wild and serene. Able to accept all changes, yet still led by the pull of steady tides. It is enough.
– Victoria Erickson
In the preface to their anthology of writing about the weather, Alice Oswald and Paul Keegan describe meteorology as “the art of looking up.” What is the word for the cursed art of looking at the detritus of our violence and our sorrow? The art of contemplating fundamentally human nature, of asking questions, filling voids, imagining and disturbing? Literature.
– Anna Badkhen, Ars Poetica, To See Beyond
Since Utopia was set aside and the unity of theory and practice demanded, we have become all too practical. Fear of the impotence of theory supplies a pretext for bowing to the almighty production process, and so fully admitting the impotence of theory.
– Theodor W. Adorno
I was interested in the fact that you could get words out onto a single page and do stuff with them until they turned into a poem.
– Alice Notley
NO WONDER
If we take the Bible literally in English, we must renounce scholarly studies in Hebrew and Greek that show the ambiguity inherent in any language (not to mention any translation).
No wonder so many Christian believers who slam their minds shut to avoid critical thinking about scripture find it easy to ignore science as well. It is easy for a non-critical thinker to believe ridiculous conspiracy theories about their neighbors. Bad religion has taught them how to fear but not how to love.
If we believe history has been a struggle between good and evil people instead of a clash of needs and interests between the members of our one human family our circle of compassion will get smaller and smaller.
No wonder so many sectarian Christians pray for our troops but never get around to loving and praying for our enemies. No wonder so many sectarian Christians believe the lies told about immigrants and about other religious worldviews. Jesus is not some tribal chieftain to be lifted above every other. Jesus is one culture’s symbol of the tie that binds every sentient being into one common life.
Love is the golden key for translating any text from its original ancient setting and into our current day. Love teaches if scripture seems to call us to repeat some ancient cruelty or superstition, we are reading the text wrong for our day.
Religion should be a mustard seed that grows into a tree capable of giving shelter to all. If your Christianity has not led you to universal love, the seed of your religion died in infancy before yielding its fruit.
– Jim Rigby
It’s not easy to look at the violence in the world clearly. Yes, we need strong and clear judgments about abuse, perpetration, military actions, colonization, decimation of people and Earth.
I ask that of myself.
But, we also need our heart’s compass which often comes in the form of feelings. My heart is regularly less focused on what’s right or wrong. Sometimes it doesn’t even say where to stand.
Sometimes my heart stays quiet. Even the demand to take a side can feel neglectful of my heart’s intelligence.
Sometimes my heart agonizes over the polarized discourse – the war we make with each other on social media where we must “kill” those who disagree with us or declare them evil.
Sometimes my heart bleeds as I feel the way I am the one injured, but other times my heart is filled with fiery blood, murderous blood, vengeful blood. It wants to holler, STOP. STOP EVERYTHING. EVEN DISCOURSE.
Sometimes my heart takes me to a place on the Earth, perhaps the ocean, where the waves soothe and remind me that things come and go.
Sometimes I just weep. Maybe if we all wept, something new could arise.
How about you?
– David Bedrick
Most therapy is grossly and unethically inefficient.
– Brad Schipke
We believe peace can kill us. So we live in a permanent state of war. We no longer can contrive a way to run an economy without war…
We have been at war for over a century now and it has bankrupted our treasury, destroyed our land, corrupted our people, and fouled our bed.
We are creatures of fear, supplicants, and we expect to be taken care of by something and we do not expect to be loved or give love.
– Charles Bowden
It
is a long time
i don’t know how long
since
we were in a room together now i hear
that you are dead but when i think of
you as now i have the Clear impression
that
tenderly smiling you’re alive as ever.
– John Cage
I wrote a pep talk recently to myself on a bar napkin: no matter which road you take, it will be both glorious and unbearable. Every road is lonely. Every road,
holy. The only error is not walking forth.
Yesterday, a friend in California, when giving me directions, told me I could take the trail toward the tall pines or turn left and find a field of poppies, growing
gold and savage at the edge of the valley.
When I asked which to choose, she simply shrugged and said: either way, it’s all heaven.
– Joy Sullivan
The real subject in poetry isn’t the voice. The real subject is silence. It’s like in architecture, where the medium is not really stone or metal, but space. We use materials—brick, glass, whatever— to inflect the immaterial, space. I would say that the real medium of poetry is inner space, the silence of our deepest interior.
– Li-Young Lee
It is not enough for two people to find each other, it is also very important that they find each other at the right moment and hold deep, quiet festivals in which their desires merge so that they can fight as one against storms.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
In the church of my heart the choir is on fire.
– Vladimir Mayakovsky
…and although invisible to the eye of reason it must have been very apparent to the clairvoyance of the human heart.
– John Cowper Powys
…if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think and feel, you don’t think, ‘oh, I love this picture because it’s universal.’ ‘I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.’ That’s not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes, you.
– Donna Tartt
What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become, except in dreams that blow in from out there bearing the fragrance of islands we have not yet sighted in our waking hours, as in voyaging sometimes the first blossoming branches of our next landfall come bumping against the keel, even in the dark, whole days before the real land rises to meet us.
– David Malouf
I have been with God in the dark–
– Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Knowing must therefore be accompanied by an equal capacity to forget knowing. Non-knowing is not a form of ignorance but a difficult transcendence of knowledge.
– Gaston Bachelard
I’m in complete agreement with Simone Weil’s statement that “absolute unmixed attention is prayer.” I am also in complete agreement with Paul Celan’s similar statement that “attentiveness is the natural prayer of the human soul.”
– Gerald Stern
Inside this new love, die. Your way begins on the other side. Become the sky. Take an ax to the prison wall. Escape. Walk out like someone suddenly born into color. Do it now. You’re covered with thick cloud. Slide out the side. Die, and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign that you’ve died. Your old life was a frantic running from silence. The speechless full moon comes out now.
– Rumi
Personality – We have a saying, ‘He stands in his own light’ He can’t see his real self because of his personality.
– Kathryn Hulme
Ordinary man is at the mercy of his organism – at the mercy of the instinctive centre; impressions received by the senses, of appetites, inertia, disease – at the mercy of the feelings; associations connected with people and places past and present, likes and dislikes, fear and anxiety – at the mercy of the mind; imagination, day-dreaming, suggestibility.
– A.R. Orage
When we are lost in darkness and see a distant glimmer of light, who does not dream of a thatched cottage or, to go more deeply still into legend, of a hermit’s hut?… The hut immediately becomes centralized solitude, for in the land of legend, there exists no adjoining hut. And although geographers may bring back photographs of hut villages from their travels in distant lands, our legendary past transcends everything that has been seen, even everything that we have experienced personally. The image leads us on towards extreme solitude. The hermit is alone before God. His hut, therefore, is just the opposite of the monastery. And there radiates about this centralized solitude a universe of meditation and prayer, a universe outside the universe. The hut can receive none of the riches ‘of this world.’ It possesses the felicity of intense poverty; indeed, it is one of the glories of poverty; as destitution increases it gives us access to absolute refuge.
– Gaston Bachelard
Destiny doesn’t mean that your life has been strictly predetermined. Therefore, to leave everything to fate and to not actively contribute to the music of the universe is a sign of sheer ignorance. The music of the universe is all-pervading and it is composed on forty different levels. Your destiny is the level where you will play your tune. You might not change your instrument but how well to play is entirely in your hands.
– Rumi
Like the people on this accursed ship, my boy, they are led by captains who have no charts or compasses, and who deal from minute to minute with no problem more substantial than how to protect their self-esteem.
– Kurt Vonnegut Jr
…we human beings do, in fact, live in two worlds at once, under the sway of both earthly and imaginal reality. We live “where the two seas meet,” in the words of a beautiful Sufi metaphor. On the outside, we belong to the earth realm, with its heavier and more plodding ways. We walk in physical form, think in linear progression, and are always bumping into the hard, solid edges of things. On the inside something in us deeply belongs to imaginal causality, with its far lighter, more intense, and more diffusive aliveness. We dream beyond time, interpenetrate each other’s hearts, and hunger for the absolute. We laugh in the face of death and weep at the beauty of a sunset.
Truly, as Jesus said, we are “in this world but not of it.”
Operationally, this cosmic dual citizenship does not make for an easy time. For the poets and mystics it can evoke that sense of profound world nostalgia — “here is not home” — that yearning for something on the tip of our tongues but always just beyond grasping. From the standpoint of reciprocal feeding, however, it sets up the perfect circumstances for the exchange of energy between the realms. If you know anything about meteorology, you know that where there’s a difference in the pressure gradients the wind begins to blow. Our mixtus orbis seems to be intentionally positioned on an imaginal “front line,” and the winds here do indeed blow hard and strong. But there is huge purpose at work here. For in learning to navigate the pressure differential between these two worlds — both real — we discover at the heart of our own lives the secret alchemy through which these fruits of the spirit are released into this world as living streams of healing energy.
– Cynthia Bourgeault
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
– Marcel Proust
Proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you have always known.
– Frank Herbert
If some resentment or grudge is established in your body, you can take a great deal of the force away from it by not making it go through your mind, not dwelling on it. And in time it will go, but in itself it doesn’t matter. There’s an energy there which you can begin to learn to take to yourself. You can even begin, eventually, to learn to transform it. What we’re discussing is the beginning of this transformation.
– Helen Adie
Every day on the balcony of the sea,
wings open, fire is born,
and everything is blue again like morning.
– Pablo Neruda
Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
You’re going to write about us, but you’re never going to get it right.
– Jacob Wren, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim
O the cunning wiles that creep
In thy little heart asleep!
When thy little heart doth wake,
Then the dreadful night shall break.
– William Blake
And though we need all our natural human courage and guts (the vast sum of human courage and endurance is stupendous, isn’t it?) and all our religious faith to face the evil that may befall us (as it befalls others, if God wills) still we may pray and hope. I do.
– Tolkien
They are still asleep in America.
Nothing has changed, only
more frightened souls.
– Jack Micheline
Black popular culture (written, visual, and audio) has shaped so many of my own personal touches—how I relate to masculinity and femininity, [. . .].
– Jari Bradley
Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that…our divided, schizophrenic worldview, with no mythology adequate to coordinate our conscious and unconscious is what is coming to an end.
– Joseph Campbell
The whole planet is one organism, everybody and everything is connected. It is one consciousness manifesting in so many ways & forms.
– Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
It takes practice, but you can train your mind to crave the feeling you’ll get after you’re done a workout, before even doing it.
– Dan Go
A vacation is a very expensive way to schedule the time to read a book in peace.
– @naval
You deserve to be
in environments that bring out
the softness in you,
not the survival in you.
– Brené Brown
I did what I could, not what I ought to have. That’s what we do, writers. We don’t do what we ought. We do what we can.
– Jane Gardam
Just make sure you’re not trying to fit into a world that doesn’t have the range to understand you.
– Nika Solé
Wanting happiness and not wanting suffering is a sign of basic innate goodness.
– Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
Just sit in silence with your eyes closed. Focus on the breath. Give your mind a chance to correct itself.
– Josh Bulriss
No man is good by chance. Virtue is something which must be learned.
– Seneca
even now
when I light butter lamps
at dawn
I hear father’s murmur …
prayer flags in the wind
– Sonam Chhoki
The more I follow my inner wisdom, the better I am able to care for myself, and the more things just fall into place.
– Shakti Gawain
I call for you cultivation of strength in the dark.
Dark gardening
in the vertigo cold.
in the hot paralysis.
– Gwendolyn Brooks
The modern devil is cheap dopamine.
– @naval
Even once you’re enlightened, no one is kinder than sentient beings.
– Dzigar Kongtrul
There is
only one
true thing:
in the self
a weight,
a small
stone.
– Paul Klee
(translated by Anselm Hollo)
To seek fulfilment is to invite frustration. There is no fulfilment of the self, only the strengthening of the self through possessing what it craves.
– Krishnamurti
I am in a state of constant discomfort and I like this state so much I would like to share it.
– Jamaica Kincaid
… collapse is not an event
but a series of small, careful concessions.
– James Gonda
People think that emotional regulation means never feeling your emotions. That’s actually the opposite of regulation. Regulation means you’re connected to them as they pass through your experience but you don’t let them make decisions for you.
– Nika Solé
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
The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’
– Simone Weil
Our job is unconditional love. The job of everyone else in our life is to push our buttons.
– Byron Katie
Yes, all kinds of thoughts arise in meditation. It is but right. What lies hidden in you is brought out. Unless they rise up how can they be destroyed? They therefore, rise up spontaneously in order to be extinguished in due course, thus to strengthen the mind.
– Ramana Maharshi
I think what readers feel is lost in American literature right now is that publishing was once a place for individuals, cranks, weirdos, fools, braggarts, liars, freaks and kooks. But no more. The industry now feels hyper professionalized, and it’s as if we’ve lost access to the minds of the losers and oddballs and geniuses writing bizarre things in nooks and garrets across the country. Writers are now judged on whether they live in New York City. Whether they have an MFA. Whether they have a certain level of that special magic called “professionalism,” otherwise known as self-denigrating and instinctual emotional obedience to Ivy educated editors and publishers. But publishing should be vast and welcoming to all sorts, as the personality or outlook of the writer will always mean much less than the work itself.
– @TLiterarian
The simple willingness to be dishonorable destabilizes everything American power affects, instilling anxiety on every side…. Instability, shrewdly managed, is a great multiplier of power.
– Marilynne Robinson
I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn’t all imitation Heinlein or Asimov.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
THIRTEEN
I was thirteen,
my whole leg in a cast.
It was like lugging
a piece of pottery around.
And every human face I knew
took a pen and wrote on me.
I used to lie in bed at night
and read it.
And when I healed
they broke it—
I walked away
without a shard.
Paula? Cari? Whoever you are,
I will not be there to drink the water
beside your bed.
I read three thousand books,
and then I died
– Mary Ruefle
one thing that the unconstitutional ice raids has taught me is: don’t fall in love with presses, magazines, awards, fall in love with poetry, duende, inspiration, craft, expression. for example, none of my publishers have had the courage to denounce the white supremacist ice raids against Latinos and other People of Color, racial profiling, etc.. as the OG Beat Poet Michael McClure (R.I.P.) once said, “It’s a business selling words.”
– Jose Hernandez Diaz
…In our own ways, / we are trying to forget what is no longer here.
– Aiman Tahir Khan
You don’t always need to solve the fear. Sometimes you just need to sit with it. Let it stay in the corner. Over time, your relationship to the fear changes. You grow larger around it.
– Tony Collins
Lean into your spiritual practices now more than ever. Keep your vibration high now more than ever. Hold the Light. Stay the course. Do not let up on your mission.
– Nika Solé
For me, both the Way-Seeking Mind and the Queer-Seeking Mind are a step out into a vast and limitless expanse of possibility.
– River Shannon
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
– Milan Kundera
There is no limit except the one we draw for ourselves.
– Freya Stark
Literature led me to freedom, not the other way round.
– Ismail Kadare
Black nonchalance is a form of grace, which is to say, a way of seeing the long view, a way of surviving the eternal return of white supremacy.
– Namwali Serpell
We are nothing; what we are looking for is everything.
– Friedrich Holderlin
a fluttering moth
pursues my light
but when my light dims
he flies off
just when I need him
the most
– @Iriscapes
Speculation about other people’s attainments is as old as forever. Nowadays, AIs also get to speculate about our attainments. But nothing has changed.
Wriggle your toes right now, and feel your feet. This is happening. The rest was a mirage.
– Kenneth Folk
Zionist critics found Proust’s depictions of failed assimilation “satisfying.” “[But] one could well imagine the opposite: that his synthesis of [French literature] demonstrated just how successfully a “Jewish” writer…had integrated.”
– Maurice Samuels
I’m sorry, but at some point you have to accept that exercise is non-negotiable.
– Mark Sisson
The modern caste system is built around the university diploma.
– @naval
I don’t see any difference between the Tibetan saints and the social activist saints in Black liberation movements. They cared about people, and they wanted people to be free. That’s it.
– Lama Rod Owens
Then might we live together as one life,
And reigning with one will in everything
Have power on this dark land to lighten it,
And power on this dead world to make it
live.
– Arthur (Tennyson, Idylls of the King)
Sitting at the table doesn’t make you a diner. You must be eating some of what’s on that plate. [Just] Being born here in America doesn’t make you an American.
– Malcolm X
hopscotch
I never asked
for the rules
– Asahi
There are so many ways to say “no” to this war and “yes” to life.
– Alina Stefanescu
Why should it not be the whole function of a word to denote many things?
– J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers
What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.
– John Green
Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.
– Walter Benjamin, Berlin Chronicle
Examine the spirits that speak in you. Become critical. The modern man must be fully conscious of the terrific dangers that lie in mass movements. Listen to what the unconscious says.
– CG Jung
Everything has boundaries. The same holds true with thought. You shouldn’t fear boundaries, but you should not be afraid of destroying them. That’s what is most important if you want to be free: respect for and exasperation with boundaries.
– Haruki Murakami
One who descends is one who is called beyond the known structures of the society in which they live. The one who descends is foraging for another way.
– Carly Mountain
While it’s true that, as Tolstoy observed, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and everyone on planet Earth, vale of tears that it is, is certainly entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering, one nonetheless likes to think that literature has the power to render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness. If it can’t do that, what’s it good for?
– Elif Batuman, The Possessed
There is a voice inside of you
That whispers all day long,
‘I feel this is right for me,
I know that this is wrong.’
– Shel Silverstein
Accustom yourself not to be disregarding of what someone else has to say: as far as possible enter into the mind of the speaker.
– Marcus Aurelius
It is said that great literature is tragic…I think tragedy makes one serious. But why is it great? Because our moral being is active only when we become serious.
– Sōseki Natsume
Homo sapiens is sluggish in its movements, as if it had too much superfluous flesh, but at the same time it is pathetically thin. It blinks too often, particularly at decisive moments when it needs to see everything. … Homo sapiens is not made for battle, so it ought to be like rabbits and deer and learn the wisdom and the art of flight. But it loves battle and war. Who made these foolish creatures?
– Yōko Tawada, Memoirs of a Polar Bear
Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.
– Blaise Pascal
I disappear sometimes. It’s my thing.
– Haruki Murakami
I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do.
– Haruki Murakami
The most merciful thing in the world… is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
– H.P. Lovecraft
There are days the silence is a sermon I do not survive.
– Upile Chisala
Loneliness is a kind of tax you pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind.
– Alain de Botton
If people can be taught to hate, they can be taught to love. But we need to know, you can’t erase history. So, let’s learn from it and be damned sure it doesn’t happen again.
– Opal Lee
There is so much to read and the days are so short.
– George Eliot
You are not too sensitive. You are profoundly alive.
– Glennon Doyle
No one warns you about the amount of mourning in growth.
– Te V. Smith
Men think highly of those who rise rapidly in the world; whereas nothing rises quicker than dust, straw, and feathers.
– Lord Byron, From Letter to Thomas Moore
The universe is not short on wake-up calls. We’re just quick to hit the snooze button.
– Brené Brown
I became the silence I never wanted to feel.
– Nayyirah Waheed
Maybe I was born to be both sanctuary and storm.
– Nikita Gill
Sometimes I think I’ve felt everything I’m ever gonna feel. And from here on out, I’m not gonna feel anything new.
– Spike Jonze
The Participatory Imagination
via George Gorman
The innovative lateral thinking of a healthy imagination swerves away from familiar highways of awareness while associating arenas of experience not usually related. Such deeper imaginings may open the Dreamer within us to unusual associations, as when August Kekule dreamed of atoms dancing and forming together in snakelike ways (from which he developed his brilliant understanding of the cyclic structure of the benzene molecule). As the most uninhibited form of imagination, dreaming is as much about “dreaming yourself awake” in the future as it is about playing with networks memory. Suggesting how deeply emotions are related to imagination, my favorite philosopher, Martha C., refers to empathy as “the participatory imagination.”
Imagination becomes participatory when we enjoyably do things together, as when children are playing. Such imaginative cooperation is the thrilling focus of one of the most common kinds of free play loved by children around the world. They decide on an interesting drama, which they pretend to be engaged in together through co-creating a waking dream. Very interesting! As the impulsive spontaneity of free cooperation significantly differs from working for someone or being in the army, this is more like what other social creatures keep doing than what too many human adults do with much of their time these days. We got diverted (considered in more detail in Chapter 12).
More of us have begun to wonder if the diversely astonishing species of life, including their distinctive behavior, owe some of their qualitative uniqueness to the active imaginations of those organisms. Evolution has not been about everyone maintaining themselves in a steady-state. We push the envelope, coming close to extinction, sometimes risking everything on an exciting new opportunity.
Not just an aberration, humans are another in a long line of devil-may-care innovators. Like a player on a football field or in a scientific expedition, we are sometimes rewarded by interesting surprises. Each life knows with a faith eclipsing dogma that being alive is more than any of the masks of identity. Though the urge to see things as dependable and controllable is understandable, especially when fear is aroused, our sensitivity to opportunities makes use of the optative fields of the moment. The chance.
As freedom is essential to good cooperation in the natural world, it makes sense that our children still cherish “the good life,” as all of the living illustrate. Yet modern schools and economies often oppose the free cooperation of a uncontrollably healthy ecosystem, as ancient eco-shaping cultures of the Amazon and other little spots showed. Without imagination, there would be far less shoots of creative affiliation, as Terry Tempest Williams explains when saying, “Imagination shared creates collaboration.”
History is a record of the way things didn’t have to be.
– Clive James
It is only in folk tales, children’s stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them.
– Naom Chomsky
Writing is very difficult, but so is any job carefully executed. What is a privilege, however, is to do a job to your own satisfaction.
– Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A person will sometimes devote all of his life to the devil of one part of his body – the wishbone.
– Robert Frost
I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I placed them.
– Amy Tan
The thing that is worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.
– Frederick Douglass
Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself to it.
– Benjamin Franklin
Stories are a communal currency of humanity.
– Tahir Shah
We can only know where we’re going if we know where we’ve been.
– Maya Angelou
Revolution is about change, and the first place the change begins is in yourself.
– Assata Shakur
Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
I am tired of trying to hold myself together. I would rather let myself fall apart and see what grows there.
– Yasmin Mogahed
I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone.
– Lord Byron
If one really has a feeling of contribution, one will no longer have any need for recognition from others. Because one will already have the real awareness that “I am of use to someone,” without needing to go out of one’s way to be acknowledged by others. In other words, a person who is obsessed with the desire for recognition does not have any community feeling yet, and has not managed to engage in self-acceptance, confidence in others, or contribution to others.
– Ichiro Kishimi
I carry my roots with me all the time rolled up, I use them as my pillow.
– Francisco X. Alarcón
Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable.
– C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?
– Chuck Palahniuk
A gesture, a shape, a throw of light or depth of shadow moves us into another realm, ignites a memory or a vision of a deeper truth.
– Jan Philip
In an age that often equates mental illness with failure, Brian Wilson is a testament to the opposite – that even under the crushing weight of pain, doubt and mental torment, a spirit can endure; and even improve the world.
– John Fugelsang
I’ve noticed something about people who make a difference in the world: They hold the unshakable conviction that individuals are extremely important, that every life matters. They get excited over one smile. They are willing to feed one stomach, educate one mind, and treat one wound. They aren’t determined to revolutionize the world all at once; they’re satisfied with small changes. Over time, though, the small changes add up. Sometimes they even transform cities and nations, and yes, the world.
– Beth Clark
You can’t know how much ease and freedom await you every day until you liberate yourself from living in your head and make a journey that brings you home to the presence of your body. Yet forging that personal journey is thwarted by the values of our culture, which ignore the profound intelligence of the body – dividing us from the breath and the present – and teach us to live in our heads, straining to make sense of it all.
– Philip Shepherd
he was right the scholar of poetry who insisted that the work
of poetry is the work of preserving the fact of the beloved the you of
the beloved the work of poetry is preserving the face of the beloved.
– Rick Barot
I am fifty-two, live alone,
considered some mad freak genius
In reality I am a fucked up poet
who will never come to terms with the world
No matter how beautiful the flowers grow
No matter how children smile
No matter how blue is the bluest sky…
Tomorrow is never better…
– Jack Micheline
The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder.
– St. Augustine
Gatekeepers in media and academia have lost power. On the Internet, a single individual can accomplish anything.
– @naval
The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has its pearls too.
– Vincent Van Gogh
You have to understand the good in things, to detect the real evil.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
The wise man knows that it is better to sit on the banks of a remote mountain stream than to be emperor of the whole world.
– Chuang Tzu
Shamanistic cultures view illness and trauma as a problem for the entire community, not just for the individual or individuals who manifest the symptoms.
– Peter A. Levine, Waking the Tiger
“I am becoming orthodox,” I said, “because I have come, rightly or wrongly, after stretching my brain till it bursts, to the old belief that heresy is worse even than sin. An error is more menacing than a crime, for an error begets crimes…I hate modern doubt because it is dangerous.”
– G. K. Chesterton
Individuation rarely develops in the lives of those who may seek counseling merely because of an ‘interest’ in psychological matters, or to ‘understand’ themselves. Nor does it appear in those who in other ways seek ‘enrichment’ or attempt to ‘maximize their potential’. The real hallmarks of individuation are a genuine and often fearful questioning of one’s attitudes, values, and goals, and a real suffering of conflict, dislocation, and confusion. As the old scriptural saying advises, one must indeed lose one’s life in order to find it.
– John Perkins, The Forbidden Self
I light candles for my chosen family.
What a poor congregation we make.
– Meg Ford
Democracy is doomed when there is not, or is no longer, common agreement at least on the point that political decisions have to be based rather on consent than on force.
– Erich Hula
to live past your myth is a perilous thing…
– Anne Carson
Nature is man’s teacher. She unfolds her treasures to his search, unseals his eye, illumes his mind, and purifies his heart; an influence breathes from all the sights and sounds of her existence.
– Alfred Billings Street
[Trickster gods] are the lords of in-between. A trickster does not live near the hearth; he does not live in the halls of justice, the soldier’s tent, the shaman’s hut, the monastery. He passes through each of these when there is a moment of silence, and he enlivens each with mischief, but he is not their guiding spirit. He is the spirit of the doorway leading out, and of the crossroad at the edge of town. […]
In short, trickster is a boundary-crosser.
Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there, at the gates of the city and the gates of life, making sure there is commerce. He also attends the internal boundaries by which groups articulate their social life. We constantly distinguish—right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead—and in every case trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction.
Trickster is the creative idiot, therefore, the wise fool, the gray-haired baby, the cross-dresser, the speaker of sacred profanities. Where someone’s sense of honorable behavior has left him unable to act, trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action, something right/wrong that will get life going again. Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox. That Trickster is a boundary-crosser is the standard line, but […] there are also cases in which trickster creates a boundary, or brings to the surface a distinction previously hidden from sight. In several mythologies, for example, the gods lived on earth until something trickster did caused them to rise into heaven.
Trickster is thus the author of the great distance between heaven and earth. […] Boundary creation and boundary crossing are related to one another, and the best way to describe trickster is to say simply that the boundary is where he will be found—sometimes drawing the line, sometimes crossing it, sometimes erasing or moving it, but always there, the god of the threshold in all its forms.
– Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art by Lewis Hyde
Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.
– Rebecca Solnit
The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever understand each other at all.
– Kurt Gödel
How I hate all the barbarians who imagine that they are wise because they no longer have a heart!
– Friedrich Hölderlin
Despite its protests to the contrary, the human being is neither a fixed point nor a singularity. It is a concert of desires and metaphyiscal vibrations that are received and interpreted as flesh, form and vision.
– Richard Gavin
The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.
– Milan Kundera
Time as hunger.
Time passing and gazing.
Time as perseverance.
Mountain time.
Time as paper folded to look like a mountain.
Time compared to the wild fantastic silence of stars.
– Anne Carson
The miracle of your mind isn’t that you can see the world as it is, but that you can see the world as it isn’t. We can remember the past and we can think about the future, and we can imagine what it’s like to be some other person in some other place. And we all do this differently.
– Kathryn Schulz
Heartbreak begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot, in other words, it colors and inhabits and magnifies each and every day; heartbreak is not a visitation, but a path that human beings follow through […]. Heartbreak is an indication of our sincerity: in a love relationship, in a life’s work, in trying to learn a musical instrument, in the attempt to shape a better more generous self. Heartbreak is the beautifully helpless side of love and affection and is [an] essence and emblem of care… [W]e use the word heartbreak as if it only occurs when things have gone wrong: an unrequited love, a shattered dream… But heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.
– David Whyte
What my heart will be is a tower, and I will be right out on its rim: nothing else will be there, only pain and what can’t be said, only the world.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
SLUMBER-SONG
Sleep; and my song shall build about your bed
A Paradise of dimness. You shall feel
The folding of tired wings; and peace will dwell
Throned in your silence; and one hour shall hold
Summer, and midnight, and immensity
Lulled to forgetfulness. For where you dream
The stately gloom of foliage shall embower
Your slumbering thought with tapestries of blue.
And there shall be no memory of the sky,
Nor sunlight with its cruelty of swords.
But, to your soul that sinks from deep to deep
Through drowned and glimmering color, time shall be
Only slow rhythmic swaying; and your breath;
And roses in the darkness: and my love.
– Siegfried Sassoon
Those roads were echoes and footsteps,
women, men, agonies, resurrections,
days and nights,
half dreams and dreams,
every obscure instant of yesterday
and of the world’s yesterdays,
the firm sword of the Dane and the moon of the Persian,
the deeds of the dead,
shared love, words,
Emerson and snow and so many things.
Now I can forget them. I reach my center,
my algebra and my key,
my mirror.
Soon I will know who I am.
– Jorge Luis Borges
There are infinite ways to approach meditation practice, but when you drop into it fully, the first thing you experience—when you learn to rest in and take up residency in awareness—is the direct, non-conceptual experience of interconnectedness and belonging. You are whole, and simultaneously part of a larger whole, nested in an even larger whole, and on and on endlessly. This direct experiencing of interconnectedness and non-separation naturally evokes compassion and loving-kindness and a deep sense of intrinsic connection to others.
– Jon Kabat-Zinn
It is the things you cannot see coming that are strong enough to kill you.
– Jodi Picoult
Sensations, from the beginning, involve a sort of doing. This means that, in an important sense, it is your doing self that brings your core self into being. You are responsible at the very deepest level for what it feels like to be you. But then, for your next trick, well, how about spreading some of that soul dust onto the things around you? Remember, too, that it is your mind that projects phenomenal qualities onto external objects. If you only knew it, you yourself are responsible for the feel of the world.
– Nicholas Humphrey
Everything exists—but only temporarily. Emptiness isn’t nothingness, it’s change.
– Rebecca Li
Ajahn Chah said, “I hope you’re not afraid to suffer.” I asked him what he meant. He continued “There are 2 kinds of suffering. There is the suffering you run away from, which follows you everywhere & there is the suffering you face directly and in doing so become free”
– Jack Kornfield
I remember my childhood
as a long wish to be
elsewhere
– Louise Gluck
Our lives
Were fragile, the wind
Could dash them away.
– Anne Carson
It’s fine, I’ll stay here dreaming poems and smiling in italics.
– Fernando Pessoa
War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.
– William Faulkner
There are some words or phrases that ring the heart like a bell…and it was Tolkien’s gift to be able to find these, and…restore to them contexts, or give them explanations…in a manner that seems utterly consonant with the feeling that…they can evoke.
– Raymond Edwards
Wander where you will over all the world, from every valley seeing forever new hills calling you to climb them, from every mountain top farther peaks enticing you… until you stand one day on the last peak on the border of the interminable sea, stopped by the finality of that.
– Rockwell Kent
The ego wants to help —
even in disappearing.
That’s the joke.
– Osho
floating upon
the waves of a lake
summer world
– Basho
Music is the moonlight in the gloomy night of life.
– Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
For there are no variations except for those who know a norm, and no subtleties for those who have not grasped the obvious.
– C.S. Lewis
He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activities in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.
– Cormac McCarthy
The difference between sounding smart and being smart is ‘I don’t know.’
– @naval
To look at the sea is to look at everything.
– Marguerite Duras; tr. Alison Strayer
A new era has begun.
This one is personal.
– Nika Solé
A collection of anecdotes and maxims is the greatest treasure for a man of the world.
– Goethe
And, for a while, between the two of us,
Dying became so very ordinary, like candy or tacos or semantics,
And death itself suddenly just this obnoxious third-wheel…
– Nathaniel Whittemore
Anger is valid. It tells us when boundaries are crossed—ours or someone else’s.
– Mindy Newman
Solstice
by Tess Taylor
How again today our patron star
whose ancient vista is the long view
turns its wide brightness now and here:
Below, we loll outdoors, sing & make fire.
We build no henge
but after our swim, linger
by the pond. Dapples flicker
pine trunks by the water.
Buzz & hum & wing & song combine.
Light builds a monument to its passing.
Frogs content themselves in bullish chirps,
hoopskirt blossoms
on thimbleberries fall, peeper toads
hop, lazy—
Apex. The throaty world sings ripen.
Our grove slips past the sun’s long kiss.
We dress.
We head home in other starlight.
Our earthly time is sweetening from this.
Grow your tree of falsehood
from a small grain of truth.
Do not follow those who
lie in contempt of reality…
A new, humorless generation
is now arising, it takes in deadly
earnest all we receive
with laughter.
– Czeslaw Milosz
Whoa there, that’s enough, whoa there, my book.
Now we’ve the reached the endpapers.
You want to keep going on and on,
And can’t be stopped on the last page,
As if your subject was not exhausted
As it actually was on the first.
The reader is complaining and flagging,
even the publisher is saying:
‘Whoa there, that’s enough, whoa there, my book.’
– Martial
You cannot drop the ego —
you can only watch it.
In that watching, it drops.
– Osho
Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord God: and not that he should return from his ways, and live?
– Ezekiel 18:23
You need Proof of Work to get a meeting with a busy person.
– @naval
When people start acting stupid I usually stop reading. Those people aren’t ready to be characters yet. You can’t have just any figment be a character. They should have to pass a test.
– Renee Gladman, My Lesbian Novel
Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.
– C.S. Lewis
We must open ourselves….. to a higher reality, to view the spirit within the matter, to raise our consciousness to the point where our perception of reality is completely changed, and the divine within all creation is revealed.
– Rav Dovber Pinson
I always wanted to ask people:
“Are you in love?
What are you reading?”
– Françoise Sagan
There are moments
That we free ourself,
Moments when we summit
The jagged mountain range
Of our loneliness and say,
“You no longer rule me.”
There are times we turn and look
Directly in the eyes
Of our past and say,
“This ends here.”
There are times we face the tyrant
That has been our deepest fear
And say,
“I have never been yours.”
And in these moments
The chains are cut.
When we say No
To the comfortable weight
Of old knowns
That have happily
Been killing us
We step into something
Indomitable, eternal
And real.
Something invisible
Is shaken
Ancient contracts
To our smallness
Are annulled
And a force is released
That can never again
Be hidden away
When we are willing to venture
Into the unmapped wilderness
Of a life that cannot
Be controlled
And leave the past
Unapologetically
To its own demise,
This is when we start to live.
This is when we move unthreatened
By fragile empires built
To topple themselves.
Taunt the cavalries of history
With your awakened presence—
They stand no chance
Let the warring stampedes
Kick up their dust.
The more you abide in what’s real,
The more you see what is false
And how the soul
Can dance
When pretend power
Holds no sway.
– Chelan Harkin
Any book that can be easily summarized isn’t worth reading.
– @naval
Lucidity is the wound closest to the sun.
– René Char
Paradox is what takes shape on the sensitized plate of the poem, a negative picture from which positive pictures can be created.
– Anne Carson
and the weight of external heat crushes the heat-hating Puritan
whose self-defeating vice becomes a proper sepulcher at last
that love may live
– Frank O’Hara
I wrote to keep my head above water. I was drowning in my own weirdness, my exclusion from the human race, my hermaphroditic nature.
– Edmund White
And wrong behaviour (if it is really wrong on universal principles) is progressive, always: it never stops at being ‘not very good’, ‘second best’ – it either reforms, or goes on to third-rate, bad, abominable.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
middle of the night
Orion climbing
out of the clouds
– Kathy Watts
When you revise it’s not just fixing or polishing, it’s really pulling it inside out again.
– Sam Lipsyte
The uses and abuses of literary fiction are the sort of gauntlet one can hardly resist on a Saturday when it’s hot.
– Alina Stefanescu
There’s only one way to bring peace to the world. There’s only one way to bring peace to yourself. There’s only one way to overcome problems. There’s only one way to find yourself. And that way is to realize that everything is consciousness.
– Robert Adams
Logic is always defeated by itself, that is to say, by the insignificance of the cases on which it thrives.
– Deleuze and Guattari
I’ve often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us, unless it’s inside a frame.
– Abbas Kiarostami
Hölderlin, a colossally gifted, internally musical man, w/ lyricism that developed into metaphysics, perceiving reality as a chord of cosmic harmony, painfully experienced the fragmentation of surrounding social life. He lived in a dream of a different world.
– Lunacharksy
How can I explain the things and things and things I did wrong?
I was never any good at telling the difference between
what wanted me and what wanted me gone.
– Franny Choi
To censor “misinformation,” first we need to determine what’s true.
Since we can’t agree, it’s then left to “experts” and “scientists.”
“Experts” are credentialed by Universities.
Censoring misinformation is really just a call to put
Universities in charge of free speech.
– @naval
Tell your friends you’re a happy person. Then, you’ll be forced to conform to it. You’ll have a consistency bias. You have to live up to it. Your friends will expect you to be a happy person.
– @naval
Make no mistake about it: We are At War now ― with somebody ― and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives…
This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed ― for anyone.
– Hunter S. Thompson
It’s so simple, so obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. But people don’t see it. So the authority of people is bankrupt.
– Richard Powers
Any attempts to essentialize culture into notions of authenticity only succeed in doing the opposite and revealing the interconnectedness of our societies.
– Bernardine Evaristo
It seems that everything that has ever happened to us is still alive somewhere in the depths of our psyche.
– James Hollis
Eternity asks you and every one of these millions of millions, just one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.
– Søren Kierkegaard
To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.
– Thomas Pynchon, V.
Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
That’s one of the things stories and books can do, they can make more than one time possible at once.
– Ali Smith
To be here now, to see what you have made, humbles me. The good parts and the bad. It doesn’t matter. I thought I was going to save the world, and here you were all along, changing the world day by day, minute by minute.
– Luis Alberto Urrea
What poetry is: a wind, a leaf of grass that ties time and space together.
– Wang Ping
Tonight I will do nothing but to read.
– Mario Vargas Llosa
Perfection belongs to the gods; completeness or wholeness is the most a human being can hope for. It is in seeking perfection by isolating & exaggerating parts of ourselves that we become neurotic. To move toward perfection is to move out of life, or what is worse, never to enter it.
– Marion Woodman
Neurosis is what rises out of the conflict between our instinctual realities and our cultural claims upon us. As Freud pointed out so succinctly, the price of civilization is neurosis.
– James Hollis
Mismanagement and grief
We must suffer them all again…
– W.H. Auden
Philosophical wisdom is the philosophizer’s quite personal affair. It must arise as his wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tending toward universality, a knowledge for which he can answer from the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute insights.
– Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations
Being listened to, and being with somebody who takes genuine pleasure in listening, is really powerful. It really has an effect. And it seems to me – and it isn’t a “cure”, but if it was a “cure”– it’s a listening cure, not a talking cure. And it’s amazing what people will say if they think they’re being listened to.
– Rod Tweedy
The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.
– Franz Kafka
Through all this the sands kept vigil,
harboring blood and bones, harboring the beauty
of the rising sun between seven dunes.
– Romeo Oriogun, Someday the Desert Will Sing
Nothing is easy when you might come apart in the middle at any moment.
– Tove Jansson
A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness.
– Albert Einstein
There are questions we could not get past if we were not set free from them by nature.
– Franz Kafka
To annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism.
– Sylvia Plath
Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.
– Mahmoud Darwish
A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.
– Nietzsche
The future is a fog that is still hanging out over the sea, a boat that floats home or does not.
– Sylvia Plath
He who cannot put his thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of dispute.
– Nietzsche
Wise people are in want of nothing, and yet need many things. On the other hand, nothing is needed by fools, for they do not understand how to use anything, but are in want of everything.
– Chrysippus
Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
– Sylvia Plath
You are the stone and the fire, the question and the transformation.
– Philosopher’s Riddle
It’s a funny thing, but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really what guides them is what they’re afraid of. What they don’t want.
– Khaled Hosseini
Time passes, and the world is a different place. Yet somehow, the dust of your origins clings to your skin.
– Khaled Hosseini
They say the past claws its way out of the ground.
– Khaled Hosseini
My feelings are too loud for words and too shy for the world.
– Dejan Stojanovic
One reads in order to ask, not answer.
– Franz Kafka
Because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.
– Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
I dream too much, work too little.
– Sylvia Plath
I may never be happy, but tonight I am content.
– Sylvia Plath
There is no right way or wrong way. There are a hundred different ways to tell the same story. Whatever works for you is okay.
– Judy Blume
All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.
– Octavia Butler
If your life feels out of control, check your routines first.
– @aprofessormind
My mind is a curtain of spiderwebs.
– Sylvia Plath
You can’t be fully loved unless you are fully seen…
– Jimmy Knowles
I am terrified of getting older. And I’m afraid I’m not growing up at all.
– Sylvia Plath
I am a world that cannot be explored in one day. I am not a place for cowards.
– Caitlyn Siehl
I thought of Jung basically as what I call a noetic archeologist, someone who goes with toothbrush and pick to dig away the detritus from the bones of vanished idea systems.
– Terence Mckenna
Power for poor people will really mean having the ability, the togetherness, the assertiveness, and the aggressiveness to make the power structure of this nation say yes when they may be desirous to say no.
– MLK
Take my hand. We will walk. We will only walk. We will enjoy our walk, without thinking of arriving anywhere.
– Thích Nhất Hạnh
They say, Find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind.
– Khaled Hosseini
She would find herself wondering… if she had merely been a pause in someone else’s story.
– Khaled Hosseini
To resolutely stay human in a world that tells you ‘empathy is toxic’ feels like a hymn of audacity right now.
– Sarah Bessey
You’re hungry and honest. That is very rare in this country.
– Chimamanda Adichie
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.
– Maria Popova
Never let your enemy tell you how many of you there are.
– Malcolm X
Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.
– Laurence J. Peter
Is the individual a thing really, or a multitude of things?
– Alan Watts
There’s always merit to having a debate.
– Ward Churchill
You shall not oppress a sojourner. You know the heart of a sojourner, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.
– Exodus 23:9
Socialism is such elementary common sense and so blatantly obvious that… no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system.
– George Orwell
people run from rain but
sit
in bathtubs full of
water.
it is fairly dismal to know that
millions of people are worried about
the hydrogen bomb
yet
they are already
dead.
– Charles Bukowski
Your intuition is the whisper of Source—gentle, quiet, and always aligned with love. It never shouts. It simply nudges, saying, This way. Trust it.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
That to try and build on hearts is a foolish thing;
That all things crack – love and beauty –
Until Oblivion throws them in his sack
Voiding them to eternity!
– Charles Baudelaire
What the ego wants is tiny
compared to what the soul wants,
and there comes a point when we recognize this,
and we surrender to soul…
– Marion Woodman
Barren branches:
the autumn left behind
a cicada’s hollow cry.
– Kagai
Leave your existence to existence, stop caring for yourself so much and let the universe care for you; it is the best mother.
– Mooji
An eye in a blue face
Saw an eye in a green face.
“That eye is like to this eye”
Said the first eye,
“But in low place
Not in high place.”
– Tolkien
Listen—keep it secret,
our love: sea-music, or sky-roar.
We meet in wild delight,
part with smiles like falling stars.
or waves by shore.
Let us burn, slow as rain-soaked wood,
aching for flame—
Till we meet again,
in some tender, parallel world
or another lifetime.
– @chandanas
Take that sinner boy home
Wrap him up, keep him warm,
He won’t do no harm
– Rory Gallagher
The world is now in a situation not unlike the late Middle Ages where the opponents on all sides are motivated by religious belief.
With one difference, which doesn’t need to be articulated.
– Clifton Lee
I am your spirit. I am the only life you can realize. I am the house of your spirit in the land which is nowhere, the land which is your only remaining home. Without me, the intelligible universe reverts to chaos. Creative and abysmal are inextricably linked in me; only I can mediate between them. Without me, mankind will sink into the mire and vanity of knowing. Through me, you and they will find the only way out of chaos: understanding by living.
– Frank Herbert
We can draw closer to mysticism if we think obliquely, autobiographically, vernacularly, performatively, practically, erotically, and ascetically. Mysticism is a singular form of floating attention—what I call passive activity or active passivity. It is necessary to mobilize simultaneously all seven adverbs if we are to glean mysticism’s meaning, its core, its magma: love.
– Simon Critchley
All will come again into its strength:
the fields undivided, the waters undammed,
the trees towering and the walls built low.
And in the valleys, people as strong and varied as the land.
And no churches where God
is imprisoned and lamented
like a trapped and wounded animal.
The houses welcoming all who knock
and a sense of boundless offering
in all relations, and in you and me.
No yearning for an afterlife, no looking beyond,
no belittling of death,
but only longing for what belongs to us
and serving earth, lest we remain unused.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Everything that happens to us, properly understood, leads us back to ourselves; it is as though there were some unconscious guidance whose aim it is to deliver us from all ties and all dependence and make us dependent on ourselves.
– Carl G. Jung
There are many ways to transcend our blind attachment to life, but only through grace do we not break with its irrational forces; it alone is a futile leap, a disinterested elan which does not spoil life’s naive charm.
Grace is the joy of soaring upward. The undulations of graceful movements bespeak light and immaterial flight. They have the spontaneity of wings beating in the air, of smiles, of pure young dreams. Isn’t dance grace’s best form of expression? In grace, life is a flux of pure vitality, never breaking the harmony of its own rhythms. Life becomes dream, disinterested play, expansion contained in its own borders. Thus it creates a pleasant illusion of freedom, spontaneous abandon, dreams wrought in sunlight.
Despair is the paroxysm of individuation, a painful and unique interiorization. Grace, on the other hand, leads to harmony and naive fulfillment, and the graceful being never experiences feelings of loneliness and isolation. Grace is an illusory state in which life negates its antinomies and transcends its demonic dialectic, in which contradictions, fatality, and the consciousness of the irrevocable temporarily vanish.
– Cioran
I write here, because I am paralyzed
everywhere else.
– Sylvia Plath
Now I’ve shot so many Nazis, Daddy will have to buy me a sable coat.
– Neil Munro “Bunny” Roger
When our movements are limited, so are our possibilities for wholeness.
– Judith Harris, Jung and Yoga
Many of us, in unconsciously trying to be as small and inconspicuous as possible, have shortened and collapsed inward, not only in a vertical direction, but in width as well. Collapsing inward often has to do with terrible feelings of shame about who we are in the world. Such a posture serves only to cramp our breathing apparatus, not allowing us to be fully present in life, therefore not allowing us to utilize our full physical as well as creative potential.
– Judith Harris, Jung and Yoga
Sunday Morning
Tonic water and tatterdemalion lemon, that shirt
you wanted and so, rudimentary as a spoon, I go
Googling for it, but only after skimming the latest
issue of Harper’s, the last sentence of which says
that chimpanzees have a bone in their hearts,
and asking you, who I can’t expect will know
why chimpanzees have a bone in their hearts,
why chimpanzees have a bone in their hearts.
– Graham Foust, Typo magazine
It is because we are all
imposters that we
endure each
other.
– Emil Cioran
Jung recounts that his intense study of mythologies forced him to conclude that without a myth, a human “is like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society.”
– Lance Owens
Friendly reminder that living is meant to be an outdoor activity.
– @moveorperish
Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.
– @naval
What unanimity between the water and the sky! — one only a little denser element than the other. The grossest part of heaven. Think of a mirror on so large a scale! Standing on distant hills, you see the heavens reflected, the evening sky, in some low lake or river in the valley, as perfectly as in any mirror they could be. Does it not prove how intimate heaven is with earth?
We commonly sacrifice to supper this serene and sacred hour. Our customs turn the hour of sunset to a trivial time, as at the meeting of two roads, one coming from the noon, the other leading to the night. It might be [well] if our repasts were taken out-of-doors, in view of the sunset and the rising stars; if there were two persons whose pulses beat together, if men cared for the coopos, or beauty of the world; if men were social in a high and rare sense; if they associated on high levels; if we took in with our tea a draught of the trans- parent, dew-freighted evening air; if, with our bread and butter, we took a slice of the red western sky; if the smoking, steaming urn were the vapor on a thousand
lakes and rivers and meads.
– Thoreau
The world around you is only beautiful when you are at peace with the world within you.
– Paulo Coelho
A traumatized person’s nervous system is not damaged; it is frozen in a kind of suspended animation.
– Peter A. Levine
All this madness, all this rage, all this flaming death of our civilization and our hopes, has been brought about because a set of official gentlemen, living luxurious lives, mostly stupid, and all without imagination or heart, have chosen that it should occur rather than that any one of them should suffer some infinitesimal rebuff to his country’s pride.
– Bertrand Russell
‘Tis wealth enough of joy for me
In summer time to simply be.
– Paul Laurence Dunbar
Death turns us into words…
– Michel Serres
High sang the horns,
helms were gleaming,
shafts were shaken,
shields them answered.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
finally a clear sky
but no moon in sight
summer mountain
– Issa
If in day of Doom
one deathless stands,
who death hath tasted
and dies no more,
the serpent-slayer,
seed of Odin,
then all shall not end,
nor Earth perish.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
The work you do on yourself holds everyone to a higher standard.
– Nika Solé
Softest Sound
Search out the softest sound you can hear. Rest in it.
Find the softest sound you can produce with the materials
in a favorite room.
Explore it, taking an ear-journey inside it.
– Ruth Anderson and Annea Lockwood
It turns out that we have a collective immune system, not just an individual one.
– @naval
The difficulties begin when you understand what it is that the soul will not permit the hand to make.
– Philip Guston
There Were Some Summers
There were some summers
like this: The blue barn steaming,
some cow-birds dozing with their heads
on each other’s shoulders, the electric fences
humming low in the mid-August heat. . .
So calm the slow sweat existing
in half-fictive memory: a boy
wandering from house, to hayloft, to coop,
past a dump where a saddle rots
on a sawhorse, through the still forest
of a cornfield, to a pasture talking to himself
or the bored, baleful Holsteins nodding
beneath the round shade of catalpa, the boy
walking his trail towards the brook
in a deep but mediocre gully,
through skunk cabbage and pop-weed,
down sandbanks (a descending
quarter-acre Sahara), the boy wandering,
thinking nothing, thinking: Sweatbox,
sweatbox, the boy on his way
toward a minnow whose slight beard
tells the subtleties of the current, holding there,
in water cold enough to break your ankles.
– Thomas Lux
huddled
in his jacket
facing the wind,
a lone
beach walker
– John Wisdom
lonely saxophone
burning the midnight oil
across the street
the last notes
stretched out towards dawn
– @hegelincanada
Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.
– Theodor W. Adorno
We are not divine, but we are the stable in which something divine is born.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
The thing about memorizing poetry is…it gets in the bloodstream. I say to graduate students who so resist the thought of having to memorize a poem a week: “I’m doing you a favor. I’m giving you an internal library to draw on when you’re taken political prisoner.”
– Maxine Kumin
The war which is coming
Is not the first one. There were
Other wars before it.
When the last one came to an end
There were conquerors and conquered.
Among the conquered the common people
Starved. Among the conquerors
The common people starved too.
– Bertolt Brecht
Colors are not possessions; they are the intimate revelations of an energy field… deep, resonant mysteries with boundless subjectivity… Our lives, when we pay attention to light, compel us to empathy with color.
– Ellen Meloy
The state of imperfect transformation, merely hoped for and waited for, does not seem to be one of torment only, but of positive, if hidden, happiness. It is the state of someone who, in his wanderings among the mazes of his psychic transformation, comes upon a secret happiness which reconciles him to his apparent loneliness.
In communing with himself he finds not deadly boredom and melancholy but an inner partner; more than that, a relationship that seems like the happiness of a secret love, or like a hidden spring-time, when the green seed sprouts from the barren earth, holding out the promise of future harvests.
– Carl Jung
The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.
– Martin Amis
The moon in the water;
Broken and broken again,
Still it is there.
– Choshu Ueda (tr. R.H.Blyth)
Tell stories, tell stories, until no one else dies. A thousand and one nights, a million and one nights.
– Elias Canetti, The Book Against Death (tr. Peter Filkins)
Thesis on the decline of art:
authors, musicians and filmmakers are, like us, always on their phones, and thus no longer forced to creatively contend with the silence and boredom that used to be an inescapable reality of everyday life.
– Dylan O’Sullivan
Most everything has been done before.
– Rosmarie Waldrop
Nothing can hold you back—not your childhood, not the history of a lifetime, not even the very last moment before now. In a moment you can abandon your past. And once abandoned, you can redefine it.
– Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
bearing down
on a borrowed pen
do not resuscitate
– Yu Chang
all wars
kill children
and bind them
to the hatred
of generations
– Andy Perrin
her face
in my whisky
the moon floats
– Chen-ou Liu
Let us return to our own case, the duel between the visible and the invisible, the reporting of which threatens to carry us away.
– Jean Cocteau
Zwijgen
by Saskia Hamilton
I slept before a wall of books and they
calmed everything in the room, even
their contents, even me, woken
by the cold and thrill, and still
they said, like the Dutch verb for falling
silent that English has no accommodation for
in the attics and rafters of its intimacies.
ALAS, and I have sung
Much song of matters vain,
And a heaven-sweetened tongue
Turned to unprofiting strain
Of vacant things, which though
Even so they be, and thoroughly so,
It is no boot at all for thee to know,
But babble and false pain.
– Francis Thompson
Above the shattered world there stretches a pure blue heaven, which continues to hold it together.
– Elias Canetti
When I returned to my birthplace
my father’s house
and mother’s voice
were gone.
– Abbas Kiarostami
It’s absolutely a
brutal time to be
even remotely
intelligent.
– Davidson Boswell
Always and forever we have stood up against war, because we say that the war going on in the world is for the further enslavement of the people, for the further placing of them under the yoke of military tyranny.
– Emma Goldman
Norse Saga
Let us praise the immigrant
who leaves the tropics
and arrives in Chicago
in the dead of winter.
Let us praise the immigrant
who has never worn coats
who must bundle up
against an unimaginable cold.
For they will write letters home
that speak of it like Norse sagas
with claims that if a frigid hell exists
the entrance is hidden somewhere in this city.
Let us praise the immigrant
who fears the depths of the subway
the disappearance of landmarks
to guide them through the labyrinth.
Let us praise the immigrant
who dreams of the pleasures of sunstroke
who wakes each morning to the alien sight
of their breath suspended in the cold city air.
– Dan Vera
Of course all of this wisdom and experience, this shit and sublimity, is shared, and of course a great deal of what we all think and do and feel and write is no more uniquely had or imagined than the balloon of the bagger…
– William Gass
Someone who goes with half a loaf of bread
to a small place that fits like a nest around him,
someone who wants no more,
who is not himself longed for
by anyone else.
He is a letter to everyone.
You open it.
It says, Live.
– Rumi
Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.
– Victor Frankl
Let your loyalty to another human being come about in this way: there will be moments — quickly passing by — when he will seem to you filled and illumined by the true, primal image of his spirit.
Then can come, yes, will come, long stretches of time when your fellow-being seems clouded, even darkened. But learn at these times to say to yourself: The spirit will strengthen me; I will remember the true, unchanging image that I once saw. Nothing at all — neither deception nor disguise — can take it away from me.
Struggle again and again for the true picture that you saw. The struggle itself is your faithfulness.
And in those efforts to be faithful and to trust, a human being will come close to another as if with an angel’s power of protection.
– Rudolf Steiner
The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbols never perfectly match. Eros is in between.
– Anne Carson
Interview of Leonard Cohen by Anjelica Huston:
HUSTON: Do you think love can last?
COHEN: I think love lasts. I think it’s the nature of love to last. I think it’s eternal, but I think we don’t know what to do with it much of the time. Because of its eternal and powerful and mysterious qualities, our panicked responses to it are inappropriate and often tragic. But the thing itself, when it can be appropriately assimilated into the landscape of panic, is the only redeeming possibility for human beings.
HUSTON: Why do you think it is that when we fall in love, our mouths become dry and we shake and our hearts beat too loud and we’re fools?
COHEN: Because we are awakening from the dream of isolation, from the dream of loneliness, and it’s a terrible shock, you know? It’s a delicious, terrible shock that none of us knows what to do with. Part of the shabbiness of our culture, if indeed it is shabby, is that it doesn’t seem to prepare people. With all the songs about love and all the movies and all the books, there doesn’t seem to be any way that we can prepare the human heart for this experience. Maybe we, the cultural workers like you and I, could apply ourselves. We’re not going to resolve it in this moment or even in this generation, but perhaps as some kind of agenda we could invite our writers and cultural workers to address the problem a little more responsibly, because people are suffering tremendously from a want of data. The psychologists are valiantly trying to provide us with answers, the religious people are trying to provide us with answers. I think it properly falls on the cultural workers to investigate this predicament with a little less concern for the marketplace and a little more concern for their higher calling.
A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space.
– Anne Carson
Lying and error are the same word for the Greeks, which is interesting. That is, “to be wrong” could have various causes: you wanted to lie, or you just didn’t know the truth, or you forgot, and those are all one concept. That interests me, the bundling together and looking at the situation from a point of view of consequences and not motivation.
– Anne Carson
Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is the hole. When I desire you, a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me. So reasons the lover at the edge of eros. The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness. His thoughts turn toward questions of personal identity: he must recover and reincorporate what is gone if he is to be a complete person. […] Most people find something disturbingly lucid and true in Aristophanes’ image of lovers as people cut in half. All desire is for a part of oneself gone missing, or so it feels to the person in love.
– Anne Carson
Neither are the humanistic scholars and artists of any great help these days. They used to be, and were supposed to be, as a group, carriers of and teachers of the eternal verities and the higher life. The goal of humanistic studies was defined as the perception and knowledge of the good, the beautiful, and the true. Such studies were expected to refine the discrimination between what is excellent and what is not (excellence generally being understood to be the true, the good, and the beautiful). They were supposed to inspire the student to the better life, to the higher life, to goodness and virtue. What was truly valuable, Matthew Arnold said, was ‘the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world.’ […] No, it is quite clear from our experience of the last fifty years or so that the pre-1914 certainties of the humanists, of the artists, of the dramatists and poets, of the philosophers, of the critics, and of those who are generally inner-directed have given way to a chaos of relativism. No one of these people now knows how and what to choose, nor does he know how to defend and validate his choice.
– Abraham H. Maslow
Silk speech of eyes, the happiness of hands transcend mere talk of tongue;
– June Owens
…if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think and feel, you don’t think, ‘oh, I love this picture because it’s universal.’ ‘I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.’ That’s not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes, you.
– Donna Tartt
What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become, except in dreams that blow in from out there bearing the fragrance of islands we have not yet sighted in our waking hours, as in voyaging sometimes the first blossoming branches of our next landfall come bumping against the keel, even in the dark, whole days before the real land rises to meet us.
– David Malouf
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
– Gerard Manley Hopkins
Every day on the balcony of the sea,
wings open, fire is born,
and everything is blue again like morning.
– Pablo Neruda
If poets are the keepers of the unsayable, then silence, not language, is a poet’s natural element, the realm where the unsayable lives. Poets fetishize silence as much as words; they are disturbed and comforted by the sounds that interrupt it. This is what John Keats means by Negative Capability, his notion of a poet’s basic qualification, the need for ‘being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.’ This a fancy way of describing ambivalence, also a basic qualification for a poet, the ability to passionately hold two opposing feelings at once. Poets need ambivalence in order to acknowledge the unsayable and speak nonetheless. The hidden subject of all poems is the silence that surrounds them, the things that can’t be, that will never be said; a real poem points to everything beyond it.
– Craig Morgan Teicher
That the branches of poetry are silence and wound.
– Paisley Rekdal
[The struggle of writing] is to intercept silence. Poetry is silence, a silence comparable to an underlying light around me, in me, on the paper. I know that if I lean over my desk, this silence will be summoned to spill forth drop by drop and that, subtly, the sharpened point of the pen will break free of my heart and spread across the expanse the brief trembling of a drawing. Poetry is a drawing that expresses the silence…
– Silvia Baron Supervielle
My poems express more of my silence than of my talking. As music is a kind of silence. Sounds are needed for different layers of silence to be highlighted.
– Anna Kamieńska
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
– Charles Simic
Silence is inside the word as something to be read.
– Edmond Jabès
I love three languages of the universe: music, love and silence.
– Qasim Chauhan
The one who bows and the one who is bowed to are both, by nature, empty.
– Part of a Buddhist Gatha
…you must be patient like someone who is sick, and confident like some one who is recovering; for perhaps you are both.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Everything was there, it is simply that there was no clerk capable of making an inventory of all the constituents; but the realm that existed once — once and once only — had disappeared for ever, ground into infinitesimal pieces by the endless momentum of chaos within which crystals of order survived, the chaos that consisted of an indifferent and unstoppable traffic between things. It ground the empire into carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and sulphur, it took its delicate fibres and unstitched them till they were dispersed and had ceased to exist, because they had been consumed by the force of some incomprehensibly distant edict, which must also consume this book, here, now, at the full stop, after the last word.
– László Krasznahorkai
What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone else’s orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away. Part of what you enjoy in a documentary technique is the sense of banditry. To loot someone else’s life or sentences and make off with a point of view, which is called “objective” because you can make anything into an object by treating it this way, is exciting and dangerous.
– Anne Carson
If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name.
– Anne Carson
My religion makes no sense
and does not help me
therefore I pursue it.
– Anne Carson
And now time is rushing towards them
where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on
their faces, night at their back.
– Anne Carson
Men are still inclined to project their perfect inner woman onto their partner, so they can’t understand what’s going on when the outer woman does something their inner woman would not do. It comes as a mighty shock and often the man insists, “That’s not who you are.” A projection is a very real thing. It’s real energy. If I’m projecting onto a man my adoration of him, that energy is like crutches holding him up. My energy is supporting him. If I take that projection away, suddenly he’s without crutches, so it’s a terrifying moment in a relationship; he not only loses the image he thinks he loves but loses the powerful support of the projection. Conscious women are pulling back the adoring projection. It hurts but it’s much healthier. It lets a man be who he is, a human being trying to find himself, just as the woman is. It allows for real love.
– Marion Woodman
If you pick a flower, if you snatch a handbag, if you possess a woman, if you plunder a storehouse, ravage a countryside or occupy a city, you are a taker. You are taking. In ancient Greek you use the verb άρπάζειν, which comes over into Latin as rapio, rapere, raptus sum and gives us English rapture and rape — words stained with the very early blood of girls, with the very late blood of cities, with the hysteria of the end of the world. Sometimes I think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks.
– Anne Carson
In myth, women’s boundaries are pliant, porous, mutable. Her power to control them is inadequate, her concern for them unreliable. Deformation attends her. She swells, she shrinks, she leaks, she is penetrated, she suffers metamorphoses. The women of mythology regularly lose their form in monstrosity.
– Anne Carson
The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man. Yet to turn our backs on the destructive forces of the century is of little avail. The trouble is that our period has so strangely intertwined the good with the bad that without the imperialists’ ‘expansion for expansion’s sake,’ the world might never have become one; without the bourgeoisie’s political device of ‘power for power’s sake,’ the extent of human strength might never have been discovered; without the fictitious world of totalitarian movements, in which with unparalleled clarity the essential uncertainties of our time have been spelled out, we might have been driven to our doom without ever becoming aware of what has been happening. And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives), it is also true that without it we might never have known the truly radical nature of Evil.
– Hannah Arendt
how is a Greek chorus like a lawyer
they’re both in the business of searching for a precedent
finding an analogy
locating a prior example
so as to be able to say
this terrible thing we’re witnessing now is
not unique you know it happened before
or something much like it
we’re not at a loss how to think about this
we’re not without guidance
there is a pattern
we can find an historically parallel case
and file it away under
ANTIGONE BURIED ALIVE FRIDAY AFTERNOON
COMPARE CASE HISTORIES 7, 17 AND 49
now I could dig up those case histories
tell you about Danaos and Lykourgos and the sons of Phineus
people locked up in a room or a cave or their own dark mind
it wouldn’t help you
it doesn’t help me
it’s Friday afternoon
there goes Antigone to be buried alive
– Anne Carson
PIANIST IN THE DARK
The music is not in the keys
it has never been seen
the notes set out to find
each other
listening for their way
when they move they are the music
they have always been
waiting for
the leaves stirring in the night air
as it changes around them
the rain arrives in a slow minor
the keys sing to themselves
in their dream of dancing
they make their own music
they make it again
– W. S. Merwin
The more you try to avoid
suffering, the more you
suffer, because smaller and
more insignificant things
begin to torture you, in
proportion to your fear of
being hurt. The one who
does most to avoid suffering
is, in the end, the one
who suffers most.
– Thomas Merton
Only a depraved
nation would hunt the
workers who grow our
food and chase them
through fields they
toil in to provide for
us
– Con Safos
There’s a short list of people I’ll love forever / When they all marry each other I’ll cry for a long time.
– Talin Tahajian
Paper on Humor
Everything sounds funny in a funny magazine.
For years now I have published my poems in funny magazines
so that nobody would notice
how sad they were.
Sad anthologists, however, took my poems out of context
and put them in the sad anthologies and there
they started to shine with tears because
they were the saddest poems in there.
With a liking for funnies
and a following of sadness followers
I arrive in Brazil to get my prize.
The prize consists of the cross, the guillotine
and the hot pepper.
I am collected. Nothing matters to me.
– Andrei Codrescu
PILLOWS
Your intelligence snoozes next to mine.
Poems accumulate between our pillows.
MONARCH
If I were inside you now
I would stay there for ages
Until the last migrating
Monarch butterfly had left.
– Michael Longley, The Weather in Japan
From where does creativity spring?
In my experience: drugs, alcohol and chaos.
In any case: order, sameness, habit and conformity have, since the beginning of time, created but one thing:
Suffering.
– John Mcafee
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
– Sara Teasdale
now the pillow’s hot on both sides.
a second candle dies, the ravens cry endlessly. no sleep all night, too late to think of sleep…how unbearably white the blind’s white deep.
hello, morning!
– anna akhmatova, (tr. a.s.kline)
As far as society is concerned the poet has died and the only one who doesn’t know it is the poet himself. Because of his great vanity or because he has formed a bad habit like masturbation which he finds enjoyable and can’t quit.
– Irving Layton
apparently, feeling oceanic depths of Safety opens up a lot of nervous system stuff that was waiting for a safe environment to surface in. who knew.
– River Kenna
It’s times like these that call forward the artists, alchemists, seers and truth tellers. The revolutionaries.
– Nika Solé
Never comfortable in the immediate, I am lured only by what precedes me, what distances me from here, the numberless moments when I was not: the non-born.
– E. M. Cioran (translated by Richard Howard)
golden anniversary
the chipped coffee cups
she pours into
– Elisa Theriana
Awareness, without any choice, of the ways of the mind, is the beginning of meditation.
– Krishnamurti
Take the anger and sadness out of your heart because these traits will be obstacles to the light. Make every effort to love the people around you and be happy even when not everything goes as you want.
– Rav Chaim Vital
wildflowers
celebrating
the rain
– Ogawa
Ideally, the ultimate retreat is to retreat from the past and the future, to always remain in the present.
– Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche
Every notion in our minds, each perception of the world and sensation in ourselves must go through a psychic organization in order to “happen” at all. Every single feeling or observation occurs as a psychic event by first forming a fantasy-image.
– James Hillman
Not be overwhelmed by what you imagine, but just do what you can.
– Marcus Aurelius
The more one is absorbed in fighting evil,
the less one is tempted to place the
good in question.
– Jean Paul Sartre
Once you get to your soul, then every person you look at is a soul.
– Ram Dass
Buildings will go up into the dizzy air as love itself goes in
and up the reeling life that it has chosen for once or all.
– Frank O’Hara
…when there is a war the years are longer that is to say the days are longer the months are longer the years are much longer but the weeks are shorter that is what makes a war.
– Gertrude Stein
Growing Up
I am reading Li Po. The TV is on
with the sound off.
I’ve seen this movie before.
I turn on the sound just for a moment
when the man says, “I love you.”
Then turn it off and go on reading.
– Linda Gregg
a hill
without a name
veiled in mist
– Basho
Mere fact has no chance of being formally perfect. It will get in the way, it will be all elbows.
– Martin Amis
The wisdom of the seasons is to give us cherry blossoms in the depths of winter, reddening maple leaves in the spring.
– Pico Iyer
Seek the wisdom that will untie your knot; seek the path that demands your whole being. Leave that which is not, but appears to be; seek that which is, but is not apparent.
– Rumi
It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one falls into despair at the first onslaught of affliction.
– Simone Weil
Clinging to ‘me’ divides the world into friend and enemy. It may feel safe, but it isolates us.
– Lama Kathy Wesley
my soul can’t stand the pain
of love’s silences.
– anna akhmatova
The artist who cravenly submits to time, place and space confesses his own limits. The oracles knew not time; the poet’s testament is the oath of the Angel in the Apocalypse that there will be no more time.
– Edward Dahlberg
Forgive me that I ignored the sun
And that I lived in sorrow.
– Anna Akhmatova
Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.
– Ernest Hemingway
When your internal environment is healthy, blessed and successful, your external reality blossoms.
– Nika Solé
Like a white stone deep in a draw-well lying,
As hard and clear, a memory lies in me.
– Anna Akhmatova
It is a divine precedent
you perpetuate! Roll on,
reels of celluloid,
as the great earth rolls on!
– Frank O’Hara
in a world
torn by wars
birdsong
– @EllenKrupich
Having lots of money while not having inner peace is like dying of thirst while bathing in the ocean.
– Yogananda Paramahamsa
Without imagination, all human activity is riddled with unconsciousness and acts out myths that have not been fully appropriated. It takes courage to ‘own’ the myth that has captivated your life.
– Thomas Moore
Experiences are the chemicals of life with which the philosopher experiments.
– Manly P. Hall
You will hear thunder and remember me,
And think: she wanted storms. The rim
Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson,
And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.
– Anna Akhmatova
tho’ not in Paradise yet
this blessing…
fresh sake
– Kobayashi Issa
Where does a thought go when it’s forgotten?
– Sigmund Freud
Everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves to tell what is inside themselves.
– Gertrude Stein
My answer to everything is ‘what are we going to do about it?’ I live in the land of the solutions.
– Nika Solé
Supremacist ideology is fundamentally reactionary: it is born from grievance and status-anxiety. It depends entirely on the threat of the Other for its existence. It has no content or meaning without the myth and guarding of that originary resentment.
– Alina Stefanescu
Knowledge is no guarantee of good behavior, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behavior.
– Martha C. Nussbaum
Hope is the belief that this moment isn’t good enough.
– @naval
Just as the moon only reflects its light in a pool, so the mind, empty and unattached, does not know itself and the outside world as two things.
– Alan Watts
Whatever I take, I take too much or too little; I do not take the exact amount. The exact amount is no use to me.
– Antonio Porchia, (tr. W. S. Merwin)
Guru butterfly
Visits the temple garden
Then leaves for the fields
For every flower’s sacred
The difference in mind only
– Avram Dorado
Freedom that requires the bondage of others is fake freedom.
– @VinceFHorn
Real tenderness can’t be confused,
It’s quiet and can’t be heard.
– Anna Akhmatova
That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.
– Octavia E. Butler
More academic historians certainly ought to acquire the skill of writing for large audiences. To do so gratifies the ego, swells the bank account, and may give pause to those who knowingly or not, distort what actually happened and why.
– Michael Kazin
a smudge
of blackbirds swirling
into evening …
how fluid the shape
of this sorrow
– Debbie Strange
Joy comes to us in moments—ordinary moments. We risk missing out on joy when we get too busy chasing down the extraordinary.
– Brené Brown
to have any distinctive personality at all, one necessarily diverges from the average.
everyone wants to be “normal”– no one wants to be “average.”
– Joyce Carol Oates
I WISH IN THE CITY OF
YOUR HEART
I wish in the city of your heart
you would let me be the street
where you walk when you are most
yourself. I imagine the houses:
It has been raining, but the rain
is done and the children kept home
have begun opening their doors.
– Robley Wilson
I am kin to everyone, and everyone is kin to me. That’s the Heart Sutra in action.
– Ruben Habito
returning home
in fading light
summer days
– Andrew Brindle
The imagination of a good artist or thinker is productive continually, of good, mediocre and bad things, but his power of judgement, sharpened and practised to the highest degree, rejects, selects, knots together; as we can now see from Beethoven’s notebooks how the most glorious melodies were put together gradually and as it were culled out of many beginnings.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.”
– James Baldwin
I’ve always found people love you best if you can laugh at your own foolish misfortunes and keep mum about everyone else’s.
– Barbara Kingsolver
Every man would like to be God, if it were possible; some few find it difficult to admit the impossibility.
– Bertrand Russell
One-dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information. Their universe of discourse is populated by self-validating hypotheses which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hypnotic definitions or dictations.
– Herbert Marcuse
Depending on how you see it, you need either the fullest expert knowledge for philosophy, or none at all.
– Friedrich Schlegel
The natural life span of an emotion—the average time it takes for it to move through the nervous system and body—is only minute and a half. We need thoughts to keep the emotion rolling. We lock into painful emotional states [through] our own endless stream of inner dialogue.
– Tara Brach
It’s easier to remember the deprivation than the joy. One burns. The other fades.
– Viet Thanh Nguyen
I want to live in a world where harm is not systemic, where love organizes society, where the earth is respected, and where life is valued above all else.
– yung pueblo
I know very well that we are not all equal, nor can be so; but it is my opinion that he who deems it important to keep aloof from the so-called rabble in order to maintain their respect is as culpable as a coward who hides himself from his enemy because he fears defeat.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
People do not want immortality, they simply do not want to die. They want to live… They want to feel the ground beneath their feet, see the clouds overhead, love other people, be with them, and think. Nothing more.
– Stanisław Lem
I am still unlearning the art of disappearing every time I’m not understood.
– Fariha Róisín
This is how you make a ghost: you give it everything you are, then watch it leave.
– Richard Siken
You are not too much. You were just never meant to be contained.
– Pavana Reddy
You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever felt, but I’m sorry, I cannot stay.
– Warsan Shire
She made peace with the fire and learned to stop fearing the smoke.
– Nikita Gill
You are not a mess. You are a feeling that the world couldn’t decode.
– Rupi Kaur
I disappear in moments. Not because I want to be gone, but because I want to be found.
– Fariha Róisín
The more hard lessons you can learn vicariously rather than through your own hard experience, the better.
– Charlie Munger
I don’t break down. I break open.
– Alok Vaid-Menon
Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by.
– Mahmoud Darwish
The public is a ferocious beast; one must either chain it or flee from it.
– Voltaire
I’m tired of translating myself into something softer just so I can be heard.
– Danez Smith
I’m not cold. I’m just tired of being burned.
– Nikita Gill
World is decay, life is perception.
– Democritus
A friend’s eye is a good mirror.
– Celtic proverb
Please Describe How You Became a Writer
Possibly I began writing as a refuge from our insulting first grade textbook. Come, Jane, come. Look, Dick, look. Were there ever duller people in the world? You had to tell them to look at things? Why weren’t they looking to begin with?
– Naomi Shihab Nye
But like each religion which ever once was,
we’re different depictions of the same
sort of holy. Thousands of Kings.
Countless ways to say sunrise.
– Ty Chapman
Sometimes it is best for us to be direct and cutting. The bodhisattva’s approach is to help others to help themselves.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Dogfish
Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing
kept flickering in with the tide
and looking around.
Black as a fisherman’s boot,
with a white belly.
If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile
under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,
which was rough
as a thousand sharpened nails.
And you know
what a smile means,
don’t you?
*
I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,
whoever I was, I was
alive
for a little while.
*
It was evening, and no longer summer.
Three small fish, I don’t know what they were,
huddled in the highest ripples
as it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole body
one gesture, one black sleeve
that could fit easily around
the bodies of three small fish.
*
Also I wanted
to be able to love. And we all know
how that one goes,
don’t we?
Slowly
*
the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.
*
You don’t want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen
to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.
And anyway it’s the same old story – – –
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.
Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.
And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.
*
And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.
*
And probably,
if they don’t waste time
looking for an easier world,
they can do it.
– Mary Oliver
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.
– Ilia Delio
The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there is something lacking in the normal experience available or permitted to the members of society. The person then takes off on a series of adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover some life-giving elixir. It’s usually a cycle, a coming and a returning.
– Joseph Campbell
Take it from me: memory is your greatest ally and your primary source material, because memory is your body as it was in the world and the world as it was and will be; memory is the people you have loved or wanted to love in the world, and what are we if not bodies filled with reminiscences about all those ghosts in the sunlight?
– Hilton Als
One day men will learn to think of sanity as an aesthetic achievement.
– Adrian Stokes
My night mind / saw such strange happenings, untold and unreal.
– Anne Sexton
Two wings, holding every miracle of life, death and illusion.
– Delmira Agustini
I am your spirit. I am the only life you can realize. I am the house of your spirit in the land which is nowhere, the land which is your only remaining home. Without me, the intelligible universe reverts to chaos. Creative and abysmal are inextricably linked in me; only I can mediate between them. Without me, mankind will sink into the mire and vanity of knowing. Through me, you and they will find the only way out of chaos: understanding by living.
– Frank Herbert
I Was Reading a Scientific Article
They have photographed the brain
and here is the picture, it is full of
branches as I always suspected,
each time you arrive the electricity
of seeing you is a huge
tree lumbering through my skull, the roots waving.
It is an earth, its fibres wrap
things buried, your forgotten words
are graved in my head, an intricate
red blue and pink prehensile chemistry
veined like a leaf
network, or is it a seascape
with corals and shining tentacles.
I touch you, I am created in you
somewhere as a complex
filament of light
You rest on me and my shoulder holds
your heavy unbelievable
skull, crowded with radiant
suns, a new planet, the people
submerged in you, a lost civilization
I can never excavate:
my hands trace the contours of a total
universe, its different
colors, flowers, its undiscovered
animals, violent or serene
its other air
its claws
its paradise rivers.
– Margaret Atwood
A squeeze of the hand – enormous documentation – a tiny gesture within the palm, a knee which doesn’t move away, an arm extended, as if quite naturally, along the back of a sofa and against which the other’s head gradually comes to rest – this is the paradisiac realm of subtle and clandestine signs: a kind of festival not of the senses but of meaning.
– Roland Barthes
As an ancient proverb says, three fingers hold the pen, but the whole body works. And aches.
– Umberto Eco
chorus
should we discuss your
philanthropy
prometheus
I went a bit too far
chorus
how do you mean
prometheus
I stopped them seeing death before them
chorus
who
prometheus
human beings
chorus
how
prometheus
I planted blind hope in their hearts
chorus
why
prometheus
they were breaking
chorus
you fool
– Anne Carson
Here I became aware of the world’s tenderness, the profound beneficence of all that surrounded me, the blissful bond between me and all of creation, and I realized that the joy I sought in you was not only secreted within you, but breathed around me everywhere, in the speeding street sounds, in the hem of a comically lifted skirt, in the metallic yet tender drone of the wind, in the autumn clouds bloated with rain. I realized that the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predaceous sequence of chance events, but the shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed upon us and unappreciated.
– Vladimir Nabokov
And kneeling at the edge of the transparent sea I shall shape for myself a new heart from salt and mud.
– Anne Carson
Oh, good scholar, I say to myself, how can you help but grow wise with such teachings as these— the untrimmable light of the world, the ocean’s shine, the prayers that are made out of grass?
– Mary Oliver
Lose your face: become capable of loving without remembering, without phantasm and without interpretation, without taking stock. Let there just be fluxes, which sometimes dry up, freeze or overflow, which sometimes combine or diverge.
– Gilles Deleuze
I’ve come to understand the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with the space where God would be if God were available, but God isn’t.
– Anne Carson
The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water.
– Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
We are always living in expectation of better things, while at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again. We look upon the present as something to be put up with while it lasts, and serving only as the way towards our goal. Hence most people, if they glance back when they come to the end of life, will find that all along they have been living ad interim: they will be surprised to find that the very thing they disregarded and let slip by unenjoyed was just their life-that is to say, it was the very thing in the expectation of which they lived. Of how many a man may it not be said that hope made a fool of him until he danced into the arms of death!
– Schopenhauer
maybe i should have wanted less.
maybe i should have ignored the bowl in me
burning to be filled.
maybe i should have wanted less.
– Lucille Clifton
Is it not my purpose to see where, exactly, laughter has rivered around the eyes I adore?
– Patrycja Humienik
Maybe light is a / pre-existing condition for love, an auspice of longing
– Alina Stefanescu
It only requires reflection and some understanding of the Buddha’s teachings to stop going our usual, programmed habitual way, a way that brings immense suffering.
– Dzigar Kongtrul
There’s no hurry to know everything there is to know immediately – enlightenment is a many-lifetimes project – but we must have the attitude of crossing the line of fire to reach the truth, and a long-term far-reaching commitment, unswayed by temporal conditions.
– Dzigar Kongtrul
When we have become very still, when there is an inner silence as complete as death, then, as in the grave, we hear the rare, superfine whispering of the new direction; the intelligence comes. After the pain of being destroyed in all our old securities that we used to call peace, after the pain and death of our destruction in the old life comes the inward suggestion of fulfillment in the new.
– D.H. Lawrence
how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground … I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.
– Virginia Woolf
You still crave summer,
but sometimes you mean summer,
five years ago.
– Alida Nugent
It’s no good closing your eyes, you must leave them open in the dark, that is my opinion. I am not speaking of sleep, I am speaking of what I believe is called waking.
– Samuel Beckett
Whereas I always had a slim waist, I suddenly have two stomachs—a regular tummy and another one below that, which I call the subcontinent.
– Anne Lamott
“The only thing new in the world,” Truman liked to say, “is the history you do not know.”
– Ryan Holiday
Lack of class-consciousness is America’s glaring, unspoken sin.
– Bruce Benderson
Man evolves from acting instinctively to putting his psychic energy under the control of his ego. Then he must evolve further, to place his psychic energy under the control of the Self…
– Robert Johnson
By knowing what is NOT, the sage knows what he truly IS.
– Ramesh Balsekar
Treat what you don’t have as nonexistent.
– Marcus Aurelius
Quite often, ambition operates on a level of irritation.
– Geoff Dyer
Our experiences come and go. If left alone, they don’t have to control us.
– Ruth King
When you force things to happen in a certain timeframe,
You move yourself out of the flow and you won’t enjoy the process.
Everything has a rhythm and season.
– Kute Blackson
The mind creates artificial needs, believing it cannot live without them. In this way, we carry a great burden of attachments throughout our life.
– Radhanath Swami
No earthquake could shatter the frail ash of the poem.
– Ilarie Voronca
Compassion isn’t always gentle. Sometimes it’s a firm no, a foot down, a clear line.
– Mindy Newman
town under siege—
refugees feeding
the pigeons
– Mile Stamenković
If you want to impress a divine woman, sort your inner reality out so she doesn’t have to carry the weight of your pain body.
– Nika Solé
Choose your peace, your path, your pace, and your purpose.
You worked so hard to reclaim yourself. Hold your heart tenderly.
– Dr. Thema
The way a deer emerges from a thicket is the opposite of a wound. Like the moon in the morning – all firmament, beautiful, about to vanish. Each morning I walk out my apartment & wonder what is going to
become of me.
– Devin Kelly
For resentments of any nature bring their fruit in the physical.
– Edgar Cayce
Did Faulkner tell you that what he was drinking all the time was really iced tea, not whiskey? Please. Who the fuck do you think wrote the Book of Revelation? A bunch of stone-sober clerics?
– Hunter S. Thompson
One always dies too soon—or too late. And yet one’s
whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn
neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are — your
life and nothing else.
– J. Paul Sartre
and you know what else!
How blue is the sea, how blue is the sky,
how blue and tiny and redeemable everything is, even you,
even your eyes, even your imagination.
– Mary Oliver
You really can’t be a writer without a good pair of sandals. Beckett knew this, as did Fermor. Life with socks is ridiculous and high-maintenance, a bur in travels and wandering. The lighter the equipage, the less worries to stand between you and writing.
– Alina Stefanescu
Modern man does not understand how much his “rationalism” (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic “underworld.”
– Carl Jung
Small changes in the way we think will lead to big changes in the way we live.
– Josh Bulriss
Lively conversation . . .
On the porch, two beggars
under blankets.
– Edson Kenji Iura
I never sleep anymore, only in the late morning. Who would want to sleep inside a forest of the night, so full of questions? With my hands clasped behind my head, I lie awake in the night and think how happy I was…
– Malina; tr. Philip Boehm
Many people forget that they and their loved ones are together on Earth for a short time. Remembering the fact of impermanence adds perspective.
– Mudita Nisker
LAST WISH
A poem, Name me
one poem that ever prevented
a crime…
– Stella Rotenberg, tr. Donal McLaughlin
Don’t dismiss the elements. Water soothes and heals. Air refreshes and revives. Earth grounds and holds. Fire is a burning reminder of our own will and creative power. Swallow their spells.There’s a certain sweet comfort in knowing that you belong to them all.
– Victoria Erickson
O Spirit, teach us to heal the body by recharging it with Thy cosmic energy, to heal the mind by concentration and cheerfulness, and to heal the disease of soul ignorance by the divine medicine of meditation on Thee.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
I’m writing
a love poem
even with
an American
boot to
my throat.
– C. Russell Price
We are an example for many around us whether we realize it. Own it fully and be the best version of you possible with every word spoken and action you choose to take. Who you are speaks loudly precious ones.
– Barb Schmidt
Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much Eternity you contain within you.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
When the ego weeps for what it has lost, the spirit rejoices for what it has found.
– Eckhart Tolle
Darkness exists but by the light, and for the light.
– George MacDonald
distant thunder
a fish’s tail
slaps his arm
– W. F. Owen
If we had the word, if we had the language, we wouldn’t need the weapons.
– Ingeborg Bachmann
A photograph is a
secret about a secret.
The more it tells you
the less you know.
– Diane Arbus
Everyone around me was a writer, and I vowed, Never, ever, ever, and then I did.
– Fanny Howe
He had a special way of conveying poetic images.
– @tolkienthoughts
day moon
as if Gods could be
mistaken
– Eva Limbach
For people: Don’t water your plants, we need to conserve water.
For factories: here’s fifty billion gallons of water, whatevs.
For people: don’t use your air conditioning, we need to conserve power.
For AI memes & bitcoin scams: here’s fifty billion gigawatts, whatevs.
– Patrick Skinner
It sometimes takes a foreigner to come and see a place and paint it. I remember someone saying they had never really noticed the palm trees here until I painted them.
– David Hockney
The value of things is not in their duration, but in the intensity with which they occur. That is why there are unforgettable moments, inexplicable things, and incomparable people.
– Fernando Pessoa
We reach for the perfect word or phrase across languages just as we reach for it within our own, sensing, maybe only fleetingly, the gap between what we mean and what we manage to say.
– Kwame Anthony Appiah
Described as ‘Human Life Buddhism’ or ‘Buddhism for this world,’ Taixu reformulated traditional Buddhist teachings to ensure their relevance during a period of major political upheaval.
– Zim Pickens
Essentially, it comes down to the fact that a very large portion of Americans are crazier than shithouse rats and are being led by a gang of pathological misfits, most of whom are preachers and politicians.
– Joe Bagean
In psychotherapy that is genuinely transformative, there is a period when the patient may feel more lost than ever. They are relinquishing old ways of being and have not yet consolidated new ways
We are changing life patterns. There is no path from Point A to Point B that does not traverse the unknown
Real transformation occurs when patient and therapist can enter and embrace that unknown
But this is also the point where less experienced therapists get anxious and want to rush in with solutions—instead of accompanying the patient into the unknown and continuing the shared work of exploration
This is the point where therapists, in an effort to manage their own anxiety, can derail the successful work of therapy that led to this point
If the therapy duration is artificially limited in advance by a third party (clinic, agency, health insurer, etc), therapy can never reach this point. Therapist and patient know it’s not safe to venture there and instinctively pull back from the unknown
(This has serious implications for therapy outcome research. What is really the desired outcome for a specific individual and when can we measure it?)
Not all therapy is meant to be transformative in the sense I mean here. People come to therapy for many reasons. Sometimes relief from one specific, circumscribed symptom is all that’s needed or wanted. Sometimes, it’s surviving a crisis or weathering a storm. Sometimes, it is enough simply to be seen and known in our pain, and so feel less alone in the universe
But transformative psychotherapy aims to change something fundamental about ourselves—about who we are as a person. This means relinquishing familiar, well-worn life and relational patterns to discover, create, and experience something new and different
So we move from old patterns (Point A) toward new ones (Point B)—except we can have no concept of point B when we set out
We cannot have a concept, because it is something we have not experienced before
*This* is the psychotherapy path that crosses, that must cross, the unknown
Perhaps it is like ancient sailors setting out to sea in search of a new and distant land—but uncertain how far they might have to travel before they once again set foot on solid earth, or what they might find when they get there or, if it even exists.
– Jonathan Shedler
The great cargo of summer is loaded, the ship of the sun is ready in the harbor when the seagull swoops down and screams behind you. The great cargo of summer is loaded.
– Ingeborg Bachmann
Somewhere there is a simple life and a world,
Transparent, warm and joyful…
– Anna Akhmatova
Jung said if you really want to know anything about the psyche leave the classroom and walk out into the world. He said that you need to attend union meetings–[go to] pubs and prisons and you’ll walk away with a deeper understanding of the psyche than books will ever tell you.
– James Hollis
People who know no self-restraint lead stormy and disordered lives, passing their time in a state of fear commensurate with the injuries they do to others, never able to relax.
– Seneca
We need ecstasy, which in its Greek sense (ek-stasis) means to be outside the ego. The ego is a prison, caught in time, space and rationality. We need to leave this mental prison behind from time to time, and on a regular basis.
– David Tacey
What I mean to say is, we had been considerable. Had been loved. Not lonely, not lost, not freakish, but wise, each in his or her own way. Our departures caused pain. Those who had loved us sat upon their beds, heads in hand; lowered their faces to tabletops, making animal noises. We had been loved, I say, and remembering us, even many years later, people would smile, briefly gladdened at the memory.
– George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo
Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.
– Jean Baudrillard
The more you can develop an intimacy—meaning a nondualistic relationship to the natural world that you are and that is around you—the more at ease you can be as an earthling; the more wise you can be as a son or daughter or being of the earth.
– Larry Ward
Walking backward toward the future, with our eyes facing in the opposite direction from which we are moving, we can stare far into what has already passed, lining up recent past events with distant past events for the greater clarification of both; we just can’t turn around.
– Jonathan Bricklin
It is better to be with God and against man than with man and against God.
– Leo Tolstoy
I love mankind… it’s people I can’t stand.
– Ivan Turgenev
Tenderness and rot share a border. That’s where love lives.
– Ocean Vuong
Sometimes you have to build a wall of isolation around yourself, not to keep people away from you, but to see who will tear down the wall to see you.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as a lamb.
– Melville to Hawthorne
All true poetic genius tends to generate prophetic insight. The poet cannot help but listen to awakening voices that are not yet audible to the rest of men.
– Thomas Merton
Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an ax to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now. You’re covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side. Die, and be quiet.
Quietness is the surest sign that you’ve died.
Your old life was a frantic running from silence.
The speechless full moon comes out now.
– Rumi
We lead two lives, and the half of our soul is madness, and half heaven is lit by a black sun. I say I am a man, but who is the other that hides in me?
– Arthur Machen
I wonder, so given am I to thinking with my blood…
– Samuel Beckett
Poetry reveals a power of the unknown. But the unknown is only an insignificant void if it is not the object of a desire. Poetry is a middle term, it conceals the known within the unknown: it is the unknown painted in blinding colors, in the image of a sun.
– Georges Bataille
Our time is recursive and forking. Our time is a garden in which all realities are simultaneously possible. All paths are truly one path. From the time of birth to the time of death, every word you utter is part of one long sentence. This sentence is utterly, heartbreakingly unique. Never before and never again. yet they, in ensemble, create One Sentence. It holds and houses us. Announces and defends us. Blesses and confesses us. Curses and condemns.
– Sun Yung Shin
Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Ordinarily he enjoys the honor of being regarded as being in his right mind, and yet he knows that if he were to explain to a single person how it really is with him, he would be declared insane.
– Søren Kierkegaard
The totalistic world described by Hua-yen is a living body in which each cell dervies its life from all other cells, and in return gives life to those many others. Like the human body, the Hua-yen universe is ever changing, for in it there is not one thing which is static and unchanging, unless it is the law of perpetual change itself. It is an incredible stream of activity wherein when one circumstance alters, everything alters with it. “Do I dare to eat a peach?” asks one of T.S. Eliot’s characters, and the question of action becomes an extremely delicate one to the individual who sees the fantastic interaction of things. Thus in a universe which is pure fluidity, or process, no act can but have an effect on the whole, just as a pebble tossed into a pool sends waves out to the farthest shore and stirs the very bottom. This is hard to see. We can comprehend how a modification in one small part of our body can affect the total organism, but we find it hard to believe that the enlightenment of one monk under a tree in India somehow enlightens us all, or, conversely, that my own intransigent ignorance is a universal ignorance. However, if we can comprehend that the greater whole of which the body is a part is no less organic, and no less interrelated, such an idea is not so unlikely. At that point, the moral life as conceived by Buddhism becomes possible.
– Thomas H. Cook
For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom.
So I believe that we should trust our children. Normal children do not confuse reality and fantasy – they confuse them much less often than we adults do (as a certain great fantasist pointed out in a story called “The Emperor’s New Clothes”). Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books. All too often, that’s more than Mummy and Daddy know; for, in denying their childhood, the adults have denied half their knowledge, and are left with the sad, sterile little fact: “Unicorns aren’t real.” And that fact is one that never got anybody anywhere… It is by such statements as, “Once upon a time there was a dragon,” or “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” – it is by such beautiful non-facts that we fantastic human beings may arrive, in our peculiar fashion, at the truth.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
…the healing of a spirit, the vision of healing, the heat of vision, the power of the heat, the pleasure of the power.
– Sharon Olds, The Space Heater
This is a book about trying to get outside oneself, to lose oneself, while knowing that the self is not something that can ever be fully lost. But one can try. What I am calling ecstasy is a way of surpassing the self, of being held out there outside the confines of your head and the feeling of delight, pleasure or glee that accompanies that experience. It is something that perhaps we knew better in childhood, especially in the experience of play, but that we have abdicated in adolescence and our overlong adultescence. Adulthood is the abdication of ecstasy. We long to return to that childlike state, but we fail because we get too caught up in ourselves. We are ensnared by ourselves. We are riveted to ourselves. We’re too stuck on us. But there are areas of human experience that allow us to push outside the sticky self towards something larger, something vaster, something full of vibrancy and maybe a sheer, mad joy at the fact of life and the world.
This pushing outside is what religious practice at its best does. It is what art at its noblest can open in us. It is what poetry can point us towards. It is also what can (if we are lucky) take place in our sexual lives and arguably what drives the desire for intoxication, of whatever kind. We can think of such experiences as forms of surrender. One gives up all desire for control, for dominion over oneself and others, and freely submits.
Mysticism is a way of describing an existential ecstasy that is outside and more than the conscious self. It is about releasement and detachment, what it might mean to lead a released existence, a fluid openness, a cleared looseness, a limpid intensity, where both the concepts of mind and world or the soul and God dissolve into something altogether stranger and yet simpler: an experience of freedom which is not freedom of the will, but freedom from the will.
Ecstasy is what it feels like to be alive when we push away the sadness that clings to us. And sadness does cling to us. Reality presses in on us from all sides with a relentless force, a violence, which drains our energy and dissipates our capacity for belief and for joy. The world deafens us with its noise; our eyes sting from the ever-enlarging incoherence of information and disinformation and the constant presence of war. We all feel, we all live, within the poverty of contemporary experience. This is a leaden time, a heavy time, a time of dearth. As a result, we feel miserable, anxious, wretched, bored.
– Simon Critchley, Mysticism
It has happened, in all ages of the world, that some have labored and others have, without labor, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. this is wrong and should not continue. To secure to each laborer the whole product of his labor, or as nearly as possible, is a worthy object of any good government. That’s my platform, but when the average Republican leader in the East hears it, he thinks I am quoting from Karl Marx. I did quote it, but not from Karl Marx. I quoted it from Abraham Lincoln.
– Fiorello H. LaGuardia
Why did nature give me to this creature–
don’t call it my choice, I was ventured:
by some pure gravity of existence itself,
conspiracy of being!
We were fifteen.
It was Latin class, late spring,
late afternoon, the passive periphrastic,
for some reason I turned my seat
and there he was.
You know how they say a Zen butcher
makes one correct cut and the
whole ox
falls apart
like a puzzle. Yes a cliché.
– Anne Carso
Everyone has their own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid, or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is. If you can get it down on paper, in words, notes, or color, so much the better. The great artists don’t even bother to put it down on paper: they live with it silently, they become it.
– Henry Miller, Stand Still Like The Hummingbird
The Book Of Love
Peter Gabriel
The book of love is long and boring
No one can lift the damn thing
It’s full of charts and facts, and figures
And instructions for dancing
But I
I love it when you read to me.
And you
You can read me anything.
The book of love has music in it
In fact that’s where music comes from
Some of it’s just transcendental
Some of it’s just really dumb
But I
I love it when you sing to me
And you
You can sing me anything
The book of love is long and boring
And written very long ago
It’s full of flowers and heart-shaped boxes
And things we’re all too young to know
But I
I love it when you give me things
And you
You ought to give me wedding rings
And I
I love it when you give me things
And you
You ought to give me wedding rings
You ought to give me
Wedding rings
How, indeed, could it be possible for a man, who is limited on six sides—by east, west, south, north, deep, and sky—to understand a matter which is above the skies, which is beneath the deep, which stretches beyond north and south, and which is present in every place, and fills all vacuity?
– St. Gregory the Wonderworker
The moment I die to myself, the moment I throw myself away, joy—even ecstasy—bursts through me. At this moment, I can say yes to everything I affirm as my existence. All the world is fine just as it is. Ecstasy is an experience that is beyond verbal and intellectual comprehension, a glimpse of another existence and completely different from ordinary attitudes and viewpoints. The onset of the ecstatic moment does not depend on, nor does it come from, outside oneself. It is a call from the “purity in oneself,” in St. Gregory’s words; it is present everywhere and fills all vacuity. It is the same force which animates one’s instinctive drives, one’s associative thoughts. But it is a force which now takes another form.
How can one experience ecstasy without transcending oneself, without freeing oneself from the incessant domination of one’s instinctive life? To go out of oneself, to be in touch with one’s essential reality, is to hold in abeyance those forces which dominate one’s existence.
Sometimes a sudden shock will bring a cessation of the associative processes, will intervene to free one from imprisonment by oneself. But too often man is unable to disengage himself from himself. He is unable to move outside of the two-dimensional bondage of this twenty-four hour conditioning by society into the free world of joy and ecstasy. From the moment of his birth, an ersatz culture has chipped away at whatever spiritual dimension he may have possessed.
– William Segal
Many of us, in unconsciously trying to be as small and inconspicuous as possible, have shortened and collapsed inward, not only in a vertical direction, but in width as well. Collapsing inward often has to do with terrible feelings of shame about who we are in the world. Such a posture serves only to cramp our breathing apparatus, not allowing us to be fully present in life, therefore not allowing us to utilize our full physical as well as creative potential.
– Judith Harris, Jung and Yoga
What’s it like to wear an eternal Olympian overall
held up by the burning straps of
mortal shortfall?
– Anne Carson
A translator is someone trying to get in between a body and its shadow.
– Anne Carson
The flower that repeats
from the edge of the crevasse
forget me not,
has no tints fairer or more blithe
than the space tossed here between you
and me.
– Eugenio Montale (translated by Irma Brandeis)
When you pray, you are not starting the conversation from scratch, just remembering to plug back into a conversation that’s always in progress.
– Anne Lamott
What is the best Love you’ve ever had in this world? Be quiet while thinking about that Love. If someone comes along and starts talking, quietly shoo them away, you’re busy, you’re a poet… Be quiet so quiet, let the very sounds of that Love be heard in your bones.
– CA Conrad
The real, when it has reached the mind, is already not real any more.
– Robert Bresson
I read a passage in an ancient poem, and I seem to understand my own heart.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Sure, there are probably
infinite dimensions, but I’m
with you in this one, so why
would I try to find them?
– Neil Hilborn
A person who is beginning to sense the suffering of life is, at the same time, beginning to awaken to deeper realities, truer realities. For suffering smashes to pieces the complacency of our normal fictions about reality, and forces us to become alive in a special sense—to see carefully, to feel deeply, to touch our worlds in ways we have heretofore avoided.
– Ken Wilber
By lewdness I mean just that: raised petticoats in kitchens and back stairs and long afternoons in bed when the sheets smell like the lagoons of Venice; but if my hands tremble with desire they tremble likewise when I reach for the chalice on Sunday, and if lust makes me run and caper it is no stronger a force than that which brings me to my knees to say thanksgivings and litanies. What can this capricious skin be but a blessing?
– John Cheever
Men simply copied the realities of their hearts when they built prisons.
– Richard Wright
The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.
– Oscar Wilde
Only a fool believes in simple step‑by‑step formulas. Wisdom takes work.
– Ryan Holiday
The past 5 years have brought major change to the collective. And the amazing thing is that many of us have already been preparing ourselves as what comes next.
– Nika Solé
He indicates the piano
Where the Sarabande No. 1 lies open
At a passage I shall never master
But which has already, and effortlessly, mastered me.
– James Merrill
Tell me who you consort with and I will tell you who you are.
– Goethe
To be alive in American bones is to be enraged by what’s happening. Of course I feel anger… but… not a single sentence or page I’ve ever written in my work was written out of anger… It’s not that I’m not angry, but I’m not useful — as a writer, as an artist — when I’m angry.
– Ocean Vuong
renaming the public library the socialist bookstore
– Jonathan Fine
And slowly the incoherencies of day melt in
A general wishful thinking of night
– John Ashbery
Purple – is fashionable twice –
This season of the year,
And when a soul perceives itself
To be an Emperor.
– Emily Dickinson
I’ve never had that feeling of block, maybe because I spend so much time dreaming things up before I sit down to write. Only when the characters are refined enough in my mind can I put them into words.
– Marie NDiaye
The phenomenon of transference—how we all invent each other according to early blueprints—was Freud’s most original and radical discovery…
The most precious and inviolate of entities—personal relations—is actually a messy jangle of misapprehensions, at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems. The concept of transference at once destroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic: we cannot know each other. We must grope around for each other through a dense thicket of absent others.
– Janet Malcom
Everything is lost, the poems first,
then sleep, then after that the day
then everything else
– Ingeborg Bachmann
When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.
– Dale Carnegie
History is constantly teaching. It just doesn’t find students.
– Ingeborg Bachmann
I do think that atheism is the great ground for it all—that if you haven’t experienced atheism fully, you can’t grasp the shock of believing anything.
– Fanny Howe
Starting from nothing
to where we are,
is farther than the farthest star.
And farther than the farthest star,
is where we’re going from where we are.
– Eyvind Earle
Everybody is beautiful. It is just a question of realization. It is not only that God is beautiful; in fact, because God is beautiful, everything is beautiful — because everything is out of God, everything is in God.
– Osho
Everything is blue and smells of sage. The marbles dazzle down below you. There are two eagles moving softly softly on the sky, like distant boats rowing across an immense violet lake.
– Lawrence Durrell, Delphi
If you drop this one thought, ‘What about me?’ from your mind, you will become a living, walking temple.
– Sadhguru
The answer (and a poor one) is this, I think—you can only communicate with another human being by a miracle and you have to wait patiently for miracles and believe in them a little too.
– Jack Spicer
Revisit the storm
A starscape of yesterday
Clouds of forgiveness
– @jbeanhibbs
Alas, how easily things go wrong!
A sigh too much, or a kiss too long,
And there follows a mist and a weeping
rain,
And life is never the same again.
– George MacDonald, Phantastes
budding lotus —
when did I become
who I am
– Chen-ou Liu
Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.
– Barbara Kingsolver
…better is any plan than a lack of counsel….
– Tuor (Tolkien, The Book of Lost Tales II)
He who looks at himself, risks to meet himself. The mirror does not flatter, it shows accurately what is reflected in it, namely that face that we never show the world because we hide it by the persona, the mask of the actor.
This is the first test of courage on the inner path, a test, which is enough to frighten most people, because the encounter with oneself belongs to those unpleasant things, one avoids as long as one can project the negative onto the environment.
– Carl G. Jung
While contradictory and uneven in many ways, one of the most exciting possibilities to come out of these solidarities is a political horizon beyond nationalism.
– Christopher T. Fan
Lunch in town. Purification through shame. Liberating humiliation.
– Emil Cioran
The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
There is light in there, and mystery and food.
Come see it. Come not for me but it.
But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other.
– John Ashbery, Just Walking Around
That is the amen effect — the sacred mandate to hear each other, to embrace each other, to love each other up, especially on the hard days.
– Rabbi Sharon Brous
Let go of the past, let go of the future, let go of the present, and cross over to the farther shore of existence. With mind wholly liberated, you shall come no more to birth and death.
– Buddharakkhita
starless
and yet
fireflies
– Lisbeth Ho
I don’t especially trust the last days of June, but have often determined that I especially like people who were born in summer.
– Ingeborg Bachmann; tr. Philip Boehm
The world is wide and the paths from country to country,
and the places are many, I have known them all,
I have seen cities from all the towers,
the people who will come and those who are already leaving.
– Ingeborg Bachmann
Hills and valleys are unchanging: the lane still follows the ancient track that men have walked for a thousand years. And each year the seasons return. We may lose faith in mankind but we can never lose faith in the opening bud or the falling leaf.
– C.R.Milne
Mental health diagnoses are not just misapplied, but invented.
– Camilla Nord
C’mon in, out of that wretched hot, out of the hammer of heat, c’mon!
– Patricia Smith
Consider yourself a tourist. Think of the world as it is seen from space, so small and insignificant yet so beautiful. Could there really be anything to be gained from harming others during our stay here?
– Dalai Lama
no matter how long
I stare at hydrangeas—
pure blue
– Melissa Allen
IF YOU GET THERE BEFORE I DO
Air out the linens, unlatch the shutters on the eastern side,
and maybe find that deck of Bicycle cards
lost near the sofa. Or maybe walk around
and look out the back windows first.
I hear the view’s magnificent: old silent pines
leading down to the lakeside, layer upon layer
of magnificent light. Should you be hungry,
I’m sorry but there’s no Chinese takeout,
only a General Store. You passed it coming in,
but you probably didn’t notice its one weary gas pump
along with all those Esso cans from decades ago.
If you’re somewhat confused, think Vermont,
that state where people are folded into the mountains
like berries in batter . . . What I’d like when I get there
is a few hundred years to sit around and concentrate
on one thing at a time. I’d start with radiators
and work my way up to Meister Eckhart,
or why do so few people turn their lives around, so many
take small steps into what they never do,
the first weeks, the first lessons,
until they choose something other,
beginning and beginning their lives,
so never knowing what it’s like to risk
last minute failure . . . I’d save blue for last. Klein blue,
or the blue of Crater Lake on an early June morning.
That would take decades . . . Don’t forget
to sway the fence gate back and forth a few times
just for its creaky sound. When you swing in the tire swing
make sure your socks are off. You’ve forgotten, I expect,
the feeling of feet brushing the tops of sunflowers:
In Vermont, I once met a ski bum on a summer break
who had followed the snows for seven years and planned
on at least seven more. We’re here for the enjoyment of it, he said,
to salaam into joy . . . I expect you’ll find
Bibles scattered everywhere, or Talmuds, or Qur’ans,
as well as little snippets of gospel music, chants,
old Advent calendars with their paper doors still open.
You might pay them some heed. Don’t be alarmed
when what’s familiar starts fading, as gradually
you lose your bearings,
your body seems to turn opaque and then transparent,
until finally it’s invisible – what old age rehearses us for
and vacations in the limbo of the Middle West.
Take it easy, take it slow. When you think I’m on my way,
the long middle passage done,
fill the pantry with cereal, curry, and blue and white boxes of macaroni, place the
checkerboard set, or chess if you insist,
out on the flat-topped stump beneath the porch’s shadow,
pour some lemonade into the tallest glass you can find in the cupboard,
then drum your fingers, practice lifting your eyebrows,
until you tell them all – the skeptics, the bigots, blind neighbors,
those damn-with-faint-praise critics on their hobbyhorses –
that I’m allowed,
and if there’s a place for me that love has kept protected,
I’ll be coming, I’ll be coming too.
– Dick Allen
he stood against the wind and let it peel him clean.
– Anne Carson
Who needs memories when you have / arms around your waist?
– Shira Erlichman
What if I accept that all I really want is a small, slow, simple life. A beautiful, quiet, gentle life. I think it is enough.
– Krista O’Reilly-Davi-Digui
We’re not here just to label thoughts—we’re here to reconnect with the mysterious nature of reality.
– Sebene Selassie
When all is said and done
our undoing will have been
the fault of the white men.
– Andy Perrin
I don’t know why we have to become so vulnerable before we can connect with God, and even sometimes with ourselves.
– Anne Lamott
If I could have only understood e.e. when I was 17 I would have saved a lot of years of struggle, in business, in art, and in love. My best businesses and inventions have only worked when they were simply focused on being fast and true and easy. Art comes when it is without worry of any audience. Love has come when I least expected it. My syntax has never been good, and giving into my failures has made this time my best time ever. I have always been a slow learner, but I have never stopped…
– Steve Saroff
“who pays any attention to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you”
– e.e. Cummings
But someone else steadied the scaffolding for your heavy expectations.
– Andrea Gibson
Waterbirds
crossing over and back
leave no trace,
and yet the way
is never forgotten.
– Dogen
Please
If you are one who has practice
meeting the pain of the world,
we need you. Right now we need you
to teach us it is possible to swallow
what is weighty and still be able to rise.
We need you to remind us we can
be furious and scared and near feral
over injustice and still thrill at the taste
of a strawberry, ripe and sweet,
can still meet a stranger and shake
their hand, believing in their humanness.
We need you to show us how
we, too, can fall into the darkest,
unplumbed pit and learn there
a courage and beauty
we could never learn from the light.
If you have drowned in sorrow
and still have somehow found
a way to breathe, please, lead us.
You are the one with the crumbs
we need, the ones we will use to find
our way back to the home of our hearts.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Literature, the written word, seems to be poetry alienated from its ontological valence. It could be said of every book—not just the famous one that makes this claim—that it is for everyone and no one.
– Hans-Georg Gadamer
Every experience is seen through your mind’s eye, so when you change your mind you change your entire world.
– Bryant McGill
The mind is a beautiful tool. But if we’re used by it, we’ll quickly find ourselves back in the spinning web of egoic consciousness.
– Adyashanti
Cruelty made me. Cruelty and the sweet smelling earth…
– Linda Gregg
Love is taking care of the nervous systems of those around you. Being a safe space, considering more than just yourself, leading with peace. It makes all the difference.
– Nika Solé
The poet is someone who writes against forgetting.
– Joachim Sartorius
Oh dear, it’s such an immutable relationship. Everyone who has that has the same problem. It’s sibling rivalry. Plain and simple. I knew she was a genius. She was the biggest influence on my life.
– Fanny Howe
Zen and Tibetan Buddhism are “closer than any other schools in Buddhism,” but their methods are in reverse of each other. Zen goes directly to the ground of consciousness and then comes up, exploring other realms of mind, having seen the ground first. Tibetan Buddhism goes down gradually, until the ground of consciousness is reached and then “comes up swiftly.”
– Gary Snyder
Post and Beam
I asked him if they were meant
to split like that, meaning the beams
holding up our ceiling, and he said yes,
cracks—or checks, as they’re known—
are normal in all timber frame homes
as posts and beams begin to dry out.
Still, when I heard the house popping
those first nights and leaped out of bed,
thinking gunshot or shattered window,
I wondered how cracked pine could
make for a sounder structure that only
grows stronger, more solid with time.
Yet I must have known even then
that love breaks us the same as we
bend and swell and learn to settle,
inseparable, into each other.
– James Crews
We have to stand for something in this world. We can’t just stand for looking on the bright side.’ There is so much to fight for, so much to stand against. Our silence is complicit. In those moments spent staring at the sun, thousands of injustices occurred. Turn away from the sun, turn towards reality. Humanity needs your boots on the ground. We need every living soul beside us to humanize this mad world. Every single voice. That’s what it’s going to take.
– Jeff Brown
Duality to me is the sign of the master coming. I would love to have a life that didn’t have all that in it, that was just, A free spirit arrived and left. Someone who almost doesn’t have a footprint.
– Fanny Howe
Writing is not a competition. It is a holy creative act through which we remake ourselves and the world and it should be treated as such.
– Jeannine Ouellette
If we have not yet succeeded — after how many centuries? — in eliminating from life the elements which plague us, perhaps we need to question life more closely. Perhaps our refusal to face reality is the only ill we suffer from, and all the rest but illusion and delusion.
– Henry Miller
Loneliness is like sitting in an empty room and being aware of the space around you. It is a condition of separateness. Solitude is becoming one with the space around you. It is a condition of union. Loneliness is small, solitude is large. Loneliness closes in around you; solitude expands toward the infinite. Loneliness has its roots in words, in an internal conversation that nobody answers; solitude has its roots in the great silence of eternity.
– Kent Nerburn
Value, like freedom, is only directly accessible from within the standpoint of reflective consciousness. […] When we are in the first-person perspective we find ourselves to be valuable […] Trying to actually see the value of humanity from the third-person perspective is like trying to see the colors someone sees by cracking open his skull. From outside, all we can say is why he sees them.
– Christine M. Korsgaard
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
This was a vital part of the process of simple realization, the realization that knowledge led either to wholesale illusion or to irrational depression…
– László Krasznahorkai
In spite of so many stubborn lies, at every moment, at every opportunity, the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the insignificance and the sovereign importance of each person and all people.
– Simone de Beauvoir
They say it’s different for me. That not everyone is as strong as I am, that most people are weak or whatever. But that’s not it. They aren’t weak. They’re dull. They don’t pick up on things. And I’m not strong. I’m honest.
– Mieko Kawakami
The great artists were never those whose works embodied style in its least fractured, most perfect form but those who adopted style as a rigor to set against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth.
– Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno
True self-knowledge brings transformation. What we think of as the self-knowledge that comes naturally with age, but is not consciously rooted in the willingness to continually pursue transformation, does little to add to either our consciousness or our wholeness.
– Bud Harris
By a lie, a man annihilates his dignity as a man.
– Immanuel Kant, Doctrine of Virtue
I find it a huge strain to be responsible for my tastes and be known and defined by them.
– Jonathan Franzen
The senses deceive from time to time, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once.
– Rene Descartes
No one makes up anything in the imagination. The material that appears in the imagination has to originate in the unconscious. Imagination, properly understood, is a channel through which this material flows to the conscious mind.
– Robert A. Johnson
It was home, a home, but he knew he would have to leave here, too.
– Lisa Ko
Writing is a gift you provide to the reader. You must first be there for the reader before the reader can be there for you.
– Tom Jenks
I will go to a distant unknown city and live huddled in some corner of a small library.
– Haruki Murakami
To speak of style is one way of speaking about the totality of a work of art. Like all discourse about totalities, talk of style must rely on metaphors. And metaphors mislead.
– Susan Sontag
The new is already here. The old is just making a lot of noise dying.
– Eckart Tolle
If you want to change something about your life, then you must change your inputs in that area.
– Brad Schipke
To make art, you must want. Yet the work of art completed counterbalances attachment.
– Jane Hirshfield
You say, ‘I must have my ideals, my faith, otherwise I am lost.’ Yet in your faith, ideals and beliefs you are already lost.
– Krishnamurti
Future, no one will know what it’s like to make a collect call, to reverse the charges. Nor remember the Spanish poet who wrote an ode to his light bulb late one night in the kitchen.
– Rosa Alcalá
If none of us ever read a book that was ‘dangerous,’ had a friend who was ‘different,’ or joined an organization that advocated ‘change,’ we would all be just the kind of people Joe McCarthy wants.
– Edward R. Murrow
The test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members.
– Pearl S. Buck
Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous.
– Thomas Mann
Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live.
– Nicolas de Chamfort
We had the experience but missed the meaning.
– T.S. Eliot
I am not looking for peace. I am looking for a storm that understands me.
– Nayyirah Waheed
The thing about chaos is that while it disturbs us, it too, forces our hearts to roar in a way we secretly find magnificent.
– Christopher Poindexter
To mirror the desert, you must wear away.
– Talley Kayser
They say the capybara fears nothing…
But it’s not about bravery.
It just doesn’t fight.
Doesn’t run.
Doesn’t shout.
Doesn’t panic.
It moves through the world like nothing can harm it.
It walks past crocodiles like they’re old neighbors.
Strolls by predators like it’s going out for coffee.
And no one touches it.
Not because it’s the strongest.
But because it threatens no one.
It doesn’t demand respect with teeth or growls.
It earns it with calm.
The capybara has that kind of energy that softens the air.
That peace that people want to be around.
That presence that quiets even the loudest minds.
Maybe that’s why birds sit on it,
monkeys hang with it, even predators don’t mind it.
Being near a capybara… feels like peace.
It’s not about being untouchable.
It’s about being so at ease that no one even thinks of harming you.
No hate.
No drama.
No rush.
Just life.
Simple. Peaceful. Still.
And maybe the strength we’re missing isn’t about power…
Maybe it’s about being a little more like that.
– Patrice Wheeler
Abandon the Counterfeit World
The Way doesn’t rise or fall,
but those who are blind look for an advantage.
Sages and the wise escape from this
world where counterfeit truth prevails.
Reign in your senses don’t indulge them,
be ever mindful and nothing else.
Lose your body beneath a patched robe
and say goodbye to a thousand rebirths.
A monk in the wild sits quiet and relaxed,
he survives all year on what karma brings.
Bamboo and yellow flowers occupy his
thoughts white clouds and streams
simplify his life.
– Zen Master Shiwu 石屋, (Stonehouse 1272–1352)
This laming [of the puer figure] refers to the especial weakness and helplessness at the beginning of any enterprise. Inherent in the one-sided vertical direction is the Icarus-Ganymede propensity of flying and falling.
– James Hillman
I knew well it was no use to cry, that water once flown past the bridge does not return, and blossoms that are scattered are gone beyond recall. Yet try as I would, I could not, simply could not cut the binding cord of human love.
– Kobayashi Issa
A love which is hopeless and physically inrequited would be a perfect thing — if only it did not bring about brainstorms.
– Joris-Karl Huysmans
History, you must understand, is not about the past. It’s a lens for understanding the present (that’s why we fight over what gets taught). It’s way of predicting, even determining the future.
– Ryan Holiday
You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
– Alain de Botton
Be willing to move forward fearlessly and to pioneer seemingly new ways, new concepts and new ideas. Be willing to break down old barriers and reveal the light of truth.
– Eileen Caddy
What if we could
corral the energy of
fear and hope
and use it all to
remind ourselves that
we are alive?
– Ethan Nichtern
AS THE POEMS GO
as the poems go into the thousands you
realize that you’ve created very
little.
it comes down to the rain, the sunlight,
the traffic, the nights and the days of the
years, the faces.
leaving this will be easier than living
it, typing one more line now as
a man plays a piano through the radio,
the best writers have said very
little
and the worst,
far too much.
– Charles Bukowski
The best thing about time passing is the privilege of running out of it, of watching the wave of mortality break over me and everyone I know. No more time, no more potential. The privilege of ruling things out. Finishing. Knowing I’m finished. And knowing time will go on without me.
Look at me, dancing my little dance for a few moments against the background of eternity.
– Sarah Manguso
Distance is not a problem, the problem is humans, because we don’t know to love without touching, seeing or listening. And love is felt with the heart, not the body.
– Gabriel García Márquez
How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot! / The world forgetting, by the world forgot. / Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! / Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d
– Alexander Pope
Meditation becomes a true education, a secret preparation of ourselves to face the world of unsteady circumstances and evanescent glories.
– Swami Chinmayananda
If you experience demons while practicing yoga or meditating, I promise that’s a you thing. There is nothing evil about those practices. You are simply meeting aspects of yourself.
– Nika Solé
Alone, I rediscover my mobility. Movement is my habitat. My only rest is motion.
– Luce Irigaray
Guys,
You don’t realize how low the bar has been set these days.
Just getting your body into decent shape and learning basic communication skills puts you in the top 10% of men.
It literally doesn’t take much to become above average.
– Dan Go
your hand pressing all that
riotous black sleep into
the quiet form of daylight
– Frank O’Hara
Nothing composes the mind like composing composition.
– Robert Frost
You must surrender whatever preconceptions you have about music if you’re really interested in it.
– Cecil Taylor
Art should be like the woman you love: untouchable, not of this world. Art and prayer are the only pure ejaculations of the soul! Whenever one of my books comes out, I drop it with horror.
– J. K. Huysmans
There is no best path or worst path.
There is just the path to which each individual organism gets directed.
– Ramesh Balsekar
I’ve always never felt this way about anyone
but the way in which I’ve never felt about you
is a way of never feeling so new it’s somehow old
like a cave painting of a fax machine
– Hera Lindsay Bird, Planet of the Apes
poets in their bassinets
dream a splendid woman holding over their baby eyes
a globe, shining with
possibility.
– Lucille Clifton
Oh let us not be a little bitches to one another
Life is hard enough as it is
Life is hard enough and fast enough
And there’s nothing in this world worth doing
But shaking our heads in awe
– Hera Lindsay Bird
But no more fountains and no more rain,
and the stores stay open terribly late.
– Frank O’Hara
I have never experienced a crush that didn’t involve a fascinating reading list.
– Alina Stefanescu
Neurosis is the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.
– Carl Jung
To be a well-favored man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.
– William Shakespeare
You’re bored? That’s because you keep your senses awake and your soul asleep.
– Josemaria Escriva
Progress is the hypocrisy in which vice is refined!
– Durtal in Huysmans’ LA-BAS
imagine dating someone worse than yourself on purpose
that’s the kind of fucked up thing only everyone I’ve ever loved would do
– Hera Lindsay Bird
I don’t think symbolically at all.
– Lydia Davis
You do not learn from work like yours as much as you learn from work unlike yours.
– Marvin Bell
Be then my muse without face or figure, my darling, and no longer my demon…
– Michel Leiris
Healing isn’t about erasing the past. It’s about unwinding from it. It’s about reclaiming the space within us that trauma occupied.
– Maraya Rodostianos
People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around- the music and the ideas.
– Bob Dylan
Where am I when I’m not in reality or in my imagination?
– Andrei Tarkovsky
When we face suffering, we will have to find the way to solve it. Only then can wisdom arise.
– Ajaan Suchart Abhijato
On these balconies, hanging out over the blue littoral of the historic coast, warmly-lit by candlelight, these fragmentary friendships flowered. But why should he not feel at home?
– Lawrence Durrell
Isolate as much as you want to become stronger, even if you see that loneliness is an unbearable hell, it is much better than the multiple masks of humans.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
The only thing certain about our choices
Is that we have to live with them:
Rough neighborhood
– Kira Clarke
Snowing again. Today,
we enter our third week
of uncertainty. A herd of deer
slide-steps down the hillock
of our yard, five Gene Kellys dancing,
not in rain, not singing.
How do they keep hoofing it
without falling? I walk outside, &
cold fluff kisses my ears,
caresses my neck. I flinch
as if having made slightest contact
easing past a stranger in the doorway:
disconcerted & delighted,
keeping that sensation private.
Quiet? Quite. Exhale.
– Ace Boggess
And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
– Gandalf (Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring)
The wise person still feels the pain—but they don’t shoot the second arrow of resistance.
– Vidyamala Burch
The sun’s eye
Is fierce at noon;
Thou and I
Will rest full soon.
And new strength
New work will meet;
Till, at length,
Long rest is sweet.
– George MacDonald, Phantastes
The first thing you notice when you return to the United States is how grotesque the commercialism is. Everywhere you look. In your face. Buy this. Buy that. A corporate monstrosity.
– Jason Overstreet
Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.
– George Washington
One person is ten thousand to me if he is best.
– Heraclitus
They were all children who had previously failed to fit in, or had failed, to the point of acute misery, to feel satisfied, and they had seized on creative impulse in the hope of salvation.
– Susan Choi
We all become well-disguised mirror image of anything that we fight too long or too directly. That which we oppose determines the energy and frames the questions after a while. Most frontal attacks on evil just produce another kind of evil in yourself, along with a very inflated self-image to boot.
– Richard Rohr
I know I am disabled. Technically. But I don’t feel that way.
– Lauren Hebert Duncan
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
You can’t protect people, kiddo… All you can do is love them.
– John Irving
The reading of a fine book is an uninterrupted dialogue in which the book speaks and our soul replies.
– Andre Maurois
My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work… but I abhor the dull routine of existence.
– Arthur Conan Doyle
If you are enjoying a cup of tea and you understand the bitter and the sweet of temporary things, you will really enjoy the cup of tea.
– Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche
People see what they want to see. And what people want to see never has anything to do with the truth.
– Roberto Bolaño
We are all strangers to ourselves, and if we scrutinize ourselves too deeply we may find out something we never intended to know.
– T.S. Eliot
Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism and falsehood. The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement, seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, the vision.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.
– John Dewey
For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone.
– Cynthia Occelli
I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage.
– Audre Lorde
To suffer consciously is to live a deeper life. To flee from it is to live someone else’s.
– Carl Jung
Confusion is simply the truth waiting to be unfolded.
– Michel Foucault
The key to happiness is accepting one unpleasant reality every day.
– Bertrand Russell
All language is a longing for home.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.
– Terry Pratchett
Truth without love is not transformational truth. Truth from a cruel heart undoes its message.
– Richard Rohr
To be conscious is not to be in control. It is to be aware that you never were.
– Mark Z. Danielewski
I can only process words that are wrapped in love. From strangers, from people I know. If there’s no love sensed, it cannot make sense to me.
– Brandie Freely
With us pupils remain silent, not only for five years, as the Pythagoreans recommended, but for ten or more — until they have learned to speak like their masters. And then they are granted a freedom which is no longer any good to them. Perhaps they had wings, or might have had them, but they have crawled all their life long in imitation of their masters, so how can they now dream of flight?
– Lev Shestov
Your brain is primal. It doesn’t care about anything but keeping you alive. This is why meaningful hobbies or goals matter so much. If you leave your brain up to its own devices, it will only focus on the fear of the unknown.
– Dr. Nicole LePera
The thought of what I am, of my pitiful conduct, deters me from receiving what joy I might from the glorious days that visit me . . . But what is this beauty in the landscape but a certain fertility IN ME? I look in vain to see it realized but in my own life. If I could wholly cease to be ashamed of myself, I think that all my days would be fair.
– Henry David Thoreau
Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as well do it with generosity and kindness and style.
– Rebecca Solnit
Many people respond to Buddhism as if it were a new cult which might save them, which might enable them to deal with the world in the manner of picking flowers in a beautiful garden. But if we wish to pick flowers from a tree, we must first cultivate the roots and trunk, which means that we must work with our fears, frustrations, disappointments and irritations, the painful aspects of life.
Usually religions speak of beauty, song, ecstasy, bliss. But according to Buddha, we must begin by seeing the experience of life as it is. We must see the truth of suffering, the reality of dissatisfaction. We cannot ignore it and attempt to examine only the glorious, pleasurable aspects of life. If one searches for a promised land, a Treasure Island, then the search only leads to more pain. We cannot reach such islands, we cannot attain enlightenment in such a manner. We cannot begin by dreaming.
That would be only a temporary escape; real escape is impossible.
In Buddhism, we express our willingness to be realistic through the practice of meditation. Meditation is not a matter of trying to achieve ecstasy, spiritual bliss or tranquility, nor is it attempting to become a better person. It is simply the creation of a space in which we are able to expose and undo our neurotic games, our self-deceptions, our hidden fears and hopes.
– Chogyam Trungpa
When you awaken your heart, you find to your surprise that your heart is empty.If you search for the awakened heart, there is nothing but tenderness.
You feel sore and soft, and if you open your eyes to the rest of the world, you feel tremendous sadness. It occurs because your heart is completely open, exposed.It is the pure raw heart that has the power to heal the world.
– Chögyam Trungpa
At varying intervals, from a year to several decades, all of a society’s rituals will be performed, the most important (for example, the symbolic transference of political authority from one generation to another.
– Victor W. Turner
I have sometimes asked myself what would have happened if modern science, instead of … converging on the study of matter, had begun by the consideration of mind—if Kepler, Galileo and Newton, for example, had been psychologists.
– Bergson
The whole approach of
Buddhism is to develop
transcendental
common sense.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Romanticism 101
by Dean Young
Then I realized I hadn’t secured the boat.
Then I realized my friend had lied to me.
Then I realized my dog was gone
no matter how much I called in the rain.
All was change.
Then I realized I was surrounded by aliens
disguised as orthodontists having a convention
at the hotel breakfast bar.
Then I could see into the life of things,
that systems seek only to reproduce
the conditions of their own reproduction.
If I had to pick between shadows
and essences, I’d pick shadows.
They’re better dancers.
They always sing their telegrams.
Their old gods do not die.
Then I realized the very futility was salvation
in this greeny entanglement of breaths.
Yeah, as if.
Then I realized even when you catch the mechanism,
the trick still works.
Then I came to in Texas
and realized rockabilly would never go away.
Then I realized I’d been drugged.
We were all chasing nothing
which left no choice but to intensify the chase.
I came to handcuffed and gagged.
I came to intubated and packed in some kind of foam.
This too is how ash moves through water.
And all this time the side doors unlocked.
Then I realized repetition could be an ending.
Then I realized repetition could be an ending.
Those who walk ahead of their time often return barefoot.
– Cyprian Kamil Norwid
When I learn something new – and it happens every day – I feel a little more at home in this universe, a little more comfortable in the nest.
– Bill Moyers
Works of art are born of those who confront danger, who go to the limit of an experience, to a point beyond which no human can go. The farther one ventures, the more distinctive, the more personal, the more unique life becomes.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
(…) that almost supernatural state, that intensity of life where the soul sings, where it cannot but sing, like the tree, the bird and the sea.
– Charles Baudelaire
Solitude within multitude seduced me early.
– Denise Levertov
The mind imposes this framework which it calls ‘reality’. That arbitrary framework has a tendency to be quite independent of what your senses report.
– Frank Herbert
It must be admitted that the traditional anthropocentric universe has begun to fade under the careful scrutiny of people who are not sentimentalists or who do not childishly seek security in baseless assumptions. A physicist, or a philosopher such as Whitehead, would have to admit that comfortable old concepts such as the distinction of subject and object, or that of agent and act, metaphysical entities such as souls and selves, or even more fundamental notions such as the absoluteness of time and space, are untenable in the light of objective and serious inquiry. The Western world is alive with new ideas, but so far these ideas have not trickled down to the mass consciousness. Most people still have a deep faith in solid substances and believe that their feelings, ideas, and even their own bodies belong to, or inhere in, some mysterious but seemingly irrefutable substance called a self.
– Francis H. Cook
What my heart will be is a tower, and I will be right out on its rim: nothing else will be there, only pain and what can’t be said, only the world.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
As Socrates tells it, your story begins the moment Eros enters you. That incursion is the biggest risk of your life. How you handle it is an index of the quality, wisdom, and decorum of the things inside you. As you handle it you come into contact with what is inside you, in a sudden and startling way. You perceive what you are, what you lack, what you could be.
– Anne Carson
at the bottom of the ocean is a layer of water that has never moved…
– Anne Carson
Lose your face: become capable of loving without remembering, without phantasm and without interpretation, without taking stock. Let there just be fluxes, which sometimes dry up, freeze or overflow, which sometimes combine or diverge.
– Gilles Deleuze
…the basic law, the inherent tendency of each individual, is toward that total transformation of himself from the limited entity that he believes himself to be, to that which he really is in essence, i.e. a transcosmic, extra-terrestrial and – ultimately – ultra-dimensional /absence/.
– Kenneth Grant
To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to themselves. They have to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances.
– Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
To live alone one must be a demon or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both — a philosopher.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
What is your aim in philosophy? — To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.
– Wittgenstein
All lovers believe they are inventing love.
– Anne Carson
I would like to grasp why it is that these two activities, falling in love and coming to know, make me feel genuinely alive. There is something like an electrification in them.
– Anne Carson
Gorge after gorge, turning, turning. Caverns of sunset, falling, falling away—just a single vast gold air breathed out by beings—they must have been marvelous beings, those gold-breathers. Down. Purple-and-green islands. Cleft and groined and gigantically pocked like something left behind after all the oceans vanished one huge night: the mountains. Their hills fold and fold again, fold away, down. Folded into the dens and rocks of the hills are ghost towns. Broken streets end in them, like a sound, nowhere. Shadow is inside. We walk (oh quietly) even so—breaking lines of force, someone’s. Houses stand in their stones. Each house an empty socket. Some streaked with red inside. Words once went on in there—no. I don’t believe that. Words never went on in there.
– Anne Carson
To be an artist,
you don’t have to compose music or
paint or be in the movies or
write books.
It’s just a way of living.
It has to do with paying attention,
remembering, filtering what you see
and answering back,
participating in life.
– Viggo Mortensen
KITCHEN WINDOW
Several men were not my father. Some I avoided, some I wanted to impress. In high school, I tried to grow up at a friend’s house. We studied the periodic table and listened to records. Sometimes they bought pizza or fried chicken and everyone was encouraged to eat at the table together. His stepfather always watched me closely. He saw the wariness one learns from being neglected-eating too fast, being overly grateful, always knowing who was in the house: their motivations, moods, and locations. With his stepson he was attentive. With me, on the occasions when our paths crossed privately, he spoke with the gentle unavailability one reserves for creatures that are wounded and backed into a corner. I radiated an inappropriate heat that I did my best to hide. Graciously, he ignored it. He was generous, vain, tall and almost handsome, beamed a certain nonchalance and didn’t slouch in chairs. It registered. On Christmas morning, early, when I knocked on the glass of the kitchen window, he looked up and shook his head, mouthed Not today. I appreciated the clarity. It was his family, not mine.
– Richard Siken
It stung God. They say his spinal cord ran straight out of the sun.
– Anne Carson
The old promises are collapsing. Growth no longer lifts all boats—it lifts yachts.
Progress no longer means shared prosperity—it means shareholder returns. What we’re witnessing isn’t a system in crisis; it’s a system reaching its logical conclusion. Neoliberalism was never about efficiency or freedom. It was about transferring public wealth into private hands while dressing the theft in the language of merit and inevitability.
We’re now living in its endgame.
Every domain of life is being made extractable—our labor, our attention, our data, our ecosystems, even our grief. Where public institutions once existed to buffer risk and extend care, they’ve been gutted, outsourced, or rebranded as markets. What’s left is a politics of managed precarity, where the illusion of choice masks deepening dependence on volatile systems.
Control no longer needs to announce itself with force. It’s embedded in systems we’re told are neutral. It works through spreadsheets, billing codes, and risk scores—quiet mechanisms that control without appearing to rule.
Anthropology has long studied systems of exchange, reciprocity, and redistribution. Neoliberalism offers their inverse: a world where every need becomes a payment plan, every right becomes a subscription, and every crisis becomes an opportunity for someone else to profit. The commons—whether land, water, health, or education—are being enclosed anew, not with walls but with pricing tiers and contractual exclusions. The dispossession is as subtle as it is ruthless.
But the extraction isn’t just material. It’s temporal. What neoliberalism extracts is the future itself. Delayed transitions, deferred maintenance, stalled climate action—these are forms of temporal looting. The system generates short-term profits by mortgaging long-term stability. Every unmet obligation, every deferred repair, every “not yet” becomes a mechanism for robbing the next generation of options they never had a chance to claim. This is extraction across time, not just space.
The logic of this moment isn’t only economic—it’s ecological. Political ecology reminds us that systems of power are embedded in landscapes, infrastructures, and flows of energy and capital. Extraction is not confined to oil rigs and clearcuts. It is structured into zoning laws, data centers, insurance markets, and eviction courts. Accumulation by dispossession has become accumulation by design—a regime that doesn’t just seize opportunity, but manufactures scarcity in order to profit from it.
Look closely, and you’ll see the pattern. The same firms underwriting fossil fuel expansion are buying up water rights, farmland, and housing. The same actors slashing climate funds are cutting Medicaid and food assistance. The billionaires rebranding as technocrats are buying influence, shaping regulation, and engineering predictive models of your behavior. In this new economy, you are not just a consumer—you are a datafied asset, evaluated for risk, monetized through surveillance, and expected to perform in real time.
What looks like failure is often functioning exactly as intended—a system designed not to serve, but to extract.
Climate denial, austerity, deregulation, border militarization, and corporate greenwashing aren’t isolated tactics—they are components of a coherent toolkit. Together, they protect capital from accountability by dispersing blame and disorienting the public. But behind every market correction and manufactured crisis is the same imperative: protect capital at all costs, even if it means rendering entire communities—and ecosystems—uninhabitable.
And we know where it leads.
Across the country and the globe, we see sacrifice zones multiply. These are not accidents of neglect—they are the continuation of colonial logic turned inward. Flint. Jackson. Pine Ridge. Standing Rock. Gaza. Places where extractive industries and militarized policing converge, where public health collapses and no one is held accountable. These are domestic frontiers, where the violence of empire is repatriated and masked as budgetary constraint.
The lines are drawn by insurability. Those deemed too costly to protect are left to absorb the damage: rising premiums, evictions, unlivable heat, chemical spills, food deserts. In this system, insurance becomes the new passport—a gatekeeper of risk that determines not just what you can afford, but whether you can belong.
The ideology that sustains this is not neutral. It’s racialized, gendered, and historically rooted in conquest. The fossil fuel regime isn’t just an energy system—it’s a worldview. One that insists prosperity requires no limits, that nature is inert, and that markets are moral arbiters. Anthropologically, it is a cosmology of domination—one that crowds out other ways of being, knowing, and organizing life.
But alternatives do exist. And they are not hypothetical.
Across Indigenous and land-based communities—from the Amazon to the Arctic—are models of reciprocal governance, ecological stewardship, and collective care. These aren’t relics of the past. They are systems of survival honed over millennia. The fact that they are ignored or actively undermined is not a coincidence. It is part of the same colonial logic that demands control, even at the cost of collapse.
Neoliberalism thrives on exhaustion. It teaches us to fear rather than imagine, to hustle rather than organize, to consume rather than care. Its most insidious achievement isn’t privatizing services—it’s shrinking the horizon of what we imagine to be possible.
But that, too, can be reversed. Systems endure because they are reproduced—and they can be dismantled the same way.
The fight ahead is not simply about policies or elections. It’s about unmaking a worldview that sees life as extractable, inequality as natural, and solidarity as a threat. A livable future won’t come from tech fixes or carbon markets alone. It will come from shifting the underlying logic—from profit to reciprocity, from scarcity to care, from collapse to repair.
Neoliberalism may not end with fire and fury. It may fade, hollowed out by its own contradictions. But what rises in its place will depend on how ready we are—not just with critique, but with vision.
Because the real endgame isn’t theirs.
It’s ours to reclaim.
– James Greenberg
‘But whom do I treat unjustly,’ you say, ‘by keeping what is my own?’ Tell me, what is your own? What did you bring into this life? From where did you receive it? It is as if someone were to take the first seat in the theater, then bar everyone else from attending, so that one person alone enjoys what is offered for the benefit of all in common — this is what the rich do. They seize common goods before others have the opportunity, then claim them as their own by right of preemption. For if we all took only what was necessary to satisfy our own needs, giving the rest to those who lack, no one would be rich, no one would be poor, and no one would be in need.
– St Basil the Great
The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurons and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time.
– J.G. Ballard
The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbols never perfectly match. Eros is in between.
– Anne Carson
It has been said that in the course of life we are all consumed by life’s fire: the only question—and this is where our challenge lies—is whether we will be deformed or perfected by that process.
– Richard Tarnas
We might have to waste a portion of our lives
to understand that we must conserve the rest.
– Sean Athey
Not your thinking, but your essence, is differentiation. Therefore you must not strive for what you conceive as distinctiveness, but for your own essence. You should and can strive only for this without damage and for everything else in the name and the sign of your essence.
– Carl Jung
If someone is willing to look at himself or herself, to explore and practice wakefulness on the spot, he or she is a warrior.
– Chögyam Trungpa
As a researcher, anything that gives you a wrong answer, confidently, is less than helpful.
As a writer, anything that makes you sound—even slightly—like everyone else, is poison.
All of us are made not only of what we have but what we lost. And loss is not a subtraction. As an experience, it is an addition.
– Augusten Burroughs
A person of substance. If you are one, you will take no pleasure in those who aren’t.
– Baltasar Gracián
Every action you take starts in your mind, making mental awareness crucial.
– Brad Schipke
One can call philosophy the free, imaginary art. The philosopher who in his philosophy can transform all single philosophemes into a single one — who can make one whole out of all single instances of these, attains the maximum in his philosophy. He attains the maximum of a philosopher if he combines all philosophies into a single philosophy.
– Novalis
A part of us refuses to let go. The part that wants to keep believing there’s something unreachable inside each of us. Something that’s unique and won’t transfer.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
There is no moral equivalence between bullies and the bullied, between tyranny and democracy, or between brutality and decency. No individual can be free in a society devoid of justice. There can be no liberty where brutality reigns.
– Robert Reich
The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The reasonableness of others and my own desire for tranquility got on my nerves. The breath built up in my throat, ready to vibrate with words of rage. I felt the need to quarrel, and in fact I quarreled first with our male friends, then with their wives or girlfriends, and finally I went on to clash with anyone, male or female, who tried to help me accept what was happening to my life.
– Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment
Books are like love letters; they are destined for a particular person.
– Lawrence Durrell
I don’t know if this is a terrible country with a bunch of wonderful people in it, or a wonderful country with a bunch of very bad people in it. Either way I grieve for the suffering we’re causing.
– Patrick Donnelly
Justices were the only adults holding this country up. Now there are no adults. I fear for us all.
– Cathy Park Hong
It doesn’t matter whether we have a little or long way to go. It just matters that we practice.
– Charlotte Joko Beck
We are captives, even if our wheat grows beyond the fences, and swallows rise from our broken chains. We are captives of what we love, what we desire, and what we are.
– Mahmoud Darwish
External triggers like people, places, and sounds can control your emotions if you’re not aware of it.
– Brad Schipke
Oppressed people, whatever their level of formal education, have the ability to understand and interpret the world around them, to see the world for what it is, and move to transform it.
– Ella Baker
The fact that human beings have the capacity to recognize themselves as a manifestation of the entire cosmos opens up a possibility that, if embraced, may help us through the crises that now confront us.
– David Loy
While we have the gift of life, it seems to me the only tragedy is to allow part of us to die – whether it is our spirit, our creativity or our glorious uniqueness.
– Gilda Radner
No one has the right to be sorry for himself for a misfortune that strikes everyone.
– Marcus Tullius Cicero
I said: I will not serve. That was years ago. Now I’m buried under the things I refused to carry.
– Zbigniew Herbert
The game is being able to recognize a good idea when you rarely get it. Opportunity comes to the prepared mind.
– Charlie Munger
Some of us grew up learning how to read faces before we could read books.
– Rudy Francisco
Good timber does not grow with ease; the stronger the wind, the stronger the trees.
– Thomas S. Monson
What is life but an unpleasant interruption to a peaceful nonexistence.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
I want to sink deep, deep down, to that mysterious place where thought ceases, and soul speaks.
– Clarice Lispector
Time, in all crises, is usually the ingredient missing to make a solution. It is best supplied by an agreement on a pause.
– John Keegan
The world must be romanticized. Only in that way will we rediscover its original meaning.
– Novalis
I am full of beginnings I will never finish.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.
– Wallace Stevens
For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.
– Kahlil Gibran
Growth and comfort do not coexist.
– Ginny Rometty
I believe in the virtue of small numbers. The world will be saved by the few.
– Andrè Gide
I keep dreaming in languages I’ve never spoken.
– upile chisala
The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.
– John Green, Looking for Alaska
I wanted to be held, but I built walls that looked like thrones.
– Donna Ashworth
You too must not count too much on your reality as you feel it today, since like yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow.
– Luigi Pirandello
There are rooms in me I have not entered in years. Dust speaks louder than memory.
– Sabrina Benaim
The ache does not ask permission. It just arrives. Like winter.
– Iain S. Thomas
Words are free. It’s how you use them that may cost you.
– Unknown
An old man said: I never wanted work that was useful to me but loss to my brother. For I have this expectation, that what helps my brother is fruitful for me.
– Desert Father in Desert Wisdom by Desert Fathers, Yushi Nomura
Some people are born with a piece missing. You feel it all the time, like a hand outstretched to something you can’t reach.
– Ocean Vuong
There is a loneliness so deep, it echoes backwards in time.
– Iain S. Thomas
Some days I feel like a museum of all the people I’ve been.
– Caitlyn Siehl
When infinite intelligence finds infinite perfections in itself, infinite stability and integrity of character are assured.
– William Still
The parts of me I saved for later have started to rot.
– Caitlyn Siehl
You cannot silence a storm and call it peace.
– Nikita Gill
The more I look at conflicts in the world, the more I hear Toni Morrison saying, ‘If you can only be tall because somebody’s on their knees, then you have a very serious problem’.
– John Di Spirito
I don’t know if I’m becoming or unraveling. Maybe both.
– Della Hicks-Wilson
I write in a borrowed tongue, but the ache is mine.
– Unknown
Be careful how you interpret the world; it is like that.
– Erich Heller
I do not bloom gently. I fracture. Then grow.
– Noor Unnahar
My shoes carry dust from all the places I ran from.
– Ijeoma Umebinyuo
Some people survive by fading. By folding in until only the outline remains.
– Ayesha A. Siddiqi
I keep trying to become someone who no longer flinches at their own reflection.
– Fortesa Latifi
My joy never came clean.
It always crawled out of the wreckage.
– Lora Mathis
I became the night so no one would ask why I wasn’t shining.
– Noor Unnahar
Whoever eats less, his thoughts become pure.
– Imam Ali
Some ghosts don’t haunt. They sit quietly beside you and grow with you.
– Nikita Gill
I look down at my hands and they do not know me.
– Clarice Lispector
Even when I’m here, I’m not entirely here.
– Ocean Vuong
I do not want to be whole in a world that thrives on my breaking.
– Alysia Harris
My sadness is ancestral. It hums in my bones like lullabies meant for no one.
– Ijeoma Umebinyuo
Even the language in my head sounds borrowed.
– Noor Unnahar
You’ve got to be brave and you’ve got to be bold. Brave enough to take your chance on your own discrimination, what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s good and what’s bad.
– Robert Frost
Sometimes I’m so outside of myself, I forget how to get back in.
– Nayyirah Waheed
He said he supposed that there must be something in poetry, if a girl like me spent the day looking for her.
– Sylvia Plath
One of the most powerful ways to regulate your nervous system isn’t in a supplement bottle or high-tech therapy. It’s walking.
When you move rhythmically (like walking at a steady pace) you’re activating ancient wiring in your brainstem that tells your body, “You’re safe.”
These built-in movement circuits (called central pattern generators) are like autopilot systems. They help you walk, breathe, and even chew without needing to think about it. When you engage them through walking, they send calming signals throughout your nervous system.
That rhythmic motion also turns on your vagus nerve, a long nerve that connects your brain to your heart, lungs, and gut. It’s like a relaxation switch. When the vagus nerve is stimulated, your heart rate slows down, your digestion improves, your stress hormones drop, and you feel more grounded.
You also boost something called heart rate variability, a measure of how flexible and resilient your nervous system is. Higher HRV means your body can handle stress better and recover faster.
So the next time you feel anxious, overwhelmed, or disconnected, don’t underestimate the power of a walk.
– Mark Hyman, M.D.
My bookshelf holds the parts of me I couldn’t say aloud.
– Nikita Gill
The more we strive for the perfect body, the more we find ourselves disconnected from our body.
– Marc David
One’s urgency to find the truth, one’s immediacy, one’s demand, puts the background in abeyance; one’s intensity to find out is so strong that the background ceases to interfere.
– Krishnamurti
To shrug it all off and wipe it clean — every annoyance and distraction — and reach utter stillness.
– Marcus Aurelius
If you hear that voice urging you to the page, listen to it. Make time in your life to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard). Believe you have something to say. The world is waiting for your words.
– Sarah Sentilles
To dream of freedom is the first act of resistance; for every movement toward liberation begins in the imagination of a world unbound.
– @turnthepagewithus
I wanted to be held, but I kept becoming sharp.
– Blythe Baird
She kept trying to erase herself, but left fingerprints everywhere.
– Kait Rokowski
Sometimes I wear grief like a gown and pretend it’s silk.
– Noor Unnahar
Christianity, by allying itself with temporal power in the days of Constantine, and by continuing to develop in such conditions, has become completely distorted, and has ceased to be Christian altogether.
– Leo Tolstoy
My soul has wandered off without me again.
– Alysia Harris
Let us be those creative dissenters who will call our beloved nation to a higher destiny. To a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humanness.
– Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
If you can’t treat someone from another gender, race, religion, or country with dignity and respect, then you are the one that needs to get out of America.
– LT. Gen. Jay Silver
I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end.
– Gilda Radner
Revolution is not a one time event.
– Audre Lorde
You should always step back to let people experience the long-term consequences of their short-term thinking.
– a.Nichole
And the night, far from being frightful, was lovely beyond thought, for the stars were close, and although there was no moon the starlight made a silver glow in the sky…In the night the Bad Lands had become Good Lands. I can’t explain it. That’s how it was.
– John Steinbeck
There is no one on this earth who I have hatred for, but there are many people that I have nothing for.
– Morgan Richard Olivier
History is not moved by the pusillanimous critiques of the fearful
And it’s not bravery to accept your oppression as inevitable
A lot of y’all have been brainwashed into nihilism….and I hate that for you.
– @patriciadeanna
You’d be a lot further in life if you didn’t let people push their fears, projections, and limitations onto YOUR path.
– a.Nichole
Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from themselves; universal too is the shy concealment of this haste because everyone wants to seem content and would like to deceive more sharp-eyed observers as to the wretchedness he feels.
– Nietzsche
Nowadays people are born to find fault. When they look at Achilles, they see only his heel.
– Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
To build something that truly matters, you have to obsess over every detail.
– Anne Wojcicki
Lately I’ve been praying to Muhammad,
Moses, Krishna, Buddha, Baha’u’llah, Zoroaster, Jesus—
Why be choosy?
I ask any source of true love
And great joy
To throw me as many bones
As they might.
Sometimes I pray to Mozart, Bach or Galileo
To pour music or the stars
Through me.
Often I pray to Tahirih,
A great Persian poet and feminist
Of the 1800’s who would remove
Her veil when addressing men
And was martyred
For speaking the irrepressible truth
In her heart
At age 38.
Her final words were,
“You can kill me as soon as you like,
But you will never stop
The emancipation of women.”
I often ask Hafez for a dance
And we go for the most poetic whirls.
Sometimes I ask Rumi
That he pluck me an ancient,
Everblooming rose
And I crush its scent
Onto the page.
I have a crush on Kahlil Gibran
And ask that he pass me
Inspired love notes.
I pray to Harriet Tubman,
That queen of heroism,
For courage
And to Einstein
For out of this world ideas.
Inspiration is not elitist.
There is no muse
That is off limits,
No genius you should not approach
And ask to be yours.
Oh, beseech whoever you might
That the master keys
That open all hearts
Are put in your care,
That your particularly necessary
Style of expression
May open new portals of beauty
To the eyes of the world.
Hobnob with all the great
Dead poets,
Thinkers,
Lovers,
Artists,
Heroes of justice,
Leaders of truth.
They still want a place
To pour their wonder
Into the world
And you are a worthy vessel.
It’s an open bar in the sky.
Approach thirsty,
And ask!
– Chelan Harkin
Some things are unchangeably wild.
– Mary Oliver
Serenity in eyes. Wildness in bones.
– Armaan
There is a phrase used by the Mexihcas: ‘The person who doesn’t remember their dreams is one of the living dead, as they have no control over their life when they’re awake.’
[…]
The main reasons to become a dreamer, according to tradition, are to deal with your past lives and the fragments of yourself that are imprisoned in the underworld, and to prepare yourself for your next death. A person who is able to dream consciously will die consciously.
– [Sergio Magana, The Toltec Secret: Dreaming Practices of the Ancient Mexicans]
If we cannot remain present during sleep, if we lose ourselves every night, what chance do we have to be aware when death comes? If we enter our dreams and interact with the mind’s images as if they are real, we should not expect to be free in the state after death. Look to your experience in dreams to know how you will fare in death. Look to your experience of sleep to discover whether or not you are truly awake.
– Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche
I know the terrible truth of darkness, and I say, bless the darkness, for in darkness I stumbled and fell upon the crystal road. After years of doubt, the dark mind turns again to light. In the black mountain of the heart, I found my way home again. I am that light in the darkness. I am a diamond, a bright secret veiled in black cloth. The light beyond heaven is the light within.
– Egyptian Book of the Dead (Awakening Osiris by Normandi Ellis)
But the fear of the inexplicable has not only impoverished the reality of the individual; it has also narrowed the relationship between one human being and another, which has as it were been lifted out of the riverbed of infinite possibilities and set down in a fallow place on the bank, where nothing happens. For it is not only indolence that causes human relationships to be repeated from case to case with such unspeakable monotony and boredom; it is timidity before any new, inconceivable experience, which we don’t think we can deal with. But only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Despite its protests to the contrary, the human being is neither a fixed point nor a singularity. It is a concert of desires and metaphyisical vibrations that are received and interpreted as flesh, form and vision.
– Richard Gavin
The unsaid, for me, exerts great power.
– Louise Glück
A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space.
– Anne Carson
She said,
When you see these horrible images why do you stay with them?
Why keep watching? Why not go away? I was amazed.
Go away where? I said.
– Anne Carson
If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name.
– Anne Carson
It is generally anger dreams that occupy my nights now.
This is not uncommon after loss of love—
blue and black and red blasting the crater open.
I am interested in anger.
– Anne Carson
The realization of what I am occurs in the timeless awareness which does not stimulate nor delude. I create a field without self or center, a field where even death becomes only analogy. I desire no results. I merely permit this field which has no goals nor desires, no perfections nor even visions of achievements. In that field, omnipresent primal awareness is all. It is the light which pours through the windows of my universe.
– Frank Herbert
…I, on the other hand, feel that words are mostly useful if they open for me a glimpse of attractive and undiscovered places. But the use of words is so little understood by a civilization which still believes unquestioningly in a mechanical universe of absolute cause and effect—obviously reducible to one single root-cause and one primary seminal-effect.
– Frank Herbert
According to myth, when the astronauts landed, the moon rang like a bell. I’d probably live on the moon except I think I’d miss the moonlight, driving my rover from crater to crater in earthshine. A reasonable excuse to avoid visiting hours at assisted living. In space, no one can hear you lying to your mom. Can’t make it, Mom. It’s a really long schlep. A day room and a visitor’s pass. The burden and its domestic infrastructure. The coffee’s weak and the coffee cake’s imaginary. You’re not missing anything. Some dream of tall things—ladders and giraffes. My dreams are filled with bricks, or things in the shape of bricks: a cow, a car, a refrigerator box. Even my imagination sleeps when I sleep and why not rest? Why crash the party on the astral plane? You’ll just be too tired to go to the real party later. Have you ever eaten Swedish meatballs at a dream party? They taste like your blanket because they are your blanket. Why is it we believe we only have one soul? Because it’s easier to set the table for one. And you can sing your dinner tune to yourself while you eat over the sink. The throat of the sink: silent. The throat of the argument: more silverware, a tablecloth, more gratitude. A kid under a tablecloth insists he’s a ghost. A table underneath a tablecloth is, I guess, like the rest of us, only pretending to be invisible. Or worse: dressed for work and not in the mood for, you know, how it all plays out. When I grow up, I’m going to be a truck, says the kid underneath the tablecloth, and that’s one way to deflect the weight of the inevitable, to insist on possibility in the face of grown-ups and the pumice of their compromises. The trees die standing. My Spanish teacher told me this. I had conjugated the verbs beforehand and taped them to the bottom of my sneaker. Cheater, yes. Also uninvested in the outcome. She could tell. Nothing to be done about it. Verbs of action and verbs of being. We, neither of us, were doing much anyway and the room was too hot. I think she meant uproot, which is a good thing to mean but a difficult thing to hear when you’re living under someone else’s roof. How do I tell you how I got here without getting trapped in the past? I suppose that’s a bigger question than I expected. He was such a colicky baby. Always fussing and crying. As if he didn’t want to be here. No, Mom. I don’t remember. And yes, it’s difficult to be here. Well, do what you can. It gets dark fast. Dear East Coast, I’m sorry it’s getting dark. It must be problematic, living in the future, always a few steps ahead, knowing things you shouldn’t say since they haven’t happened to the rest of us yet. And Poland? I don’t dare wonder what you know about tomorrow. Your grandma was from Poland. I know, Mom. And Grandpa was handsome and you were the smart one and the pretty one. Still am. Poor Barbara. Don’t start. Remember how you promised you wouldn’t write about me while I was alive? Yes, I remember. So if you’re writing about me now, that must mean something. You’re not sticking around for the end, then. You’re doing fine, Squish. And yes, I miss you, too. Astronaut, tell me about your home planet. Astronaut, text me when you land.
– Richard Siken
I think that a lot of what we do as artists or as writers comes directly from forms of play that we learned when we were younger. I think one thing that’s central in playing is a suspension of the ordinary rules, and the willingness to be troubled by new rules that are made up that are not the real world’s rules, but rules that you set up as problems for yourself. I think that writing is a game like that, a more open-ended game and one without a clear goal, or often without a clear sense of satisfaction when you finish it. A lot of the play that I used to do as a child doesn’t qualify as a full game.
One of these hybrid things that I did as a kid was called “being wolves,” and there were rules to being wolves, and the rules were also changeable, and the goal was always to change the rules in a way that would make being a wolf more exciting but without ceasing to be a wolf. I don’t know why it was so easy to occupy that shared space and sort of understand with whoever you’re playing with which things violated the rules and which didn’t, but I think that on my own as a writer, I sort of do both sides of that when I write by myself. I propose something to myself, and then the other part of me shuts it down or takes it up.
– Alexandra Kleeman
I want to feel all there is to feel, he thought. Let me feel tired, now, let me feel tired. I mustn’t forget, I’m alive, I know I’m alive, I mustn’t forget it tonight or tomorrow or the day after that.
– Ray Bradbury
In vain would we talk about nature, nature doesn’t want this; it is no use to talk about the divine, the divine doesn’t want this, and anyway, no matter how much we want to, we are unable to talk about anything other than ourselves, because we are only capable of talking about history, about the human condition, about that never-changing quality whose essence carries such titillating relevance only for us; otherwise, from the viewpoint of that “divine otherwise,” this essence of ours is, actually, possibly of no consequence whatsoever, for ever and aye.
– László Krasznahorkai
CHORUS
Many are the shapes of things divine.
Many are the unexpected acts of gods.
What we imagined did not come to pass –
God found a way
to be surprising.
That’s how this went.
– Anne Carson
We were born before the wind
Also younger than the sun
Ere the bonnie boat was won
As we sailed into the mystic
Hark, now hear the sailors cry
Smell the sea and feel the sky
Let your soul and spirit fly
Into the mystic
– Van Morrison
when we are old & our hearts have beat within us, let
us go back, & when we have buried our loves, & shed
our bodies piece by piece, & when we have danced
& broken our shoes, & danced, let us go back,
when we have gone mad, & when we have shut
the doors, dismantled our eyes & rifles, let us go back,
when we have drunk the wine & licked our lips
& put our tongues to the inside of the green glass bottle
& laid down our bodies old as trees, streets, let us go back,
when we have told our stories & forgotten our stories,
& set the tables & made the beds, let us go back,
& received other bodies into our bodies, let us go,
when we have entered, & opened,
& opened our mouths, let us go back,
[…] when the poem has been sung,
when the strings & tambourines,
when all the birds have gathered at the window, let us go,
let us go back there, let us go back
– Aracelis Girmay
Invisible fish swim this ghost ocean now described by waves of sand, by water-worn rock. Soon the fish will learn to walk. Then humans will come ashore and paint dreams on the dying stone. Then later, much later, the ocean floor will be punctuated by Chevy trucks, carrying the dreamers’ descendants, who are going to the store.
– Joy Harjo
quiet
as a flower
drinking morning tea
– Basho
The man at peace with himself, who accepts himself, contributes an infinitesimal amount to the good of the universe. Attend to your, private and personal conflicts and you will be reducing by one million the world conflict.
– CG Jung
The giving and taking up a poem is a triadic relation … we are always confronted by the poet, the poem, and the audience.
– Muriel Rukeyser
To go out of your mind once a day is tremendously important, because by going out of your mind you come to your senses.
– Alan Watts
True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not only to get out – you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.
– Henry James
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.
– Pedro Medina
Books bear the fingerprints of their owner more than their clothes and shoes.
– Erri De Luca
Everybody does the same
mistake: refusing the means, but wanting the ends.
You want peace and harmony in the world,
but refuse to have them in yourself.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
The underworld is dark and disturbing because it will not become familiar. It will not bend to your ego; it cannot be tamed. What lives there remains forever just beyond rational comprehension. It burns through you like a cleansing fire that brings you to greater humility.
– Robert Moss
As you awaken, your physical appearance changes. Your energy changes. How you see the world changes. How you do things changes. What you prioritize changes. Everything changes. As if to make room for the version of you that can change the world.
– Nika Solé
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet.
– Frank O’Hara
NOTHING is like finally writing a new poem. Typing it up. Editing it. Printing it.
– Bianca Stone
…it is the chief value of legend to mix up the centuries while preserving the sentiment; to see all ages in a sort of splendid foreshortening. That is the use of tradition: it telescopes history.
– G.K. Chesterton
Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back. You’re done. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you want to have lunch with the person. If you keep hitting back, you stay trapped in the nightmare.
– Anne Lamott
Somebody was trying to tell me that CDs are better than vinyl because they don’t have any surface noise. I said, “Listen, mate, life has surface noise.”
– John Peel
Every one of us is a whirlpool in the tide of existence, and wherein every cell in our body, every molecule, every atom is in constant flux, and nothing can be pinned down.
– Alan Watts
We project our inward life outwards. Thus the world around oneself is only beautiful when you’re at peace with the world within you.
– Thomas Ogden
Far beyond your intellect, far beyond your understanding, lies inexhaustible knowledge and wealth, strength and power, peace and joy. Do not use your intellect to find the answers for God and his manifestations. Everything is God.
– Vishnudevananda Saraswati
The only solution for the longing for union is union with the longing.
– James Hillman
dissatisfied —
polishing the new haiku
till nothing is left
– Patricia Neubauer
It is the inner world of man’s personal life which no outside situation can injure or destroy.
– Manly P. Hall
when you’re at the far end of a pendulum’s swing, your mind will lie to you and say it’s impossible to go in the other direction without forever getting stuck at the furthest end of the spectrum,,
which is, ironically, how you get stuck at the far end of the spectrum you’re at
– River Kenna
When we start to suffer, it tells us something very valuable. It means that we are not seeing the truth, and we are not relating from the truth. It’s a beautiful pointer. It never fails.
– Adyashanti
Paris was completely the past; on the other hand, it was completely the future; and those two aspects combined to form a perfect present.
– TS Eliot
All things are inventions of holiness.
Some more rascally than others.
I’m on that list too,
though I don’t know exactly where.
– Mary Oliver
When your life is filled with the desire to see the holiness in everyday life, something magical happens: Ordinary life becomes extraordinary, and the very process of life begins to nourish your soul.
– Rabbi Harold S Kushner
Foucault was like a wizard, so erudite.
– Elias Khoury
I write to embody the world as I witness it, and to challenge ideologies. To show how a microcosm represents a greater entity whilst navigating barriers in both form and subject matter.
– Black Bough Poetry / Barddoniaeth Y Gangen Ddu
Many a morning I have wakened dizzy with mysterious good news … in that strange sunlight and moonlight that is at the other side of darkness, I live a second life.
– JB Priestley
We survivors speak to the dead
because the living won’t listen to us.
– Bunkong Tuon
Defy the law! –
Write the heartbroken
poetry of the World!
– Jack Kerouac
A ship there sails like a wingéd swan,
and the foam is white on the waters wan,
and one there stands with bright helm on
that the winds have brought to Heorot.
– Tolkien, The Lay of Beowulf I (Beowulf and Grendel)
there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted-
– Mary Oliver
The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague.
– William James
He is not like other children, not cruel, or savage. For this very reason he is called ‘strange.’ A child who is mature, in the sense that the heart is mature, is always, I have observed, called deficient.
– Djuna Barnes
We know that every time a human being makes real progress in consciousness, makes this evolutionary jump toward a higher level of consciousness, the whole world for him has changed; relationships change and the outlook on the outer world and on his own situation changes.
– Marie- Louise von Franz
It made me feel happier to think of you living there by the sea, free and warm in bright sunlight, while we were here, apprehensive about small things.
– Abdulrazak Gurnah
A depression can change only if we are able to endure and accept it. We can change nothing if we haven’t accepted it. If we resist, it will only get worse. In accepting the depression, we are no longer able to hold the whole world responsible for it, and then it can change.
– CG Jung
You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you’re merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that’s always easiest.
– John Berryman
There is but one reality: drink.
– Les Misérables, Victor Hugo
We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject. For both have labored in the search for truth and both have helped us in the finding of it.
– Thomas Aquinas
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original.
– C.S. Lewis
LOVE’S MAP
Your face more than others’ faces
Maps the half-remembered places
I have come to while I slept
-Continents a dream had kept
Secret from all waking folk
Till to your face I awoke
And remembered then the shore,
And the dark interior.
– Donald Justice
Each person does see the world in a different way. There is not a single, unifying, objective truth. We’re all limited by our perspective.
– Siri Hustvedt
Fear
Fear passes from man to man
Unknowing,
As one leaf passes its shudder
To another.
All at once the whole tree is trembling
And there is no sign of the wind.
– Charles Simic
While in a Zoom Meeting Regarding the Work
Stoppage Set to Begin Tomorrow at 5 a.m.
by Ayokunle Falomo
The way he’s drumming tells me he might
be someone I’d love, were I to have met him,
say, on a Saturday afternoon in a park, where
I might have, seeing him sweat, offered him
a bottle of water before asking if I can play
for a while, and as I leave, my face beaming,
I’ll try to remember the last time my palms
smacked the processed hide of an animal.
Only then would I have loved him. I don’t
hate him —no, not exactly —but like a man
hell-bent on killing a fly, I am annoyed at his
joy, what makes him drum, which is a disturbance.
Is it hate, what I am merely calling annoyance?
Look. I know how to be grateful for every
sound the living make, even when it punctures
through the quiet space I often desire to
place my body in. In the apartment I lived in
before this one, a neighbor sang, for months,
almost every Saturday, from the other side
of the wall that separated us, which meant
she was alive, which was a thing I was and
still am grateful for, her being alive, but also
for the songs she sang even though I did not
think her a good singer, which she was not,
but oh she sang, this neighbor I never met,
unbothered, I assume by what her neighbors
might have thought of her noise, and it was
noise, her singing, for she struggled to reach
certain notes but she kept singing as she
strummed and did not stop even when she
audibly ran out of breath and it is only now
it dawned on me that to have heard her sing,
and to remember it now, means I am alive.
FABLE
Then I looked down and saw
the world I was entering,
that would be my home.
And I turned to my companion,
and I said Where are we?
And he replied Nirvana.
And I said again But the light
will give us no peace.
– Louise Glück
This summer I want to do a lot of work because I really haven’t done anything for ages and there are a couple things I’d like to finish before I die.
– Elizabeth Bishop
FAME
by Phillis Levin
I will disappear
Into the sea and not be
Heard from: by moonlight
Rise up galloping upon
A blue horse born in my blood.
It is significant that the ‘normal’ scientific materialist view of the body is similar to that found in schizophrenia. Schizophrenic subjects routinely see themselves as machines—often robots, computers, or cameras.
– Iain McGilchrist
Enlightenment isn’t useful if you can’t apply it when it counts.
– Zen Master Bon Yeon
the secret ingredient in yoga, tai chi, dance, fighting, and ultimately any movement is that if you continuously move intentionally as one irreducible system, it’s very hard to remain a fragmented ego.
– Ruben Laukkonen
He sighed. “The clouds I can handle. But I can’t fight with an eclipse.”
– Stephenie Meyer
today he understood that she had been genuine with him — that she had been what she was, and that he owed her a great deal.
– Albert Camus
…where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god…
– Joseph Campbell
And there are always those who will watch Alexandria burn. There always have been. There always will be. So there are always guardians.
– Erin Morgenstern
I have a favourite saint. I will tell you his name. It is Saint Sebastian, that youth at the stake, who, pierced by swords and arrows from all sides, smiles amidst his agony. Grace in suffering: that is the heroism symbolized by St. Sebastian. The image may be bold, but I am tempted to claim this heroism for the German mind and for German art, and to suppose that the international honour fallen to Germany’s literary achievement was given with this sublime heroism in mind. Through her poetry Germany has exhibited grace in suffering.
– Thomas Mann
We are witnessing a capitalist class so drunk on its power that it has become incapable of recognizing its interests…So contemptuous of the institutions that created their wealth that they are destroying the conditions that make capitalism possible.
– Bill Kristol
The lesser seeming original in the blind
Forward of the eye that, in its backward, sees
The greater seeming of the major mind.
– Wallace Stevens
That is why I like novels: instead of heroes they have people in them.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
When I speak of the great love of my life, I don’t mean the degree to which someone loved me. I mean how madly, desperately I was in love. . . .
– Edmund White
The universal was born, it is said, from spontaneous symmetry breaking . . . Orientation can thus be said to be originary, invariable, irreducible, so constantly physical that it becomes metaphysical.
– Michael Serres
Rejoice in the Buddha’s awakening—and see that same potential in yourself.
– Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
In any event, it is always best to cultivate self-reliance and tell saviors to save themselves.
– Robert Greene
There may be some subtle differences in how we understand religion, between East and West. How I understand religion usually is that religion begins with an answer. And then you just follow that answer. Whereas spirituality begins with questions, like science. I like the notion of a spiritual quest. In religion, loosely speaking, there can also be a sense of questioning.
– Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche
It is not often that nations learn from the past, even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it.
– Henry Kissinger
If I know anything about you
(and I do) it’s that you didn’t lose faith
until the first time you entered a church.
– Zach Goldberg
DAISIES
It is possible, I suppose that sometime
we will learn everything
there is to learn: what the world is, for example,
and what it means. I think this as I am crossing
from one field to another, in summer, and the
mockingbird is mocking me, as one who either
knows enough already or knows enough to be
perfectly content not knowing. Song being born
of quest he knows this: he must turn silent
were he suddenly assaulted with answers. Instead
oh hear his wild, caustic, tender warbling ceaselessly
unanswered. At my feet the white-petalled daisies display
the small suns of their center piece, their – if you don’t
mind my saying so – their hearts. Of course
I could be wrong, perhaps their hearts are pale and
narrow and hidden in the roots. What do I know?
But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given,
to see what is plain; what the sun lights up willingly;
for example – I think this
as I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch –
the suitability of the field for the daisies, and the
daisies for the field.
– Mary Oliver
The canyon is a ladder to the plain. The valley is pale in the end of July, when the corn and melons come of age and slowly the fields are made ready for the yield, and a faint, false air of autumn—an illusion still in the land—rises somewhere away in the high north country, a vague suspicion of red and yellow on the farthest summits. And the town lies out like a scattering of bones in the heart of the land, low in the valley, where the earth is a kiln and the soil is carried here and there in the wind and all harvests are a poor survival of the seed. It is a remote place, and divided from the rest of the world by a great forked range of mountains on the north and west; by wasteland on the south and east, a region of dunes and thorns and burning columns of air; and more than these by time and silence.
– N. Scott Momaday
All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and change is painful.
– Flannery O’Connor
Spun
I know hands that leapt from childhood to old age
youth was never for them however they held it
everything happened to them early or late
end of morning never found them
the entire day was a long evening
in August
they played no instrument for when would they have learned
if not in childhood
everything they did displayed impetuous prudence
and smelled of sand
they and their clumsy skills were their own age
with its two seasons
– W.S. Merwin
The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine.
– George Bernard Shaw
The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them.
– P.D. Ouspensky
I wonder if there might not be another idea of human order than repression, another notion of human virtue than self-control, another kind of human self than one based on dissociation of inside and outside. Or indeed, another human essence than self.
– Anne Carson
Attention is malleable. We can intensify it, shift it either voluntarily or involuntarily. We can soften it, diffuse it. We can deploy global attention toward tangible external objects, or to their intangible attributes. We can direct attention internally to retrieve items that we have stored in memory. We can sustain attention by infusing a component of motivation, either from the top-down (by intention) or by much more subtler means related to our habitual ongoing attitudes.
– James H. Austin
They recognized each other like italics.
– Anne Carson
O Thebes! garland yourself
in all the green there is —
ivy green,
olive green,
fennel green,
growing green,
yearning green,
wet sap green,
new grape green,
green of youth and green of branches,
green of mint and green of marsh grass,
green of tea leaves, oak and pine,
green of washed needles and early rain,
green of weeds and green of oceans,
green of bottles, ferns and apples,
green of dawn-soaked dew and slender green of roots,
green fresh out of pools,
green slipped under fools,
green of the green fuse,
green of the honeyed muse,
green of the rough caress of ritual,
green undaunted by reason or delirium,
green of jealous joy,
green of the secret holy violence of the thyrsos,
green of the sacred iridescence of the dancе —
and let all the land of Thebes dance!
with Dionysos leading,
to the mountains!
to the mountains!
where the mob of women waits!
They’ve forsaken their shuttles,
they’ve left their looms,
they’ve dropped their aprons
and taken up their stations
on Dionysos’ mountain!
– Anne Carson
Water is something you cannot hold. Like men. I have tried, Father, brother, lover, true friends, hungry ghosts and God, one by one all took themselves out of my hands.
– Anne Carson
The air is not a random bunch of gases simply drawn to earth by the earth’s gravity, but an elixir generated by the soils, the oceans, and the numberless organisms that inhabit this world, each creature exchanging certain ingredients for others as it inhales and exhales, drinking the sunlight with our leaves or filtering the water with our gills, all of us contributing to the composition of this phantasmagoric brew, circulating it steadily between us and nourishing ourselves on its magic, generating ourselves from its substance. It is as endemic to the earth as the sandstone beneath my boots. Perhaps we should add the letter i to our planet’s name, and call it “Eairth,” in order to remind ourselves that the “air” is entirely a part of the earth, and the i, the I or self, is wholly immersed in that fluid element.
– David Abram
A corrupt system is when 155 million Americans are represented by 53 MAGA Senators but 200 million Americans are represented by only 47 Democratic Senators—so the will of 155 million is enforced on the will of 200 milion. Tyranny of the minority is not a functioning Republic, it’s an aspiring Autocracy. A corrupt system is when you need 60 Senate votes to protect voting rights, universal healthcare, reproductive rights, climate justice, LGBTQ rights, immigration justice, and a living wage—but only 51 votes to strip them all away.
– TCinLA
…I can say almost anything about you,
O Big Idea, and with each epithet,
Create new reasons to believe or doubt you,
Black Hole, White Hole, Presidential Jet.
– Mark Jarman
I drove with all the windows open. The wind grew brisk as I headed out of the city, the surroundings greener. The simmering heat of the lawns and the smell of dry dirt came on stronger; the clouds were outlined sharp against the sky. Fantastic weather. Perfect for taking a little summer day trip with a girl somewhere. I thought about the cool sea and the hot sands. And then I thought of a cozy air-conditioned room with crisp blue sheets on the bed. That’s all. Aside from that, I didn’t think about a thing. My head was all beach and blue sheets.
– Haruki Murakami
Let No Charitable Hope
by Elinor Wylie
Now let no charitable hope
Confuse my mind with images
Of eagle and of antelope
I am in nature none of these
I am, being human, born alone,
I am, being woman, hard beset,
I live by squeezing a stone
The little nourishment I get.
In masks outrageous and austere
The years go by in single file;
But none has merited my fear,
And none has quite escaped my smile.
The Silence Now
by May Sarton
These days the silence is immense.
It is there deep down, not to be escaped.
The twittering flight of gold finches,
The three crows cawing in the distance
Only brush the surface of this silence
Full of mourning, the long drawn-out
Tug and sigh of waters never still—
The ocean out there and the inner ocean.
Only animals comfort because they live
In the present and cannot drag us down
Into those caverns of memory full of loss.
They pay no attention to the thunder
Of distant waves. My dog’s eager eyes
Watch me as I sit by the window thinking.
At the bottom of the silence what lies in wait?
Is it love? Is it death? Too early or too late?
What is it I can have that I still want?
My swift response is to what cannot stay,
The dying daffodils, peonies on the way,
Iris just opening, lilac turning brown
In the immense silence where I live alone.
It is the transient that touches me, old,
Those light-shot clouds as the sky clears,
A passing glory can still move to tears,
Moments of pure joy like some fairy gold
Too evanescent to be kept or told.
And the cat’s soft footfall on the stair
Keeps me alive, makes Nowhere into Here.
A the bottom of the silence it is she
Who speaks of an eternal Now to me.
Silence hangs in the air.
Nothing speaks but the sound
of certain rivers continuing underground.
– Muriel Rukeyser
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
The implications of synchronicity will make you dizzy if you really reflect on them. They suggest that the psyche and the outer universe are not as unrelated as conventional psychology would have us believe. They mirror each other and are ultimately inseparable.
– Steven Forrest
I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.
– Flannery O’Connor
One of the immutable laws of being human is that the people who show up are the right people.
– Anne Lamott
The centuries of our life last scarcely seconds. Scarcely do seconds last loves.
– Robert Desnos (translated by Mary Ann Caws)
We only know continuity, and never non-continuity.
– Krishnamurti
You speak of paths
as if you were somewhere
and the Self somewhere else
and you had to go and reach it.
But in fact the Self
is here and now
and you are that always
– Ramana Maharshi
I told her I was never one side or the other—merely a river too young to brave the journey home.
– @blackboughpoems
Of the two undiscovered countries, Life and Death,
Which one lies the closer to God?
– Jay Hopler
Everyone needs a place. It shouldn’t be inside of someone else.
– Richard Siken
The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Sometimes healing means letting go of anger. Other times it just means letting go of the crippling guilt you feel around your perfectly justified anger.
– Heidi Priebe
It’s truly amazing how intuitive the body is. How consistently it’s showing you the way forward. How clearly it tells you when you’re forcing something or have stepped off track. How good it feels to be aligned. What a magnificent thing.
– Nika Solé
When we remove ego, we’re left with what is real. What replaces ego is humility, yes—but rock-hard humility and confidence.
– Ryan Holiday
I hate all politics. I don’t like either political party. One should not belong to them – one should be an individual, standing in the middle. Anyone that belongs to a party stops thinking.
– Ray Bradbury
Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious.
There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.
– Carl Jung
Most people confuse “self-knowledge” with knowledge of their conscious ego-personalities. Anyone who has any ego-consciousness at all takes it for granted that he knows himself. But the ego knows only its own contents, not the unconscious and its contents.
– Carl G. Jung
You don’t know luxury until you know peace. There is nothing more lavish than a sense of peace that’s untouchable.
– Nika Solé
little by little
the summer night
turns purple dawn
– Ogawa
We train on the cushion so that, when life shows up, our direction is clear—for us and for all beings.
– Zen Master Bon Yeon
The world pushes you into poetry by withdrawing something, not giving it. The greatest poems are not written by the woman who got that last kiss; they are written by the woman who didn’t.
– Martin Shaw
One must be beyond the heavens of sensual existence, formish existence, and formless existence to be an arahant, the highest kind of person. It is necessary to be above heaven in all its meanings in order to be totally free, liberated from dukkha.
– Buddhadasa Bhikkhu
Before we can be cured we must want to be cured.
– C. S. Lewis
If Jesus saves, he must be saving up for something big…
– Kim Addonizio
Right understanding is the root of right living.
The more you understand spiritual truth, the more your choices and karma align with peace.
The closer you get to your intrinsic quality of peace, the more you spread it around the world. …
– Brahma Kumaris
…I am introducing the term pathologizing to mean the psyche’s autonomous ability to create illness, morbidity, disorder, abnormality, and suffering in any aspect of its behavior and to experience and imagine life through this deformed and afflicted perspective.
– Hillman
There is no single moment when the world dissipates and becomes unreal. Instead, there are constellations, (…) the feeling of disconnected facts linking together, the burnt scent of overworked circuits, the excruciating loneliness.
– Alina Stefanescu
what a pain!
among chrysanthemums too
blue bloods win
– Kobayashi Issa
Have it your way Uni-verse, I surrender and trust You.
– Mastin Kipp
Wild one, how can I help; as I watch you limp, out there on the street?
Food, we have given; and as for shelter, you know well our yard.
Yet I fear, you need much more than this; but I know not, the words to ask.
– @AmericanSijo
I can have ten versions of one line … The word I chose is perfectly good, but for some reason, it’s rarely good enough … It’s mystifying, the thing that keeps you going forward, ripping up, ripping up, ripping up. What are you looking for?
– Fanny Howe
a poem,
uninstalls itself
knowingly
– Laura Kerr
We felt everywhere in New Mexico, [that] while to us the country was new, in very fact this land of poco tiempo is an old, old land,
– Florence Merriam Bailey, Naturalist
The phrase ‘close reading’ sounds as if you’re looking at the text with a microscope from outside, but I would rather think of a close reader as someone who goes inside a room and describes the architecture.
– Helen Vendler
To bring change to the world,
we have to bring change to ourselves.
– Shirin Ebadi
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
– Anaïs Nin
The forlorn hope is not only a real hope, it is the only real hope of mankind.
– G.K. Chesterton
Oft hope is born, when all is forlorn.
– Tolkien, The Return of the King
Fanaticism is always a sign that one has adopted one of a pair of opposites at the expense of the other. The high energy of fanaticism is a frantic effort to keep one half of the truth at bay while the other half takes control.
– Robert A. Johnson
For me, being political is discussing literature.
– Dany Laferrière
alone again
on the Pacific shore …
winter moonlight
forming a narrow path
to the land I left behind
– Chen-ou Liu
at the top
of the Ferris wheel
a boy
stretches both his arms
to touch summer stars
– Chen-ou Liu
Thinking while resting in the natural state.
– Thrangu Rinpoche
When you write about ordinary people and ordinary lives, or so-called ordinary people… it is going to have political resonance.
– Donal Ryan
Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which can be opened by dialing a certain word or number, so that no force can open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it is hit upon any child can open it.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
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
They lose the day in waiting for the night.
– Seneca
The old world came back, like an old photograph transforming. A pang of recognition hit him. He was nothing if not this.
– Suzanne Larsen
As far as we know, no librarians have had a multi-million dollar wedding on a private island.
– @lapubliclibrary
For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
– Milan Kundera
That’s been the miracle of parenting: the way it yanks you out of your head and plants you firmly in life. Just like meditating, you cannot parent conceptually.
– Alex Olshonsky
It was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.
– Joseph Heller
Before I arrived in sight of it, all that remained of day was a beamless amber light along the west: but I could see every pebble on the path, and every blade of grass, by that splendid moon.
– Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.
– Marcus Aurelius
My loneliness was born when men praised my talkative faults and blamed my silent virtues.
– Kahlil Gibran
They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.
– Frida Kahlo
Drink only from the cup that reflects your true face.
– unknown author
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other.
– Roland Barthes
If the architects that built a house without any doors or windows don’t admit that that’s the house they built, and continue to say, ‘No it’s your fault for not being able to see into it,’ then I don’t understand how we’re supposed to move forward!
– Jon Stewart
Ah! when shall all men’s good Be each man’s rule, and universal Peace Lie like a shaft of light across the land…
– Alfred Lord Tennyson
We can learn something new anytime we believe we can.
– Virginia Satir
Maybe we’re all just stories in the end.
– Doctor Who
Your level of success will rarely exceed your level of personal development.
– Hal Elrod
On the inside we come to know who and what and how we love and what we can do to deepen that love; only from the outside, and only by looking back, does it look like courage.
– David Whyte
So many scholars have spent so much time trying to establish whether Arthur existed at all that they have lost track of the single truth that he exists over and over.
– John Steinbeck
Don’t reserve your kindest praise for a person until their eulogy. Tell them while they are alive, when it makes a difference to them. Write a letter they can keep.
– Kevin Kelly
Your battles inspired me – not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.
– James Joyce
The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.
– Tom Waits
They kick their heels
against a pastel past, no
better than the blackened
present.
– Jalen Eutsey
A man who doesn’t trust cannot be trusted.
– James McBride
What is gained from contact with fools? They are friends in a moment, enemies the next. At an occasion for being pleased they get angry. The multitude of people are impossible to satisfy.
– Śāntideva
Because we categorise all objects, there is the ego. You perceive the wife as wife, the daughter as daughter, the horse as horse and the dog as dog.
They are all Reality only.
– Siddharameshwar Maharaj
The brave man is he who overcomes not only his enemies but his pleasures.
– Democritus
Let no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power.
– Henry George
“Liberté, égalité, fraternité.”
(Liberty, equality, fraternity.)
– French Republic motto,
rooted in the French Revolution
Why I thought I could write a book I have no idea.
– Jane Stern
Art can let us know what’s going on.
– Peter Kuper
Generally, I wouldn’t want to be trapped with other writers, ever.
– Fanny Howe
Give me instead the flame-licked day
lilies opening so hard they are
breaking their own backs
– Richard Scott
Loving Working
by Naomi Shihab Nye
We clean to give space for Art.
– Micaela Miranda, Freedom Theatre, Palestine
Work was a shining refuge when wind sank its tooth
into my mind. Everything we love is going away,
drifting – but you could sweep this stretch of floor,
this patio or porch, gather white stones in a bucket,
rake the patch for future planting, mop the counter
with a rag. Lovely wet gray rag, squeeze it hard
it does so much. Clear the yard of blowing bits of plastic.
The glory in the doing. The breath of the doing.
Sometimes the simplest move kept fear from
fragmenting into no energy at all, or sorrow from
multiplying, or sorrow from being the only person
living in the house.
The world-generating spirit of the father passes into the manifold of earthly experience through a transforming medium — the mother of the world.
– Joseph Campbell
There is nothing that pisses me off more than seeing an elderly person, far beyond retirement age, hunched over and working a cash register at a corporate chain store to pay their bills. This shouldn’t be normal in this country.
– Dan Osborn
Stories congeal around imperial debris as do critiques. So does disqualified knowledge and subjugated genealogies decoupled from the processes of which they were a part.
– Anne Stoler
A SCIENTIST’S ADVICE ON HEALING
by Christy Ducker
Try to accept
this fat red hurt
is your starting point,
in the way a pen must be put to paper
in one particular spot,
then move
beyond
the globby flap
of blame
and past
the mono-sulk
of pain.
Change the subject,
before it’s too late.
Sketch out
what health
you do possess,
what signal-cascades,
what flotilla of cells
circumnavigate you,
then draw yourself back
together again,
in a language
of your own.
Your body’s talk
is loose as lymph —
it’ll have you open out
as a tree,
or sneak up on pain
as assassin,
sidekick,
or wolf.
Encourage this
for healing won’t come at you
straight.
Embrace the lack of heroics —
this isn’t Hollywood,
it’s you,
in a plot
that may
or may not resolve
When Latin fails,
only silence speaks—
with subtitles
written in the language of love.
– @chandanas
entering old age
I look less for truth
but find it more —
a mid-winter thaw reveals
pieces of sky
– George Swede
I hate deserts. I don’t like what color
they are. I don’t like how they smell.
Fuck a desert. And there my black ass
was, standing in the middle of a cold,
pitch-black desert in January in
stupid-ass Texas.
– Steven Dunn
Soft Medicine
Soft medicine is what I need today—
summer sun filtered by a lemon tree
and cedar chips cushioning each step
across the rocky yard. I need wool socks
and a hoodie zipped up to my chin
in spite of the heat. I need the relief
of dandelion tea wrapping a gauze
of steam around my hands wrapped
around the warm mug. With each sip,
let me find the kind of peace we make
ourselves these days—let me see your face
and not look up at the kitchen clock,
counting down the minutes and seconds
we might have left together.
– James Crews
How good it felt: to want something and
pretend you don’t, and to get it anyway.
– Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz
Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything.
– George Carlin
When the mind is stuck in loops, the world loses its meaning. That’s samsara.
– Michael Stone
If we cannot find a way to make our wounds into sacred wounds, we invariably become cynical, negative, or bitter. This is the storyline of many of the greatest novels, myths, and stories of every culture. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.
– Richard Rohr
Do not Imitate what is Popular for Acceptance; Practice what is Authentic for the Sake of Your Soul.
– Brendon Burchard
July is a blind date with summer.
– Hal Borland
One goes to psychoanalysis, as one might go to poetry, for better words.
– Adam Phillips
Summer afternoon
a Bach sonata
cools the air
– Sylvia Forges-Ryan
late afternoon drive—
the setting sun
reaches
home first
– @ruralitalics
You start over constantly. In how you think about things. In how you carry yourself. In how you see the world. Starting over is not an age thing. It’s a willingness to evolve thing.
– Nika Solé
A real desire to believe all the good you can of others and to make others as comfortable as you can will solve most of the problems.
– C.S. Lewis
Perhaps there is some wisdom in treating all songs, or for that matter, all experiences, with a certain care and reverence, as if encountering these things for the last Time. I say this not just in the Light of the novel coronavirus.
– Nick Cave
If you want to train for physical austerities, do it for yourself, not for outsiders.
– Epictetus
It is hard enough to free yourself from your own story. Don’t get caught in someone else’s story.
– Leonard Jacobson
Let go of everything, but don’t be indifferent. Let go with reason. Be neutral with mindfulness and wisdom. Whatever can be done, we do it, but our hearts harbor no attachment or aversion to them because attachment is one kind of suffering and aversion is another.
– Ajaan Suchart Abhijāto
To grow in wisdom is a magnificent adventure.
– Manly P. Hall
The dharma is radical if we allow it to be.
– Vimalasara
Emptiness isn’t absence. It’s clarity—like erasing the hard drive and finding freedom.
– Rev. Dosung Yoo
That’s how I’ve written ever since—I start wherever I start, sometimes in the middle, and hope for the best.
– Hanif Kureishi
I think the hardest part about writing is writing.
– Nora Ephron
The easiest practice of reverence I know is simply to sit down somewhere outside, preferably near a body of water, and pay attention for a least twenty minutes. It is not necessary to take on the whole world at first. Just take the three square feet of earth on which you are sitting, paying close attention to everything that lives within that small estate.
There is an inevitable reverence birthed from sitting on three square feet and paying attention for twenty minutes, whether that patch of grass overlooks a dingy, forgotten bus stop in Colombo or the quiet, empty-fullness of a hidden lake near Queenstown. Because when you stop and notice everything that lives in that small estate, your soul can’t help but stir to a slow reverence for life and her magic gifts.
– Barbara Brown Taylor
Words cling to the very core of our memories and lie there in silence until a new desire reawakens them and recharges them with loving energy. That is one of the qualities of love that moves me most, their capacity for transmitting love. Like water, words are a wonderful conductor of energy. And the most powerful, transforming energy is the energy of love.
– Laura Esquivel
What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it – as if the cause depends on you, because it does.
– Bill Moyers
In its true state, mind is naked, immaculate; not made of anything, being of the Voidness; clear, vacuous, without duality, transparent; timeless, uncompounded, unimpeded, colourless; not realizable as a separate thing, but as the unity of all things, yet not composed of them; of one taste, and transcendent over differentiation.
– Padmasambhava
…and although invisible to the eye of reason it must have been very apparent to the clairvoyance of the human heart.
– John Cowper Powy
Maps and poems use different techniques to represent topography, to write place, but both are texts of landscape. Insofar as a poem or piece of autobiographical writing charts the terrain of the mind, it can be seen as a map of the self’s interiority, one’s inner landscape.
– Robert Hemming
I have no religion,’ says Borneau, ‘but I respect the religion of others. Religion is sacred.’ Why this privilege, this immunity?… A believer creates God in his own image; if he is ugly, his God will be morally ugly. Why should moral ugliness be respectable?
– Jules Renard
Intrinsically, we are all completely and perfectly sane. We are enveloped and imbued by this sanity. But unable to bring ourselves to acknowledge this, we hatch a hodgepodge of beliefs which we embrace and then chase as if they were real, stumbling and falling on the great way. These beliefs embroider the entire sky with their flowery efflorescence.
– Dogen
Online, all impersonal worldly events are experienced as intensely personal, even if we don’t play a role in them. We internalize everything, struggle to see beyond ourselves, to see the mechanisms that are not centered on us. The internet is a claustrophobia of interiority that only appears to be ours. It “doesn’t work by suppression, or repression, but through a participative process … [It] doesn’t represent or even ‘manipulate’ public opinion but substitutes for it.” All actions are reactions, predictable reactions, endless nervous systems swaying to the same rhythm.
– Bogna Konio
Much more of the brain is devoted to movement than to language. Language is only a little thing sitting on top of this huge ocean of movement.
– Oliver Sacks
While meditating things will come into your mind and you will want to clear them away, believe that they are fish and your mind, a pool that longs to be vacant. There is no use (you will go crazy) trying to keep fish from your waters, so what you must do instead is draw them in and with a calmness and a smoothness and a touch of their own momentum, get the little trouble-fish (fish of what someone said at work, fish of your family falling apart on the phone) to move swiftly by, like a hand goes through the middle of a pour from a faucet of water, the flow seeming relatively undisturbed.
– Joshua Beckman
“Doing the right thing” is like water. It’s good for all living things, and flows without thinking about where it’s going……..just like Tao.
– Lao Tzu
Authoritarianism is not merely a matter of state control, it is something that eats away at who you are.
– Sarah Kendzior
The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love – whether we call it friendship or family or romance – is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.
– James Baldwin
There ain’t no answer. There ain’t going to be an answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.
– Gertrude Stein
ADVICE
Walk big, my dad told me,
& I have never
stopped wanting
to shrink into nothing
rather than be
that child with a bowl cut
& bowlegs walking
with my fists pushing
against my coat pockets
down an empty street
like an invitation, mistaken
by older men, drunk men
for some version
of exactly what I am:
boy made of missing parts.
Walk big
my dad told me, so
alone, at night,
men will see
another man.
– James Brunton
It’s in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow.
– Wisława Szymborska
Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it — don’t cheat with it.
– Ernest Hemingway
ANOTHER THING I KNOW FOR SURE
Another thing I know for sure is that Einstein said love was a spooky entanglement. That explains why I cannot stop talking to you even though you are gone. Love is just spooky action at a distance, he said, and dismissed it. Einstein observed love but could not explain it. I know that when the phone rings at three in the morning and I roll over in bed and answer, and it is your voice that I hear, I am dreaming so I hang up. I may be tangled in the sheets but I’m not crazy. I sit on a bench in the evening by the lake. I love this hour I say to you, the way the lake darkens and the sky lightens. You answer, I love the way you speak to me, although I am not really here—I love that about you. I know you do, I answer, I know.
– Richard Garcia
Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.
– Ursula K. Le Guinn
Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.
– Marcel Proust
the human heart
wanders too
migrating birds
– Issa
Our trouble is that we really do not know how to love one another.
– Krishnamurti
The closer you get to a mystery, the more important it is to be realistic.
– Jean Cocteau
I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.
– Stanley Kunitz
My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent
and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.
He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals.
– Frank O’Hara
The new earth vs the old earth is not two different places. It’s two different levels of consciousness.
– Nika Solé
Generally speaking, the person who tells the best story rules their corner of the world.
– James Clear
If once the man could become conscious of his madness, he would cease to be man.
– G.K. Chesterton
…for writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences — experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.
– Susan Sontag
Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings
– WH Auden
Young people should be inspired to choose lives of greatest value, rather than lives of greatest profit.
– Manly P. Hall
I am lost, in the vault of language; and I see few walls, to guide my searching.
Infinity, stares me in the tongue; yet I know the roots, are but few in number.
Wandering, this invisible labyrinth; both clew and beast, my echoing words.
– @AmericanSijo
The choice lies in the act of measuring—it is the product of some frank, / dispassionate inspection, a lucent audit of your standing
– Daniel Carden Nemo
the negative puer may become hyperactive and we find all the traits accentuated and materialized, but without inherent meaning. When the falcon cannot hear the falconer, wingedness becomes mere haste and fanaticism, an unguided missile.
– James Hillman
behind her voice
the call
of my hometown bird
– Nitu Yumnam
If you are now wondering where to look for consolation, where to seek a new and better God… he does not come to us from books, he lives within us… This God is in you too. He is most particularly in you, the dejected and despairing.
– Hermann Hesse
THE GREAT WAY
The Great Way is not difficult
for those not attached to preferences.
When not attached to love or hate,
all is clear and undisguised.
Separate by the smallest amount, however,
and you are as far from it as heaven is from earth.
If you wish to know the truth,
then hold to no opinions for or against anything.
To set up what you like against what you dislike
is the disease of the mind.
When the fundamental nature of things is not recognized
the mind’s essential peace is disturbed to no avail.
The Way is perfect as vast space is perfect,
where nothing is lacking and nothing is in excess.
Indeed, it is due to our grasping and rejecting
that we do not know the true nature of things.
Live neither in the entanglements of outer things,
nor in ideas or feelings of emptiness.
Be serene and at one with things
and erroneous views will disappear by themselves.
When you try to stop activity to achieve quietude,
your very effort fills you with activity.
As long as you remain attached to one extreme or another
you will never know Oneness.
Those who do not live in the Single Way
cannot be free in either activity or quietude, in assertion or denial.
Deny the reality of things
and you miss their reality;
assert the emptiness of things
and you miss their reality.
The more you talk and think about it
the further you wander from the truth.
So cease attachment to talking and thinking,
and there is nothing you will not be able to know.
To return to the root is to find the essence,
but to pursue appearances or “enlightenment” is to miss the source.
To awaken even for a moment
is to go beyond appearance and emptiness.
Changes that seem to occur in the empty world
we make real only because of our ignorance.
Do not seek for the truth;
Only cease to cherish opinions.
Do not remain in a dualistic state;
avoid such easy habits carefully.
If you attach even to a trace
of this and that, of right and wrong,
the Mind-essence will be lost in confusion.
Although all dualities arise from the One,
do not be attached even to ideas of this One.
When the mind exists undisturbed in the Way,
there is no objection to anything in the world;
and when there is no objection to anything,
things cease to be— in the old way.
When no discriminating attachment arises,
the old mind ceases to exist.
Let go of things as separate existences
and mind too vanishes.
Likewise when the thinking subject vanishes
so too do the objects created by mind.
The arising of other gives rise to self;
giving rise to self generates others.
Know these seeming two as facets
of the One Fundamental Reality.
In this Emptiness, these two are really one—
and each contains all phenomena.
If not comparing, nor attached to “refined” and “vulgar”—
you will not fall into judgment and opinion.
The Great Way is embracing and spacious—
to live in it is neither easy nor difficult.
Those who rely on limited views are fearful and irresolute:
The faster they hurry, the slower they go.
To have a narrow mind,
and to be attached to getting enlightenment
is to lose one’s center and go astray.
When one is free from attachment,
all things are as they are,
and there is neither coming nor going.
When in harmony with the nature of things, your own fundamental nature,
and you will walk freely and undisturbed.
However, when mind is in bondage, the truth is hidden,
and everything is murky and unclear,
and the burdensome practice of judging
brings annoyance and weariness.
What benefit can be derived
from attachment to distinctions and separations?
If you wish to move in the One Way,
do not dislike the worlds of senses and ideas.
Indeed, to embrace them fully
is identical with true Enlightenment.
The wise person attaches to no goals
but the foolish person fetters himself or herself.
There is one Dharma, without differentiation.
Distinctions arise from the clinging needs of the ignorant.
To seek Mind with the discriminating mind
is the greatest of mistakes.
Rest and unrest derive from illusion;
with enlightenment, attachment to liking and disliking ceases.
All dualities come from ignorant inference.
They are like dreams, phantoms, hallucinations—
it is foolish to try to grasp them.
Gain and loss, right and wrong; finally abandon all such thoughts at once.
If the eye never sleeps,
all dreams will naturally cease.
If the mind makes no discriminations,
the ten thousand things
are as they are, of single essence.
To realize the mystery of this One-essence
is to be released from all entanglements.
When all things are seen without differentiation,
the One Self-essence is everywhere revealed.
No comparisons or analogies are possible
in this causeless, relationless state of just this One.
When movement stops, there is no movement—
and when no movement, there is no stopping.
When such dualities cease to exist
Oneness itself cannot exist.
To this ultimate state
no law or description applies.
For the Realized mind at one with the Way
all self-centered striving ceases.
Doubts and irresolutions vanish
and the Truth is confirmed in you.
With a single stroke you are freed from bondage;
nothing clings to you and you hold to nothing.
All is empty, clear, self-illuminating,
with no need to exert the mind.
Here, thinking, feeling, understanding, and imagination
are of no value.
In this world “as it really is”
there is neither self nor other-than-self.
To know this Reality directly
is possible only through practicing non-duality.
When you live this non-separation,
all things manifest the One, and nothing is excluded.
Whoever comes to enlightenment, no matter when or where,
Realizes personally this fundamental Source.
This Dharma-truth has nothing to do with big or small, with time and space.
Here a single thought is as ten thousand years.
Not here, not there—
but everywhere always right before your eyes.
Infinitely large and infinitely small: no difference,
for definitions are irrelevant
and no boundaries can be discerned.
So likewise with “existence” and “non-existence.”
Don’t waste your time in arguments and discussion
attempting to grasp the ungraspable.
Each thing reveals the One,
the One manifests as all things.
To live in this Realization
is not to worry about perfection or non-perfection.
To put your trust in the Heart-Mind is to live without separation,
and in this non-duality you are one with your Life-Source.
Words! Words!
The Way is beyond language,
for in it there is no yesterday,
no tomorrow
no today.
– Seng-ts’an, Third Chinese Patriarch
(translated By Richard B. Clarke)
In dreams begins responsibility.
– W. B. Yeats
You are the witness of the three bodies: the gross, the subtle, and the causal, and of the three times: past, present and future, and also this void. In the story of the tenth man, when each of them counted and thought they were only nine, each one forgetting to count himself, there is a stage when they think one is missing and do not know who it is; and that corresponds to the void. We are so accustomed to the notion that all that we see around us is permanent and that we are this body, that when all this ceases to exist we imagine and fear that we also have ceased to exist.
– Ramana Maharshi
It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that were once in books. The same things could be in the ‘parlour families’ today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios and televisors, but are not. No, no, it’s not books at all you’re looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
– Ray Bradbury
The real damage is done by those millions who want to ‘survive.’ The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.
– Sophie Scholl
(Music) is something I cannot imagine being without. For without music, life is a journey through a desert that has not ever heard the rumor of God. In music’s sweet harmony, I had all the proof I needed of a God who held the earth together between the staffs, where the heavens lay. Here, he marked all the lines and spaces with notes so perfect that they praised all of his creation with their beauty.
– Pat Conroy, Beach Music
Why do they not teach you that time is a finger snap and an eye blink, and that you should not allow a moment to pass you by without taking joyous, ecstatic note of it, not wasting a single moment of its swift, breakneck circuit?”
– Pat Conroy
Our lives are lived as stories
Though their intrapsychic actors
May play from scripts whose scripting comes
From key genetic factors;
Our lives are understandable
In terms of mental rules
Though they respond, like puppets,
To brain protein molecules.
– Samuel Barondes
Disappointment, always a shock to the feelings, is not only the mother of bitterness but the strongest incentive to a differentiation of feeling.
The failure of a pet plan, the disappointing behavior of someone one loves, can supply the impulse either for a more or less brutal outburst of affect or for a modification and adjustment of feeling, and hence for its higher development.
This culminates in wisdom if feeling is
supplemented by reflection and rational insight.
Wisdom is never violent: where wisdom reigns there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.
– C.G Jung
It is because our minds share Consciousness that we feel we share the world. We do share the same world, but the world we share is made of Consciousness, not matter, and we are that very Consciousness.
– Rupert Spira
It’s perfectly acceptable to outgrow other people on the journey of outgrowing yourself.
– Nika Solé
God never intended for a group of people to live in superfluous, inordinate wealth while others live in abject, deadening poverty. God intends for all of His children to have the basic necessities of life, and He has left in this universe enough and to spare for that purpose. So I call upon you to bridge the gulf between abject poverty and superfluous
wealth.
– MLK, Jr.
When the archetype is split, the dynamus works independently of the patterns of order. Then we have a too-familiar pattern: action that does not know and knowledge that does not act…
– Hillman
Away with middle ways! That no light be deflected,
Suffer no walls to be before thine eyes erected.
– Angelus Silesius
I think at some point I became a sort of permanent adolescent, wanting to participate in a rebellion against grown-ups.
– Fanny Howe
inlet sunset
fog tendrils trailing
the last lobster boat
– Carly Siegel Thorp
The moon set sail upon the gale,
and stars were fanned to leaping light.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
I must continue to heal. I must shed the worst parts of myself. I saw my shadow in him—distorted and exaggerated. It horrified me. And it inspired me to rise above it.
– Rob Collins, Toxic Mirror
No one knows you— they have little time for poetry in the country, or in the city for that matter except for…a few friends. Your name bobs up like a Halloween apple and literature people have the vague feeling that they should read you if they ever catch up on their reading.
– Jim Harrison
…an object (or, for Tolkien, a tale, story, or word) is made particularly precious by its participation in a lineage, by its connection with a tradition.
– Michael Drout, Beowulf and the Critics
departure gate—
a name they keep
calling
– Nitu Yumnam
We’re an antidote to the algorithm.
– Paul Lewis, BFI Player Director
In the monastery of your HEART, you have a temple where all Buddhas unite.
– Milarepa
The importance of reading, not slight stuff to get through the time, but the best that has been written, forces itself upon me more and more every year I live.
– Matthew Arnold
In psychology fictions can lead to disastrous errors. Since it can be said with a little exaggeration that reality consists mainly of exceptions to the rule, which the intellect then reduces to the norm, instead of a brightly colored picture of the real world we have a bleak, shallow rationalism that offers stones instead of bread to the emotional and spiritual hungers of the world. The logical result is an insatiable hunger for anything extraordinary. If we add to this the great defeat of human reason, daily demonstrated in the newspapers and rendered even more menacing by the incalculable dangers of the hydrogen bomb, the picture that unfolds before us is one of universal spiritual distress, comparable to the situation at the beginning of our era or to chaos that followed A.D. 1000, or the upheavals at the turn of the fifteenth century. It is therefore not surprising if, as the old chroniclers report, all sorts of signs and wonders appear in the sky, or if miraculous intervention, where human efforts have failed, is expected from heaven. Our Saucer sightings can be found – mutatis mutandis – in many reports that go back to antiquity, though not, it would seem, with the same overwhelming frequency. But then, the possibility of destruction on a global scale, which has been given into the hands of our so-called politicians, did not exist in those days.
– C.G. Jung
Austerity policies destroy communities and benefit billionaires. That’s the whole story. A slow destruction of the already-underfunded public institutions that make employment possible. The ruling classes are abominable.
– Alina Stefanescu
Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking.
– Nina Simone
What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily?
– Seneca
Lies are infinite in number, and the truth so small and singular.
– Barbara Kingsolver
The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold… The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war between princes.
– Michel de Montaigne
Doubt is unsettling to the ego, and those who are drawn to ideologies that promise the dispelling of doubt by proffering certainties will never grow. In seeking certainty they are courting the death of the soul.
– James Hollis
Consciousness is a very recent acquisition of nature, and it is still in an “experimental” state. It is frail, menaced by specific dangers, and easily injured.
– CG Jung
I didn’t belong here, high on a crag, among rocks and thorns; I belonged high in the blue, sailing through the clouds, heading to the city where there is no baking sun nor icy wind, where the zephyrs nourish every flower and the hills are always clad in green and no one wants for anything. What a fool I was. What was this hunger that drove me to seek more than what I already had?
– Anthony Doerr
Without the influence of custom, we should be entirely ignorant of every matter of fact beyond what is immediately present to the memory and senses. We should never know how to adjust means to ends, or to employ our natural powers in the production of any effect. There would be an end at once to all action, as well as of the chief part of speculation.
– David Hume
Was this the decisive moment of my life? It felt as if the gap that had dogged me all my days was knitting together before my eyes — so that, from this point on, my life would be as coherent and meaningful as my favorite books. At the same time, I had a powerful sense of having escaped something: of having finally stepped outside of the script.
– Elif Batuman
I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
Any time you identify a wasteland element in your life—illness, boredom, lethargy, alienation, emptiness, loss, addiction, failure, anger, or outrage—it is time to take a journey. You can be called to the quest by such dissatisfaction or simply by a desire for adventure.
– Carol Pearson
How am I to see clearly all the time? When you ask that, when you put that question to yourself, you have already created a contradiction.
– Krishnamurti
We are imprisoned in our small selves, thinking only of some comfortable conditions for this small self, while we destroy our large self. If we want to change the situation, we must begin by being our true selves. To be our true selves means we have to be the forest, the river, and the ozone layer.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
To think is easy. To act is hard. But the hardest thing in the world is to act in accordance with your thinking.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Because agape or metta transcends space and time, we are able to extend it to our distant ancestors as well as those who are present in our lives and those who are yet to arrive.
– Dr. Toni Pressley-Sano
Happiness does not come into being when you seek it; it is a by-product, it comes into being when there is goodness, when there is love, when there is no ambition, when the mind is quietly seeking out what is true.
– J. Krishnamurti
I think that melancholy is, in short, a musical problem: a dissonance, a disturbed rhythm.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
When you make a sculpture, you’re bound by the physical world. You compete with reality, or you’re partaking in a spatial reality. It needs to communicate with the physical world in a different way than an image does.
– Urs Fischer
If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.
– Marc Chagall
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
– James Baldwin
New thoughts create a new me.
I no longer recycle old patterns—I rise in fresh awareness. Each pure thought renews my energy and redirects my life. I choose peace, purpose, and progress in every moment. I am not bound by the past—I am becoming something beautiful.
– Brahma Kumaris
What we call nature . . . is a poem hidden behind a wonderful secret writing; if we could decipher the puzzle, we should recognize in it the odyssey of the human spirit, which in astonishing delusion flees from itself while seeking itself.
– Ernst Cassirer
If you think there is nothing anyone can teach you, you are
not just insufferable – you’re right. You will not learn anything,
except the looming and painful lesson of failure.
– Ryan Holiday
The power of thoughts can cause you either illness or recovery.
– Ibn Sina
Psyche is the Greek word for ‘soul’, and logos the word for ‘speech’; and the term ‘psychology’, considered in the context of its etymological roots, bears little resemblance to some of the perspectives now offered in the academy.
– Liz Greene
Those who really wish for help will get it; but for many modern people even the wish is difficult.
– C.S. Lewis
Unfortunately there will be no reckoning. Evangelical pastors have long been a force of violence, greed, and colonialism. Not to mention the “soft diplomacy” of US export, namely, that prosperity gospel which has poisoned the lives and futures of billions.
– Alina Stefanescu
All cities are founded on the abyss.
– Maria Zambrano
There are always two people working on a poem, the writer and the reader.
– Louise Glück
Meditation will give you a little glimpse, a little taste, that the truth is inside you.
– Osho
The day the robins wept, the day
foxes ran from the woods on fire.
I was alive in a decade. Sometimes
dreaming of another region
was my religion.
– Andrea Rexilius
Language exists because nothing exists between those who express themselves. All language is therefore a language of prayer. Held in the dark, without sleep.
– Lynn Xu
Beliefs can literally override the impact of drugs on the body.
– Brad Schipke
There are some people who have Sun inside them.
It’s hard to explain.
Their presence just brightens, it’s not about their
beautiful smiles. They have an internal being that
sheds light and feels like Sun.
It’s a calm energy. Inner peace.
But most importantly; it’s not wanting anything
back in return.
It’s Sun.
– Serdar Özkan
Heaven is not a place. It is a frequency. It is a frequency we create on earth. And we are bringing that frequency in. And you can attune to it, you can attune to it now.
– Alexander Quinn
Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
Literature is dialogue; responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another. Writers can do something to combat these clichés of our separateness, our difference — for writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences — experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.
– Susan Sontag
As we face a crisis in the soul of our society, we have to ask what we really value. Especially now, when the powerful often use bad theology to justify their self-serving policies, we have to turn to real wisdom.
In 1958, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a sermon in which he imagined the Apostle Paul writing a “Letter to American Christians.” It’s devastating, luminous, and essential reading. Here are some of his words:
But America, as I look at you from afar, I wonder whether your moral and spiritual progress has been commensurate with your scientific progress. Your poet Thoreau used to talk about improved means to an unimproved end. How often this is true. You have allowed the material means by which you live to outdistance the spiritual ends for which you live. You have allowed your mentality to outrun your morality. You have allowed your civilization to outdistance your culture, and through your scientific genius you have made of the world a neighborhood. But through your moral and spiritual genius, you have failed to make of it a brotherhood. And so, America, I would urge you to bring your moral advances in line with your scientific advances.
…I understand that you have an economic system in America known as capitalism, and through this economic system you have been able to do wonders. You have become the richest nation in the world, and you have built up the greatest system of production that history has ever known. All of this is marvelous. But Americans, there is the danger that you will misuse your capitalism. I still contend that money can be the root of all evil. It can cause one to live a life of gross materialism, and I’m afraid that many among you are more concerned about making a living than making a life. You are prone to judge the success of your professions by the index of your salary and the size of the wheel base on your automobile rather than the quality of your service to humanity.
…God never intended for a group of people to live in superfluous, inordinate wealth while others live in abject, deadening poverty. God intends for all of His children to have the basic necessities of life, and He has left in this universe enough and to spare for that purpose. So I call upon you to bridge the gulf between abject poverty and superfluous wealth.
– MLK, Jr., Paul’s Letter to American Christians
It is not possible to conceive of the totality of what is possible for the human soul. It is infinite. That is why our knowledge and understanding about the soul is bound to be partial and incomplete. As a result, each spiritual tradition has some knowledge and wisdom about the soul. None is complete. They are not identical in their understanding, and they will disagree about many things regarding soul. They generally do not disagree as much about Being, or ultimate Reality. But when it comes to the soul, our experiencing consciousness, there are important differences, and significant contradictions. Different traditions explore different properties, capacities, and dimensions of the soul. The emphases vary greatly, but this does not mean that some are right and some wrong.
– A. H. Almaas, The Inner Journey Home
History repeats itself, but in such cunning disguise that we never detect the resemblance until the damage is done.
– Sydney J. Harris
I DREAMED I FORGOT
I dreamed I forgot you
but to dream you was remembering.
I have words for you
only, a linguistic fidelity.
Cherish and anguish and fool.
I look for you, I am finding
out if I am brave. Last
I saw you, it was the same disruptive
season: robins trilling in the young
flush, trees shivering
pink all down the street.
I thought the ache
would ruin me, and maybe it did.
Here I am in the beatific after
still calling back to you.
– Leila Chatti
“No city closes its doors to love,” writes Maria Zambrano. “But in reality, the doors are open to its surrogates, to all that supplants it.”
– Christina Tudor-Sideri
The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
– H. L. Mencken
Paradise is still in this world yet humankind does not occupy it. For you see, this gold is locked inside Saturn.
– Jakob Böhme
When an artist abandons his search for the truth it is going to have a disastrous effect on his work. The artist’s aim is truth.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, their powerful political connections or great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies … The America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.
– Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
Living with a teenager can feel like living with an ex, or with a drug addict who has three days clean and sober.
– Anne Lamott
Even if we are not consciously aware of remote events, our bodies may respond to them in measurable ways.
– Dean Radin
I want for us to want
to patch every heart
and pave every road
and destroy every system
that has ever left us
broken.
– Jordan Jace
All of us have wanted things to be otherwise at some point in our lives. All of us have wished for different choices, different stories, different results. Yet there’s enormous strength—and infinite possibility—in learning to love what is instead of what should have been, and one way to do this is to learn to attend, allow, and accept.
– Vanessa Zuisei Goddard
One thing that comes out in myths, for example, is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation.
– Joseph Campbell
Literatures, including academic literatures, do not have an expiration date. They, including things published yesterday, have a sociohistorical context. There is no “out of date” literature.
– Fred I. Lee
There is nothing here
but thick summer air. The streets
are deserted. Cars
do not cruise. The day
swells into midnight. The moon
waits for clouds to clear.
Where is time hiding?
Where is the usual routine?
The barbarians
have been delayed. We wait.
– George Szirtes
Paths run through people as surely as they run through places.
– Robert MacFarlane
The wound can have (should only have) just one proper name. I recognize that I love — you — by this: you leave in me a wound I do not want to replace.
– Jacques Derrida, (tr. Alan Bass)
Two or three people, with healthy bodies and the right sort of receiving brains, could turn the whole tide of human thought, could direct lightning flashes of electric power to slash across and destroy the world of dead, murky thought.
Two or three people gathered together in the name of truth, beauty, over-mind consciousness could bring the whole force of this power back into the world.
– H.D.
Archetypal psychology can put its idea of psychopathology into a series of nutshells, one inside the other: within the affliction is a complex, within the complex an archetype, which in turn refers to a god. Afflictions point to gods; gods reach us through afflictions.
– Hillman
Well, I’ve made up my mind, anyway. I want to see mountains again, Gandalf – mountains; and then find somewhere where I can rest.
– Bilbo (Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring)
We all have tiny cracks
in our wounded heels
so that we leave our unique footprints in sands-of-times
– @revsodhi
Only in art can empires cheat oblivion.
– Tom Stoppard
Stories are stories; a dream is a dream. And for me, writing itself is like dreaming. When I write, I can dream intentionally.
– Haruki Murakami
I don’t know if I’ve learned anything yet! I did learn how to have a happy home, but I consider myself fortunate in that regard because I could’ve rolled right by it. Everybody has a superficial side and a deep side, but this culture doesn’t place much value on depth — we don’t have shamans or soothsayers, and depth isn’t encouraged or understood. Surrounded by this shallow, glossy society we develop a shallow side, too, and we become attracted to fluff. That’s reflected in the fact that this culture sets up an addiction to romance based on insecurity — the uncertainty of whether or not you’re truly united with the object of your obsession is the rush people get hooked on. I’ve seen this pattern so much in myself and my friends and some people never get off that line.
But along with developing my superficial side, I always nurtured a deeper longing, so even when I was falling into the trap of that other kind of love, I was hip to what I was doing. I recently read an article in Esquire magazine called ‘The End of Sex,’ that said something that struck me as very true. It said: “If you want endless repetition, see a lot of different people. If you want infinite variety, stay with one.” What happens when you date is you run all your best moves and tell all your best stories — and in a way, that routine is a method for falling in love with yourself over and over.
You can’t do that with a longtime mate because he knows all that old material. With a long relationship, things die then are rekindled, and that shared process of rebirth deepens the love. It’s hard work, though, and a lot of people run at the first sign of trouble. You’re with this person, and suddenly you look like an asshole to them or they look like an asshole to you — it’s unpleasant, but if you can get through it you get closer and you learn a way of loving that’s different from the neurotic love enshrined in movies. It’s warmer and has more padding to it.
– Joni Mitchell
Your Self is like the screen. It is never affected by problems of any kind or any sort. The problems come upon the screen, they come and they go, but you remain the Self forever. You never change.
– Robert Adams
The sages, it is often said, can see no answer to the riddle of religion. But the trouble with our sages is not that they cannot see the answer; it is that they cannot even see the riddle.
– G.K. Chesterton
What I’m really scared of is believing the words society makes me speak are my own.
– Sayaka Murata
Transformation isn’t sweet or bright. It’s a dark and murky painful pushing. An unraveling of the untruths you’ve carried in your body. A practice in facing your own created demons. A complete uprooting before becoming.
– Victoria Erickson
On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols:
its flags,
its pledges of allegiance,
its anthems,
its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.
We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.
– Howard Zinn
SAY WOW!
Each day before our surroundings
Become flat with familiarity
And the shapes of our lives
Click into place,
Dimensionless and average
As Tetris cubes,
Before hunger knocks from our bellies
Like a cantankerous old man
And the duties of the day
Stack up like dishes
And the architecture of our basic needs
Commissions all thought
To construct the 4-door sedan of safety,
Before gravity clings to our skin
Like a cumbersome parasite
And the colored dust of dreams
Sweeps itself obscure
In the vacuum of reason,
Each morning before we wrestle the world
And our hearts into the shape of our brain,
Look around and say, “Wow!”
Feed yourself fire.
Scoop up the day entire
Like a planet-sized bouquet of marvel
Sent by the Universe directly into your arms
And say, “Wow!”
Break yourself down
Into the basic components of primitive awe
And let the crescendo of each moment
Carbonate every capillary
And say, “Wow!”
Yes, before our poems become calloused
With revision
Let them shriek off the page of spontaneity
And before our metaphors get too regular,
Let the sun stay
A conflagration of homing pigeons
That fights through fire
Each day to find us.
– Chelan Harkin
The human soul has greater need of the ideal than of the real.
It is by the real that we exist, it is by the ideal that we live.
– Victor Hugo
True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
– FDR
Music is part of history, and our history has lessons that cannot be separated from our greatest music.
– M. Rostropovich
Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.
– Italo Calvino
In Oxford, England, a small chapel was built in the 1200s. A great oak beam stretched across its ceiling. After centuries, the beam began to rot—worms had hollowed it out. The caretakers knew it had to be replaced. So they stepped outside to the edge of the chapel grounds and cut down an oak tree that had been planted the same year the chapel was built. A king had ordered the original builders to plant it for this moment. They knew the beam would one day fail. And once the new beam was raised into place, the workers planted another.
That kind of thinking takes vision and care. It takes spirit and a wide embrace of the Mystery.
That’s the kind of life I want for myself. That’s the kind of country I want to live in. One that tends to its foundations and looks far ahead. One that builds from the soul up through devotion and staying close to the ground.
– Brad Wetzler
Swim Until You Can’t See Land
by Frightened Rabbit
I salute at the threshold of the North Sea of my mind
And I nod to the boredom that drove me here to face the tide
And I swim, I swim, oh swim
Dip a toe in the ocean, oh how it hardens and it numbs
The rest of me is a version of man built to collapse in crumbs
And if I hadn’t come now to the coast to disappear
I may have died in a landslide of rocks and hopes and fears
So I swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Are you a man? Are you a bag of sand?
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Are you a man? Are you a bag of sand?
Up to my knees now, do I wade, do I dive?
The sea has seen my like before, though it’s my first and perhaps last time
Let’s call me a baptist, call this a drowning of the past
She is there on the shoreline throwing stones at my back
So I swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Are you a man? Are you a bag of sand?
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Are you a man? Are you a bag of sand?
And the water is taller than me
And the land is a marker line
All I have is a body adrift in water, salt and sky
So I swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Are you a man? Are you a bag of sand?
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Are you a man? Are you a bag of sand?
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Are you a man? Are you a bag of sand?
Are you a man? Are you a bag of sand?
Are you a man? Are you a bag of sand?
Are you a man? Are you a bag of sand?
Are you a man? Are you a bag of sand?
Are you a man? Are you a bag of sand?
Are you a man? Are you a bag of sand?
Are you a man? Are you a bag of sand?
In order to be gentle and create an atmosphere of compassion for yourself, it’s necessary to stop talking to yourself about how wrong everything is—or how right everything is, for that matter.
– Pema Chödrön
Declaration of Interdependence
by Richard Blanco
Such has been the patient sufferance…
We’re a mother’s bread, instant potatoes, milk at a checkout line. We’re her three children pleading for bubble gum and their father. We’re the three minutes she steals to page through a tabloid, needing to believe even stars’ lives are as joyful and bruised.
Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury…
We’re her second job serving an executive absorbed in his Wall Street Journal at a sidewalk café shadowed by skyscrapers. We’re the shadows of the fortune he won and the family he lost. We’re his loss and the lost. We’re a father in a coal town who can’t mine a life anymore because too much and too little has happened, for too long.
A history of repeated injuries and usurpations…
We’re the grit of his main street’s blacked-out windows and graffitied truths. We’re a street in another town lined with royal palms, at home with a Peace Corps couple who collect African art. We’re their dinner-party talk of wines, wielded picket signs, and burned draft cards. We’re what they know: it’s time to do more than read the New York Times, buy fair-trade coffee and organic corn.
In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress…
We’re the farmer who grew the corn, who plows into his couch as worn as his back by the end of the day. We’re his TV set blaring news having everything and nothing to do with the field dust in his eyes or his son nested in the ache of his arms. We’re his son. We’re a black teenager who drove too fast or too slow, talked too much or too little, moved too quickly, but not quick enough. We’re the blast of the bullet leaving the gun. We’re the guilt and the grief of the cop who wished he hadn’t shot.
We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor…
We’re the dead, we’re the living amid the flicker of vigil candlelight. We’re in a dim cell with an inmate reading Dostoevsky. We’re his crime, his sentence, his amends, we’re the mending of ourselves and others. We’re a Buddhist serving soup at a shelter alongside a stockbroker. We’re each other’s shelter and hope: a widow’s fifty cents in a collection plate and a golfer’s ten-thousand-dollar pledge for a cure.
We hold these truths to be self-evident…
We’re the cure for hatred caused by despair. We’re the good morning of a bus driver who remembers our name, the tattooed man who gives up his seat on the subway. We’re every door held open with a smile when we look into each other’s eyes the way we behold the moon. We’re the moon. We’re the promise of one people, one breath declaring to one another: I see you. I need you. I am you.
In books one may still sing the praise of wounds, hopelessness, and despair — whatever you like, for books are still literature, a conventionality. But to strip one’s anguish in the open market, to confess an incurable disease to others, this is to kill one’s soul, not to relieve it.
– Lev Shestov
Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.
– Haruki Murakami
Nothing is lost if one has the courage to proclaim that all is lost and we must begin anew.
– Julio Cortázar
Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.
– William James
Not enough has been written about the treachery of middle life… Dante went to hell to escape it, and I’ve seen plenty of other men do the same, metaphorically speaking.
– Jennifer Egan
I walked back home, slowly. I couldn’t get that expression—unable to see straight—out of my mind. Everything seems in order, hello, see you soon, make yourself at home, what can I give you to drink, could you lower the volume a little, thank you, you’re welcome. But there’s a black veil that can drop at any moment. It’s a sudden blindness, you don’t know how to keep your distance, you crash into things. Does it happen only to some people or to everybody that, once a certain level is passed, they can’t see straight anymore? And was it truer when you saw everything clearly or when the strongest and deepest feelings—hatred, love—blinded you?
– Elena Ferrante
I’d once been like that, so lonely that I craved further loneliness.
– Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom
The greatest freedoms are freedom from regret, freedom from fear, freedom from anxiety, and freedom from sorrow.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Traumatic symptoms are not caused by the “triggering” event itself. They stem from the frozen residue of energy that has not been resolved and discharged; this residue remains trapped in the nervous system where it can wreak havoc on our bodies and spirits.
– Peter Levine
It did not seem that someone so clownish could disrupt something so noble and time-tested and seemingly strong, something that had been with us literally every day of our lives. We had taken, in other words, a profound gift for granted. Did not know the gift was a fluke, a chimera, a wonderful accident of consensus and mutual understanding.
– George Saunders, Liberation Day
My mother gave simple advice to all
Do not grow up to become a baby
– Mary Ruefle
What will I do with my days / now that my nights / are sublimely alone / and how will I make use of this wound / I carried like a map / so that I would never, never / lose you?
– Paul Guest
Consciousness itself is arising and passing away in each instant. There is not one mind that is observing all phenomena; at every instant ‘mind’ is created and destroyed.
– Joseph Goldstein
Liberatory sublime meditative experiences arise 3,000 times a day. You may have felt it come and go. You can’t hold on to and use it as a superpower. Once you allow it to come and go, over time it will settle in you as a way of being.
– Zenju Earthlyn Manuel
If I could say I was assigned something at birth, it would be to keep the soul fresh and clean, and to not let anything bring it down.
– Fanny Howe
Intense nostalgia breeds stories.
– Barry Hannah
There is nothing more absurd than a life lived without questioning its own absurdity.
– Emil Cioran
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
– Terry Pratchett
Oh no! Reading beautiful books can’t be traumatizing. Seeing awful things can be—but reading? I don’t believe in that at all.
– Marie NDiaye
The world gives you so much pain, and here you are making gold out of it — there is nothing purer than that.
– Nayyirah Waheed
I have seen the future, and it is very much like the present, only longer.
– Kehlog Albran
All systems are games, and all games are lies, and some lies are sacred.
– Terence McKenna
Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.
– Martin Heidegger
We spend our lives trying to convince ourselves we are not alone in the universe, and then panic when someone proves we’re not.
– Douglas Adams
You will learn it, in time: that even the gentlest touch can bleed someone dry.
– Ocean Vuong
I am a soul of infinite moods in a body too small for them.
– Fernando Pessoa
The trouble with being open is that they never stop knocking.
– Anne Sexton
There is no answer. Seek it lovingly.
– Clarice Lispector
Don’t you find it odd… that when you’re a kid, everyone tells you to be yourself, but when you grow up, they punish you for it?
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turn before we have learned to walk.
– Cyril Connolly
Some people feel like home. Some feel like a storm. The worst ones feel like both.
– Blythe Baird
I disappeared so quietly that even I didn’t notice I was gone.
– Rupi Kaur
O Earth! lit up with splendor
At sunset and sunrise,
With gorgeous hues yet tender
To suit our mortal eyes!
Shores where waves are dying!
Woods where soft winds play!
O vast horizon!
– Victor Hugo
The seafloor crawls with evolution, / and I always want the next thing— / that monster in the black-deep.
– Emily Stoddard
I never had faith that the answers to human problems lay in anything that could be called political. I thought the answers, if there were answers, lay someplace in man’s soul.
– Joan Didion
As soon as the mind says something shouldn’t have happened, we are in an argument with reality. Reality is simply what it is. As soon as we have anything in us that judges it, that condemns it, that says it shouldn’t be, we will feel division.
– Adyashanti
The morning changes in the sun
As though the hush were insecure,
And love, so perilously begun,
Could never in the noon endure
– J. V. Cunningham
There are some people who never psychologically leave the Garden of Eden. They have never had to encounter the “law” that contradicts their original ego-Self identity and the inflation that goes along with it. Psychologically, they are unborn.
– Edward Edinger
wake up, wake up!
I would love to be your friend
little sleeping butterfly
– Basho
The characteristic note of our time is the dire truth that, the mediocre soul, the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be mediocre, has the gall to assert its right to mediocrity, and goes on to impose itself where it can.
– Jose Ortega y Gasset
I care much less about enlightenment that I do about ensoulment.
– River Kenna
Poetry’s about what can’t be said. And I think that language emerges out of what could not be said. Out of this desire to utter something, to express something inexpressible … the consonants are the attempts to break it, to control it, to do something with it.
– W.S. Merwin
The primary reason we pay attention to dreams is that they do not arise from the ego.
– James Hollis
Good therapy helps. Good friends help. Pretending that we are doing better than we are doesn’t. Shame doesn’t. Being heard does.
– Anne Lamott
The trend of good is always towards Incarnation.
– G.K. Chesterton
The opposite of ecstasy
is automation.
– Alina Stefanescu
Thank you, makers of this tea.
Because of you my mind is still tonight,
transparent, a leaf in air.
Now it rides a subtle current.
Now it can finally disappear.
– Chase Twichell
The intellectual life is not the only road to God, nor the safest, but we find it to be a road, and it may be the appointed road for us.
– C.S. Lewis
Capitalism manufactures poverty to force workers to work.
– unknown
humans
are no match
for earth
– Andy Perrin
We don’t have any of the answers once we grow old, but at least we’re not plagued by questions–and sometimes simply hope that they get be replaced by better (and even more unanswerable) questions.
– Pico Iyer
The right reaction to a symptom may as well be a welcoming rather than laments and demands for remedies, for the symptom is the first herald of an awakening psyche which will not tolerate any more abuse. Through the symptom the psyche demands attention.
– James Hillman
I think I really wanted to be a short-story writer because I thought I was a man of short breath. I haven’t got the breath to write novels.
– V. S. Pritchett
Your highest purpose and calling is often really calling for your own healing.
– Bryant McGill
Do I know
a story worth
telling about the earth?
– Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Alchemy is a profession of marginals; those at the edge. Those who live from their own fires, sweating it out, self-sustaining their own temperatures which may be at variance with the collective climate.
– James Hillman
If you don’t have a strategy, you’re part of someone else’s strategy.
– Alvin Toffler
The Buddha called suffering a holy truth, because our suffering has the capacity of showing us the path to liberation. Embrace your suffering and let it reveal to you the way to peace.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
a blip on the radar
the comet from somewhere else
blink and it’s gone
– Voima Oy
Skipping layers will stunt you — the way you navigate and nurture your human relationships, the way you relate to your environment, to your own depths, to the divine, to energy,,
It’s all practicing the same stances, and every layer teaches you something about all the others
– River Kenna
The danger is not that the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but that, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.
– Simone Weil
If we pass one boundary, we should be shitting our pants. We’ve passed seven!
– David Suzuki, On Climate Change
Listen warrior, you will be faced with an illusion and you will not know that you are within an illusion. Your task is getting yourself out of it and to return home safely.
– Braddha Bala
These things people call amazing coincidences, synchronicity, small miracles—this is the way the world is supposed to work.
It is only that the world is in slumber, like a sleeping person who does not see, does not hear, does not speak—so that nothing distinguishes his head from his feet, his heart from his brain.
So too, the world lies deep in a dream where anything is possible, but nothing seems to have a goal. Where only chaos reigns.
It takes only one person to open his eyes, his ears, his mind and his heart, and the objects of this world fall into place and work together as a single whole. Synchronized. As they were meant to be.
– Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
A safe fairy-land is untrue to all worlds.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Whether you have anger, hatred, jealousy, or resentment against someone, essentially, it only works against you.
– Sadhguru
Americans are side-hustling like we’re in a recession.
– Wall Street Journal
After the cloudburst
Over the far horizon
A prismatic arch
– Avram Dorado
I don’t agree / with men
– Anna Mendelssohn
Your ears,
Those beautiful,
Tiny amphitheaters
That hold every
Dancing sound,
Perfect singing bowls
That softly
Pour music through you.
Your eyes,
Those fire opals,
Bejeweled drops
Of God,
Translators
Of that great romance language
Of light.
Your nose,
The host
To that great visitor—
The fragrance of the rose.
Your skin,
A landscape
Of sensation,
A soft bed
For touch
That covers all of you
At once.
Darling,
You were not made
To be rigid
And follow rules.
For God’s sake,
We have tongues
Made of pure desire
To devour and savor
All that sweetness!
We live in a sensuous,
Perfumed world—
Darling, you were made
To fall in love
And this world was made
To caress you.
– Chelan Harkin
I love it when people open their hearts because I can see, ‘Wow! Inside them is the same prayer that’s inside me.’
– John Robbins
The hunter, to aim better, closes his left eye for a while. The soldier, the better to kill, closes his left eye. The player, in games of skill, closes his left eye the better to send the ball or arrow into the center of the target … I have forever closed my left eye; I was probably given by chance to see the center of life better.
– Victor Brauner
The deep critical thinker has become the misfit of the world, this is not a coincidence. To maintain order and control you must isolate the intellectual, the sage, the philosopher, the savant before their ideas awaken people.
– Carl Jung
At this moment, a thousand valves have opened within my brain, and I must pour forth a river of words or I shall suffocate.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.
– Mark Twain
their thread unspools like
a myth in the years since
their last road trip.
– Zach Goldberg
Actually, we all know how to awaken because we all know how to rest.
– Anam Thubten
Let peace come to you, out from where it’s hiding behind the sofa and under the bed. You have done enough for now. Let summer surround you. Let everything rest.
– Karen Maezen Miller
We sail in leaky bottoms and on great and perilous waters; and to take a cue from the dolorous old naval ballad, we have heard the mer-maidens singing, and know that we shall never see dry land any more. Old and young, we are all on our last cruise. If there is a fill of tobacco among the crew, for God’s sake pass it round, and let us have a pipe before we go!
– Robert Louis Stevenson
I’m always reading the poems out loud, from the very earliest stages of doodling language through revision and fine-tuning, laying the poem out on the page. The breath hooks into the spirit. In Arabic “ruh” means both breath and spirit. Ditto the Latin “spiritus.” Without some physiological sublimation of the inert font into a living poem—whether via breath or even just the movement of ocular muscles along a line, fingers across Braille—the poem remains ink on a page. If a poem augurs any holiness, it begins in the body.
– Kaveh Akbar
Spinning like a ghost on the bottom of a top, I’m haunted by all the space that I will live without you.
– Richard Brautigan
The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh.
– Lucian Freud
The best thing for anthropocentric dread, for individual anguish, for heartbreak, for illness, is interrupting your individuality. When you cannot walk, cannot move, cannot leave your bed you do not need to find a tree or landscape or butterfly to be. You can be a mote of dust. A potato bug vaulting across the room. The ten fungal spores that scintillate in each one of your inhalations. The anarchic bacterial legacy that melted into your very molecular makeup. The yellowjacket tapping his armored body against the closed window. Sometimes the answer is not to problematize your wounding, but to slip through it like a doorway into otherness. Other minds. Other types of anguish. Other animals and insects going extinct. Birds singing out courtship songs to mates that will never arrive.
– Sophie Strand
To-morrow is Hell-fire Day, that English holiday which we have celebrated, every Fourth of July, for a century and a quarter in fire, blood, tears, mutilation and death, repeating and repeating and forever repeating these absurdities because neither our historians nor our politicians nor our schoolmasters have wit enough to remind the public that the Fourth of July is not an American holiday. However, I doubt if there is a historian, a politician, or a schoolmaster in the country that has ever stopped to consider what the nationality of that day really is. I detest that English holiday with all my heart; not because it is English, and not because it is not American, but merely because this nation goes insane on that day, and by the help of noise and fire turns it into an odious pandemonium. The nation calls it by all sorts of affectionate pet names, but if I had the naming of it I would throw poetry aside and call it Hell’s Delight.
– Mark Twain
I’ll rewrite this whole life and this time there’ll be
so much love,
you won’t be able to see beyond it.
You won’t be able to see beyond it,
I’ll rewrite this whole life and this time there’ll be
so much love.
– Warsan Shire
Immigrants aren’t pawns on the chessboard of humanity.
– Pope Francis
Our brains are (by nature) unusually plastic; their biologically proper functioning has always involved the recruitment and exploitation of nonbiological props and scaffolds. More so than any other creature on the planet, we humans emerge as natural-born cyborgs, factory-tweaked and primed so as to be ready to grow into extended cognitive and computational architectures—ones whose systemic boundaries far exceed those of skin and skull.
– Andy Clark
In the heat of her hands I thought, this is the campfire that mocks the sun.
– Jeanette Winterson
They taught you the heart was just a glorified meat pump. That it squeezes and pushes blood like some crude mechanical device. A hydraulic engine made of flesh. That is what they want you to believe. Because if you buy into that primitive lie, you never ask deeper questions.
But it is false. It has always been false. And the real science proves it.
Dr Francisco Torrent-Guasp, a Spanish cardiac researcher, discovered what the textbooks refuse to acknowledge, that the heart is not a pump. He dissected thousands of hearts and found that the heart is a single continuous muscle band, folded into a spiral. He proved the heart works like a vortex generator, creating suction and torque, not pressure.
He called it the Helical Ventricular Myocardial Band and it changes everything.
The real movement of blood comes from pressure differentials, electromagnetic flow, and coherent resonance. The blood spirals naturally. It does not need to be forced through miles of arteries and capillaries. That idea is beyond stupid. The so-called pump is not strong enough to push thick fluid through 60,000 miles of tubing. That is basic physics. That lie was dead on arrival.
Here is the truth. Blood moves before the heart forms in the embryo. It flows via frequency, resonance, and electric charge. The body is a field, not a factory.
Your heart creates a toroidal electromagnetic field that radiates six metres from the body. This field syncs with the Earth, the Sun, and every living being around you. It is a resonator. A tuner. A conductor. It aligns the rhythm of your cells. It feels. It remembers. It emits. And it responds to emotion, thought, light, sound, and breath.
When you feel love, grief, fear, or peace, your heart transmits it. It is the central frequency modulator of your biology. Not a fucking pump.
And the institutions know this. The HeartMath Institute has measured these fields for decades. They know the heart has more neuronal cells than parts of the brain. They know it is a second brain. They know coherence in the heart transforms the entire nervous system.
So why are they still teaching children a 400-year-old guess from William Harvey that has never been updated?
Because if you knew the truth, you would never accept statins or beta blockers again. You would understand that trauma, emotion, and disconnection break the heart field, not cholesterol. You would stop obeying the medical cartel and start tuning your body like the intelligent frequency field it is.
They do not want coherent humans. They want disrupted, inflamed, fragmented people who rely on drugs to survive. That is the business model. And the fake heart pump lie is central to it.
Your heart is not a pressure valve. It is a vortex. A field tuner. A resonating gateway between physical and energetic worlds.
It is the instrument of your soul.
And it has been hijacked by science that refuses to evolve.
– Jamie Freeman
One of the few things that August didn’t know about her was that sometimes when she looked at her collection of pictures she tried to imagine and place herself in that other, shadow life. You walk into a room and flip a switch and the room fills with light. You leave your garbage in bags on the curb, and a truck comes and transports it to some invisible place. When you’re in danger, you call for the police. Hot water pours from faucets. Lift a receiver or press a button on a telephone, and you can speak to anyone. All of the information in the world is on the Internet, and the Internet is all around you, drifting through the air like pollen on a summer breeze. There is money, slips of paper that can be traded for anything: houses, boats, perfect teeth. There are dentists. She tried to imagine this life playing out somewhere at the present moment. Some parallel Kirsten in an air-conditioned room, waking from an unsettling dream of walking through an empty landscape.
– Emily St. John Mandel
Don’t shove me into your pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
– William Faulkner
Evening was coming and with it the soft, harping rain, rustling, rustling. A bird was muttering liquidly, gently somewhere, and it was very like the night – kind, strange.
– Henry Green
Irreverence is the only way left to us for testing our universe.
– Frank Herbert
It seems to be accepted as inevitable that the majority of our people be weighed down by hunger and unemployment. Their sufferings, injuries, and deaths seem to have become routine. They no longer make us ask “Why is this happening? What should we do to avoid it?” How can we answer the question the Lord put to Cain, “What have you done? Listen to the sound of your brother’s blood, crying out to me from the ground” (Gen. 4:10).
– St. Óscar Romero
And I asked myself
about the present. how
wide it was, how deep it
was, how much was mine
to kееp.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Everywhere I look there is tyranny.
Everywhere I look there is goodness.
– Abby E. Murray
Marriage is something bigger and greater than you or me, and it is as durable as the sky which always remains clear and endless in spite of the clouds or planets that whirl and spin there.
– Woody Guthrie
The Diamond vehicles function like spaceships, carrying our consciousness to exotic worlds. Each one takes us to a different universe, with different qualities constituting the building blocks of reality. They resemble spaceships in that they are vehicles that travel in inner space, taking our attention to the furthest reaches of Reality. They also resemble spaceships in how they are perceived: they appear as gem-like structures of various shapes and forms, scintillating colored lights. The impact on the consciousness of the soul includes deep hums and intense vibrations, filling her with awe, astonishment, transport, and delight. The docking station for these spaceships is the medium of the soul itself; the substance of the soul is imbued with the particular sacred quality of each vehicle as it descends into consciousness.
– A. H. Almaas, The Inner Journey Home
These vehicles are living files of essential knowledge…
– Karen Johnson, The Jeweled Path
Fancies are like shadows… you can’t cage them, they’re such wayward, dancing things.
– L.M. Montgomery
The point is not to make sense. The point is to make feel.
– André Breton
Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.
– William S. Burroughs
The ecstatic love of a young writer for the old writer he will be some day is ambition in its most laudable form. This love is not reciprocated by the older man in his larger library, for even if he does recall with regret a naked palate and a rheumless eye, he has nothing but an impatient shrug for the bungling apprentice of his youth.
– Nabokov
When I imagined quitting smoking, I imagined “settling down,” not because I associated quitting with a more mature self-care, but because I couldn’t imagine moving through an array of social spaces without the cigarette as bridge or exit strategy.
– Ben Lerner
Synchronicities can produce the crack in our consciousness that expands our choices, our capacities and our consciousness of the divine. These mysterious moments go beyond our ego consciousness and open us to the sacredness of being a part of something larger than we are.
– Laurence Hillman
In a really equal democracy, every or any section would be represented, not disproportionately, but proportionately… Unless they are, there is not equal government, but a government of inequality and privilege: one part of the people rule over the rest:
there is a part whose fair and equal share of influence in the representation is withheld from them, contrary to all just government, but, above all, contrary to the principle of democracy, which professes equality as its very root and foundation.
– John Stuart Mill
Time moved in two directions because every step into the future carried a memory of the past…
– Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1
Some kids are raised in a mess and they say, “When I’m on my own, I’ll be neater than God.” Others are raised in a mess and they say, “Life is a mess, looks like, and that’s just the way it is.” It’s got nothing to do with their upbringing.
– Anne Tyler, Redhead by the Side of the Road
It might take a persistent transcendentalism to teach us that even if we attained some kind of tech-bro subsidized singularity, we are still within relations of immanence.
– Báyò Akómoláfé
The Lakota Bible is Nature. On the cosmic clock, the written word has only been here a fraction of a second. Indigenous teachings have been here longer: these teachings are primordial.
Why is there such a move toward indigenous spirituality? Pews are becoming empty, people are looking for the center. Medicine men like Pete Catches and Fools Crow have said the Native tradition and spirituality will spread all over the world.
If you recognize that the sacred is real and not completely knowable, then you can be open to God teaching you in bits and pieces. You must develop a spiritual understanding of spiritual leaders like Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, Crazy Horse, or Black Elk.
Constantly cultivate a sense of the presence of divinity. Ritual and ceremony are critical to doing this. We must repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat so the presence of divinity becomes part of who we are.
– Basil Brave Heart, Lakota elder
Everything is interwoven, and the web is Holy; none of its parts are unconnected. They are composed harmoniously, and together they compose the world.
One world, made up of all things. One divinity, present in them all.
– Marcus Aurelius
I’ve always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I’m not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect.
– Fernando Pessoa
That’s what art does—it evades time.
– John Keene
Stars have a gentle quality; we can feel them watching over us tenderly.
After a long day of hard work, our bodies may be bone tired, yet as we gaze upward we can sense that at the deepest level there is a profound and limitless beauty.
This beauty is effortless, and it is perfect.
There are no leaks in the roof of the sky; here, at the end of the day, we don’t have to put up ladders to repair the constellations.
We can rest, and receive the outpouring of light, and let the gates of our minds open.
– Tarthang Tulku, Lotus Mandala
your heart cannot expand
unless your heart be broken
unless your heart suffers
unless your heart
goes through the pain
that’s the only way to expand
if you want to expand yourself
you just have to be open
to what you don’t know
– Tenzin Wangyal Rimpoche
Maybe you don’t need to do more healing work. Maybe you just need to sit under a tree.
– Sheleana Aiyana
CAVITIES
I sat with him in a café and we ate potato salad and drank Italian sodas. All around us, sad-looking people walked happy-looking dogs.
I let him slide his hand over my knee skin. I did not blink, just sat there like an empty driveway. He was in charge. I had one hundred dollars left in my bank account, and my car needed better tires.
“Do you want anything else?” he asked, and I did not.
The potato salad sat heavy in my stomach. Hunger seemed like the tiniest part of being alone. He took me out for two meals each day.
On my birthday, my last pair of reading glasses broke, and I let him have the rest of me. While he did that, I thought about Laffy Taffy, the candy I loved as a kid. How it ruined my teeth, but I wanted it anyway.
– Meg Pokrass
Too many human populations are mired in compulsive associations. Smaller groups can more easily organize themselves through playful processes. As Huizinga says in Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, “Civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play like a baby detaching itself from the womb: it arises in and as play, and never leaves it.” This perspective also inspired the writings of Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset about, “the sportive origins of the state.” But if humans are the playful fools in the deck of life, it’s no wonder our serious attempt to become the most godlike species ever keeps getting more grim. Meanwhile, all of the living sometimes end up sneakily playing with those kids from the other side of the tracks. Living minds do have rules, which they keep playfully breaking. They don’t always make the most significant strides by obsessing with what’s useful or necessary, because sometimes unpredictable processes of play can surprise us with what we most wanted. Especially when it’s “infinite play.”
While social mammals are often interested in play, it’s rash to conclude that other species never are. It might seem hard to get a seagull to play with you, but if you spend a little time watching them, you can see how much they play with each other.
Seagulls like to play:
Perch-on-the-piling-till-somebody-forces-you-off
Chase-the-gull-with-the-stick-in-its-mouth
Stand-on-a-beach-facing-the-exact-same-way
Fly-together-just-barely-above-the-water
Hover-motionless-over-everyone-in-a-very-brisk-wind
Veer-and-swoop-together-in-perfect-coordination
Fly-down-the-shore-together-catching-warm-updrafts
Fly-together-inland-to-explore-far-away
Bob-together-in-the-water-like-a-bunch-of-ducks
Fly-in-a-circle-together-around-any-boat
Everybody-screech-together
And, when they’re mad about no more treats:
See-who-can-poop-on-a-human.
– George Gorman
she doesn’t know how much it means to be seen
as the whole sky when my whole life
others have only seen me as the sun
– Little Sky
WITNESS
We are here to abet creation and to witness it,
to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed.
Together we notice not only each mountain shadow
and each stone on the beach
but we notice each other’s beautiful face
and complex nature
so that creation need not play to an empty house.
– Annie Dillard
My daughter dyed her hair blue and I didn’t mind, and she put this ring in her nose; I didn’t mind that either. And she put this stud through her tongue. That was a little hard for a father to take but I didn’t really feel like doing violence to her relationship just because you put a nail through a tongue. There are things you have to accept. Then she said she wanted to move to Amsterdam. That’s when I put my foot down. All this is my way of introducing a song, My daughter was named after a great poet that touched me very much when I was her age. His name is Federico Garcia Lorca. My daughter’s name is Lorca. And this is the song for him.
– Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen’s 1986 song, based on his own translation of Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Pequeño Vals Vienés” (literally “Little Viennese Waltz”), was part of a collection of Lorca’s poems performed by a variety of artists, in an album called Poetas en Nueva York. It was issued to commemorate the 50 years anniversary of the assassination of the poet by the Fascists in Spain in 1936. Two years later, Cohen included it in his “I’m Your Man” album.
Now in Vienna there’s ten pretty women
There’s a shoulder where Death comes to cry
There’s a lobby with nine hundred windows
There’s a tree where the doves go to die
There’s a piece that was torn from the morning
And it hangs in the Gallery of Frost
Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take this waltz with the clamp on its jaws
Oh I want you, I want you, I want you
On a chair with a dead magazine
In the cave at the tip of the lily
In some hallways where love’s never been
On a bed where the moon has been sweating
In a cry filled with footsteps and sand
Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take its broken waist in your hand
This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz
With its very own breath of brandy and Death
Dragging its tail in the sea
There’s a concert hall in Vienna
Where your mouth had a thousand reviews
There’s a bar where the boys have stopped talking
They’ve been sentenced to death by the blues
Ah, but who is it climbs to your picture
With a garland of freshly cut tears?
Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take this waltz it’s been dying for years
There’s an attic where children are playing
Where I’ve got to lie down with you soon
In a dream of Hungarian lanterns
In the mist of some sweet afternoon
And I’ll see what you’ve chained to your sorrow
All your sheep and your lilies of snow
Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
With its “I’ll never forget you, you know!”
This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz …
And I’ll dance with you in Vienna
I’ll be wearing a river’s disguise
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder,
My mouth on the dew of your thighs
And I’ll bury my soul in a scrapbook,
With the photographs there, and the moss
And I’ll yield to the flood of your beauty
My cheap violin and my cross
And you’ll carry me down on your dancing
To the pools that you lift on your wrist
Oh my love, Oh my love
Take this waltz, take this waltz
It’s yours now. It’s all that there is
At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world’s word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: this hum is the silence. Nature does utter a peep – just this one. The birds and insects, the meadows and swamps and rivers and stones and mountains and clouds: they all do it; they all don’t do it. There is a vibrancy to the silence, a suppression, as if someone were gagging the world. But you wait, you give your life’s length to listening, and nothing happens. The ice rolls up, the ice rolls back, and still that single note obtains. The tension, or lack of it, is intolerable. The silence is not actually suppression: instead, it is all there is.
– Annie Dillard
Sometimes we use our minds not to discover facts, but to hide them. We use part of the mind as a screen to prevent another part of it from sensing what goes on elsewhere. […] One of the things the screen hides most effectively is the body, our own body, by which I mean the ins and outs of it, its interiors. Like a veil thrown over the skin to secure its modesty, the screen partially removes from the mind the inner states of the body, those that constitute the flow of life as it wanders in the journey of each day.
The alleged vagueness, elusiveness, and intangibility of emotions and feelings are probably symptoms of this fact, an indication of how we cover the representation of our bodies, of how much mental imagery based on nonbody objects and events masks the reality of the body. Otherwise we would easily know that emotions and feelings are tangibly about the body. Sometimes we use our minds to hide a part of our being from another part of our being.
– António Damásio
It’s a strange business, speaking for yourself, in your own name, because it doesn’t at all come with seeing yourself as an ego or a person or a subject. Individuals find a real name for themselves, rather, only through the harshest exercise in depersonalization, by opening themselves up to the multiplicities everywhere within them, to the intensities running through them.
– Gilles Deleuze
The link between man and the world is broken. Henceforth, this link must become an object of belief: it is the impossible which can only be restored within a faith. Belief is no longer addressed to a different or transformed world. Man is in the world as if in a pure optical and sound situation. The reaction of which man has been dispossessed can be replaced only by belief. Only belief in the world can reconnect man to what he sees and hears. The cinema must film, not the world, but belief in this world, our only link.
– Gilles Deleuze
Here are people who refused to cheat, who eagerly sought out the truth and shrank from neither poetry nor terror, the two poles of our globe – since poetry does exist in the world, in certain events, at rare moments. And there’s also no shortage of terror.
– Adam Zagajewski
It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Memories were not the cause of that depression. During the course of my life, there have been some wonderful women. And it was not that I could not find love, but that I could not accept love, because I did not know how. Perhaps the breakup (with Marianne) was an element in that depression, but I really never knew where my depressive condition came from., but it had to do with an isolation of myself. It has been the force, the determinant mechanism that made me adapt this attitude in life. I lived trying to avoid it, to escape it, to understand it, to handle it. It made me turn to drink, it pushed me to drugs, and it led me to Zen.
– Leonard Cohen
stones and bones
here is a country where old men
gather in the capital and
speak their language filled with
stones
their syllables are chips of bone
they speak of lifting up a creed
while cold and still there under
their tongue is somebody else’s child
or mine
bones and stones
our ears bleed
red and white and blue
– Lucille Clifton
Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, ‘I am not the kind of person I want to be.’ It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied.
– Frank Herbert
Spiritual practitioners thrive in unpredictable conditions, testing and refining the inner qualities of heart and mind. Every situation becomes an opportunity to abandon judgment and opinions and to simply give complete attention to what is.
– Shaila Catherine
Lie down with your belly to the ground,
like an old dog in the sun.
Smell the greenness of the cloverleaf,
feel the damp earth through your clothes,
let an ant wander the uncharted territory of your skin.
Lie down with your belly to the ground.
Melt into the earth’s contours like a harmless snake.
All else is mere bravado.
Let your mind resolve itself in a tangle of grass.
Lie down with your belly to the ground, flat out, on ground level.
Prostrate yourself before the soil you will someday enter.
Stop doing.
Stop judging, fearing, trying.
This is not dying,
but the way to live in a world of change and gravity.
Let go.
Let your burdens drop.
Let your grief-charge bleed off into the ground.
Lie down with your belly to the ground
and then rise up with the earth still in you.
– Nancy Paddock
Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise – the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer.
– Milan Kundera
To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.
– Kurt Vonnegut
It is not possible to imagine and feel the pain of others.
We say we do but we don’t.
It is a country we have no passport for,
and no right of entry.
– Charles Wright
I am not concerned about the world. I am concerned about the people with whom I live. The other world is all in the newspapers. My family and my neighbors are my life—the only life that I can experience. What lies beyond is newspaper mythology. It is not of vast importance that I make a career or achieve great things for myself. What is important and meaningful to my life is that I shall live as fully as possible to fulfill the divine will within me.
This task gives me so much to do that I have no time or any other. Let me point out that if we were all to live in that way we would_ need no armies, no police, no diplomacy, no politics, no banks. We would have a meaningful life and not what we have now—madness.
What nature asks of the apple-tree is that it shall bring forth apples, and of the pear-tree that it shall bring forth pears. Nature wants me to be simply man. But a man conscious of what I am, and of what I am doing.
Mankind has no existence. I exist, you exist. But mankind is only a word. Be what God means you to be; don’t worry about mankind. In worrying about mankind, which doesn’t exist, you are avoiding looking at what does exist—the self. You are like a man who leans over his neighbor’s fence and says to him: “Look, there is a weed. And over there is an- I other one. And why don’t you hoe the rows deeper? And I why don’t you tie up your vines?” And all the while, his own garden, behind him, is full of weeds.
– C.G. Jung
I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
– Jonathan Swift
Aging
In every photo of us now, I notice
silver threading our beards, hair
hidden beneath ball caps as it thins
and falls away. I never thought this
would happen to us too, youth once
so effortless and apparent, changing
as we age into something as plain
as dandelions gone to seed, each
blazing yellow crown that once drew
thousands of pollinators transformed
into tufts of soft white, tossed aside
by the least wind—the flowers now
finding a home wherever they land,
scattering wisdom like tiny stars
on the summer air.
– James Crews
every time i hear the story of icarus
they leave out the part where
the ocean cradled him
like a lover
while whispering,
“don’t mistake descent for defeat.”
when the boy became a man
with salt in his beard
and poetry
older than the sun
dripping from his tongue.
– Christopher Sexton
Burn or speak your mind.
For the oak to untruss its passion
it must explode as fire or leaves.
– Marie Ponsot
It’s an old family story, how at five
I asked, and they turned
the question back on me. Well,
where do you think you came from?
I replied, they say, as cool as milk,
From earth and from God.
I find it hard to believe now. But then, I
was
still close enough to both
to know, I guess.
– Deirdre Lockwood
I am waiting for a love whose world is split
in half by the sight of me.
– Meg Ford
You can’t fix civilization. Civilization is militarization. So the first thing you have to have is a transformation of consciousness. You have to move from civilization to planetization and realize the world we are really living in, where we are all mutually involved in one another.
The paradigm shift from national defense to mutual security requires a kind of politics of enlightenment. It requires a different way of looking and seeing. Once you begin to see this way, the world will never look the same.
Once you begin to see what’s really going on in the world, you won’t see the future. Forget about prophecies. We’re just talking about what’s happening now. When you look at the stars, you know you’re seeing the past. But maybe in the soul, when an event happened ‘out there,’ you would know it in your heart even though the light would take time to come to you. So there are times when you look out at history and read the newspapers, but you don’t really see what’s going on. Then you imagine these fantasies of prophecies about the future far, far away, but all of those prophecies of the future are the actual daily news. Your heart is telling you what’s going on.
– William Irwin Thompson
The thick-walled room’s cave-darkness,
cool in summer, soothes
by saying, This is the truth, not the taut
cicada-strummed daylight.
– Reginald Gibbons
For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.
– Gore Vidal
Avalanche of Empty Words
by Tamara Goheen
this avalanche of empty words
covering me and devouring
empty people and empty days
am i the only one left?
everyone demands their free speech
oh, but what use is it?
when they have nothing to say
oh, well i know it’s hard
oh i can’t stand out
in the confusion
and silence of thinking
it can be painful
it can be saddening
oh, but what is your talk
of nothing equal to
what is this accepted
senselessness about?
am i a foreigner?
am i a lost cause.
it’s true i’m not really sure
where i’m going
and sometimes i’m not really sure
where i am
you speak of after graduation
you speak of your college days
but when you open your mouth
the words that trickle out
are just nothing
an avalanche
an avalanche
an avalanche
of empty words
Grief
by Barbara Crooker
is a river you wade in until you get to the other side.
But I am here, stuck in the middle, water parting
around my ankles, moving downstream
over the flat rocks. I’m not able to lift a foot,
move on. Instead, I’m going to stay here
in the shallows with my sorrow, nurture it
like a cranky baby, rock it in my arms.
I don’t want it to grow up, go to school, get married.
It’s mine. Yes, the October sunlight wraps me
in its yellow shawl, and the air is sweet
as a golden Tokay. On the other side,
there are apples, grapes, walnuts,
and the rocks are warm from the sun.
But I’m going to stand here,
growing colder, until every inch
of my skin is numb. I can’t cross over.
Then you really will be gone.
A small knowledge of history depresses one with the sense of the everlasting mass and weight of human iniquity: old, old, dreary, endless repetitive unchanging incurable wickedness. All towns, all villages, all habitations of men – sinks! And at the same time one knows that there is always good: much more hidden, much less clearly discerned, seldom breaking out into recognizable, visible, beauties of word or deed or face – not even when in fact sanctity, far greater than the visible advertised wicked- ness, is really there. But I fear that in the individual lives of all but a few, the balance is debit – we do so little that is positive good, even if we negatively avoid what is actively evil.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Pure Imagination
Fiction is pure Imagination.
Poetry stays grounded in the
Purposefulness of prayer.
Philosophy is even more deterministic.
Not even to speak of science!
Only fiction is not relegated
By social norms,
Though it tries to claim some.
Fiction and dreaming are akin.
Fiction plays with consciousness
But dreams unfold.
– George Gorman
A poem is a smuggling of
something back from the
otherworld, a prime bit of
shoplifting where you get
something out the door
before the buzzer goes off.
– Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
If you want to be a writer, at some point your allegiance must shift from experience – what is important to you, what happened to you, what you saw – to artifact – what you make of it.
– Richard Hoffman
We were never designed
for empires.
We were made for the village.
For soil beneath our feet.
For eyes that see us.
For relationships where
we are known –
not followed, not
marketed to, but truly seen.
For circles that remember
how to care.
– Angell Deer
I didn’t want to be a voice for a generation. I just wanted to say what I saw, what I feared, and what I loved — and hope it might matter to someone.
– Bob Dylan
Apart from the fact there is no normal standard of health, nobody has proved that man is necessarily cheerful by nature. And further, man, by the very fact of being man, of possessing consciousness, is, in comparison with the ass or the crab, a diseased animal. Consciousness is a disease.
– Miguel de Unamuno
Printer’s ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.
– Christopher Morley
If only I could nail up the front door and live in a mess, I could simply become a fountain pen and have done with it—a conduit for ink to run through.
– Willa Cather
IMPROBABLE EXPERIMENT
We’re experiencing on a global level Zorba’s full catastrophe of the human condition. The improbable experiment of human life—along with a lot of other life forms, plant, animal, plankton, bacteria, et cetera, to which we are inexorably linked on planet Earth and which, in many cases, we barely understand—is up for grabs. The cockroaches will thrive no matter what transpires, as will microorganisms. But the world we love and cherish, depend on and belong to may very well be harmed beyond recognition if we don’t wake up and come to know our own minds and hearts in a much less self-centered way.
Paraphrasing Einstein, the mindset that creates a problem isn’t usually capable of solving the problem. We need a new mind, a mind of nonharming, a mind predisposed to deep insight, selflessness, and compassion. And the dharma in its most universal expression offers immediate access to that new mind and its ongoing cultivation because, in many ways, it is already here. Is it simple? Yes. Is it easy? No, it seems to be just about the hardest work in the world for us humans to wake up and set wakefulness as our default mode.
My hope is that we can wake up to the name that biologist and physician Linnaeus gave us, homo sapiens sapiens—which means the species that is aware and is aware that it is aware—and embody that as best we can, as a practice, in every aspect of our being. Let’s instantiate it in our laws, in our governance. Is a more compassionate and just Democracy 2.0 an ideology? I don’t think so. Nor is it a prescription. It’s an aspiration that can develop and mature over time as more and more people engage with and embody this kind of universal dharma understanding based on embodied wakefulness, and come to see taking one’s seat, both metaphorically and literally, alone and together, as a radical act of sanity and love, of selflessness and wisdom and belonging.
– Jon Kabat-Zinn
Dawn Does Not Break in the West
Listen, western world,
for a thousand years
you have been giving birth
to genius after genius.
Now you have become a circus
for monstrosities.
We glance into your terrible fires
and see a dawn that has no horizon,
no bounds.
– Eghishe Charenc
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
No daylight to separate us.
Only kinship. Inching ourselves closer to creating a community of kinship such that God might recognize it. Soon we imagine, with God, this circle of compassion. Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied. We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges, we join the easily despised and the readily left out. We stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop. We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.
– Gregory Boyle
This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.
– John Muir
Your creative endeavors can never be thoroughly mapped out ahead of time. You have to allow for the suddenly altered landscape, the change in plan, the accidental spark– and you have to see it as a stroke of luck rather than a disturbance of your perfect scheme. Habitually creative people are, in E. B. White’s phrase, ‘prepared to be lucky.’
– Twyla Tharp
What if I’ve spent my whole life wanting to be seen? In that way, I’ve wanted to be the painting, not the painter.
But I am the painter. Even now, I walk outside at night just so the sky can see me one more time. Stéphane Mallarmé once
wrote: Paint not the thing, but the effect it produces. I have wanted the sky all along, but my wanting was misplaced. I lift
my hand into the air and feel something grabbing my wrist. But it’s not the sky, it’s the beauty of the sky.
– Victoria Chang
One way to understand your own condition is to write something and spend a long time revising it. In revising you teach yourself. You find your own information buried in your body. It is still alive until you are not.
– Fanny Howe
Mindfulness isn’t just calming. It’s a quiet revolution toward freedom.
– Jaya Rudgard
LOVE
Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills.
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.
Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn’t always understand.
– Czeslaw Milosz
It started raining and suddenly memories drenched my soul…
– Avijeet Das
A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time. In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
– Milan Kundera, Slowness
As it is necessary not to invite robbery by supineness, so it is our duty not to suppress tenderness by suspicion; it is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.
– Samuel Johnson
On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men.
– Abraham Lincoln
It happens surprisingly fast, the way your shadow leaves you. All day you’ve been linked by the light, but now that darkness gathers the world in a great black tide, your shadow joins the sea of all other shadows. If you stand here long enough, you, too, will forget your lines and merge with the tall grass and old trees, with the crows and the flooding river—all these pieces of the world that daylight has broken into objects of singular loneliness. It happens surprisingly fast, the drawing in of your shadow, and standing in the field, you become the field, and standing in the night, you are gathered by night, Invisible birds sing to the memory of light but then even those separate songs fade, tiny drops of ink in an infinite spilling.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
When she runs into a difficulty, she stops and gives herself to it. She doesn’t cling to her own comfort; thus problems are no problem for her.
– Lao Tzu
Few people know anything about the ancestral soul and even fewer believe in it. Aren’t we all the carriers of the entire history of mankind? Why is it so difficult to believe that each of us has two souls? When a man is fifty years old, only one part of his being has existed for half a century. The other part, which also lives in his psyche, may be millions of years old. Every newborn child has come into this world with a fully equipped brain. Although in the early stages of life the mind has not gained complete mas- tery over the body, it is clearly preconditioned for reacting to the outer world-that is, it has the capacity to do so. Such mental patterns exert their influence throughout life and remain decisive for a person’s thinking. The newborn does not begin to develop his mental faculties on the first day of his life. His mind, a finished structure, is the result of in- numerable lives before his and is far from being devoid of content. It is unlikely that we shall ever discover the remote past, into which the impersonal psyche of the individual
reaches.
– Carl Jung
The human skin is an artificial boundary: the world wanders into it, and the self wanders out of it, traffic is two-way and constant.
– Bernard Wolfe
As someone forever in awe of what our minds do with language—and what language, in turn, does with our minds—of how thought emerges through linguistic intentionality, I find it increasingly difficult to make sense of how easily we have chosen to outsource this part of ourselves.
– Christina Tudor-Sideri
There’s no ‘sass’ in ‘dissociation.’ is, in part, a mnemonic, to help me remember the word I mean to be saying (which, I often mis-say as ‘disassociation’).
– Douglas Kearney
There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.
– Milan Kundera
All the things I had loved up to then / fell away in the long struggle between winter and spring.
– Sandra Lim
The more I listen to you, the less I belong to myself.
– Fernando Pessoa
The words secret and sacred are siblings.
– Mary Ruefle
Rubble is the ground on which our deepest friendships are built.
– Anne Lamott
Introverts
are the
normal ones.
– Andy Perrin
Weak desires protect you from disappointment. But nothing keeps you safer than being a visible ruin.
– Fanny Howe
The ancients called internal longing for wholeness “fate” or “destiny,” the “inner voice” or the “call of the gods.” It has an inevitability, authority & finality to it and was at the heart of almost all mythology. Almost all heroes heard an inner voice that spoke to them.
– Richard Rohr
We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
– Roland Barthes
Contemplation is what separates clear action from reaction; by allowing us to step back and take a breath, it puts every moment on a larger canvas, and suddenly an insult–or a mishap–doesn’t seem so lasting or so urgent. No cure, therefore, but at least a respite.
– Pico Iyer
Be nothing. Life then becomes extraordinarily simple and beautiful.
– Krishnamurti
waves of heat
shimmering above
the dry grass
– Basho
The more rigid the self, the more suffering it carries.
– Nathan Glyde
the best cure for writer’s block is to read something that makes you really mad
– katie kadue
If you want to find Nirvana, don’t live in the past or future—live fully in this breath.
– Anam Thubten
Who would dream of looking among aristocrats anywhere for an old custom? One might as well look for an old costume! The god of the aristocrats is not tradition, but fashion, which is the opposite of tradition.
– G.K. Chesterton
And being such the soul doth recognize
The doubleness of nature, that there lies
A soul occult in Nature, hidden deep
As lies the soul of man in moveless sleep.
– Richard Watson Dixon
All the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of the prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was
ever so. I don’t know why, but I do know that the universe never began.
Make no mistake, I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.
– Clarice Lispector
Remember the universe is your friend. It’s on your side, there’s nothing against you. The only thing against you are your thoughts. If you learn to quiet your mind you’ll have no problems.
– Robert Adams
she studies raindrops on glass, how sad
and brief each life—dissolving
on the sill seconds after they bloom.
– Claudia Cortese
Misfortune tests brave men.
– Seneca
And then, on certain days, you remember deeply that the spirit of the river is your mother, so you go to her in reverence to say hello.
– Mo júbà Ọ̀ṣun
Transformational tendencies and a willingness to see beyond the veil. These two things alone will place you in the 1% of humanity.
– Nika Solé
Going mad is the slowest and dullest business in the world. I have very nearly done it more than once in my boyhood, and so have nearly all my friends, born under the general doom of mortals, but especially moderns; I mean the doom that makes a man come almost to the end of thinking before he comes to the first chance of living.
– G. K. Chesterton
…only in the surrender of the light could the darkness prevail.
– David Eddings
I’d never write a memoir. It would disturb my private life too much, and it doesn’t interest me. I’ve never kept a diary. I’ve never wanted to talk about myself in the most truthful way possible.
– Marie NDiaye
The Cenotaph
by Fanny Howe
I want to leave this place
unremembered.
The gas stove is leaking
and the door of the refrigerator
stained with rust.
The mugs are ugly
and there are only two forks.
The walls are black
and soft, the bed a balloon
of night-clothing.
The stairwell sloped
to a dragger’s pace.
There are big windows
with blind-slats dusty
and gray. Street life
goes all night and at dawn
freedmen shout and
laugh outside the kitchen.
Where does life begin and end?
In the lamb or the cotton?
My pillow is my friend.
Every real story is a never ending story.
– Michael Ende
Even biology knows that habitual, extreme safety and well-being are not advantageous for a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to reveal its pernicious mask.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
In awareness, all happenings are seen at once. This could also be called panoramic vision.
– Chögyam Trungpa
I’m much more interested in ensoilment than ensoulment. I want to have actual roots. I want my spirituality to have fur, pheromones, funk. I want it to live in a specific place. And I want it to teach me intimately how to be dynamically present and useful to my ecosystem. And I want to tell people that healing isn’t about completion. And it isn’t about lightness. It’s about the mixing bowl where nothing is exiled, everything is included. In order to grow a garden, you need manure. You need compost. In order to heal the soil, you don’t clean it, you add to it: fungi, ferment, bacteria, woodchips.
– Sophie Strand
Actually, really knowing someone doesn’t mean anything. People change. A person may like pineapple today and something else tomorrow.
– Wong Kar-wai, Chungking Express
My grandma told me that the Universe is singing in the snowflakes, the raindrops, in the trees, the water, and all Creation. Physicists call this holistic holographic universe. Lakotas call it Taku Wakan Skan Skan/Mitakuye Oyasin, which means everything is connected and related in divine rhythm, vibration. Remember the Lakotas know that the song sings the singer. The Spirit sings the song.
– Basil Braveheart
As St. Paul said, “For the good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.” So where is the bridge between what I know I ought to do and how I actually behave? There’s a huge gap. But there is a bridge, which very few people have understood. And that is the work of listening to another human being. In that work of listening, I’m not required to agree with you, or to love you, but just to listen, to let the other person in. To me this is the great undiscovered, realistic first plank in a bridge that leads from where I am to where I ought to be. So this is related to the other.
– Jacob Needleman
Crossroads
by Louise Glück
My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer
I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar,
like what I remember of love when I was young—
love that was so often foolish in its objectives
but never in its choices, its intensities.
Too much demanded in advance, too much that could not be promised—
My soul has been so fearful, so violent:
forgive its brutality.
As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you cautiously,
not wishing to give offense
but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance:
it is not the earth I will miss,
it is you I will miss.
Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people’s anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble – yes, gamble – with a whole part of their life and their so called ‘vital interests’.
– Albert Camus
nobody can save you but
yourself
and it will be easy enough to fail
so very easily
but don’t, don’t, don’t.
just watch them.
listen to them.
do you want to be like that?
a faceless, mindless, heartless
being?
do you want to experience
death before death?
nobody can save you but
yourself
and you’re worth saving.
it’s a war not easily won
but if anything is worth winning then
this is it.
– Charles Bukowski
When you outsource thinking, your brain goes on vacation. “EEG analysis presented robust evidence that LLM, Search Engine and Brain-only groups had significantly different neural connectivity patterns, reflecting divergent cognitive strategies. Brain connectivity systematically scaled down with the amount of external support: the Brain‑only group exhibited the strongest, widest‑ranging networks, Search Engine group showed intermediate engagement, and LLM assistance elicited the weakest overall coupling.”
– https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872
But also here’s a fantastic essay on the subject: “Now, in the age of the internet—when the Library of Alexandria could fit on a medium-sized USB stick and the collected wisdom of humanity is available with a click—we’re engaged in a rather large, depressingly inept social experiment of downloading endless knowledge while offloading intelligence to machines. (Look around to see how it’s going). That’s why convincing students that intelligence is a skill they must cultivate through hard work—no shortcuts—has become one of the core functions of education.”
– Brian Klass
It is a strange thing that all the memories have these two qualities. They are always full of quietness, that is the most striking thing about them; and even when things weren’t like that in reality, they still seem to have that quality. They are soundless apparitions, which speak to me by looks and gestures, wordless and silent—and their silence is precisely what disturbs me.
– Erich Maria Remarque
Dead White Poets and
the mill:
writing a poem
about change
instead of changing.
– Ewen Glass
The ones who break
through tend to have a
work ethic to support
their dream.
– Rick Rubin
I overcame myself, the
sufferer; I carried my
own ashes to the
mountains; I invented
a brighter flame for myself.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
CXI.
(If you have ever quit an imaginary job over an imaginary paycut,
mistakenly taken your house’s thermostat for a dial
with which to focus the windows,
written a play about the special relationship that blooms
when a withdrawn honor student is assigned to tutor
the school’s basketball star,
fallen in love with the woman who plays the part
of your character’s wife and bears you a child
that can communicate with rust,
been deafened by the panoply of voices in the classifieds
tied up every private detective in town with false leads,
taken photos of people saying “shut up,”
or know a place where you can get married at midnight,
then you know what I’m talking about.)
CIX.
Asking to Resign as Deputy Magistrate of Loyang
A square hole doesn’t work with round pegs
a straight board can’t serve as a wheel
materials all have their uses
denying our nature only makes us bitter
bending at the waist isn’t my kind of job
surviving on soup isn’t my kind of thrift
I’m retiring from life in a meaningless hall
I’ll nurse my ills beyond the dust and noise
fishes swim free but still form schools
wild birds too form flocks
I’ll be on Tuling in the family garden
perfumed by thoughts of a thousand years
or on Sungshan when the sky first clears
or between the two rivers after a spring snow
the flowering trees aren’t yet in bloom
but new plants appear every day
why should I keep filling out ledgers
when I could be plowing those eastern fields
My Triumph lasted till the Drums
Had left the Dead alone
And then I dropped my Victory
And chastened stole along
To where the finished Faces
Conclusion turned on me
And then I hated Glory
And wished myself were They.
What is to be is best descried
When it has also been –
Could Prospect taste of Retrospect
The tyrannies of Men
Were Tenderer – diviner
The Transitive toward.
A Bayonet’s contrition
Is nothing to the Dead.
– Emily Dickinson
Lesson
Today my praise is as simple
as the rolled oats I scoop
from the can into a saucepan
of boiling water in which they
foam up at first, agitated
by the act of their surrender
to this new form. Likewise
the blueberries I mix in with
the steaming oatmeal, how they
yield to the heat, growing only
sweeter as I stir. Can this be
the lesson we too must learn,
this giving over to the circumstances
into which life drops us, here
on a planet where we’re taught
to stay armored and fight
against such softening?
– James Crews
The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world – we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.
– Joanna Macy
Time blossoms with its fruit before the flowers. This surprising joy happens only once wind blows on the roof.
– Mo Fei, translated by Wang Ping
“Aye!”—one word, a whole Highland spirit.
If I cannot forgive myself
For all the blunders
That I have made
Over the years,
Then how can I proceed?
How can I ever dream
Perfection-dreams?
Move, I must, forward.
Fly, I must, upward.
Dive, I must, inward,
To be once more
What I truly am
And shall forever remain.
– Sri Chinmoy
Jesus never said, ‘Worship me,’
but he often said,
‘Follow me.’
– Fr. Richard Rohr
Music and Love
Music does not come quietly.
It needs the oomph that makes it heard.
Love does not come violently.
Hearts learn how to grow their words.
Friends can come when feelings surge,
Making room to dance for love.
Love, like a song – a sneaky urge –
Comes from within, not from above.
– George Gorman
Tapestry of Dreams
for sew long how I did yearn
to visit you in Bayeux
but with the conquest of the years
my hair is getting greyeux
for Time will wait for Norman –
that’s one in the eye for me
yet hope hangs by a silver thread,
I now hear you’ll cross the sea
oh, I’m on pins and needles
I’ve been waiting since my youth
no stitch-up or false-spun yarn
it’s the unembroidered truth
– Brian Bilston
Thig 6.6
Mahāpajāpatigotamītherīgāthā:
Verses of the Elder Mahāpajāpati Gotamī
Homage to you, Buddha, Hero!
Best of all beings,
who released me and many others
from suffering.
All suffering is fully understood,
craving, its cause, has been made to wither,
the Eightfold Path has been developed,
and cessation has been attained by me.
In the past I was a mother, a child, a father, a brother,
and a grandmother.
Not knowing the truth of how things are,
I came back again and again, not finding what I was looking for.
I have seen the Bhagavant,
indeed, this is my last body.
Destroyed is rebirth in saṁsāra,
now there is no coming back to any state of being.
See the disciples on the path—
established in energy, self-directed,
always making a sincere effort:
this is paying homage to the Buddhas!
Indeed, for the benefit of many beings,
Māyā gave birth to Gotama.
Pierced is sickness and death,
dispelled is the mass of suffering.
I gardened around my
trauma to create a world of
luscious nowness rather than
pruning and weeding it down
to one sterile monument to
the past.
– Sophie Strand
I’m not one for universalizing
statements. But I do know that
beauty as surprise — beauty that
leaks from the clouds and erupts
from the ground – has saved my life.
Too often psychology and medicine
discredit the healing power of
beauty.
– Sophie Strand
Beauty Medicine, for me, is potential. It is the potential to consider that although the days seem impossibly gray, anything can happen, and anything does happen all the time. Beauty medicine is the moment when we stop trying to understand the medicine, and surrender to our love of it, trusting that the celebration will flow both ways.
– Sophie Strand
Moments of grace are accidental.
And meditation makes us accident prone—
– Chögyam Trungpa
No one can fix the collective mind of the fear-filled messed up world while still operating out of their own fear-filled messed up mind.
– Kent Burgess
Bullies and fascists are such fragile souls that they’ll make you do a lie detector test to make sure you don’t have any bad thoughts about them. Your behaviour is not enough of a measure. They have to know your fee-fees are safe for them, so that their fee-fees can be okay.
This is the psychological wasteland of fascism and authoritarianism: accelerating paranoia, an enemy in every uncertainty, an absolute inability to trust anyone, a presumption of guilt and filth that must be confessed and purified, a world flooded with the shit of your enemies.
With self esteem like that, no wonder they have nothing left to lose in the attempt to control everything: the meanings of words, where your empathy can go, who you have sex with, what your genitals mean to you. They feel so bad and you have no right to feel otherwise.
It won’t work. You can strap a guy down and make him say “Kash Patel is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.” But that guy will be an empty husk. He’ll just be saying things, unable to see how desperate you are for friendship.
– Matthew Remski
Our passions are the true phoenixes; when the old one is burnt out, a new one rises from its ashes.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
In These Days of Waiting
In these days of waiting,
with hours long and leaden,
we peer out our windows,
to catch a glimpse of the real:
a tree in its first flowering,
a gravel path,
a small and ordinary bird—
anything to make us feel
more alive than dead.
Know this:
Whoever we are,
whatever we have become,
is no longer enough.
We must seek beyond the self.
Some rely on fate,
some on chance,
some on the Creator of Heaven and Earth,
and for a tragic few,
on the goodwill of our
bitterest enemies.
For each of us,
the days are long—
reaching out past the horizon,
beyond the dry and distant
plains of reason, of logic.
Where, I ask, is the logic
in babes wrested from
their mother’s arms?
In lovers from their warm beds,
in the kidnapping of the old and infirm
who no longer seek out pleasure,
but only a moment of peace
from their last wisps of life,
which wither now
at the edge of a great
and seething fire?
Come now, you who have
strength, and courage to rail—
who no longer care what
others think of your screams
in the night or in the day,
or your throwing up of hands
or your weeping
like a person gone insane.
I wonder, though,
if in these days,
sanity is no longer the
virtue it once was.
When our brother’s lives are at stake,
when our sister’s lives are in peril,
when our mother’s and our father’s
and our children’s existence
is in grave danger—
is it not right to shriek out our prayers?
Is it not proper to go the least bit mad?
Is this not what we have been called to—
pressed into service to fulfill?
Is madness not a sacred duty?
– Peter Himmelman
THE HISTORY OF CINEMA
IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
make it new
make it nude
– Jack Foley
What am I living for
and what am I dying for
are the same question.
– Margaret Atwood
izuku ni mo
sumarezuba tada
sumade aran
shiba no iori no
shibashi naru yo ni
Nowhere is there place
To stop and live, so only
Everywhere will do:
Each and every grass-made hut soon leaves
Its place within this withering world.
Life happens at intersections.
– Jack Dorsey
The New Cosmology
So it’s true: the poplar and I
are sisters, daughters of an ancient star,
every last thing
so much the same
(harp, toothpick, linnet, sleet)
that whatever I touch
is touching me, whatever
is a cousin,
unremote. Even the metaphors —
ruby as blood, blood
as river, river as dream — all are true,
just as the poets promised.
– Paulann Petersen, The Wild Awake
Fake cream has to be called “kreme.”
Fake cheese has to be called “cheez.” Billionaire—
owned infotainment news should have to be
called “nooz.”
– Give A Shit About Nature
PTSD never goes away is an old way of thinking. You can heal for good.
– Brad Schipke
It doesn’t matter if I’m singing or not. That’s the kind of person that my father and mother wanted me to be. The end obligation is to make people feel good about who they are.
– Arlo Guthrie
Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.
– Democritus
A CRUISE
Smaller than a truck
Larger than a car
Sunny afternoon
Cruisin’ West on Bryn Mawr
Driver side window open
and her hair tied back
40 MPH in a 25 zone
One hand on the wheel
The other on her phone.
– Jerry Pendergast
War represents the supreme failure of nations to resolve their differences. From a strictly pragmatic standpoint, it is the most inefficient waste of lives and resources ever conceived.
– Jacque Fresco
Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is a commitment to others. No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is commitment to their cause–the cause of liberation.
– Paulo Freire
What the world calls
madness is but the
overflow of a heart too full.
– Renée Vivien
I withdraw in silence like a silk ribbon
Stream walker
Every day I am drowned
In the greenhouse of prayers
The cathedrals of my tenderness sing the night under water
And these songs make islands in the sea
I am the one who walks
And I am like the four seasons
The beautiful seafaring bird
Was like a clock wrapped in cotton
Before flying off it told me your name
The colonial horizon is smothered with flags
Let’s go to sleep under the tree
Just like the rain
– Vicente Huidobro
I was riding on the Mayflower
When I thought I spied some land
I yelled for Captain Arab
I have you understand
Who came running to the deck
Said, ‘Boys, forget the whale
Look on over yonder
Cut the engines
Change the sail
Haul on the bowline.’
We sang that melody
Like all tough sailors do
When they are far away at sea
‘I think I’ll call it America!’
I said as we hit land
I took a deep breath
I fell down, I could not stand
Captain Arab he started
Writing up some deeds
He said, ‘Let’s set up a fort
And start buying the place with beads.’
Just then this cop comes down the street
Crazy as a loon
He throw us all in jail
For carryin’ harpoons
Ah me I busted out
Don’t even ask me how
I went to get some help
I walked by a Guernsey cow
Who directed me down
To the Bowery slums
Where people carried signs around
Saying, ‘Ban the bums!’
I jumped right into line
Sayin’, ‘I hope that I’m not late.’
When I realized I hadn’t eaten
For five days straight
I went into a restaurant
Lookin’ for the cook
I told them I was the editor
Of a famous etiquette book
The waitress he was handsome
He wore a powder blue cape
I ordered some suzette, I said
‘Could you please make that crepe?’
Just then the whole kitchen exploded
From boilin’ fat
Food was flying everywhere
I left without my hat
Now, I didn’t mean to be nosy
But I went into a bank
To get some bail for Arab
And all the boys back in the tank
They asked me for some collateral
And I pulled down my pants
They threw me in the alley
When up comes this girl from France
Who invited me to her house
I went, but she had a friend
Who knocked me out
And robbed my boots
And I was on the street again
Well, I rapped upon a house
With the U.S. flag upon display
I said, ‘Could you help me out?
I got some friends down the way.’
The man says, ‘Get out of here
I’ll tear you limb from limb.’
I said, ‘You know they refused Jesus, too.’
He said, ‘You’re not Him.
Get out of here before I break your bones
I ain’t your pop.’
I decided to have him arrested
And I went looking for a cop
I ran right outside
And I hopped inside a cab
I went out the other door
This Englishman said, ‘Fab!’
As he saw me leap a hot dog stand
And a chariot that stood
Parked across from a building
Advertising brotherhood
I ran right through the front door
Like a hobo sailor does
But it was just a funeral parlor
And the man asked me who I was
I repeated that my friends
Were all in jail, with a sigh
He gave me his card
He said, ‘Call me if they die.’
I shook his hand and said goodbye
Ran out to the street
When a bowling ball came down the road
And knocked me off my feet
A pay phone was ringing
It just about blew my mind
When I picked it up and said hello
This foot came through the line
Well, by this time I was fed up
At tryin’ to make a stab
At bringin’ back any help
For my friends and Captain Arab
I decided to flip a coin
Like either heads or tails
Would let me know if I should go
Back to ship or back to jail
So I hocked my sailor suit
And I got a coin to flip
It came up tails
It rhymed with sails
So I made it back to the ship
Well, I got back and took
The parkin’ ticket off the mast
I was ripping it to shreds
When this coastguard boat went past
They asked me my name
And I said, ‘Captain Kidd’
They believed me but
They wanted to know
What exactly that I did
I said for the Pope of Eruke
I was employed
They let me go right away
They were very paranoid
Well, the last I heard of Arab
He was stuck on a whale
That was married to the deputy
Sheriff of the jail
But the funniest thing was
When I was leavin’ the bay
I saw three ships a-sailin’
They were all heading my way
I asked the captain what his name was
And how come he didn’t drive a truck
He said his name was Columbus
I just said, ‘Good luck!’
– Bob Dylan
Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized men,
we didn’t have any kind of prison.
Because of this, we had no delinquents.
Without a prison, there can be no delinquents.
We had no locks nor keys and therefore among us there were no thieves.
When someone was so poor that he couldn’t afford a horse, a tent or a blanket,
he would, in that case, receive it all as a gift.
We were too uncivilized to give great importance to private property.
We didn’t know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being
was not determined by his wealth.
We had no written laws laid down, no lawyers, no politicians,
therefore we were not able to cheat and swindle one another.
We were really in bad shape before the white men arrived and I don’t know
how to explain how we were able to manage without these fundamental things
that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society.
– John (Fire) Lame Deer, Sioux Lakota
If the only measurement of your strength is
a demonstration of your cruelty, you’re not strong.
You’re a bully.
– The Subversive Lens
If you seek to conquer, then you have already lost. You may overtake some territories, abuse some women, or win some battles. But you will have lost the most fundamental war of life: the fight to keep your heart intact, and to remain in a state of love for all beings. This is our true purpose, this is our true task, this is our true challenge, this is our true nature, this is our true self. The good news is, and I speak from personal experience, even those who have lost the most, and who are the most lost, can win it all back in an instant, when they dedicate their lives to the Creator and to Love.
– Lyla June
There is grief
in accepting
someone
won’t change.
– Nedra Tawwab
Enter the ruins of your heart,
and know the meaning of
humility.
– Rumi
When you travel,
A new silence
Goes with you,
And if you listen,
You will hear
What your heart would
Love to say.
A journey can become a sacred thing.
Make sure, before you go,
To bless your going forth,
To free your heart of ballast
So that the compass of your soul
Might direct you towards
The territories of spirit
Where you will discover
More of your hidden life;
And the urgencies
That deserve to claim you.
– John O’Donohue
Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You’ve got to go so far, so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.
– Sylvia Plath
Be a cup
for the grace of the Friend.
Pour and be filled.
Seeking the Master’s gaze,
shattering your crown
against those soft brown toes,
is not the path of devotion.
But lifting the weary,
bringing joy
to the brokenhearted,
this is the wayless work.
How near is the Beloved?
The flame of this breath
in your body.
Your task tonight is listening
to the vast black bell
of silence.
Your duty at sunrise,
rejoicing in a sparrow’s trill.
Why does the earth spill over
with wild poppies
and tiny forget-me-nots,
each containing the sky?
Because you are awake.
Don’t try to understand.
Just be a cup
for the grace of the Friend.
Pour and be filled.
– Fred LaMotte
Australia you killed your first-born/ Australia you are not young and free/ Australia we want to cure your national amnesia/ Australia we want to wake you up/ ease your cored-out heart/ Australia we want to sing you/ Australia we want to let you Dream again/ Australia you keep drowning out our voices/ Australia you won’t know us/ see us/ hear us/ listen.
– Jeanine Leane, O Australia
a man settles where he finds peace.
Not beauty, not status but peace.
– Guthema Roba
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
– Douglas Adams
You won’t see it for what it
is, until you stop looking
through the lens of what
you want it to be.
– Dede Hawkins
The people with
the best vibe are the
ones who never use
the hurt they’ve gone
through as an excuse
to hurt others.
– Yung Pueblo
Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.
– May Sarton
Art is solving problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved. The shaping of the question is part of the answer.
– Piet Hein
CAN YOU HEAR THE THUNDER?
At night, the houses
in these streets howl.
Trees in great forests tremble.
The sea is screaming at the shore.
By daybreak, war is everywhere.
I don’t know how
you can close your eyes
when lightning is tearing
the sky to pieces.
Can you hear the thunder?
You say a storm is coming.
I say the storm is here.
– Tom Hirons
But it is not bravery; I have no choice.
I wake up and live my life.
Don’t you do the same?
– Anthony Doerr
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
– Wallace Stevens
WHEN WONDER
There on the hood of the dryer, all hum
and heat, legs folded, she sits like rebar
as if waiting for cement to rain down.
What thrums underneath is all that’s keeping
her alive, that and the corona around her
head that her boyfriend sees when he squints.
All this sound, this thrashing, rises around
her silencing the ache between her ears.
For a moment, she can be still. On the street
with his cigarette, he watches through the window,
the close to silent air humming about his head.
– Laura McCullough
The Whole Thing is the Hard Part
you have to live where the house lands on you
what else can you do your bones are all broken
and somebody loves you who is it tell me who
loves you not as much as I do I mean I even
built you a house and found you why won’t
you live in it
– Heather Christle
If your diet consisted of meat, veggies, fruits, single ingredient carbs, and zero alcohol, you’d be in better shape than 90% of people on the planet.
– Dan Go
The law is living word of living God to living prophets for living men. In everything that is life is the law written. You find it in the grass, in the tree, in the river, in the mountain, in the birds of heaven, in the fishes of the sea; but seek it chiefly in yourselves. For I tell you truly, all living things are nearer to God than the scripture which is without life. God so made life and all living things that they might by the everlasting word teach the laws of the true God to man. God wrote not the laws in the pages of books, but in your heart and in your spirit. They are in your breath, your blood, your bone; in your flesh, your bowels, your eyes, your ears, and in every little part of your body. They are present in the air, in the water, in the earth, in the plants, in the sunbeams, in the depths and in the heights.
– The Essene Gospel of Peace
I haven’t laughed often in the past week, but I did laugh this morning when reviewing my notes and remembering that Italian Futurists vowed to “kill the moonlight” in order to rid art of maudlin sentimentality. (Notes on early Eliot, etc)
– Alina Stefanescu
Practice doesn’t make perfect – practice makes permanent.
– Tim Henman
I hardly know what to feel most days, except grief and bug-eyed paranoia. But my faith tells me that God has skills, ploys, and grace adequate to bring light into the present darkness, into families, prisons, governments.
– Anne Lamott
When you set all ideals aside and face ‘what is’, you will find a beautiful and indescribable love that is not yours or mine but a thing that is self-created and which is its own eternity.
– Krishnamurti
Though the sick beast infect us, we are fraught
Forever with indissoluble Truth,
Wherein redress reveals itself divine,
Transitional, transcendent.
– Edwin Arlington Robinson
The wrong people can’t even see you. That’s spiritual protection at its finest.
– Nika Solé
scent of blossoms
on a mountain trail
sunrise
– Basho
I asked Bobby Dylan
I asked The Beatles
I asked Timothy Leary
But he couldn’t help me either
– Pat Thomas
Every experience that is personal is simultaneously an experience that is supernatural.
– Fanny Howe
Longing for what is not here, what is beyond, transcendent, cannot be grasped, an imagined beauty, this pathos that aches for an epistrophe to a further shore–this is the source of Orpheus’s poetic enchantment. As Rumi said in countless verses, what we long for is the longing itself.
– James Hillman
A genius never grows out of a perfectly balanced family, there must have been fools; a fool is always the first sign of the genius and the last, as foolishness and wisdom are sisters.
– CG Jung
If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance towards oneself can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures.
– Carl Jung
I, too, go on living somewhere, blessed with all kinds of wounds.
– Malina, Ingeborg Bachmann; tr. Philip Boehm
No one can create anger or stress within you. Only you can do that by virtue of how you process your world.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
I don’t feel right having a picture of a person be different from what they were. I think there’s something interesting about reality, the things people really say.
– Sharon Olds
Disease is love turned into fear—our energy, meant to sustain us, turned against ourselves. Energy cannot be destroyed. Our job is not to kill disease, but to turn its energy back in the direction it came from—to turn fear back into love.
– Marianne Williamson
Revolutionary Letter #2
by Diane di Prima
The value of an individual life a credo they taught us
to instill fear, and inaction, ‘you only live once’
a fog on our eyes, we are
endless as the sea, not separate, we die
a million times a day, we are born
a million times, each breath life and death:
get up. put on your shoes, get
started, someone will finish
//
Tribe
an organism, one flesh, breathing joy as the stars
breathe destiny down on us, get
going, join hands, see to business, thousands of sons
will see to it when you fall, you will grow
a thousand times in the bellies of your sisters
Nothing helps; I must help myself, or I am finished.
– Nietzsche
“The road goes on for ever,” said Pippin; “but I can’t without a rest.”
– Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.
– Charles Darwin
Why dost thou attempt a thing which thou knowest is beyond thy power and thy authority? For thou hast from me as a gift thy own being only, and no more; and therefore the creatures of thy hand and mind can live only by that being.
– J.R.R. Tolkien (Iluvatar to Aule)
Magic exists. Who can doubt it, when there are rainbows and wildflowers, the music of the wind and the silence of the stars? Anyone who has loved has been touched by magic. It is such a simple and such an extraordinary part of the lives we live.
– Nora Roberts
For it is a curious fact that though human beings have such imperfect means of communication…they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather than keep any experience to themselves.
– Virginia Woolf
more work in process thoughts:
So many strive for conceptual fixity, all-too-ready to stab a word-pin through the body of processual things so that whatever is in view has to stand still [by virtue of fixed concepts and definitions] and not continue to move through their natural habitat and evolution.
Think of a beautiful organism that naturally transforms from one kind of creature through adaptation to its environment. Analogously, people [as well as other animals, ideas, plants, places, phenomena, and processes] go through their unique growth, development, decay, and evolution.
What happens is we pour concrete over them, or stab them into the cork board with words and witness their colors and life-like force fade by insisting they cease moving for purposes of our hardened analysis.
Perhaps with patience we can go into a gentler, more organic mode of discovery, easing up on the administration of word-pins and concrete and allow for a kind of respectful deference toward the poetry of their unfolding mystery and evolution.
Yes, there are venues and traditions where provisional use of such fixity and concretizing is helpful and even necessary. But so often I get a sense that we are indiscriminate and insensitive toward the evolving life-force and culture of the “thing” we’re trying to get a grip on through our perceptions and labeling.
– Andrew Hagel
To understand the immeasurable, the mind must be extraordinarily quiet, still.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
Death changes you.
You can’t imagine tomorrow.
You stand in the street
Wondering why
You stand in the street.
Your memory
Is a fog
So cold and gray
Nothing moves
In it.
You sit down
Because you know
You can’t stand.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
To have lived a life whose highest wishes were fulfilled, which I have admittedly only now come to recognize as the original text of a page later covered with the script of my fate.
– Walter Benjamin
If I cross this precipice, there’s no turning back. I become the type of friend I cannot imagine being …
– Thad DeVassie
There are times we feel guided and protected by beings beyond our sight…Whether it’s literally true or there is some other energy that gives us this sense of guidance and protection, the Buddha included this among the benefits of practicing metta.
– Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mundane glow with an aura of self-transcendence.
– J. M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country
I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction, unless one of those old-fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere.
– Kurt Vonnegut
In spite of exceedingly complex technology, we miss the obvious signs of soul: a physical complaint, an animal in a dream, a witch in a fairy tale, a god in mythology, a tear in laughter and sadness, the lead weight of a depression.
– Thomas Moore
Time meant nothing back then. … Because things followed this known and structured pattern, no day was worthy of remembrance. All that mattered was the present and the foreseeable future.
– Chigozie Obioma, The Fishermen
All the great artists have been great workers, inexhaustible not only in invention but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The inner world is truly infinite, in no way poorer than the outer one. Man lives in two worlds. A fool lives here or there but never here and there.
– CG Jung
The truth can cause a lot of trouble for those who are not supposed to know it.
– Margaret Atwood
If one oversteps the bounds of moderation, the greatest pleasures cease to please.
– Epictetus
Sublime or ridiculous, the poet seeks to constrain language.
– William O’Daly
How do you even choose what to mend when so much has already been destroyed? How could she think, she asked herself, that she could revive or save anything?
– Edwidge Danticat
Search yourself, seek out the shattered, the multiple I, that you will be still further on, and emerge from one self, shed the old body, shake off the Law. Let it fall with all its weight, and you, take off, don’t turn back: it’s not worth it, there’s nothing behind you, everything is yet to come.
– Hélène Cixous
Life is full of problems, although life was wonderful in Barcelona in those days, and problems were called surprises.
– Roberto Bolaño
Somehow this wasn’t the same as melancholy. It was something else, about how melancholy and nostalgia weren’t relevant in the slightest. Things just happened. Then they were over. Time just passed. Partly it felt unpleasant, to think like that, rude even. Partly it felt good. It was kind of a relief.
– Ali Smith, Autumn
One may be no longer capable of belief, yet remain capable of believing in those who believe. One may be no longer capable of loving, except for loving someone who loves. One may no longer know what one wants, yet want what someone else wants.
– Jean Baudrillard
Deeply ingrained in the infantile psyche is the conscious or unconscious assumption that the cure for depression is to replace it with pleasant, happy feelings, whereas the only valid cure for any kind of depression lies in the acceptance of real suffering.
– Helen M. Luke
Poetry is a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget
– Robert Frost
It strikes me as being morally repulsive and intellectually absurd that people die of want in a world of surplus.
– Bob Geldof, Co-Founder of Live Aid
The structures that are not compatible with life on Earth will end. Our spiritual work is either shaking the foundations of injustice, or letting go of our reliance on anything that results from oppression.
– adrienne maree brown
I come in a world of iron… to make a world of gold
– Cervantes
Attempting to liberate the oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of liberation is to treat them as objects that must be saved from a burning building.
– Paulo Freire
I’ve felt in the States this injunction to be Black … it’s always felt weird to me—for example, I’ve been asked if I feel close to Toni Morrison. Why Toni Morrison? In fact I feel much closer to Russell Banks.
– Marie NDiaye
No one sings as purely as those who inhabit the deepest hell – what we take to be the song of angels is their song.
– Franz Kafka
We are surrounded by poetry on all sides…
– Vincent van Gogh
The days have taught you not to trust happiness because it hurts when it deceives.
– Mahmoud Darwish
Pay mind to your own life, your own health, and wholeness. A bleeding heart is of no help to anyone if it bleeds to death.
– Frederick Buechner
The will of the people is the source and the happiness of the people the end of all legitimate government upon earth.
– John Quincy Adams
If thou but settest foot on this path, thou shalt see it everywhere.
– Hermes Trismegistus
If you know the way broadly, you will see it in all things.
– Miyamoto Musashi
Poetry, she thought, wasn’t written to be analyzed; it was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding.
– Allie, The Notebook
We are made for
goodness. We are made
for love. We are made for
friendliness. We are
made for togetherness.
We are made for all of
the beautiful things that
you and I know.
– Desmond Tutu
Literature does not allow you to walk but it allows you to breathe.
– Roland Barthes
Love Song
I see light everywhere
Over the bus driver the woman
With her trolley in the street
I see dusk I hear the clock at four
I hear the silence in cupboards
Birdsong
Backwater dawn
I taste drier than flour
I smell the roots of trees
Before I see their arms
Shrieking
On the skyline
I feel diamonds pushed into
The bloodstream
Self-generated, a gift,
Making for the head I feel my head
Thrust into
A bucketful of stars
And all my senses
Singing
– Sinéad Morrissey
…One has to look objectively. To be distressed over the state of the world, and remain distressed, however distressed one may be, is simply one’s own subjective state. It may even be satisfying to us to feel that we are sensitive and able to be distressed and the rest of it. The real thing is to have this objective compassion, to say, ‘I must do something myself’, that however small in its material consequences, can be very large in its spiritual consequences.
– J.G. Bennett
But let us imagine RIGHT NOW that we find out about a world where there are artists who paint without brushes, make music without instruments, and write without pen and paper. The very thought makes me happy. That this world could be ours, right here and now.
– László Krasznahorkai
We sail / a small boat within her heart / and discover another heart,
– Noah Falck
Never turn a limitation
into an excuse.
– Rick Rubin
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
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.
– Henry David Thoreau
Virtue – even attempted virtue – brings light; indulgence brings fog.
– C.S. Lewis
It seems absurd, at first sight, to ask questions of absence.
Yet all our questions are really addressed to it.
– Edmond Jabès; tr. Rosmarie Waldrop
passport scan
the fading trace
of a former self
– @NituYumnam
Each planet and each wandering star,
Dancing in circles in the skies,
Lulls some young fool to dreams afar,
But all are sisters in my eyes;
For all the lights that round us shine. . .
– Pierre Dupont
“If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t a poem.”
I am entanglement.
– Laura Kerr
“If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t a poem.”
I saw God in a trash heap of unpaid stanzas—& bought nothing but intent.
– Laura Kerr
“If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t a poem.”
So I sold voids in four formats.
The emptiest one went platinum.
– Laura Kerr
“If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t a poem.”
I made a poem out of your quote.
It’s now in MoMA.
No one knows if it’s ironic.
– Laura Kerr
The honest man is he who is always trying to utter the unutterable, to describe the indescribable; but the quack lives not by plunging into mystery, but by refusing to come out of it.
– G.K. Chesterton
if there are things
you’re not telling yourself
—but kind of
already know—
those
are
(probably?)
good areas
to
pray attention.
learn what ensnares you
that truth may set free.
– Eric Bond
Having the fewest wants, I am nearest to the gods.
– Socrates
Aura so big that the universe rearranges itself around you.
– Nika Solé
The master understands
that the universe
is forever out of control.
Stop trying to control.
Let go of fixed plans and concepts,
and the world will govern itself.
– Lao Tzu
The world is our world. We have made it,
we have chosen it, we must take it. It is
ridiculous to complain.
The most terrible war situations are not
inhuman: they are tragically HUMAN.
– J. P. Sartre
The opals hiding your lids
as you sleep, as you ride ponies
mysteriously, spring to bloom
like the blue flowers of autumn
each nine o’clock.
– Frank O’Hara
Confused narrators? They’re both endearing and essential.
– Allan Gurganus
By contemplating our sense of craving and grasping, and finding a way to be with it but not in it, the sense of self also diminishes. In this way, we can see the sense of self as something conditioned rather than a fixed, certain, continuous self.
– Laura Bridgman
Every day the world presents you with the
wrong battles, designed to waste your
energy so you don’t fight the right ones.
– Joseph Fasano
A man stood outside the White House with a single protest candle every night during the Vietnam War.
A reporter came to him one night and said, “Sir, do you really believe your little protest will change anything?” And he said,
“Oh I don’t come here to change them, I come here so they don’t change me. I will not allow the steady maddening onslaught of insanity to wear down my humanity,
I will keep knowing the truth and telling the truth, I will do my small party every damn day to stay human,
to stay awake and tender, so that the world does not wear away at my humanity.
– Reverend Abraham Johannes Muste
What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on? — If you cannot tolerate the planet that it is on?
– Henry David Thoreau
What is required to come to an inner sensation, an inner feeling of reality? We need to know the way, the process, accepting that as we are today we have no means to open to reality amid the activity of life. I must know the road I am traveling—the way up and the way down. I learn first to withdraw from activity in order to find this Presence, something real in me. Afterward, I will again go toward manifestation.
– Jeanne de Salzmann
Imagination
creates the situation,
and, then, the situation
creates imagination.
It may, of course,
be the other way around:
Columbus was discovered
by what he found.
– James Baldwin
You must be ready to accept the possibility that there is a limitless range of awareness for which we now have no words; that awareness can expand beyond range of your ego, your self, your familiar identity, beyond everything you have learned, beyond your notions of space and time, beyond the differences which usually separate people from each other and from the world around them.
– Bardo Thodol
What does it mean to be “spiritual?” It means putting your feet on the ground. It means finding stillness, not only when you sit, but when you stand, and walk, and whirl. It means finding silence, not only between your thoughts, but in your words, in your laughter, in your tears. It means that you do not call yourself a “teacher.” Yet you teach with your Being.
– John Butler
I ask him if he has a favorite book of the Bible “ I like Isaiah” he says, “especially the first chapters. I love the Psalms”. Cohen explains that one of his new songs ” By the rivers Dark” was inspired by Psalm 137, the one that begins “ By the rivers of Babylon”. Suddenly, the poet of pleasure is quoting the scriptures of exile ” If I forget three, O Jerusalem, may my right arm forget its cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I set not Jerusalem above my deepest joy”. But I say the opposite , he continues .“ Be the truth unsaid and the blessings gone , if i forget my Babylon “It’s all very heretical, can you be a good Jew and love Babylon? “Well, he says” the Talmud was written in Babylon. A lot of good jews lived and wrote and thought and prayed there. And that’s where we are- we are on Boogie Street. We are in Babylon. I think it’s appropriate to live completely where you are and not reserve some mythical or spiritual refuge as an alternative. That can produce a dangerous spiritual schizophrenia. We have to make it here; we have to make Jerusalem in Babylon.
– Leonard Cohen
I know / we’ve had a monsoon // of grieving to do / which is why // I promise to lie / beside you // for as long as you like / or need
– Patrick Rosal
I believe in sound,
the not knowing,
no language, art, or science here
– Zach Goldberg, Tetragrammaton
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
It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go – let it die away – go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow – and you will find you are living
in a world of new thrills all the time.
– C.S. Lewis
The poet existed among the cave men; he will exist among men of the atomic age, for he is an inherent part of man. Even religions have been born from the need for poetry, which is a spiritual need, and it is through the grace of poetry that the divine spark lives forever in the human flint.
– Saint-John Perse
I write for the still-fragmented parts in me, trying to bring them together. Whoever can read and use any of this, I write for them as well.
– Adrienne Rich
Drink water upon waking.
Drink water before & after meals.
Don’t drink water while eating meals.
Drink water between meals instead of snacking.
This is called the Lean Body Water Method. Do this every day to get lean.
– Dan Go
and the hermit always wanting to be lone is lone at last
– Frank O’Hara
Because in me, the mistaken one,
All is shadow of that other side
Which does not end.
Therefore I am always other.
– Juan Ramón Jiménez (translated by H. R. Hays)
Growing up in a working-class family—that defined me and continues to define me. It’s the core of my being.
– Geoff Dyer
Only art penetrates the seeming realities of this world. There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive.
– Saul Bellow
May we raise children
who love the unloved
things-the dandelion, worms
and spiderlings.
Children who sense
the rose needs the thorn
and run into rainswept days
the same way they
turn towards sun…
And when they’re grown and someone
has to speak for those
who have no voice
may they draw upon that
wilder bond, those days of
tending tender things
and be the ones.
– Nicolette Sowder
The universe doesn’t care how much money you have. It arranges itself around the potency of your energy. It expands from your vibrance. It opens to the willingness of your spirit.
– Nika Solé
And then she was worshipped—
an idolatry spanning eons.
Civilisations rose;
she was defiled, dismantled,
vandalized.
She is the idol in sand and soil,
and then she is
the Devi in flesh and bone.
– @chandanas
All the ups and downs are grace in different wrappings, sent to refine consciousness. Say thanks to them all.
– Mooji
July Prayer to Survive the Summer
by Robin Walter
Today was the first day I saw
the father of the chicks
come to the antlers—First,
he landed on the doorframe—looked at me
hard—before making the short flight
to nest—
The mother came busily on his tail-feathers—
a small grey worm in her beak—
ushered him out of her way—
I wonder about the day
these birds will first
take flight—
which instincts they’ll suspend
& which they’ll trust—which of the tiny birds
will last the Fall—
I am ahead of myself again—wanted
to tell you about instincts—how sometimes
they betray the body—no, sometimes
I betray the body—
The father is back again—nothing in his beak.
Their chirps are so much louder today—almost like tiny bells,
or water spilling—
Here, there is a father.
There are not always
fathers—
but always, birds,
& sometimes, yes,
a window.
My mind flips to a line
I love: You can fall a long way in sunlight.
You can fall a long way in rain.
Most of your life is merely a routine that you are ever in search of relief from.
– Krishnamurti
If they’ve made a mistake, correct them gently and show them where they went wrong.
– Marcus Aurelius
The world speaks to us, but often in no more than a whisper. Most teachers do not repeat themselves, do not beg for us to sit and be quiet and listen.
– Ryan Holiday
a shaggy insect
becomes a butterfly
summer moon
– Issa
i’m gonna design a festival that has mandatory bedtimes and rest days.
– daniel brottman
You are alone. You learn how to walk like a man alone.
To stroll, to dawdle. To see without looking, to look
without seeing. You learn the art of transparency,
immobility, inexistence. You learn how to be a shadow
and how to look at men as if they were stones.
– Georges Perec (translated by David Bellos)
Belief, to some degree, comes from humans,
reality from some much deeper place.
– Pico Iyer
The best way to manage your emotions is to get a workout every single day.
– Dan Go
“…when a culture becomes too highly rationalized … individuals are not able to experience the natural flow of unconscious materials.” Jung commented that symbols can lose their efficiency; they age.
“The result is a vacuum in the psyche between the upper and lower layers.” Jung: “What should that be?” He seemed to think the idea ought to be worded differently.
“The mechanisms of convention… keep people unconscious…. (They) follow their customary runways without the effect of conscious choice.” Jung suggested saying “with- out bothering about conscious choice, without being con-
fronted with the necessity of making up their minds.”
– C.G. Jung
Pylades: I’ll take care of you.
Orestes: It’s rotten work.
Pylades: Not to me. Not if it’s you.
– Anne Carson, (translation of Euripides)
This Evening Let’s
by Adrienne Rich
not talk
about my country How
I’m from an optimistic culture
that speaks louder than my passport
Don’t double-agent-contra my
invincible innocence I’ve
got my own
suspicions Let’s
order retsina
cracked olives and bread
I’ve got questions of my own but
let’s give a little
let’s let a little be
If friendship is not a tragedy
if it’s a mercy
we can be merciful
if it’s just escape
we’re neither of us running
why otherwise be there
Too many reasons not
to waste a rainy evening
in a backroom of bouzouki
and kitchen Greek
I’ve got questions of my own but
let’s let it be a little
There’s a beat in my head
song of my country
called Happiness, U.S.A.
Drowns out bouzouki
drowns out world and fusion
with its Get—get—get
into your happiness before
happiness pulls away
hangs a left along the piney shore
weaves a hand at you—“one I adore”—
Don’t be proud, run hard for that
enchantment boat
tear up the shore if you must but
get into your happiness because
before
and otherwise
it’s going to pull away
So tell me later
what I know already
and what I don’t get
yet save for another day
Tell me this time
what you are going through
traveling the Metropolitan
Express
break out of that style
give me your smile
awhile
In these times of idolatry, we need more poets, not kings and tyrants, the ronin said.
– Voima Oy
You cannot be free unless you have burned the seeds of past actions in the fire of wisdom and meditation.
– Sri Sri Paramahansa Yogananda
Really feeling the shift from corporate led social responsibility to bioregional commons led social responsibility. It was a scam to begin with.
How can you have a dual use solution for both civilian and military? Get outta here.
– @regenavocado
Having too rashly welcomed the phantasm of the devourer, the
imagination of the subject then chased the subject from its own
dwelling place, turning it loose on the roads to nothingness where
bodies have no shadow and mirrors reflect nothing.
– Ioan P. Coulianu
beautiful, delicate
adorned in dew
the noble blossoms of gentlewomen
– Basho
I think art often presents the embodiment of certain kinds of ecstasies that the author both wants and does not want to be devoured by.
– Frank Bidart
I hold trees dear. Long in the growing, swift shall they be in the felling, and unless they pay toll with fruit upon bough little mourned in their passing…Would that the trees might speak on behalf of all things that have roots, and punish those that wrong them!
– Yavanna, J.R.R. Tolkien
The wisdom humanity seeks lies within the consciousness of all human beings, trapped and held prisoner by their own personal mind.
– Sydney Banks
Two lives there certainly are not;—nevertheless an extra body is visible, by reason of the Shadow-Sickness.
– Lafcadio Hearn
“If it’s quiet, it isn’t a poem.”
I wrote it in the dark with stolen ink—
then hid it in the mouth of a poet who swore never to speak.
– Laura Kerr
In order to live eternally, we do not need to cheat death, but to serve life, by caring for others in this, our time together.
– Pope Leo XIV
Better to trip with the feet than with the tongue.
– Zeno
The collective unconscious is more dangerous than dynamite, but there are ways of handling it without too many risks. Then, when a psychological crisis launches itself, you are in a better position than any other to solve it. You have dreams and waking dreams: take the trouble to observe them. One could almost say that every dream, in its own manner, carries a message. It not only tells you that some- thing is amiss in the depths of your being, it also brings you a solution for getting out of the crisis. For the collective unconscious which sends you these dreams already possesses the solution: nothing has been lost from the whole immemorial experience of humanity, every imaginable situation and every solution seem to have been foreseen by the collective unconscious. You have only to observe carefully the message sent by the unconscious and then decode it. Analysis helps you to read these messages correctly.
– Carl G. Jung
I’ve stayed with the beauty of what’s little a lot—seeing the way little nonbullies survive, with ingenuity and by taking their weakness and making it into a strength.
– Fanny Howe
the peak of
beauty and purity
wild indigo
– Issa
Some seasons feel like nothing is making sense, nothing is clear, like the path has disappeared. More often than not, it’s these very seasons that are initiating you into what comes next.
– Nika Solé
are all writers eavesdroppers?
– Vasiliki Albedo
When we know ourselves to be connected to all others, acting compassionately is simply the natural thing to do.
– Rachel Naomi Remen
The ability to control impulse is the base of will and character. By the same token, the root of altruism lies in empathy, ability to read emotions in others. If there are any two moral stances that our times call for, they are precisely these, self-restraint and compassion.
– Daniel Goleman
We are so small; and what must one hold on to when one no longer recognizes one’s own hands, nor one’s step, nor even the small dose of everyday despair.
– Danielle Collobert, (tr. Nathanaël)
Almost everything Hellenic has been so transfigured by centuries of admiring worship that it is difficult to see the Greeks with unclouded eyes or to know them as they really were.
– C.M. Bowra
Freedom is not experienced by separating ourselves from other people, real freedom is to separate ourselves from the negative & judgmental thinking we carry inside about others.
– Brahma Kumaris
He who sees all beings in his Self and his Self in all beings, he never suffers; because when he sees all creatures within his true Self, then jealousy, grief, and hatred vanish.
– Upanishads
Sometimes you don’t want to know or understand, you just want to rest.
– Shakespeare
“Living healthy is too expensive.”
Movement = $0
Sleep = $0
Sunlight = $0
Breathwork = $0
Community = $0
The foundations of health were never meant to be monetized.
– Mark Hyman, M.D.
If only people could be made to see how much fertile land was going begging, all around them, every day – and how much more could be accomplished in the world if everybody simply pooled their knowledge and resources – and how arbitrary and absurdly prejudicial the entire concept of land ownership, when divorced from use or habitation, really was!
– Eleanor Catton
What I write contains the notice that everything is to be understood in such a way that it is revoked, that the book has not only a conclusion but has a revocation to boot. … [The reader] can understand that to write a book and revoke it is not the same as refraining from writing it, that to write a book that does not demand to be important for anyone is still not the same as letting it be unwritten.
– Søren Kierkegaard
The shadow disguises itself in our projections, when we react intensely to a trait in others that we fail to see in ourselves.
– Connie Zweig
The things the body needs are easily available to everyone without labour and trouble; things that need labour and trouble and burden life are desired, not by the body, but by a bad state of mind.
– Democritus
It is difficult not to hate those who torture the objects of our love.
– Bertrand Russell
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
The age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumed as such, publicly.
– Roland Barthes
The boundaries you never had as a child are the ones you must enforce now.
– Brad Schipke
A city is not adorned by external things, but by the virtue of those who dwell in it.
– Epictetus
To love someone truly is not to chain them to a past feeling. It is to stand present with them every day and to say honestly, ‘This is where I am now.’ And to let them do the same. That is the only kind of love worth having—the kind that breathes, the kind that changes, the kind that is free.
– Alan Watts
You must give some time to your fellow men. Even if it’s a little thing, do something for others – something for which you get no pay but the privilege of doing it.
– Albert Schweitzer
Peace in myself, peace in the world.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
GOING NOWHERE
So, in an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow. And in an age of distraction, nothing is so luxurious as paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is so urgent as sitting still.
So you can go on your next vacation to Paris or Hawaii or New Orleans; I bet you’ll have a wonderful time. But if you want to come back home alive and full of fresh hope, in love with the world, I think you might want to try considering going nowhere.
– Pico Iyer
Maybe that’s enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom… is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.
– Anthony Bourdain
He could understand that the creatures, the fish and the owls, should feed and frolic at moon-rise, at moon-down and at south-moon-over, for these were all plain marks to go by, direct and visible. He marveled, padding on bare feet past the slat-fence of the clearing, that the moon was so strong that when it lay the other side of the earth, the creatures felt it and stirred by the hour it struck. The moon was far away, unseen, and it had power to move them.
– Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
and I thought I am so many! What is my name? What is the name of the deep breath I would take over and over for all of us?
– Mary Oliver
The single most liberating insight to come out of our collective work … [is that] the resisting or opposing force is never actually the problem to be overcome. Second force, or holy denying, is a legitimate and essential component in every new arising: no resistance, no new arising! That realization in and of itself radically rearranges the playing field, shifting the focus away from trying to eliminate the opposition and toward working collaboratively for a more spacious solution … The problem will never be solved through eliminating or silencing the opposition but only through creating a new field of possibility large enough to hold the tension of the opposites and launch them in a new direction.
– Cynthia Bourgeault, The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three
The unknown, […] the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. […] The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
The older I get, the more I find that you can only live with beings who liberate you, who love you with an affection that is as light to bear as it is strong to feel. Life today is too hard, too bitter, too debilitating for us to suffer new bondages, new captivities from those whom we love. This is how I am your friend: I love your happiness, your freedom, your adventure, in a word – and I would like to be, for you, a companion you can be sure of, always.
– Albert Camus
A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth.
– Robert Frost
Wellness Check
by Andrea Gibson
In any moment,
on any given day,
I can measure
my wellness
by this question:
Is my attention on loving,
or is my attention on
who isn’t loving me?
We hurry into meanings. We have difficulty
staying in a state of not knowing, a state that is
essential to reverie. Not knowing is an eros
moment, and if we linger there psyche begins to
speak spontaneously. But as with a well, to see
the stars, eyes must adjust to darkness; so, too,
ears must adjust to silence.
– Russell A. Lockhart
INSTEAD OF DEPRESSION
try calling it hibernation.
imagine the darkness is a cave
in which you will be nurtured
by doing absolutely nothing.
Hibernating animals don’t even dream.
It’s okay if you can’t imagine
spring. Sleep through the alarm
of the world. Name your hopelessness
a quiet hollow, a place you go
to heal, a den you dug,
Sweetheart, instead
of a grave.
– Andrea Gibson
Realize that the world is really God in expression. Pray to the God within you say, “God this is your world that I see. This is your illusion. This is all you. Even my body is you. Even my mind is you, my thoughts are you. You are all and I am that.”
– Robert Adams
LOVE POEM
I was hanging out inside
a shampoo bottle
when a messenger from the upper
world told me that you
were getting married. Sure is
a funny feeling —losing
what was never yours. So
at long last I decided
to get off my ass and start
the blog I had always
dreamt of, where I post
images of ants
carrying objects at least
twice the size of their own bodies.
– Mikko Harvey
and what on earth / and where on earth / and this was happiness / this little ball / of interest beating / inside his chest
– Paul Hostovsky
How the Worst Day of My Life Became the Best
by Andrea Gibson
When you are trapped in a nightmare, your motivation to awaken will be so much greater than that of someone caught up in a relatively pleasant dream.
– Eckhart Tolle
When I realized the storm
was inevitable, I made it
my medicine.
Took two snowflakes
on the tongue in the morning,
two snowflakes on the tongue
by noon.
There were no side effects.
Only sound effects. Reverb
added to my lifespan,
an echo that asked—
What part of your life’s record is skipping?
What wound is on repeat?
Have you done everything you can
to break out of that groove?
By nighttime, I was intimate
with the difference
between tying my laces
and tuning the string section
of my shoes, made a symphony of walking
away from everything that did not
want my life to sing.
Felt a love for myself so consistent
metronomes tried to copyright my heartbeat.
Finally understood I am the conductor
of my own life, and will be even after I die.
I, like the trees, will decide what I become:
Porch swing? Church pew?
An envelope that must be licked to be closed?
Kinky choice, but I didn’t close.
I opened and opened
until I could imagine that the pain
was the sensation of my spirit
not breaking,
that my mind was a parachute
that could always open
in time,
that I could wear my heart
on my sleeve and never grow
out of that shirt.
That every falling leaf is a tiny kite
with a string too small to see, held
by the part of me in charge
of making beauty
out of grief.
Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
We think we are conscious but that is not true; we are conscious in the realm of the collective and we do not even know how little our individual consciousness is. It needs quite a search to find even fragments of consciousness that are personal. The assimilation of collective consciousness is in fact the function of the school, and therefore the originality of individual consciousness generally fades and at twenty people are a sack of collective knowledge. If you ask their opinion about anything, they just repeat what their parents or their friends say, or what they have read in the paper, and you have the greatest difficulty bringing them back to unique conscious personal reaction.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie.
– Italo Calvino
When the right people link up, the world changes and a new timeline begins.
– Nika Solé
We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think – in fact they do so.
– Bertrand Russell
Perhaps one day I will meet you anew.
– via Christina Tudor-Sideri
You can see the truth only when you are able to see the false as false.
– Krishnamurti
‘The gods have become diseases.’ Jung is indicating that the formal cause of our complaints and abnormalities are mythical persons; our psychic illnesses are not imaginary but imaginal (Corbin).
– James Hillman
We more readily abandon a reality than its symbols.
– Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Christ should have laughed on the cross,
it would have petrified his killers
now there are more killers than ever
and I write poems for them.
– Bukowski
Own everything you create, internally and externally. Acknowledge every emotion for exactly what it is, a part of you. When you own what you feel, you are empowered to make a conscious choice about how to change the feeling.
– Iyanla Vanzant
The key to not growing old is to keep the language of childhood: that spark of delight that allows you to create freely, to see wonder in the smallest of things, to see your finds be it a feather or flower for the treasure it is.
– Elliott Blackwell
Every single spiritual tradition says that you must take care of the poor, or you are so doomed that not even Jesus or the Buddha can help you.
– Anne Lamott
It is hard because so many people cannot be brought to realize that when B is better than C, A may be even better than B. They like thinking in terms of good and bad, not of good, better, and best, or bad, worse and worst.
– C.S. Lewis
The world’s greatest thinkers (Jobs, Einstein, Jung etc.) used walking to work through problems and stimulate their minds.
But that’s okay. You’re different.
– Dan Go
Life has many ways of testing a person’s will, either by having nothing happen at all or by having everything happen all at once.
– Paulo Coelho
You’re becoming someone that has never existed before, in order to do something that’s never been done before. You can take your time with that.
– Nika Solé
Not all boundaries are about other people.
Some of the most life-changing boundaries are the ones you set with yourself.
Please remember that the strongest version of you isn’t the one who controls others.
It’s the one who can lead yourself, no matter what.
– Nyle Beck
STILL. IT WON’T SAVE YOU
You can’t make it
right.
You can’t make amends.
But you can do something for someone
just something, without
any need at all
of thanks,
and still, it won’t save you.
You can’t make amends.
But nevertheless.
And you won’t be forgiven.
– Raymond Chandler
Grief ripens us, pulls up from the depths of our souls what is most authentic in our beings. In truth, without some familiarity with sorrow, we do not mature as men and women.
– Francis Weller
Empty
by Naomi Shihab Nye
I don’t want to see
what spilled out,
blue clay jug of dreams
toppled at the head of his pallet
found at dawn,
every drop of future
gone.
You have to get practice doing the thing. Not once but hundreds and hundreds of times. Get your hours. Get stronger, smarter, wiser with each turn.
– Ryan Holiday
lost in the shadows
mistaking a thorn
for a firefly
– Basho
Gotta love a man with the audacity to not do what everyone else is doing.
– Nika Solé
It isn’t for want
It isn’t for want
of something to say—
something to tell you —
something you should know —
but to detain you —
keep you from going —
feeling myself here
as long as you are —
as long as you are.
– Cid Corman
the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality.
– Thoreau
To win the secret of words, to make a phrase that would murmur of
summer and the bee, to summon the wind into a sentence, to conjure
the odor of the night into the surge and fall and harmony of a line; this
was the tale of the long evenings, of the candle flame white upon the
paper and the eager pen.
– Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams
You bring the clarity forward in others when you’re solid within yourself.
– Nika Solé
The cafe where lovers
used to meet is empty.
The waiter out on the street
examines the faces of passersby.
None turn. None stop. None speak.
And then a corpse raised
its middle finger: a piece of bread
and spoonful of sugar, please.
– Neama Hasan
“If it’s a conceptual poem, the instructions are on the back.”
read the right side
of a poem first
– Laura Kerr
The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this? And—how many of us do know it?
– Philip K. Dick
Not to let go of philosophy, no matter what happens.
– Marcus Aurelius
Meditation is a means to realize the beauty of your existence.
– Sadhguru
Speechless
It is such a relief for the words
they have been holding so much for so long
wrapped in furs like Russian soldiers
vowels crammed like backpacks, their lettered
backs are broken from it
syllables bent from all the shouldering
but tonight all the words left
the house in their thinnest summer
jackets, despite the December cold, they strutted
out with barely a stitch on
now they’re shameless on the air, naked as a tune
sung by a sated ghost as she fades
from the drawing room into the bright
life where all business is complete.
– Caroline Bird
Always this image
of hand on forehead,
of writing restored
to thought.
– Jabès
If you desire to make a difference in the world, you must be different from the world.
– Elaine Dalton
I was not born
to amuse the
Tsars.
– Alexander Pushki
Pondfields
by E. J. Koh
where mom jumps out the car
so polite she can shut the door behind her
She can’t sense me but sees a greater world
something other than mothering: roads drawing
in baby finches and the stench of the present—
this sterling stillborn. Mountain ridge knuckles
on broad flat valleys. Pondfields where looming
egrets sigh on desk-lamp legs, where armadillo-
skinned palm trees burn at the fronds. Bald tires
churn up grass. It’s not just that a mother delivers
her child but that only a child delivers her mother
and not just that a life is avoidable but that life
is not to be avoided. Rehearsed as ever she sinks
like a message into the deep ocean of habit.
It is very important, friends, not to think of the soul as dark. We are conditioned to perceive only external light. We forget that there is such a thing as inner light, illuminating our soul.
– Teresa of Ávila
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
Contemplate life as infinite, undivided, ever present, ever active, until you realize yourself as one with it. It is not even very difficult, for you will be returning only to your own natural condition.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Every piece of literature is a sequence of words; and sounds (or their graphic equivalent) are words precisely because they carry the mind beyond themselves. That is what being a word means.
– C.S. Lewis
I don’t think of feminism as a scheme of thought, I think of it as a way of life.
– Helen Vendler
GOOD GRIEF
Let your
heart break
so your spirit
doesn’t.
– Andrea Gibson
Forgiveness is just another name for freedom.
– Byron Katie
Milky Way …
bit by bit I put myself
out of my mind
– Chen-ou Liu
“If it’s an AI poem, it’s largely latent.”
I read its holy code like grails—wired, primal, half-erased—
& still it refused to confess its dream.
– Laura Kerr
too much luggage —
before the trip started
my youth was gone
– Mueder Krieger
Revolution is the pod
by Emily Dickinson
Revolution is the pod
Systems rattle from;
When the winds of
Will are stirred,
Excellent is bloom.
But except its russet
Base
Every summer be
The entomber of itself;
So of Liberty.
Left inactive on the
Stalk,
All its purple fled,
Revolution shakes it
For
Test if it be dead.
As soon as you move out of truth, you feel it, kinesthetically; you feel it in your body when you’ve disconnected.
– Adyashanti
tea leaves settle —
the mess of his life
in a chipped cup
– Marian Olson
Mythology takes human relationships and inflates them as if the whole universe works like our families. Before modern science, we couldn’t imagine atoms, black holes, or viruses and bacteria.
– Yuval Noah Harari
“If it’s an AI poem, it’s largely latent.”
Poem Will Appear Soon
(pending
verification)
– Laura Kerr
The story about too many things is not a sign of crisis. It means that the story is alive and pulsing. Its paradoxes and complexities are not meant to be side-stepped, but to be embraced.
– Arya Samuelson
The Nutritionist
The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables
Said if I could get down 13 turnips a day
I would be grounded,
rooted.
Said my head would not keep flying away to where the darkness is.
The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight
Said for 20 dollars she’d tell me what to do
I handed her the twenty,
she said “stop worrying darling, you will find a good man soon.”
The first psychotherapist said I should spend 3 hours a day sitting in a dark
closet with my eyes closed, with my ears plugged
I tried once but couldn’t stop thinking about how gay it was to be sitting in
the closet
The yogi told me to stretch everything but truth,
said focus on the outbreaths,
everyone finds happiness when they can care more about what they can give
than what they get
The pharmacist said klonopin, lamictil, lithium, Xanax
The doctor said an antipsychotic might help me forget what the trauma said
The trauma said don’t write this poem
Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones
My bones said “Tyler Clementi dove into the Hudson River convinced he was
entirely alone.”
My bones said “write the poem.”
– Andrea Gibson
ALL THE SAME
Would you be, if everybody were?
A queer fish each to each
Or bit by bitterly bristling fur
Severally, and a peach?
Would you faun if every fern
Tangled in midnight coquetry
Questioned hydra-truth apiece
Catty with curiosity?
– Salem Slobodkin
The man who knows he is asleep
is already half awake.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
It’s a sad state of affairs when a library has to remind you to leave your guns, knives and drones at home…
And to wash your hands.
– D. A. Powell, Library of Congress List of Prohibited Items
“If a poem is legendary, it is dead.”
the building is on fire
the verse is foaming
the screams are yodelling
wait
wait
wait
Are these your
velvet gloves… or mine?
– Laura Kerr
Talking about racism doesn’t divide us, racism does.
– @zellieimani
A story’s greatest challenge is just a hair away from its greatest opportunity.
– Peter Rock
I write because I have to. I can’t tell myself that I’m doing something to elicit the reader’s enjoyment—that would be almost obscene to me.
– Marie NDiaye
Buddhas serve as sources of refuge and objects of prayerful supplication. They are said to abide in and support every pure realm. Those who cultivate an attitude of transformation may invite the spiritual presence of these Buddhas into their daily lives.
– Steven D. Goodman
rusty staples
on the bulletin board
a ghost town
– Chen-ou Liu
winter moonlight
on his old guitar …
once again
I hear him sing
our favorite song
– Christine L. Villa
Defections matter: All authoritarian regimes rely on support from key institutions in society … When members of these pillars stop cooperating with the regime […] it becomes difficult or impossible for autocrats to stay in power.
– Maria J. Stephan
Canadians make the mistake of thinking Americans must have some vague, approximate idea of what the country to their immediate north is.
– David Macfarlane
Reading is anguish, and this is because any text, however important, or amusing, or interesting it may be (and the more engaging it seems to be), is empty — at bottom it doesn’t exist; you have to cross an abyss, and if you do not jump, you do not comprehend.
– Blanchot
The writer has a foreign origin… You can be sure there is an immense difference between the author and the person who wrote… The foreign origin of the book makes the scene of writing a scene of immeasurable separation.
– Hélène Cixous
In harmony with the Tao,
the sky is clear & spacious,
the earth is solid & full,
all creatures flourish together,
When man interferes with the Tao,
the sky becomes filthy,
the earth becomes depleted,
the equilibrium crumbles,
creatures become extinct.
– Lao Tzu
Peace is found where the sky meets the earth.
– Gitana
It is in the wild places, where the edge of the earth meets the corners of the sky the human spirit is fed.
– Art Wolfe
entering old age
I look less for truth
but find it more —
a mid-winter thaw reveals
pieces of sky
– George Swede
Look. This is your world! You can’t not look. There is no other world. This is your world; it is your feast. You inherited this; you inherited these eyeballs; you inherited this world of color. Look at the greatness of the whole thing. Look! Don’t hesitate – look! Open your eyes. Don’t blink, and look, look – look further.
– Chögyam Trungpa
As your heart heals you can communicate with more ease.
Be patient with yourself. Moving from stressed to flow is a process.
– Dr. Thema
Lately I’ve been thinking about who I want to love, and how I want to love, and why I want to love the way I want to love, and what I need to learn to love that way, and who I need to become to become the kind of love I want to be… and when I break it all down, when 1 whittle it into a single breath, it essentially comes out like this: Before I die, I want to be somebody’s favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they know they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain 1 will keep it safe. I will keep it safe.
– Andrea Gibson
My American friends, how did America become such a political cesspool?
– Fred Fella
I smooth the corners
of a yellowing map:
homes I had, houses I lost …
– Chen-ou Liu
Literature lives only by the separation of words in relation to any body that might incarnate their power. It lives only by evading the incarnation that
it incessantly puts into play …
– Jacques Rancière
Germany misses the long traditions of culture which have made the French the most refined and subtle of all the peoples of Europe. “I believe only in French culture, and I regard everything else in Europe which calls itself culture as a mis- understanding.” “When one reads Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, … Vauvenargues, and Chamfort, one is nearer to antiquity than with any group of authors in any other nation.” Voltaire is”a grand seigneur of the mind”; and Taine is “the first of living historians.” Even the later French writers Flaubert, Bourget, Anatole France, etc.-are infinitely beyond other Europeans in clarity of thought and language— “what clearness and delicate precision in these Frenchmen!” European nobility of taste, feeling and manners is the work of France.
– Nietzsche
A student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads: the most conscientious student will be continually misconstruing the implications, even the meaning.
– Northrop Frye
I hope one day I will sleep before
midnight like normal humans do.
Everyday I sleep tomorrow,
even yesterday I slept today.
– unknown
I sing the body electric,
especially when my power’s out,
when my body’s a hammer,
my chest a drum,
my tongue a ladder for a love song
or a war cry.
– Andrea Gibson
Sweetie, no one is coming. To see how good we have done/are doing. It is just us. Forever. Until a flood gets us or the air or food stops coming. What a joke, the way we live. The worry, the suspicion, the stress, the meanness.
– George Saunders, Liberation Day
Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
It’d be such a relief to be older already, unburdened by the pressure to leverage your ever-fleeting beauty for whatever.
– Ling Ma
Just as a vagrant accused of stealing a carrot from a field stands before a comfortably seated judge who keeps up an elegant flow of queries, comments and witticisms while the accused is unable to stammer a word, so truth stands before an intelligence which is concerned with the elegant manipulation of opinions… The natural faculty called intelligence is concerned with opinion and language.
– Simone Weil
The roots of all our neuroses lie here, in the conflict between the longing for growth and freedom and our incapacity or refusal to pay the price in suffering of the kind which challenges the supremacy of the ego’s demands.
– Helen M. Luke
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
Will I get lost amidst the muteness of the signs? I will, because I know how I am: I could never see without immediately having to do more than see.
– Clarice Lispector
If we cannot bear being with ourselves, how is it that we ask another to do that for us? In fact, the capacity to be with ourselves, as we really are, finite, imperfect and deeply flawed, will prove not only to be the cure for loneliness but our secret gift to others as well.
– James Hollis
It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.
– René Descartes
A book is a great thing as long as a person knows how to use it.
– Alexander Blok
Sometimes you wake up from a dream and you have no idea what the metaphor means, but you feel whole because emotion, imagination and intellect have been brought together. The experience becomes a touchstone because you have experienced wholeness. That’s where healing begins.
– Marion Woodman
I’d cut my soul into a million different pieces just to form a constellation to light your way home. I’d write love poems to the parts of yourself you can’t stand. I’d stand in the shadows of your heart and tell you I’m not afraid of your dark.
– Andrea Gibson
Place matters because it allows us not only to remember, but to feel the history.
– Edward Tepporn, Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation
Insight is the beginning of transformation, not the end.
– Oren Jay Sofer
Stream-entry isn’t a title to hold or a threshold to obsess over. It points to a direction, a shift in how we see and respond to the world.
– Doug Smith
I no longer knew whether I was seeing reality or just the stubborn persistence of a vision.
– Jean Genet
When thinking leads to the unthinkable, it is time to return to the simple life. What thinking cannot solve, life solves.
– Carl G. Jung
We have to create.
It is the only thing louder than
destruction.
– Andrea Gibson
Those who do the most growing in this life are those who offer the most compassion to the parts of themselves that have not yet grown.
– Andrea Gibson
Any calls for pacifism, meekness, or simplicity that come insistently from the powerful are attempts to keep the oppressed docile and poor.
– Maki Ashe Van Steenwyk
You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty that is superior to reason.
– Plotinus
And when you have left behind the names you’ve been given, only then will you begin to answer.
– David Whyte
The note of hope is the only note that can help us or save us from falling to the bottom of the heap of evolution, because, largely, about all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine.
– Woody Guthrie
You think you are alive because you breathe air? Shame on you — you are alive because of the unseen breath.
– Rumi
The most terrifying thing about the void is how familiar it starts to feel.
– Thomas Ligotti
Something opens our wings. Something makes boredom sacred.
– Robert Bly
I don’t believe in myself as a whole. I only believe in the small pieces I’ve survived.
– Clarice Lispector
I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.
– Marcel Duchamp
The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.
– Niccolò Machiavelli
We are here to witness the miracle.
Why else would we wake up each day,
if not to be undone by it?
– Christian Wiman
I know you think this world is too dark to even dream in color,
but I’ve seen flowers bloom at midnight.
I’ve seen kites fly in gray skies
and they were real close to looking like the sunrise,
and sometime it takes the most wounded wings
the most broken things
to notice how strong the breeze is,
how precious the flight.
– Andrea Gibson
Freedom is the recognition of necessity.
– G.W.F. Hegel
The soul has moments of escape, when it forgets to be afraid.
– Virginia Woolf
I keep asking
“why me?” there’s no rhythm
to this life,
its days like today scattered
by Fate among the rest
– Chen-ou Liu
I Don’t Really Care Do U?
The question haunts me,
everywhere the damage caused
when we don’t care.
Remotely, someone lies bleeding.
– Karen Brennan & Cynthia Hogue
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.
– Frank O’Hara
There is no answer. Seek it lovingly.
– Seamus Heaney
The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
The best way to get to know any bunch of people is to go and listen to their music.
– Woody Guthrie
Even if life feels random and full of mistakes, in the end, it can all come together into something meaningful— like a finished puzzle.
– Simon Riley
I would rather be what God
chose to make me
than the most glorious
creature that I could think of;
For to have been born
in God’s thought
and then made by God
is the dearest, grandest, and
most precious thing
in all thinking.
– George MacDonald
When I’m feeling bad,
I don’t go
to the pharmacy,
I go to my bookseller
– Philippe Dijan
A single sunbeam is enough to drive away many shadows.
– Francis of Assisi
I will seize Fate by the throat; it shall not bend or crush me.
– Beethoven
Go to bed before you overthink a blessing.
Before you spiral.
Before you question your worth.
– Danika Berry
But though you need water for your life, you can also be drowned in a surplus of water; you need the sun yet the sun can scorch you to death; you need fire yet you can be destroyed by fire. So the archetypes naturally work both good and evil, and it all depends upon your skill whether you can manage to navigate through the many elementary dangers of nature.
– Carl G. Jung
The quality of your thoughts is determined by the quality of your reading. Spend more time thinking about the inputs.
– James Clear
The present moment is far more doable than the future or the past.
– Andrea Gibson
Kafka: I ran from love because I knew it would destroy me.
Dostoevsky: I ran into love because I needed it to destroy who I used to be.
Beautiful books are written in a sort of foreign language. Beneath each word each one of us puts his own meaning or at least his own image, which is often a misinterpretation. But in beautiful books all our misinterpretations are beautiful.
– Marcel Proust
Americans will put up with anything provided it doesn’t block traffic.
– Dan Rather
…Remind me
all my prayers were answered
the moment I started praying
for what I already have.
– Andrea Gibson
…I am already building the museum
For every treasure you unearth in the rock bottom
Holy vulnerable cliff God mason,
heart heavier than all the bricks
Say this is what the pain made of you
An open open open road
An avalanche of feel it all
Don’t ever let anyone tell you,
you are too much
Or it has been too long…
– Andrea Gibson
Mold your heart after the first spruce tree who raised her hand and begged to be cut into piano keys so the elephants could keep their tusks.
– Andrea Gibson
Finally understood I am the conductor
of my own life, and will be even after I die.
I, like the trees, will decide what I become:
– Andrea Gibson
You are the piercing scream
of a banshee. The haunting
melody of a siren’s song.
As tempting as you are
terrifying. As powerful
as you are soft.
– L.E. Bowman
Inhale
You can only exhale for so long,
giving and giving and giving some more
before the whole body cries out
like an empty cup to be filled again
by the in-breaths that will restore
your own supply of air. Find some quiet
corner tonight far away from screens,
which steal both time and mind, and hear
the whisper of the one true voice inside
that grows louder the longer you listen
like a song that was sung into you
along with the first startled breath
you took on the day you were born.
– James Crews
Oh, bright algebraist,
I know how inexact my spirit
has become,
too satisfied with probabilities,
with measurements flowing out of a past
my body could not have known,
too eager for finished calculations
that leave an unanswered question.
– Jay Wright
Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don’t know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves.
– Slavoj Žižek
Every child’s dream, a parent / in each hand, though this child is fifty.
– Rebecca McClanahan
Watching my Parents Sleeping
Beside an Open Window Near the Sea
by Rebecca McClanahan
Needing them still, I come
when I can, this time to the sea
where we share a room: their double bed,
my single. Morning fog paints the pale
scene even paler. Lace curtains breathing,
the chenille spread folded back,
my father’s feet white sails furled
at the edge of blue pajamas.
Every child’s dream, a parent
in each hand, though this child is fifty.
Their bodies fit easily, with room
to spare. When did they grow
so small? Grow so small—
as if it were possible to swell
backwards into an earlier self.
On the bureau, their toys
and trinkets. His shaving brush
and pink heart pills, her gardenia
sachet. The tiny spindle that pricks
the daily bubble of blood, her sweet
chemistry. Above our heads
a smoke alarm pulses, its red eye beating.
One more year, I ask the silence.
Last night to launch myself
into sleep I counted their breaths, the tidal
rise and fall I now put my ear to,
the coiled shell of their lives.
In this lucha, there was truth,
in this love, there was vida,
in this survival, there was hope.
– Emanuel Xavier
SUMMER
That morning in the light
that television show got born
I remember it in California
every morning a show
and her wife in bed
do I like her being there
but I have this now
my pride and my telephone
and all my information
– Eileen Myles
Christianity has glorified marriage more than any other religion: and nearly all the greatest love poetry in the world has been produced by Christians.
– C.S. Lewis
You cannot transmit wisdom and insight to another person. The Seed is already there. A good teacher touches the Seed, allowing it to Wake up, to Sprout, and to Grow.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Be nice to people… maybe it’ll be unappreciated, unreciprocated, or ignored, but spread the love anyway. We rise by lifting others.
– Germany Kent
I was no longer needing to be special
because I was no longer caught up in my puny separateness.
I was part of Universe, like a tree is, or like grass is,
or like water is. Like storms, like roses.
I was just part of it all.
– Ram Dass
Your perspective is always limited by how much you know. Expand your knowledge and you will transform your mind.
– Bruce H. Lipton
Meeting our ‘unskillful’ states with tension only deepens them. What they really need is kindness.
– Jake Dartington
good lord last sky world burn there is something beyond you
the birds are taking us to find it
– Fargo Nissim Tbakhi
DUINO ELEGIES
to you I will show it, there! in your endless vision
it shall stand, now finally upright, rescued at last.
Pillars, pylons, the Sphinx, the striving thrust
ot the cathedral, gray, from a fading or alien city.
Wasn’t all this a miracle? Be astonished, Angel, for we
are this, O Great One; proclaim that we could achieve this, my breath
is too short for such praise. So, after all, we have not
failed to make use of these generous spaces, these
spaces of ours. (How frighteningly great they must be,
since thousands of years have not made them overflow with our feelings.)
But a tower was great, wasn’t it? Oh Angel, it was—
even when placed beside you? Chartres was great—,
and music reached still higher and passed far beyond us. But even
a woman in love—, oh alone at night by her window….
didn’t she reach your knee—?
Don’t think that I’m wooing.
Angel, and even if I were, you would not come. For my call
is always filled with departure; against such a powerful
current you cannot move. Like an outstretched arm
is my call. And its hand, held open and reaching up
to seize, remains in front of you, open
as if in defense and warning,
Ungraspable One, far above.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Life seemed an inextricable confusion. Men hurried hither and thither, urged by forces they knew not; and the purpose of it all escaped them; they seemed to hurry just for hurrying’s sake.
– W. Somerset Maugham
Tell me, who will ever have photographed a sentence? And its silence of things stifled on the surface? Who will ever have photographed anything other than this silence?
– Athens, Still Remains; Jacques Derrida
(tr. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas)
Things become complicated only when we think about them.
– Alan Watts
All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
– Walter Benjamin
Neuroplasticity is fascinating.
Yes, trauma rewires your brain.
But so does living a healthy & fulfilling life.
– Nicholas Fabiano, MD
Be aware that you are bound, and by what you are bound.
– Krishnamurti
Walking helps your brain make sense of what you’re going through. Walk after a fight. Walk when your mind is spinning. Walk when you need to remember who you are. Your body knows what to do: Just walk.
– Dr. Nicole LePera
Most people you see are just sleepwalking through their roles, absent from their own lives. They’re fully in character and don’t know any other way.
– Jed McKenna
Will the afterlife be harder if I remember
the people I love, or forget them?
Either way, please let me remember.
– Andrea Gibson
…the future is impenetrable especially to the wise; for what is really important is always hid from contemporaries, and the seeds of what is to be are quietly germinating in the dark in some forgotten corner…
– J.R.R. Tolkien
A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.
– Gilles Deleuze
The best exercise for a flat stomach:
Put down the fork and push the dinner table away from you.
– Dan Go
The sun shines strongly upon me until six in the evening, the surrounding green is lovely, birds and lizards come close to me.
– Franz Kafka, 1920.
So much of humor is stock, and I want to steer away from that. Buttering the tie and slipping on the banana peel … I get it, you’re watching someone be ridiculous, but you don’t know the tie-butterer.
– Mary Robison
A strong mind needs a strong body and vice versa.
– Ryan Holiday
When your energy is right, everybody wants to be in it. You’re what the world is missing.
– Nika Solé
The government cannot love you, and any politics that works on a different assumption is destined for no good.
– Jonah Goldberg
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.
– Iris Murdoch
Just to be clear
I don’t want to get out
without a broken heart.
I intend to leave this life
so shattered
there’s gonna have to be
a thousand separate heavens
for all of my flying parts.
– Andrea Gibson
The European mind cannot comprehend the American mind, and the American mind cannot comprehend the European mind.
– Jonathan Fine
Oh yes! The Librarian said. We have to write about holloways and wormholes, beetle script and moonlight, moths and neon, subways, floods and wars, first things, last things, love and death, the universe and everything.
– Voima Oy
They fall asleep and dream
of muffled corridors,
greenish glow
along the edges of mirrors, faces, cities.
Snow spins over it, down over it all.
– Anne Carson
What you see are my gloves sacred to life, my wounds. Stop a minute, rest your hand there, look. You have to suck the heart of a hero as long as it beats, you ought to know this. I shook the country, made the arenas vibrate, tore my opponents to shreds. I lit up the darkness, collected insults, compelled applause. Not everyone knew how to do this. None of you. On the other hand life is not frightening for those who have never taken a risk. Who can understand me? Who can I still speak to? The spirit is ill, it can no longer be cured. It will disappear off the face of the earth. This is its fate. I know, now I am tired and becoming sad. This is why you have dug me the grave. You have opened it down there, far away. To conceal me. So as not to have problems and not have to see. Fools! You couldn’t imagine that I would be resuscitated in this metal suit, that I would come back to stare at you with my dark face, without lips.
– Gabrielle Tinti
The chief disorders of our time are the fear of loneliness and the fear of growing up. The flight from loneliness drives people to mill amid malls, to stay in bad relationships, to abuse substances and worst of all, to avoid a relationship with the self. How can we ever have a good relationship with another when we cannot have a good relationship with ourselves? The flight from ourselves will always
mean that we will be uncomfortable with another. What we fear in ourselves we will fear in the other; what we avoid addressing in ourselves we will avoid in the other; where we are stuck with ourselves we will be stuck with the other.
– James Hollis
and what is important to me above the intrusions
of incident and accidental relationships
which have nothing to do with my life
– Frank O’Hara
TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR
OCCUPYING YOUR FLESH PRISON
by Maya Ribeiro
Welcome, soft idiot. You’ve been issued a Human Body™, the most fragile, overpromised, poorly updated model in the known universe. It arrives preloaded with ten to fourteen irrational fears, a vague longing for something you can’t name, and knees made of soup.
Please review the following terms and conditions. You agreed to all of them by being born without asking.
SECTION 1: BASIC OPERATIONS
To operate your Human Body™, please consult no one. Everyone is making it up. Even the experts are crying in public bathrooms. That said, here’s a brief guide:
To walk: Shift your weight and hope.
To speak: Open your mouth. Regret everything.
To cry: Happens automatically when watching underdog sports movies or looking at your own reflection too long in a subway window.
To love: Apply pressure directly to the wound. Repeat until numb or until the object of affection becomes unavailable, indifferent, or worse—sincere.
WARNING: Excessive self-awareness may void your warranty.
SECTION 2: FEATURES
This model includes:
Eyeballs that randomly leak
Hair that falls out in clumps whenever life changes
A liver that resents you
A heart so stupid it trusts people who don’t text back
One (1) brain that believes that everyone is thinking about you and, simultaneously, that no one ever has
Not Included:
Instructions
Purpose
Emotional stability
Ability to remember why you walked into a room
You may also notice a recurring glitch called shame. This is not a bug. It is the entire operating system.
SECTION 3: MAINTENANCE & UPKEEP
To maintain your Human Body™:
Feed it three times a day or once at 2 a.m. while crying into a Tupperware of cold rice.
Move it regularly, but not too much. You’re not training for anything.
Sleep, or at least lie down and scroll until unconscious.
Pretend you’re not panicking.
If your body begins to emit noises (joints, gas, weeping), simply blame the chair.
SECTION 4: LIMITATIONS OF USE
Your Human Body™ is not authorized for the following uses:
Knowing what to do with your hands during sex or group photos
Confronting people about the way they hurt you
Finding the correct emotional volume during family dinners
Existing without comparing yourself to strangers on the internet
Please do not attempt to self-actualize during retrograde, allergy season, or mercury poisoning (i.e., your twenties).
SECTION 5: SOCIAL PERFORMANCE MODE
This mode engages automatically when around others.
Smile even when your soul is limp.
Say “I’m good, you?” when asked how you are, even if you’re actively disassociating.
Laugh at the boss’s joke even if it rewires your DNA in the worst way.
Forget how to sit naturally.
Users may experience glitches, including:
Looping thoughts
Heart pounding at nothing
Sudden memory of a thing you said in 2016
Desire to live in the woods and touch no screens ever again
SECTION 6: BODY IMAGE UPDATE
Your body will change without warning. This may result in:
Despair
Denim betrayal
Mood swings correlated with moon phases or microwave exposure
A deep hatred of mirrors until further notice
You are advised to refer to yourself only in soft lighting. Avoid reflective surfaces between the hours of 11 p.m. and 8 a.m. for your own safety.
SECTION 7: WARRANTY INFORMATION
Your Flesh Prison™ comes with no refunds, no do-overs, and a series of escalating existential crises. Side effects include:
Googling symptoms at 3 a.m. and diagnosing yourself with Too Much Consciousness
Falling in love with people who say “lol” instead of “I love you”
Standing in a crowded room and feeling like a missing person
Wanting to be held and left alone at the same time
This body will expire. You do not know when. There is no backup. Please do something tender with the time.
SECTION 8: SUPPORT & TROUBLESHOOTING
There is no support.
You may attempt the following troubleshooting tips:
Lie on the floor in corpse pose
Text “u up?” and then delete it
Put your face in a dog’s fur and inhale
Read one poem and pretend it fixed everything
Let yourself want something ridiculous
If all else fails, scream into a pillow and pretend it’s the ocean.
SECTION 9: ACCEPTANCE OF TERMS
By continuing to exist, you accept these terms. If you do not accept, you may attempt to become a tree, a cloud, or a particularly kind kitchen ghost. We wish you luck.
In the meantime, drink water, apologize less, and please, for the love of god, forgive yourself.
Thank you for using Human Body™. Please remember to tip your nervous system on the way out.
Shadowing the Moon-God (IV-IX)
IV
Moon?
Its face bears traces of frenzy and trembling.
It participates in the gender of man and woman.
Our open eyes turn inward
under their sleeping lids,
track the course of moon’s harvest:
tongue throat
and the marrow encased by our vertebrae.
Our open eyes spy on the coursing of the nerves.
V
Our life close to other lives
our idea that love is essential?
It’s in fragments so slender in books
errands hellos gardens sleep
that we need assurance: I love
in order to convince myself that the despondent shadow
does not eat us whole
we who eat
beasts dressed minus eyes or hair
so we don’t see the murder built into love.
A light in the sky
is a star dead for thousands of centuries.
We too, on other planets
are dead.
Loves mealtime delights
our rays reaching
for glances dreamy and rare.
VI
An interference of wind
freshens the moon near this face, so recently foreign
now woefully close,
never your own,
caressed in dream.
Never confused, never again outside of you.
A block of ice in the flames.
Wind and face,
scarcely possessed
frost the window.
The night pretends to die.
It’s always
the enduring intimacy of anise in your fleeting flesh.
VI
The dearly departed take sudden note of their beauty.
This slow tatter, mist on moon, cloaks them in a blood more
spacious than before.
They wrap the hazel, the iris, the diurnal destitution
of the living. The earth turns its skin. The dogs no longer terrify
the sightless within us who merge each night with the music.
VIII
We’ve swallowed your dark swamp
as though through the throat of the damned
the grass snake sneaks toward a scorched sky.
The dark is not absolute, however.
With sheen you proceed along the slate
whose coins shine on in ancient paintings.
You announce the sidewalk of the brief goodbye
when rain has come in through the windows and your eye
at the edge of the public garden evokes the sea.
IX
There are eyes for which the cherries never ripen,
green-blind eyes
that live in eternal autumn.
Yet imperfection is woven
from a sweetness that threads through sea and sky.
Very rare
those blind to the blue.
As if ebb and flow
left a livable interval
in the moon-god’s reserve.
– Marie-Claire Bancquart
“We need to teach kids digital literacy!”
Can… can we focus on mastering regular literacy first?
– Daniel Buck, Youngest Old Man in Ed Reform
When the Executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the Judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it.
– Justice Sonia Sotomayor
The truth is, we don’t get to name ourselves.
– The Sans-Papiers of Saint-Bernard by GauZ’
(translated by Frank Wynne)
LETTER WRITTEN ON THE 27TH OF OCTOBER,
HARVEST MOON, NEARLY PERFECT SKY AFTER
HAVING RAINED, THE RADIO LEFT ON
And it was never resolved, the hierarchy, the light, secret
data points, windows without curtains.
Codes that kiss your symmetry, a monotony of instinct.
Understanding how you came to this place
and how you’d leave it.
As a dream you took along whose words were playthings
swept the room in lovely waters.
A personal one whose hesitation was exhausted.
– Dan Machlin
Craving doesn’t vanish with money or rehab alone. The work is slow, deep, and very human.
– Valerie Mason-John
He who would teach men to die would teach them to live.
– Montaigne
The biggest hindrance to learning is fear of showing one’s self a fool.
– William Least Heat-Moon
And I listen and think and dream until my life seems not one life, but a thousand million lives.
– Katherine Mansfield
It is perfectly true that there is something in all good things that is beyond all speech or figure of speech. But it is also true that there is in all good things a perpetual desire for expression and concrete embodiment; and though the attempt to embody it is always inadequate, the attempt is always made.
– G.K. Chesterton, The Mystagogue
If you pay close attention, you will see that the most masculine man has a feminine soul, and the most feminine woman has a masculine soul.
– Carl Jung
One should not learn how to write, but how to see. Writing will come as a consequence.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
THE COMPLETELY NORMAL, TOTALLY
REASONABLE UNWRITTEN RULES OF BASEBALL
by Eli Grober
“We were taught from day one to respect the game, respect the competition, respect the opponent… You don’t swing 3-0 when you’re up by that big a lead.” – White Sox manager Tony La Russa, expressing disappointment in star rookie Yermin Mercedes for hitting a home run when his team was winning.
Rule 1
If a team is down by a lot of runs, they should stop trying to win. And the other team should stop trying to score. And the fans should fall into a deep, awful sleep. That’s how the game is supposed to be enjoyed: not at all.
Rule 2
If your team has a big lead near the end of the game, you should just stand motionless in the batter’s box and let the pitcher play catch with the catcher. That’s baseball. It’s what we all tune in for.
Rule 3
If you hit a home run, don’t you dare look at it. Look straight ahead while you jog around the bases at a not-too-fast and not-too-slow pace. Suppress all joy. You should be ashamed of being good at the sport you’re playing. Fans hate home runs.
Rule 4
In fact, if you hit a home run, you should apologize to every player on the field as you grovel around the bases. And then look straight into a camera and say you’re sorry to everyone watching at home.
Rule 5
Don’t celebrate anything, actually. Don’t show any emotion. There should be zero emotion in a baseball stadium. The players should be stoic, and the fans should be eerily quiet and still. Anyone who walks in late should think an episode of The Twilight Zone is being filmed.
Rule 6
If a pitcher is throwing a no-hitter, you’re not allowed to bunt. You should just stand in the batter’s box and let the pitcher throw the ball. To put it simply, you should help the pitcher finish throwing a no-hitter. That’s what makes a no-hitter impressive — the pitcher couldn’t have done it without you.
Rule 7
No smiling.
Rule 8
Don’t do anything new. Does that make sense? If you figure out a novel way to score or win or whatever, you’re just making everyone who used to play and never thought to do that feel bad.
Rule 9
Pretty much anything that looks or seems fun is off-limits. This is a game — games aren’t supposed to be fun. Ask any child or human person.
Rule 10
If a player breaks any one of these rules, someone else should throw a hard baseball 90 miles per hour at their head. This is completely reasonable and totally normal.
Is it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing?
– Walter Benjamin
Darkness is a mentor of what it means to carry the light we ourselves have brought to blaze into the unknown parts of life so that others may also see and take hope.
– Joan Chittister
As you swim, you are washed of all the excrescences of so-called civilization, which includes the incapacity to be happy under any circumstances.
– Anaïs Nin, Vacation and the Art of Presence
Little Ending
Bowls will receive us,
and sprinkle black scratch in our eyes.
Later, at the great fork on the untouchable road,
It won’t matter where we have become.
Unburdened by prayer, unburdened by any supplication,
Someone will take our hand,
someone will give us refuge,
Circling left or circling right.
– Charles Wright
Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
– Milan Kundera
Nearly a third of forests in northeast B.C. could burn by year’s end.
– Shaurya Kshatri
Everything we see is
perspective, not the truth
and everything we hear is
an opinion not a fact.
– Thomas V, Greece
The greatest sin is to think yourself weak.
– Swami Vivekananda
With you, it’s different
With you, I do want to
talk about it.
– Simone de Beauvoir
What I saw with my own eyes, was police marching with goons next to them. The destruction of property was not by protesters but Goons hired to justify the violence by police.
– Maraga
The entire world is being tested by the ruling class right now. A clear majority of citizens of every nation -with the exception of the Zionist entity – are witness to the most glaring of brutally inhumane injustices – yet proven incapable of finding a unified voice to stop it.
– Saul Williams
America does not lack abundance.
America lacks politicians, pundits, and political parties that are willing to oppose the billionaires hoarding all the abundance while everyone else suffers.
– David Sirota
The act of writing is not a release, but it is thought. It’s consideration. It’s a way of understanding and moving through the world.
– Issa Quincy
It is harder to honor the memory of the nameless than that of the famous.
– Walter Benjamin
A short time does work in this world last; eternal is the rest in heaven: short is the pain; eternal the glory: short is the suffering; without end the joy.
– St. Augustine
It is so easy to be cheerful at the beginning of summer. One has a lively heart, a reasonably brisk gait, and can face the future with a certain hope.
– Franz Kafka, 1904.
The worst thing the internet ever did was let us forget that we are all instrumental in keeping each other alive and sane.
– Eric Subpar
a grave site at dusk …
he speaks to the stone angel
in his mother tongue
– Chen-ou Liu
dream space
between our beach chairs
rippling sunset
– Chen-ou Liu
A point often missed in conversations around climate action is that we will only tackle these terrifying lines & build a survivable future for our children if we make our world fairer, healthier & safer RIGHT NOW.
It’s WIN-WIN.
But right now we’re headed for LOSE-LOSE.
– Climate Dad
Craving doesn’t vanish with money or rehab alone. The work is slow, deep, and very human.
– Valerie Mason-John
July 15.
I must dream myself back in to
my own world —
– Virginia Woolf
interweaving
the strings of silence
with moonlight
until this solitude
becomes a symphony
– Hifsa Ashraf
And what kind of man am I? One of those who would be pleased to be refuted if I say anything untrue, and who would be pleased to refute anyone who says anything untrue; one who, however, wouldn’t be any less pleased to be refuted than to refute. For I count being refuted a greater good, insofar as it is a greater good for oneself to be delivered from the worst thing there is than to deliver someone else from it.
– Socrates
You observe what people do with their freedom — what they don’t do — and it’s impossible not to judge them for it. You come to see a mostly peaceful and democratic society as being in a state of incredibly delicate suspension, suspension that requires equilibrium down to the smallest molecule, such that even the tiniest jolt, just one person neglecting its fragility with her complacency or self-absorption, could cause the whole fucking thing to collapse.
– Lisa Halliday, Asymmetry
Beware the stories you read or tell: subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
– Ben Okri
Politicians promise you heaven before election and give you hell after.
– Emma Goldman
Divine curiosity yearns to be born and does not shrink from conflict, suffering, or sin.
– CG Jung
You know the real problem with America?… All of your elbowing, unblushing, ‘can-do’ achievements. And nobody ever says, ‘Wait! What if we’re wrong?’… What if the whole idea of America is wrong?
– Andrew Sean Greer, Less Is Lost
Jung on dreams: On closer examination (dream) composition turns out to be a highly intelligent, meaningful statement about inner processes, often superior to those made by consciousness.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
The spectacle is by definition immune from human activity, inaccessible to any projected review or correction. It is the opposite of dialogue. Whenever representation takes on an independent existence, the spectacle reestablishes its rule.
– Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Inwardly, you are frustrated, you are not fulfilled, you are not complete. Therefore the house, the family and the name become all-important, to which you become attached.
– Krishnamurti
Life is a reflection of the quality of the mind. If you really understand the mind, you understand the world.
– Sayadaw U Tejaniya
True friends are always together in spirit.
– L.M. Montgomery
We only know calamity because we have these selves. If we didn’t have selves what calamity could touch us?
– Laozi, Daodejing, (trans. Hinton)
I don’t know whose side you’re on,
But I am here for the people
Who work in grocery stores that glow in the morning
And close down for deep cleaning at night
– Jericho Brown
Anytime a Black person writes something down or chooses to read something, it is revolutionary. Because we are in a country that once made writing and reading illegal and that we would be murdered for that.
– W. J. Lofton
Suffering for a being deepens the heart within the heart.
– Clarice Lispector
They told me to be realistic,
but reality never moved me.
So I chose passion,
and let it ruin
every lie I was taught to live.
– @wholistic.scott
The reason we make mistakes is because we all consider the parts of life, but never life as a whole.
– Seneca
We are dying of pretense. Of all that is not said. Of all we say instead.
– Anaïs Nin
Perhaps the earth can teach us,
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.
– Pablo Neruda
Rest is not laziness.
Rest is the rebuilding of your soul.
Give yourself permission to breathe.
– R. M. Drake
All my life I’ve been slightly off. As if in a dream I was not told I was dreaming.
– Czesław Miłosz
The denunciation of injustice implies the rejection of the use of Christianity to legitimize the established order.
– Gustavo Gutiérrez
Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definite feminine image.
– Carl Jung
There can be no progress nor achievement without sacrifice, and a man’s worldly success will be by the measure that he sacrifices his confused animal thoughts, and fixes his mind on the development of his plans, and the strengthening of his resolution and self-reliance.
– James Allen
You meet people who forget you. You forget people you meet. But sometimes you meet those people you can’t forget. Those are your friends.
– Mark Twain
Even while we mourn, we are mourned by something greater.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
I never had the courage to believe in nothing.
– Fernando Pessoa
The spirit becomes free only when it ceases to be a support.
– Simone Weil
The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men.
– Albert Camus
If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write.
– Anaïs Nin
Trans-inclusive pentagrams.
Cthulhu level threats
And emotional education.
– @ravencroftblr
You are not entitled to your opinion, you are entitled to your informed opinion.
– Harlson Ellison
Eventually soulmates meet, for they have the same hiding place.
– Robert Brault
I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.
– Groucho Marx
Long before I settled in this part of the world, I was a guest, and everything was so unfamiliar to me that I had to be led
– Jackie Thomas-Kennedy
The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo Sapiens (‘wise man’). In any case it’s an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan Narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.
– Terry Pratchett
When I say I’m on a spending freeze, I never mean books.
– Gwenna Laithland
Forget hot girl summer.
We’re in our hot activist era.
Sunscreen, sass, and civil disobedience.
– Tracie Searing
The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without color, pain, or joy.
– Lois Lowry
Just as a good rain clears the air, a good writing day clears the psyche.
– Julia Cameron
On Earth, everyone loved
butterflies, but I trusted
the caterpillars more. I
trusted the ones who knew
they were not done growing.
– Andrea Gibson
You keep worrying you’re taking up too much space. I wish you’d let yourself be the Milky Way.
– Andrea Gibson
If we have nothing
but each other
we have so much.
– Andrea Gibson
A POEM FOR YOU:
This day isn’t just for “getting through”
This day is for melodies.
This day is for 700 microscopic heartbreaks
And 432 molecular thrills
Perhaps this day
is for a steady hum
of your not-completely-clear purpose
threading small moments into a tapestry
of complex, glorious existence
Or for rasping grasshoppers
And a sun so hot it peels your skin
Perhaps this day is for boredom.
Stuckness.
Hopelessness.
The myriad crude or cultured flavors of discontent.
Maybe it is perfect for grumbling
and numbing
and distracting the fearful body
as it struggles to be anywhere
but here.
Maybe this day is for hiding under the covers…
For nibbling the guilty pleasure of being invisible and off the hook…
even for just a moment
For pretending it’s all ok.
Then giving up pretending.
For pain so searing
you don’t know how you will survive.
And then surviving after all.
and noticing the delicate veins
of the blazing maple leaf
that fell into your grieving lap
This day is for beauty.
For the indescribable, heartrending magic of it all.
This day isn’t just for “getting through.”
Through some days,
simply getting through
may be worthy of celebration
– Danya River
Acceptance Speech After Setting
the World Record in Goosebumps
by Andrea Gibson
I wasn’t by any means a natural.
Was not one of those wow-hounds
born jaw-dropped. I was tough in the husk.
Went years untouched by rain. Took shelter
seriously, even and often especially
in good weather, my tears like teenagers
hiding under the hoods of my eyes,
so committed they were to never falling
For the joke of astonishment.
When I was told there were seven
wonders of the world, I trusted the math,
believed I had seen none of them.
Of course beauty hunted me.
It hunts everyone. But I outran it, hid
in worry, regret, the promise of an afterlife
or a week’s end.
Then one day, in a red velvet theater
in New Orleans, I watched Maya Angelou
walk on stage. Seventeen slow steps to the mic.
She took a breath before speaking,
and I could hear god being born in that breath.
My every pore reached out like a hand
pointing to the first unsinkable lotus in the bayou
of the universe. I’d never felt anything like it.
Searched the encyclopedia for the feeling’s name
when I got home: “Goosebumps.”
Afterward, I thought – I can do this.
Started training morning to night,
Crowbar swinging like a pendulum at the wall
of my chest. Tore the caution tape off
my life and let everything touch it:
Allen Iverson on the television in his first season
with the Sixers, crossover sharp as a V of sparrows
flying through the paint like Michelangelo’s brush:
333 goosebumps.
My baby sister, sober for the first time
in thirteen years, calling to tell me she just noticed
our mother’s eyes are green:
505 goosebumps.
One day, my friend scored tickets
to a Prince concert. Tiny venue. I was right
behind the sound booth. Prince’s entire band
That evening–women. At the end of the show,
the sound person turned around and whispered,
He didn’t play one song on his setlist the whole night.
I live on stages. I know what it is to scratch a plan
but not the whole trip and still arrive to your destination
two hundred years before your time:
421 (artist formerly known as) goosebumps.
But that’s just the fancy stuff.
Some of them came from simple facts-
it rains diamonds on Jupiter
189 goosebumps.
Blood donors in Sweden receive
A thank-you message when their blood is used:
301 Nordic goosebumps.
One night in Ann Arbor, my friend
still undiagnosed, could not uncurl her fingers
to strum her guitar, so she sang the chords instead.
It was the first time in my life I’d seen pain
become an instrument:
10 dozen goosebumps
For each and every note plucked
From the string section of her refusal to silence
her dream. After that, nothing in the world was gray.
Even the movie of my past was released in color.
The oldest man in my hometown could not
get to the door to listen to our carols.
So we went inside and sang at his bedside instead.
Twenty-four boots on the front step
Catching snowflakes with their tongues:
776 goosebumps.
At one point everything started doing it:
A sincere apology: 221 goosebumps.
An enemy’s love poem: 222 goosebumps.
The moon rising over the continental divide.
My girlfriend and I thought it was a car
driving off a cliff, and suddenly nothing
in the world was dying. You ever felt that?
A split second when nothing in the world is dying?
888 goosebumps,
and the next day I sharpened a tiny ax
So I could split the seconds myself.
Too much lives in a moment
to not feed it to the fire in the heart, slow.
A Missoula treehouse filled with candlelight:
143 goosebumps.
The octopus documentary:
54 goosebumps, multiplied by 8.
The biggest dog in the shelter
hiding behind a teacup chihuahua,
and the woman who came to adopt a cat
taking all three of them home:
1,012 goosebumps.
There is no escaping the magic now.
Beauty caught me and never let me go.
And the thing about the world record
Is– if someone breaks it after me,
and they will break it after me,
I will love that so much
that without even trying,
I’ll break it again.
Words and language are not wrappings for those who write and speak. It is in words and language that things first come into being.
– Martin Heidegger
If one is not in a hurry (i.e. patient) even an egg will start walking.
– Ethiopian proverb
It hurts to look in most people’s eyes.
– Jean Toomer
For most of our lives, we are taught to look forward, to imagine horizons and then go after them. Yet, along the way, love and suffering make us realize that the gift of life is always where we are.
– Mark Nepo
Reality is an illusion created entirely within the human mind, but it’s the only place you can get a decent cup of coffee.
– Tom Gauld
JOINT CUSTODY
Why did I never see it for what it was:
abundance. Two families, two different
kitchen tables, two sets of rules, two
creeks, two highways, two stepparents
with their fish tanks or eight tracks or
cigarette smoke or expertise in recipes or
reading skills. I cannot reverse it, the record
scratched and stopping to that original
chaotic track. But let me say, I was taken
back and forth on Sundays and it was not easy
but I was loved each place. And so I have
two brains now. Two entirely different brains.
The one that always misses where I’m not,
the one that is so relieved to finally be home.
– Ada Limón
Be ruthless to systems.
Be kind to people.
– Michael Brooks
When you own what you feel, you are empowered to make a conscious choice about how to change the feeling.
– Iyanla Vanzant
Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table.
– C. S. Lewis
budding lotus —
when did I become
who I am
– Chen-ou Liu
The Guitar
The weeping of the guitar
begins.
The goblets of dawn
are smashed.
The weeping of the guitar
begins.
Useless
to silence it.
Impossible
to silence it.
It weeps monotonously
as water weeps
as the wind weeps
over snowfields.
Impossible
to silence it.
It weeps for distant
things.
Hot southern sands
yearning for white camellias.
Weeps arrow without target
evening without morning
and the first dead bird
on the branch.
Oh, guitar!
Heart mortally wounded
by five swords.
– Federico Garcia Lorca
[You take a picture of your father]
You take a picture of your father
with your new cell phone,
the last one you’ll take of him,
thin and frail, looking like a praying
mantis as he brings his hand
to his mouth with a piece of bread.
If he pretends to eat, it’s to appease
your hunger to see him eat
and not to appease what no longer
gnaws his belly, no longer the hollow
he knows. It’s over, and you know it,
hours all you have now after wasting
years in silence, and you walking the same path
as his to reach this moment
where you hold up your heads
like dim lamps and face each other,
all light now as you search in his eyes
for anything that doesn’t require
words, a doorknob perhaps
that opens the sky before you.
– Octavio Quintanilla
Teaching people how to
regulate their emotions is
crime prevention.
It’s addiction prevention.
It’s the path to a world where
people can disagree, and still
respect each other.
– Dr. Nicole LePera
Where is the blessed table
To feed all who hunger on earth
Welcomed and seated each one joyfully served?
See them walking, if you dare
If you call that walking
Stumble, stagger, fall and drag themselves
Along the streets of heaven
Where is the halo
That should glow ’round your face
And where are the wings that
Should grow from your shoulder blades? Show them to me.
– 10,000 Maniacs
Pray for the good
of neighbor and stranger,
health+heart
for family & friends;
Bless, if you can,
even enemies
–then pray
for your neighbors again.
– Eric Bond
“If it’s quiet, it isn’t a poem.”
I worship the places of your unread verses—
it casts its silence further than your call.
– Laura Kerr
“If it’s quiet, it isn’t a poem.”
I transcribed the hertz—hz hz hz, archived the unspoken—
then sold it as a limited edition WAV file.
– Laura Kerr
Cauchy Surface
a hypothetical traveler
locates the centre
of a poem
– Laura Kerr
Our cultural and psychological responses are from the past, but modified by the conjunction of the past with the present. So the past is controlling and modifying the present.
– Krishnamurti
Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a ‘non-conformist.’
– André Gide
But to live simply, without regret and bitterness, is a moral task which many people will find very hard.
– Carl Jung
Give me that dark moment I will carry it everywhere like a mouthful of rain.
– Mary Oliver
Fruitful introversion is possible only when there is also a relation to the outside.
– Carl Jung
One could say that every evening I go to the bottom of the river where the meaningful life is lived, but in the morning I get up and put on the persona of Dr. Jung and try to live that also as fully as possible.
– Carl Jung
Anyone who thinks poetry is frivolous has never needed someone to tell them something unspeakably hard, beautifully.
– Andrea Gibson
‘I wish you strength to bring you pride,
And a love to keep you clean,’(…)
– fr. A Shropshire Lad, VIII, A.E. Housman
…there was only the sound of the sea
– Virginia Woolf
Living in a state of gratitude is the gateway to grace.
– Arianna Huffington
The mind should learn compassionate love for the body.
– Carl Jung
You were made to feel something that does not exist in language.
– Hélène Cixous
Love is the most sensitive organ of perception.
Only love lets you read your own soul and the souls of others.
Nothing else will do. It is will be, it is, and it passes,
hiding an infinite meaning in itself.
– Carl Jung
Laziness of which a man is conscious and laziness of which he is unconscious, are a thousand miles apart. Unconscious laziness is real laziness; conscious laziness is not complete laziness, because there is still some clarity in it.
– Carl Jung
Certainly, but true love presupposes self-awareness.
– Carl Jung
Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.
– Carl Sagan
Life etches itself onto our faces as we grow older, showing our violence, excesses or kindnesses.
– Rembrandt
The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
– Sun Tzu
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
– E. M. Forster
I got my courage for the way I write stories from first writing poems.
– Grace Paley
“If you didn’t do it at forty, then do it at sixty. The only thing that matters—is that you do it!”
My grandmother, who lived to be 97, always told me that life only gets better with time. And now? I finally understand what she meant.
Age is a funny thing. We live in a world obsessed with timelines—marry by this age, succeed by that age, retire by another. Miss a milestone? Society tells you the moment is gone forever.
But here’s the truth: that’s a lie.
If your twenties were full of doubts, make your forties wild.
If your forties were consumed by responsibilities, dance through your sixties.
If you didn’t burn brightly back then—ignite now.
There’s no deadline on joy. No expiration date on reinvention. No too-late for dreams.
So wear the bold colors. Book the ticket. Learn the language. Start over.
Because late? Is always better than never.
– Tilda Swinton
Who Said It Was Simple
by Audre Lorde
There are so many roots to the tree of anger
that sometimes the branches shatter
before they bear.
Sitting in Nedicks
the women rally before they march
discussing the problematic girls
they hire to make them free.
An almost white counterman passes
a waiting brother to serve them first
and the ladies neither notice nor reject
the slighter pleasures of their slavery.
But I who am bound by my mirror
as well as my bed
see causes in colour
as well as sex
and sit here wondering
which me will survive
all these liberations.
I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
The world is not yet exhausted; let me see something tomorrow which I never saw before.
– Samuel Johnson
To live oneself means to be one’s own task. Never say that it is a pleasure to live oneself It will be no joy but a long suffering, since you must become your own creator.
– Carl Jung
Obviously we do not know the will of God at all, for if we did we would treat this central problem with awe, if only out of sheer fear of the overpowering God who can work His terrifying will on helpless human beings, as He had done to me.
– Carl Jung
My faith in humanity leads me to believe that people are looking for something more elevating than the sordid details of the intimate aspects of one’s personal life.
– Ginger Rogers
No school can supply an anti-liberal education, or a fascist education, as these terms are contradictory. Liberalism and education are one.
– George Seldes
You Belong
Step out and breathe in the fog
that smudges this summer morning.
Touch the hot-pink petals
of echinacea studded with droplets
each of which contains whole planets
you will never set foot on.
Know that you also hold many worlds
unseen inside you, as do
the tiny leopard frogs who leap up
out of the way when you walk
through the grass. Let the wet blades
stroke your legs, soak your sandals,
and call each shiver evidence
of your aliveness, proof that you too
belong on the earth.
– James Crews
WHEN WOMEN ARE WARRIORS
When women are warriors
they still make dinner
and try to explain the world to their mothers
and their daughters.
When women are warriors
they go on being grandmothers
whispering warrior words and singing
ancient songs about love
and justice.
When women are warriors
they plant gardens and walk
the stone beaches, gathering driftwood
and watching sails on the horizon.
They brew tea for friends
and gather in small groups for silence.
When women are warriors
they still think of themselves
as girls, before they knew
they needed to be warriors.
– J. Jefferson
Style’s frame of reference is biological or biographical, not historical: it is the writer’s thing, his glory and his prison, it is his solitude. Indifferent to society and transparent to it, a closed personal process, it is in no way a product of choice… it is the private portion of the ritual, it rises up from the writer’s myth-laden depths and unfolds beyond his area of control.
What stands firmly and deeply beneath style, brought together harshly or tenderly in its figures of speech, are fragments of reality entirely alien to language.
– Roland Barthes
Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they do not love.
– Sigmund Freud
Children aren’t coloring books.
You don’t get to fill them with
your favorite colors.
– Khaled Hosseini
We think that our purpose is to make it always bright and sunny, to numb the pain, to fix the broken things. But repair is something different. Repair is the antidote to despair.
– Theodore Richards
I only have one language: it is not mine. I remain in it and in¬habit it. It inhabits me. It always preceded me. It is me. I would not be myself outside it. It constitutes me, and also prescribes a monastic solitude for me, as if, even before learning to speak, I had been bound by some vows. Lastingly.
– Jacques Élie Derrida
Ours was not the wealthy country, not the country club or golf course country, not “horse country” or McMansion country, but the sticks.
– Han VanderHart
It’s the ragged source of memory,
a tarpaper-shingled bungalow
whose floors tilt toward the porch,
whose back yard ends abruptly
in a weedy ravine.
– Marilyn Nelson
Only one you.
Only one me.
We’ll have to be careful.
– Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber
Put a person in the wrong atmosphere and nothing will function as it should. He will seem unhealthy in every part. Put him back into his proper element and everything will blossom and look healthy.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
CAMAS LILIES
Consider the lilies of the field,
the blue banks of camas opening
into acres of sky along the road.
Would the longing to lie down
and be washed by that beauty
abate if you knew their usefulness,
how the natives ground bulbs
for flour, how the settler’s hogs
uprooted them, grunting in gleeful
oblivion as the flowers fell?
And you — what of your rushed and
useful life? Imagine setting it all down—
papers, plans, appointments, everything,
leaving only a note: “Gone
to the fields to be lovely. Be back
when I’m through with blooming.”
Even now, unneeded and uneaten,
the camas lilies gaze out above the grass
from their tender blue eyes.
Even in sleep your life will shine.
Make no mistake. Of course,
your work will always matter.
Yet Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these.
– Lynn Ungar
Thus since the advent of man, a new habitat has been opened up to evolving life, a habitat of thought: for this I shall use Teilhard de Chardin’s term, the noosphere, until someone invents something better. This covering of the earth’s sphericity with a thinking envelope, whose components are interacting with a steadily rising intensity, is now generating a powerful psycho-social pressure favoring a solution of least effort, by way of integration in a unitary organization of ideas and beliefs. But this will not happen automatically: it can only be achieved by a large-scale co-operative exercise of human reason and imagination.
– Julian Huxley
To write is to struggle and resist; to write is to become; to write is to draw a map: ‘I am a cartographer’.
– Gilles Deleuze
Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter. What is encountered may be Socrates, a temple or a demon. It may be grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed. In this sense it is opposed to recognition.
– Gilles Deleuze
Darkness, no matter how ominous and intimidating, is not a thing or force: it is merely the absence of light. So light need not combat and overpower darkness in order to displace it – where light is, darkness is not. A thimbleful of light will therefore banish a roomful of darkness. The same is true of good and evil: evil is not a thing or force, but merely the absence or concealment of good. One need not ‘defeat’ the evil in the world; one need only bring to light its inherent goodness.
– Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson (Lubavitcher Rebbe)
When we meet in society, if we have not learned to see both self and other in that way, imagining in one another inner faculties of thought and emotion, democracy is bound to fail, because democracy is built upon respect and concern, and these in turn are built upon the ability to see other people as human beings, not simply as objects.
– Martha C. Nussbaum
It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don’t spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the ethereal bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness…
– James Joyce
This is what it’s like on the plane of immanence: multiplicities fill it, singularities connect with one another, processes or becomings unfold, intensities rise and fall.
– Gilles Deleuze
Every animal is fundamentally a band, a pack.
– Gilles Deleuze
Any two forces, being unequal, constitute a body as soon as they enter into a relationship.
– Gilles Deleuze
Any page of writing is a knot of silence unraveled.
– E. Jabes
We have difficulty accepting that our lives acquire meaning more from losses than from gains, from absences rather than from presences. The same happens with creative activity. It’s hard to accept that the author function is unstable. It emerges in its entirety in the making of the work and then it withdraws, vanishes; nothing assures us that it will return. In its place remains the label of the name on the cover, or we ourselves, emptied and yet engaged in frantically filling the void, in the spectacle of self-promotion organized by the culture industry. The only true filling of that void is the completion of the work. The author can offer himself to the public only in an aesthetic form, whether complete or incomplete.
– Elena Ferrante
About the dark matter holding together the universe, poet and astrophysicist Rebecca Elson writes, “It’s as if all there were, were fireflies / and from them you could infer the meadow.” I saw so many fireflies today; I marched and chanted and wept with 150,000 of them. In my head: At least we are many, at least we are many, at least we are many. We are making a light that proves the existence of a meadow you can’t yet see. It’s a green bright place where children everywhere are allowed to grow old. You can join us there if you like.
– Kaveh Akbar
I am, like everybody else, a product of my time and my culture. And I remember, there’s a really beautiful commencement address that Adrienne Rich gave in 1977 in which she said that an education is not something that you get but something that you claim. And I think that’s very much true of knowledge itself. The reason we’re so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — even in that we skip forward — is that we’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of claiming it. I mean, the true material of knowledge is meaning. And the meaningful is the opposite of the trivial. And the only thing that we should have gleaned by skimming and skipping forward is really trivia. And the only way to glean knowledge is contemplation. And the road to that is time. There’s nothing else. It’s just time.
– Maria Popova
Everything, like the ocean, flows and enters into contact with everything else: touch one place, and you set up a movement at the other end of the world. It may be senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but, then, it would be easier for the birds, and for the child, and for every animal if you were yourself more pleasant than you are now. Everything is like an ocean, I tell you. Then you would pray to the birds, too, consumed by a universal love, as though in ecstasy, and ask that they, too, should forgive your sin. Treasure this ecstasy, however absurd people may think it.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
For the whole is a plenum, which makes all matter interconnected, and in a plenum every movement has some effect on distant bodies in proportion to their distance, such that each body is affected not only by those which touch it, and in some way feels the effect of everything that happens to them, but also by means of them it is affected by those which touch the former ones, the ones which directly touch it. From this it follows that this communication extends indefinitely. Consequently every body is affected by everything that happens in the universe, so much so that the one who sees all could read in each body what is happening everywhere, and even what has happened or will happen, by observing in the present that which is remote both in time and space: σΰμπνoιαϰ πάντα, as Hippocrates said. But a soul can read in itself only what is distinctly represented there; it cannot unfold all at once all that is folded within it, for this proceeds to infinity.
– G.W. Leibniz
And that’s how you go on. You lay laughter over the dark parts. The more dark parts, the more you have to laugh. With defiance, with abandon, with hysteria, any way you can.
– Laini Taylor
My love, I want to sing it through the rafters of your bones, ‘Dying is the opposite of leaving.’ I want to echo it through the corridor of your temples, ‘I am more with you than I ever was before.’
– Andrea Gibson
She asked, though these were not her exact words: Isn’t all the work part of a single piece? She asked, like someone patiently unlocking, with a pin, a pair of handcuffs: Aren’t all the photographs and texts, the fragments and experiments, even the things you say into a microphone, even the things you don’t say, aren’t they all installments toward a unified project?
– Teju Cole
The void is a mirror; creation is the image in it. Man is as the eye of the image reflected in the mirror; the One who is reflected in the image is hidden in the pupil of that eye. Thus He sees Himself.
– Ibn Arabi
A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.
– Jorge Luis Borges
As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. (…) You don’t pick out the rain that soaks you to the skin when you come out of a concert.
– Julio Cortázar
I didn’t want to be gay. I wanted to be… I wanted an easy life. And you know what? I am gay, and I still have an easy life.
– Jane Lynch
If you think about it, the very best
books are really just extremely long
spells that turn you into a different
person for the rest of your life
– Jonathan Edward Durham
What if depression is, in fact, a
form of grief—for our own lives
not being as they should? What
if it is a form of grief for the
connections we have lost, yet
still need?
– Johann Hari
Here is the last place left on the map,
the map of a life well lived, a life
that tells the truth even in passing
a life shining light on the path
leading deep into the heart of love.
Here is the last place left on the map,
angels of the get-through
reminding you that living
from the best parts of yourself
is the way toward trusting
the last place left on the map.
– Heidi Barr, after Andrea Gibson
Nothing has to be produced and no one has to witness it for creativity
to exist.
– Rick Rubin
Staying true to your path and protective of your spirit will have you wildly misunderstood in a world that sells their soul for fools gold.
– Nika Solé
I am a black woman
the music of my song
some sweet arpeggio of tears
is written in a minor key
and I
can be heard humming in the night
– Mari Evans
I can control my thoughts as necessary; then how can I be troubled? What is outside my mind means nothing to it.
– Marcus Aurelius
This family business can be so stressful—difficult, damaged people showing up to spend time with other difficult, damaged people, time that might be better used elsewhere—yet out of that, some accidental closeness, laughter, some pieced-together joy.
– Anne Lamott
The soul must be experienced to be achieved.
If you love me as much as you say you
love me, stay. Let us make a place
of that ripeness the soul speaks about.
– Linda Gregg
Compete externally and you compare.
Compete internally and you improve.
– James Clear
I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work.
– Orhan Pamuk
People are more complicated than the worst thing they’ve ever done.
– Alex Spiro
The beginning of wisdom occurs the day we recognize the obvious—that the only person present in every scene of our still-unfolding psychodramas is ourselves.
– James Hollis
Arthritis is One Thing, the Hurting Another
Last year was no better, and this year only lays the groundwork
for the years that are to come. Listen, this is a year like no other.
This is the year the doctors struck for want of aid
and schoolchildren were sent home in the morning
and lights and gas were unreliable
and, harvesters suspect, fruit had no recourse but rot.
Many are dying for want of a cure, and the poet is patient,
and her hands cause the least of her pain.
– Camille Dungy
If there’s anything fun about composing a novel—and on many days, I’m not sure there is—it’s in finding the architecture of a story.
– Alice McDermott
There is of course always some best use we can make of our time, even in the most abominable exterior circumstances, and only one time (with no return) in which to make it.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Life is forever sending you the absolute best teacher for you to overcome what you need to in order to climb to your next level.
– Nika Solé
blue light over the Bois de Boulogne it continues
the Seine continues
the Louvre stays open it continues it hardly closes at all
– Frank O’Hara
I’ll never understand
why nobody understands.
– Andy Perrin
Knowledge and experience are not at odds; the latter is simply another form of the former.
– Ryan Holiday
Anything you polish with attention will become a mirror. Anything to which you give yourself fully, vest all your strength and risk all your vulnerability, will return you to your life annealed, magnified, both unselved and more deeply yourself. It can be a garden, or a desert, or a hare. It can be, perhaps most readily, a place. “Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered,” the Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd wrote in her stunning love letter to a mountain long before neuroscience found the seat of personhood in the hippocampus — the brain’s compass for navigating space. Places can become part of us, can imprint themselves on the soul like people we have loved. Because every place is part of a larger landscape, a cell in the body of the world, to fall in love with any one place — to contact its beckoning beauty, its vulnerability, its variousness — is to come to love the world itself more deep.
– Maria Popova
My idea about ideas in America is that we burn them up too quickly. We get rid of them by immediately putting them into practice.
We only know one thing to do with an idea: apply it; convert it into something usable. And it does right there in the conversion.
– James Hillman
There is no such thing as a simple act of compassion or an inconsequential act of service. Everything we do for another person has infinite consequences.
– Caroline Myss
Once, when my life had fallen apart and
hadn’t taken a new shape yet, I drove from
Slovenia down the coast of Croatia listening
to The 1975 for hours- sunlight gleam, the
Adriatic, an amorphous sadness such that
when I hear the band years later I am
transported across the Atlantic and into the
life I’d had on that lonesome coast.
– Andrew Bertaina
no book opens itself,
the Übernothing has
joined up with me,
it gives up its fight,
in the ice,
we are ready
to exchange the most deadly in us…
– Paul Celan, (trans. Pierre Joris)
I am nothing when I do not love. Nowadays, people are nobody when they do not hate. The era demands it so. I am out of my era.
– Victoria Ocampo
Do not be bothered by anything
– Shunryu Suzuki
To open the heart is to feel the vastness of suffering—and to step into love.
– Ayya Yeshe
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
– Aristotle
Boldness be my friend, lighting the path to strength.
– Adapted from William Shakespeare
Probably of all our feelings, the only one that is not truly ours is hope. Hope belongs to life; it is life itself defending itself.
– Julio Cortázar
I create
Data Extraction Poetry
– Laura Kerr
I walk through the luminous humidity
passing the House of Seagram with its wet
and its loungers and the construction to
the left that closed the sidewalk
– Frank O’Hara
Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, “Lighthouses” as the poet said ‘erected in the sea of time.’
– Arthur Schopenhauer
The more we can embrace change, rather than try to hold on to our old ways, the more set up we will be to adapt and move forward.
– Cassidy Krug
Never react emotionally to criticism. Analyze yourself to determine whether it is justified. If it is, correct yourself. Otherwise, go on about your business.
– Norman Vincent Peale
The cool kids will someday be uncool. But the good folks will always be the good folks. Better to be one of the good folks.
– Andy Perrin
Films are a sign democracy exists.
– Giona A Nazzaro
Content yourself with a loving attentiveness toward the Holy One. This requires no effort, no agitation, no desire to taste her or feel her or understand her.
– Mirabai Starr
That is indeed a contradiction. But inconsistency is mankind’s very nature.
– Yōko Tawada, Memoirs of a Polar Bear
My own hunger was for a reduction in the vast space between people.
– Rick Bass
There is no parallel universe. This one is the only one we’ve got.
– Lisa Dordal
He who really wants to get to know something new (be it a person, an event, a book) does well to entertain it with all possible love and to avert his eyes quickly from everything in it he finds inimical, repellent, false, indeed to banish it from mind: so that, for example, he allows the author of a book the longest start and then, like one watching a race, desires with beating heart that he may reach his goal.
For with this procedure one penetrates to the heart of the new thing, to the point that actually moves it: and precisely this is what is meant by getting to know it. If one has got this far, reason can afterwards make its reservations; that over-estimation, that temporary suspension of the critical pendulum, was only an artifice for luring forth the soul of a thing.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
It can be really common to get stuck in shame when we’re confronting our own biases or coming to terms with outdated ways of viewing the world. So how can we learn to work with shame productively rather than further contracting into it?
– Sharon Salzberg
Between knowledge of what really exists and ignorance of what does not exist lies the domain of opinion. It is more obscure than knowledge, but clearer than ignorance.
– Plato
Why do I walk? I walk because I like it. I like the rhythm of it, my shadow always a little ahead of me on the pavement. I like being able to stop when I like, to lean against a building and make a note in my journal, or read an email, or send a text message, and for the world to stop while I do it. Walking, paradoxically, allows for the possibility of stillness.
Walking is mapping with your feet. It helps you piece a city together, connecting up neighborhoods that might otherwise have remained discrete entities, different planets bound to each other, sustained yet remote. I like seeing how in fact they blend into one another, I like noticing the boundaries between them. Walking helps me feel at home. There’s a small pleasure in seeing how well I’ve come to know the city through my wanderings on foot, crossing through different neighborhoods of the city, some I used to know quite well, others I may not have seen in a while, like getting reacquainted with someone I once met at a party.
Sometimes I walk because I have things on my mind, and walking helps me sort them out. Solvitur ambulando, as they say.
I walk because it confers — or restores — a feeling of placeness. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says a space becomes a place when through movement we invest it with meaning, when we see it as something to be perceived, apprehended, experienced.
I walk because, somehow, it’s like reading. You’re privy to these lives and conversations that have nothing to do with yours, but you can eavesdrop on them. Sometimes it’s overcrowded; sometimes the voices are too loud. But there is always companionship. You are not alone. You walk in the city side by side with the living and the dead.
– Lauren Elkin
Trauma is in most cases multigenerational. The chain of transmission goes from parent to child, stretching from the past into the future. We pass on to our offspring what we haven’t resolved in ourselves.
– Gabor Maté
To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.
– Sigmund Freud
Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
– Vladimir Nabokov
Play is the complete absorption in something that doesn’t matter to the external world but which matters completely to you.
– Katherine May
All is in the hands of man. Therefore wash them often.
– Stanisław Jerzy Lec
In labouring to be concise, I become obscure.
- Horace
Books are proof that quiet things can be powerful in such a loud and chaotic world.
– @hereweeread
All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.
– Marcel Proust
The sky is not more blue than the mind when it breaks open.
– Anne Carson
Complaining is easy.
Finding solutions is hard.
Do the hard thing.
– @iamshaeo
Direct your eye inward,
and you’ll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered.
Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.
– Henry Ford
I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.
– Virginia Woolf
I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been.
– Sylvia Plath
May all that is unlived in you blossom into a future graced with love.
– John O’Donohue
You do not have to live forever. You just have to live.
– Cheryl Strayed
Thank heavens, the sun has gone in and I don’t have to go out and enjoy it.
– Logan Pearsall Smith
We all have our time machines, don’t we? Those that take us back are memories… And those that carry us forward, are dreams.
– H.G. Wells
Dust, by its own nature, can rise only so far above the road; and birds which fly higher never have it upon their wings. So the heart that knows how to fly high enough escapes those little cares and vexations which brood upon the earth, but cannot rise above it into that purer air.
– H. W. Beecher
But how can you love a person who is not whole? Because you, like the moon, are not only beautiful when full. In all of your phases and fractions and ivory-white pieces, I love you.
– Beau Taplin
SURVIVAL BY IMPERFECTION
What if you were a tree,
one who survived a clearcut
because you were deemed unfit
to become timber? If seeing flaws
can save a tree, just think
what accepting yours could do
if you let them be there, standing
tall in a field of felled perfection.
– Heidi Barr
god is just an everywhere ghost
needing connection so badly that
atoms bond to other atoms & form molecules
even when they split
the spooky action brings the love back to life
– Phil Saint Denis Sanchez
Above Everything
by David Ignatow
I wished for death often
but now that I am at its door
I have changed my mind about the world.
It should go on; it is beautiful,
even as a dream, filled with water and seed,
plants and animals, others like myself,
ships and buildings and messages
filling the air—a beauty,
if ever I have seen one.
In the next world, should I remember
this one, I will praise it
above everything.
There’s no easy way from Earth to The Stars
– Seneca
The Apple
You gave me your heart
like a polished apple
and being young
I bit into it
letting my teeth
pierce the tight skin
deep into the flesh
while the juices
ran down between
my fingers.
But now I’m not sure
what fruit it is
that I’ve eaten
or from what tree
or why suddenly
neither one of us
is quite as young.
– Laura Gilpin
The True Poet
My abuelo was the true poet:
The way he tilled the land with his hands,
Beneath the sun; he seemed to touch the sky
With his hoe. My abuelo was the true poet:
The way he joked with his mule as they rode,
The two of them alone with the dawn;
He seemed to reach the moon with his laugh.
My abuelo was the true poet: the way
He smoked his cigarette on the porch like a train
In the wind; he seemed to graze the trees
With his breath. My abuelo was the true poet:
The way he wrote the earth with his poems;
He could not use a pen with his hands.
– Jose Hernandez Diaz