Journal XXVII

Whatever causes night in our souls may leave stars.
– Victor Hugo

The deepest abyss is the inability to be alone.
– H. P. Lovecraft

hiking date
she trips over
her words
– @Andddrrrew

How to Live

Depravity begins with thinking of love
as a radical act. I quit loving
with difficulty. I love
easy now. Two parakeets on my shoulders.
They’ll fly away if I move. So I move.
I love flight. I love cages
left wide open. I am not a window.
I could be a window. Open me,
you’ll find a dense wood,
children wandering inside it.
Not lost children. They know the way.
They live the way horses run
If they each had a bird in hand
they would open their hands.

– Todd Dillard

I’m so attracted to people who are confident enough to genuinely listen instead of trying to prove or assert themselves (I’m the latter). you know that student or colleague or family member who chimes in once or twice thoughtfully but otherwise steps back? I aim to be this person.
– Alicia Andrzejewski, PhD

the reason I don’t say I’m an “ally” in my bio is because it’s not up to me. marginalized people aren’t looking for declarative statements, they’re looking for action & evidence. they know who their allies are.
– Alicia Andrzejewski, PhD

Image and meaning are identical, and as the first takes shape, so the latter becomes clear. Actually, the pattern needs no interpretation; it portrays its own meaning.
– Carl Jung

There is, certainly in this age, a want of writing that shall rest and brace the mind. [. . .] We must be militant here on earth, militant against every form of error.
– Frank Barbour Coffin

I never thought I would
live to see the collapse
of the United States,

and here I am right in
the middle of the death
of a nation’s potential,

losing our city on a hill.

– Andy Perrin

Reality is massively creative. The more aligned with reality you are the more creative you become.
– Daniel Thorson

That all these walls oppression builds
Will have to go!
– Langston Hughes

Then said Idril heavily: ‘Sad is the blindness of the wise’; but Tuor said: ‘Sad too is the stubbornness of those we love – yet ’twas a valiant fault,’ then stooping he lifted and kissed her, for she was more to him than all the Gondothlim…’

– Tolkien, Book of Lost Tales II

‘Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?’

‘A man may do both,’ said Aragorn. ‘For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time.’

– Tolkien, The Two Towers

I think we’re at that place in the history of the human timeline where “they” have bamboozled the population so much that we don’t care anymore. We’re still gong to be everything we came to be, no matter what tricks they’re playing on us. This is where they’ve messed up.
– Nika Solé

Everyone who does not NEED to be a writer ought to do something else.
– George Simenon

Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.
– Derek Walcott

Saint Brigid’s Prayer
(from the Irish)

I’d like to give a lake of beer to God.
I’d love the Heavenly
Host to be tippling there
for all eternity.

I’d love the men of Heaven to live with me,
to dance and sing.
If they wanted, I’d put at their disposal
vats of suffering.

White cups of love I’d give them
with a heart and a half;
sweet pitchers of mercy I’d offer
to every man.

I’d make Heaven a cheerful spot
because the happy heart is true.
I’d make the men contented for their own sake.
I’d like Jesus to love me too.

I’d like the people of Heaven to gather
from all the parishes around.
I’d give a special welcome to the women,
the three Marys of great renown.

I’d sit with the men, the women and God
there by the lake of beer.
We’d be drinking good health forever
and every drop would be a prayer.

– Brendan Kennelly

I clearly saw the
skeleton underneath
all this show of
personality
what is left of a man
and all his pride
but bones?
– Jack Kerouac

We had a kettle; we let it leak:
Our not repairing made it worse.
We haven’t had any tea for a week…
The bottom is out of the Universe.
– Rudyard Kipling

What we’d hope for on the planet is creativity and sanity, conviviality, the real work of our hands and minds.
– Gary Snyder

Speak when you’re angry and you’ll make the best speech you’ll ever regret.
– Lawrence Peters

The trickster…always breaks in, just as the unconscious does, to trip up the rational situation. He’s both a fool and who’s beyond the system. And the trickster represents all those possibilities of life that your mind hasn’t decided it wants to deal with.
– Joseph Campbell

Everybody acts out a myth, but very few people know what their myth is. And you should know what your myth is because it might be a tragedy and maybe you dont want it to be.
– Carl Jung

Racism is like a Cadillac, every year they roll out a new model.
– Malcolm X

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.
– John Maynard Keynes

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence– whether much that is glorious– whether all that is profound– does not spring from disease of thought– from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.
– Edgar Allan Poe

This love we have, grief in reverse, full rhyme, wrong place, wrong time, sweet work for hands, the heart’s vocation, flares to guide the new year in, the days and nights far out upon the sky’s dark sea. Your mouth is snow now on my lips, cool, intimate, first kiss, a vow. Time falls and falls through endless space, to when we are.
– Carol Ann Duffy

Remember, Kid, the ease, the grace, the glory, the greatness of your art; remember it, never forget. Remember passion. Do not forget, do not forsake, do not forget. It is there, the order and the purpose; there is chaos, but not in you, not way down deep in your heart, no chaos, only ease, grace, beauty, love, greatness…
– Jack Kerouac

While we are postponing, life speeds by.
– Seneca

How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause…
– Sophie Scholl

Please help others rise. Greatness comes not from a position, but from helping build the future. We have an obligation to pull others up.
– Indra Nooyi

In moments of crisis, people are willing to hand over a great deal of power to anyone who claims to have a magic cure.
– Naomi Klein

When I think I’m unfairly hated, I try to remember that I’m unfairly loved.
– R.C. Sproul

Our consciousness is not produced by our brains: it’s only received there.
– John Desouza

FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed — it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.
– A.J. Perlis

That’s what tact is. It’s the art of saying nothing when there’s nothing to say.
– Fiona Apple

The Past: Our cradle, not our prison; there is danger as well as appeal in its glamor. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition.
– Israel Zangwill

Every artist dips their brush in their own soul,
and paints their own nature into their pictures.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Advice is like snow—the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Our beliefs do not sit passively in our brains waiting to be confirmed or contradicted by incoming information. Instead, they play a key role in shaping how we see the world.
– Richard Wiseman

Pour inward, dear one. Pour inward. It’s not that you lack Love. It’s that your river needs to flow in both directions.
– Jaiya John

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.
– Thomas Jefferson

Our reputation depends more on what we conceal than what we reveal.
– Robert Green

If you look carefully
Everyone is pretending
– Hafez

Is poetry a pyramid scheme? Do we all just write and consume for each other without non writers being part of the equation?
– @theunexpectedsplaff

To raise the world to God in deathless Light,
To bring God down to the world on earth we came,
To change the earthly life to Life Divine.
– Sri Aurobindo

It takes courage to rest and play in a world where exhaustion is a status symbol.
– Brené Brown

Go for a walk, if it is not too dark.
Get some fresh air, try to smile.
Say something kind
To a safe-looking stranger, if one happens by.
Always exercise your heart’s knowing.
You might as well attempt something real
Along this path:
Take your spouse or lover into your arms
The way you did when you first met.
Let tenderness pour from your eyes
The way the Sun gazes warmly on the earth.
Play a game with some children.
Extend yourself to a friend.
Sing a few ribald songs to your pets and plants –
Why not let them get drunk and wild!
Let’s toast
Every rung we’ve climbed on Evolution’s ladder.
Whisper, “I love you! I love you!”
To the whole mad world.
Let’s stop reading about God –
We will never understand Him.
Jump to your feet, wave your fists,
Threaten and warn the whole Universe
That your heart can no longer live
Without real love!
– Hafiz

I Heard God Laughing – Renderings of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky

The wise come to know their own inner conflicts,
while the unwise keep insisting that all the trouble is the
fault of others.
– Michael Meade

THE SHORTEST AND
SWEETEST OF SONGS.

Come
Home.

– George MacDonald

I would never endorse deliberate cruelty, but I firmly believe in stating a case bluntly and ruthlessly against all things evil, which would include those things that deny dignity and peace and rights to people; any hurtful belief that poisons the listeners and endangers those subjected to those beliefs. Sometimes you have to enter particular rooms with a sword.
– Tennessee Williams

Poetry and divine inspiration have this in common, that both are projected in images which cannot be decoded, but must be allowed to signify what they signify of the reality beyond them.
– Austin Farrer, The Glass of Vision

What tormented him was the endeavor to come up with the most precise linguistic expression for trivial matters. This misuse of his talent was a true act of prostitution…. Every effort of language spent on his official documents seemed to him a loss.
– Reiner Stachs on Kafka

A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
– John Updike

The Guitar
by Patrick Phillips

It came with those scratches
from all their belt buckles,

palm-dark with their sweat
like the stock of a gun:

an arc of pickmarks cut
clear through the lacquer

where all the players before me
once strummed-once

thumbed these same latches
where it sleeps in green velvet.

Once sang, as I sing, the old songs.
There’s no end, there’s no end

to this world, everlasting.
We crumble to dust in its arms.

All Nature will commune with you when you are in tune with God. Realization of this truth will make you a master of your destiny.
– Paramahansa Yogananda

If an ecosystem loses one of its native species, we know that we cannot speak of it as itself minus one species. An ecosystem minus one species is a
different ecosystem.
– Wendell Berry

Ode To A Mystic
I hope for you
the fires of transformation
that burns away the dross of ego
leaving oneness, grace, and light.
That you may breathe the winds of being
With wings of an eagle to soar
Sowing life into each other
opening hearts and doors
For you are a spring of heaven
A breeze in the desert of life
Giving hope to the hopeless and broken
Bringing grace, and peace, and light.
– Bob Holmes

I think it first hit me when you
said we instead of me. It stuck
when all the lights in my our house
stopped going out.

– L.E. Bowman

A Night in Brooklyn
by D. Nurkse

We undid a button,
turned out the light,
and in that narrow bed
we built the great city—
water towers, cisterns,
hot asphalt roofs, parks,
septic tanks, arterial roads,
Canarsie, the intricate channels,
the seacoast, underwater mountains,
bluffs, islands, the next continent,
using only the palms of our hands
and the tips of our tongues, next
we made darkness itself, by then
it was time for dawn
and we closed our eyes
and counted to ourselves
until the sun rose
and we had to take it all to pieces
for there could be only one Brooklyn.

I continue to remind myself that 77 million is a small percentage of 330 million Americans, and an exceedingly small percentage of 8,000,0000,0000 humans.
– Ethan Nichtern

How long the winter has lasted like a Mahler
symphony, or an hour in the dentist’s chair.
– Jane Kenyon

We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.
– Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

the neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone — remodeling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygenic design– but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness.
– Jean Baudrillard

Closed in a final rain
Clouds are complete,
Vows of shadowful light
Are vain,
And every hour is late.
– J. V. Cunningham

Against all evidence it is necessary and redemptive to remember that the future is not yet written.
– Tom Pow

Sometimes writing saves me. And then, sometimes, I think, I hate it. Because nothing that is really fully lived needs to be written down. It burns itself out totally. Does a tear need to be written down? Or a prayer? Or holding hands? I would like my life to be like that. But now I have to compliment my life with
writing… A full life is like a fruit, it reaches its ripeness and it falls down. Now, it sits under my brain and it keeps eating me, wants to be born.
– Jonas Mekas

—you have such a February face,
So full of frost, of storm and cloudiness
– William Shakespeare

We were talking of dragons, Tolkien and I
In a Berkshire bar. The big workman
Who had sat silent and sucked his pipe
All the evening, from his empty mug
With gleaming eye, glanced towards us;
‘I seen ‘em myself,’ he said fiercely.
– C.S. Lewis

The occasion is entirely fictitious. I have never seen a dragon, nor ever seen a man who said that he has. I don’t wish to see either.
– Tolkien to Walter Hooper

No one cares what it’s all for,
you’ll be buried in the clothes
that you’ve never wore…
– Tom Waits

Choose your enemies carefully because you will become like them.
– René Girard

Our world is full of hatred and violence, because we do not take the time to nourish the love and compassion that are already in our hearts.
– Thich Nhat Hanh

Outgrow bosses, landlords, and roommates.
– @naval

We assume walls will stay standing because we live in a country that manufactures walls and security and borders to distract us from our fears. But the world is a case in which the unthinkable often happens. The unthinkable makes our ghosts local and global. Ghosts hate borders.
– Alina Stefanescu

Do cry a little. It will do you good.
– George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind

Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.
– James Baldwin

Yet seek to know at least: by what dark paths
Did night return you from the dead to day?
Remember, who you are; reclaim that thread
– Paul Valery

if my heart / gets away from me— / help me bring it back.
– Karen Pojmann

The smarter you are, the faster you see through any given game.
– @naval

When you let go of the egoic self what you’re getting in exchange is the whole universe.
– Adyashanti

Not locus if you will but envelope,
Paths of light not atoms of good form;
Such tangent praise, less crashing, not less warm,
May gain more intimacy for less hope.
– William Empson

The more you learn, the more you realize how much fun there is in not knowing.
– Prof. Feynman

Once you reach a certain level of consciousness, explaining yourself to the average person becomes futile. All you’ll get back is a fluoride stare.
– Nika Solé

A poor diet very powerfully limits the growth of your brain.
– Ray Peat

One of the main functions of organized religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God.
– Carl Jung

amplifying
my solitude
frost on the window
– Issa

He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight…
– James Joyce

But now if life should grant one endless night,
If the stars ever would watch the world, the sun
Sleep ever, the moon only come and go,
A space of darkness leaving when our eyes
Dared not sweet meeting, we’d ask no more of earth
But that sea’s song. . . .
– A. E. Waite

People you don’t even know exist are in daily competition with you because you’re the highest one on their map. This is how greatness raises the average.
– Nika Solé

Life does not get in the way; it is the way.
– Rebecca Li

I know I’m supposed to believe in all these limitations, but baby I’m too magical for that.
– Nika Solé

For me, the word “writing” is the exact opposite of the word “waiting.” Instead of waiting, there is writing.
– Roberto Bolaño

Please, for the love of god, abandon bad books, there are no medals for completion in the afterlife, and time is short.
– Dylan O’Sullivan

(A kiss can destroy a philosophy.)
– Anaïs Nin

To end the misery that has afflicted the human condition for thousands of years, you have to start with yourself and take responsibility for your inner state at any given moment. That means now.
– Eckhart Tolle

lavender unraveling
the last thread
of a tangled day
– @Jocelynx44

All the great questions have only personal answers.
– @naval

Perfection is less interesting.
– Anne Carson

Don’t look away. Look straight at everything. Look it all in
the eye, good and bad.
– Henry Miller

If you can’t read and write, you can’t think. Your thoughts are dispersed if you don’t know how to read and write. You’ve got to be able to look at your thoughts on paper and discover what a fool you were.
– Ray Bradbury

Meditation is a way of settling in oneself, at the innermost core of your being. Once you have found the center of your existence, you will have found both your roots and your wings.
– Osho

It is like a priest or a psychiatrist; if you get the wrong one, then you are better off alone. But there are editors so rare and so important that they are worth searching for, and you always know when you have one.
– Toni Morrison

A voyage without love is rather sterile.
– James Salter

Be suspicious of all those who employ the term ‘we’ or ‘us’ without your permission. This is a form of surreptitious conscription… Always ask who this ‘we’ is; as often as not it’s an attempt to smuggle tribalism through customs.
– Christopher Hitchens

I turned in just three poems to workshop in my last semester—three! I wrote more, but I didn’t want to show them to the hyenas.
– Rita Dove

Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
– Iris Murdoch

Geography has made us
neighbors. History has made
us friends. Economics has
made us partners. And
necessity has made us
allies.
– President John F. Kennedy
May 17, 1961 Address before the
Canadian parliament

My love is in a light attire
Among the apple trees,
Where the gay winds do most desire
To run in companies.
– James Joyce

The Dictators
by Pablo Neruda

An odor has remained among the sugarcane:
a mixture of blood and body, a penetrating
petal that brings nausea.
Between the coconut palms the graves are full
of ruined bones, of speechless death-rattles.
The delicate dictator is talking
with top hats, gold braid, and collars.
The tiny palace gleams like a watch
and the rapid laughs with gloves on
cross the corridors at times
and join the dead voices
and the blue mouths freshly buried.
The weeping cannot be seen, like a plant
whose seeds fall endlessly on the earth,
whose large blind leaves grow even without light.
Hatred has grown scale on scale,
blow on blow, in the ghastly water of the swamp,
with a snout full of ooze and silence

The sky settles everything.
– E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

Surely there is a future,
And your hope will not be cut off.
– Proverbs 23:18

Love’s as hard as nails
Love is nails:
Blunt, thick, hammered through
The medial nerves of One
Who, having made us, knew
The thing He had done,
Seeing (with all that is)
Our cross, and His.
– C.S. Lewis

There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else.
– C.S. Lewis

THE SKATERS
by Dante Di Stefano

At the rink, they whoosh, these little bundled
Beings, their scarves graffitiing the air
My daughter weaving among them, her long legs
Pumping, the bright pink kitty earmuffs, a blur

& I imagine those other skaters this week
Their blades asleep in their stowed luggage
Their ankles describing triple toe loops
& double axels above the twilight Potomac

We parents know what it is to be afraid
Of the uncertain, the incendiary, the whirring dark,
Deviations from flight plans, the unconfirmed
Reports of whomever, whatever wasn’t supposed to

Happen, but the fact is it is always happening,
What we most fear & feared & glide away from,
But never escape, & still the faith that these feet
Ours & our children’s, will trace something

Beautiful, an arabesque on ice, the perfect cursive
Of a name that will melt away, but the memory
Of which we might trace, so delicately like this line
Right here, whirling away into the dear humming dark

I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone – if possible – Jew, Gentile – black man – white. We all want to help one another.

Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness – not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone.

And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way…

– Charlie Chaplin

Maybe we’re all out
here saving each other
because without each other
there would be no
reason to be saved.
– Neil Hilborn

The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.
– Marcel Proust

There are two simple beings: the child who does not yet know evil; and the sanctified old man who has forgotten it by dint of conquering it. Therefore the old man loves the child and is loved by it.
– Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.
– Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

Here I stand; I can do no other.
– Martin Luther

And even after all you have survived, you’re still a loving person.

Amazing. Beautiful. Miracle.

– Dr. Thema

Everybody is the guest of everybody
– Chögyam Trungpa

When your life is
moving too fast and you
find yourself in chaos,
introduce yourself to each
color of the sunset.
– Christy Ann Martine

We all have a shadow. Or does our shadow have us? Jung asked this question: How do you find a lion that has swallowed you?
– Connie Zweig

Nothing is inevitable. Do not be alone and do not be dismayed. Find someone who is doing something you admire and join them.
– @namesaregone.bsky.social

We can be of service by bringing some kindness, care, groundedness, and balance to those around us.
– Sebene Selassie

I ran away from home .I ran away from St. Louis, then I ran away from the U.S.A because of that terror of discrimination, that horrible beast which paralyzes one’s very soul and body.
– Josephine Baker

I love flowers,
I’d love to have the whole place swimming in roses.
– James Joyce

Their choice of Barabbas foreshadowed that robber Antichrist, whom they would hereafter choose in the end of the world.
– St. Jerome

The work of the poet is the work of the historian.
– Najwan Darwish

Each human is a world

Each human is a world, peopled
by blind beings in shady rebellion
against the I the king that rules them.
In every soul are a thousand souls imprisoned
in every world a thousand worlds are hidden
and these blind, these lower worlds
are real and alive, if unfinished,
as true as I am real. And we kings
and princes of the thousand possible within us
are ourselves subjects, ourselves imprisoned
in some greater creation, whose I and being
we grasp as little as our superior
his superior. From their death and love
our own feelings have taken a shade.

As when a mighty steamship passes
far out there, under the horizon, where it lies
so evening calm. And we do not know of it
until a bow wave reaches us on the shore,
first one, then another and many more
that strikes and foams until everything turns
as before. Everything is yet different.

Thus, we shadows are gripped by a strange unrest
When something tells us people have moved,
That some of the possible have been set free.

– Gunnar Ekel

All things are and will be vain, until we find that which is complete and perfect.
– St. Jerome

I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young, and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting.
– Bertrand Russell

You take a breather, say fuck it, look at the clouds for a couple of weeks. You come to your rented hole one night—the gas is off, the lights are out, the phone yanked out—what for? You owe them all a total, combined, of $39; they couldn’t wait.
– Charles Bukowski

They fear love because it creates
a world they can’t control.
– George Orwell

Stand up for and with your trans friends, colleagues, students, and those who are strangers to you. For kids and parents who are terrified. Show them that you care and are worried and won’t abide discrimination or harassment. Find your backbone.
– Sheera Talpaz

a photo of this poem exists

That morning there were 10,000
coloured shapes in the sand.

Seeing them he saw her seeming
the most beautiful pattern,

and wondered at all this meaning
seeming to shine for him, from them,

for her. Saying so, she replied, yes,
that’s just the pretty sea glass.

– Alec Finlay

The exoteric sees things up from below – while the esoteric sees them down from above!
– Nietzsche

One element that is personally disheartening about this new regime that is so far out of the bounds of western democratic political and policy discourse, is not only does the emperor have no clothes, but many of the people I grew up around and/or with and respected, deferred to, and admired as a kid (and as an adult) have none either. Which is not a recent realization, but this turn of events crystalizes the reality.
– Clifton Lee

…Dante’s Commedia, too, begins
not in hell but on earth: that famous dark wood,
not a garden of delights, not at all, but a kind
of garden nevertheless, and that
an arrival in Paradise might well take
the form, as in that remarkable final
shot of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, of
a return to Earth, a real Earth or
a reconstructed Earth, an imagined
garden or a painted garden, or simply
the garden where you were born. The leafy
globe, perhaps, that we see when the triptych
is closed. It is the earth that is ours,
and Dante’s cosmic love, though it moves
the stars that track their paths through the skies,
is a leafy thing, a fleshly thing,
a thing of the soil, a thing that demands
to be lived out on this surface, on the face
of this terrestrial sphere, this local
unheavenly orb, this, our planet,
our neighborhood, if, that is
to say, it is to be lived at all.
– Troy Jollimore

You’re homesick
for all the lives
you’re not living.
– Joy Sullivan

What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight.
– Virginia Woolf

One night, when he was studying the course of the moon and its revolutions and was gazing open-mouthed at the heavens, a lizard crapped upon him from the top of the roof.
– Aristophanes, The Clouds

…the highest wisdom must ever appear folly to those who do not possess it.
– George MacDonald

Writing is a way of saying that you and the world have a chance.
– Richard Hugo

I hope you are reading.
I hope you are looking at the art.
I hope you watch old black and white movies.
I hope your life is music.
– Vlada Mars

Beyond the basics, money doesn’t make you happier because, beyond the basics, nothing makes you happier.
– @naval

I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of the idea that if you care about something, you’ve gotta be willing to blow it up

Otherwise it’s too easy to get stuck perpetuating a low-integrity good-enough-ish version of it

– River Kenna

I really have no idea
what’s going on,
the poet finally told
the old monk.

– The Old Monk

Doesn’t matter how much money you have in the bank.

If you’re not healthy you’re poor.

– Dan Go

I don’t sense that inner work has a Correct Order of Operations,

But I do sense that the order of operations you choose can entirely change how the path unfolds and what you find on it

It’s like a combination lock that will open to any one of a few dozen combinations,,

But depending which combination you use, you find something entirely different on the other side of the door

This is part of why certain traditions are pretty strict and insistent on where to start, where to go next, how to orient towards it, etc. — if you do things significantly differently, you’re not really on their path anymore, you’re doing something else to some degree

It’s also part of why I avoided certain practices and views toward the beginning,,

I saw and listened to the people who’d started there and were insistent that I should start there and iiiiiiiiii had no interest in being a part of what they’d found by inputting that combination

– River Kenna

My only thought: go to the forest in order to return to the sea.

– Rêvoir, Hélène Cixous; tr. Beverley Bie Brahic

My favorite genre of literature is gossip. My second favorite is prayer. But sometimes those are one and the same.

– Aurora Mattia, The Fifth Wound

EMPATHY

I remember hearing, from some priest or nun, back when I was a kid, that the unique ability that Jesus had was to know and empathize instantly with whomever he met. Whoever introduced me to this notion related it to love—to Jesus’ ability to be vastly, unlimitedly loving. I was really taken by this; it seemed like the greatest superpower of all. And it would be a very novelistic gift—to be able to suspend judgment so completely that you could almost become the other person. All disapproval or distance would vanish. In a sense, all violence would disappear. If you are coming from a place of total understanding, what can you oppose?

– George Saunders

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, 2001: A Space Odyssey

It is the nature and intention of a constitution to prevent governing by party, by establishing a common principle that shall limit and control the power and impulse of party, and that says to all parties, thus far shalt thou go and no further. But in the absence of a constitution, men look entirely to party; and instead of principle governing party, party governs principle.

– Thomas Paine, First Principles of Government

Every man contains within himself a ghost continent.
– Loren Eiseley

Weak and narrow are the powers implanted in the limbs of men; many the woes that fall on them and blunt the edge of thought; short is the measure of the life in death through which they toil; then are they borne away, like smoke they vanish into air, and what they dream they know is but the little each has stumbled on in wandering about the world; yet boast they all that they have learned the whole—vain fools! For what that is, no eye has seen, no ear has heard, nor can it be conceived by the mind of man. You, then, since you have fallen to this place, shall know no more than human wisdom may attain.
But, gods avert the madness of those babblers of my tongue, and cause the stream of holy words to issue from my lips. And you, great muse of memory, maiden with the milk-white arms, I pray to you to teach me things that creatures of a day may hear.
– Empedokles

All day I have been reading
about the invisible world, the one
that’s always trying to reach us. What if we could hear
the small round o’s of dirt,
the chant of stars and plants,
carbon and sulphur, calling to each other, innumerable
to innumerable, a throat at every blade of grass.
– Ellery Akers

A prisoner paints a landscape on the wall of his cell showing a miniature train entering a tunnel. When his jailers come to get him, he asks them politely to ‘wait a moment, to allow me to verify something in the little train in my picture. As usual, they started to laugh, because they considered me to be weak-minded…

I made myself very tiny, entered into my picture and climbed into the little train, which started moving, then disappeared into the darkness of the tunnel. For a few seconds longer, a bit of flaky smoke could be seen coming out of the round hole. Then this smoke blew away, and with it the picture, and with the picture, my person …

How many times poet-painters, in their prisons, have broken through walls, by way of a tunnel! How many times, as they painted their dreams, they have escaped through a crack in the wall! And to get out of prison all means are good ones. If need be, mere absurdity can be a source of freedom.

– Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

If we are courageous enough to say, “Not this person, nor any other, can ultimately give me what I want; only I can,” then we are free to celebrate a relationship for what it can gives.
– James Hollis

When you find the gods blessing you over and over again, it’s because you’re about to go through hell and they want you well-provisioned.
– River Kenna

February: Question

What is older than desire?
the bare tree asked.
Sorrow, said the sky.
Sorrow is a river
older than desire.

– Robert Hass

Music creates order out of chaos; for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent; melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous.
– Yehudi Menuhin

You chose amid doubts the path that seemed right: the choice was just, and it has been rewarded.
– Gandalf to Aragorn (Tolkien, The Two Towers)

And he said to himself
in a sunken morning moon
between two pines,
between lost gold and lingering green:

I believe I will count up my worlds.

– Carl Sandburg

sunrise—
i think i’ll add oranges
to my grocery list
– @Andddrrrew

We all have a fantasy of arriving
at a conflict-free plateau or a
sunlit glen without struggle,
without the demand for
increasing consciousness,
without being pulled deeper and
further than we wish to travel
Interestingly, there is such a
place-it is called Death.

– James Hollis

divorced a year
the yard full
of wild flowers

– Francis E. Masat

[what direction will you take when the universe collapses. you who when you go must go someplace]

what direction will you take when the universe collapses. you who when you go must go someplace you who must have more to spend than the rest of your life: busfare for instance. mileage coupons

you have lived with yourself these several long years and wasn’t that enough. the awe now worn behind the vacations of which you are fond: a flinch of terror. your loins sag in their hammock

once men gobbled the garbo of you. no wonder reclusiveness: in the russian river of your veins the salmon are murmuring. you go to your bungalow. you know your bungalow dark as a birthmark

– D. A. Powell, Tea

Border Lines
by Alberto Rios

A weight carried by two
Weighs only half as much.

The world on a map looks like the drawing of a cow
In a butcher’s shop, all those lines showing
Where to cut.

That drawing of the cow is also a jigsaw puzzle,
Showing just as much how very well
All the strange parts fit together.

Which way we look at the drawing
Makes all the difference.
We seem to live in a world of maps:

But in truth we live in a world made
Not of paper and ink but of people.
Those lines are our lives. Together,

Let us turn the map until we see clearly:
The border is what joins us,
Not what separates us.

I am tired.
These people make me
feel I have a hole in the
middle of me.
– D.H. Lawrence

I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time.
– Charles Mingus

The day you catch an idea you fall in love with, even a small one, is a beautiful day.
– David Lynch

Giving is fraught with danger — as is taking.
– Ali Smith, Artful

Édouard Glissant: The earth is trembling. Systems of thought have been demolished, and there are no more straight paths. There are endless floods, eruptions, earthquakes, fires. Today, the world is unpredictable and in such a world, utopia is necessary. But utopia needs trembling thinking: we cannot discuss utopia with fixed ideas. Because today we are always the object of bombardment, of bombing, of events, news, and so on and so on. We cannot escape that. And we have to manage with that.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: What is trembling thinking?

ÉG : Tremblement. Firstly, what I call tremblement is neither incertitude nor fear. It is not what paralyzes us. Trembling thinking is the instinctual feeling that we must refuse all categories of fixed and imperial thought. Tremblement is thinking in which we can lose time, lose time searching, in which we can wander and in which we can counter all the systems of terror, domination, and imperialism with the poetics of trembling—it allows us to be in real contact with the world and with the peoples of the world.

For me, that’s what trembling thinking is. An instinct, an intuition of the world that we can’t achieve with imperial thoughts, with thoughts of domination, thoughts of a systematic path toward a truth that we’ve posited in advance. It’s metaphorical, but it’s also real, concrete.

It gives us something that systems of thought cannot give us, not today at least.
Yes. think of the sumptuous ways of Western cultures: Greece, Rome, France, Germany… All their great ideas — Imperialism, Cartesianism, Egalitarianism, Marxism, and Socialism — approached all the people of the world with a confident objective: “I have to do this or that and I will achieve it because I have a system of thought.”

– ARCHIPELAGO : Édouard Glissant in Conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist

From among us we have sent out
Into the enervating dusk
One little whining beast
Whose longing
Is to slink back to antediluvian burrow
And one elastic tentacle of intuition
To quiver among the stars
– Mina Loy

The World wants to know what I am made of. I am trying to find a way to answer Her.
– Robin Coste Lewis

UPON ENTERING THE FOREST
by Tom Hirons

A man goes into the forest and says
I know you / I miss you / I was
once here with you
and he listens to the singing
and the way the ground beats
and crackles and hums

and if he can bear it
he allows his heartbreak out
the black pearl of his loneliness
he’s carried all his life

The thin world will soon call him back but
for a moment he might crack open
and hear the forest roar.
His life will never be the same
He cannot go back to sleep
The pearl in his chest becomes a fire

PRACTICE

We practice in order to cultivate a sense of agency,
to understand that a range of responses is open to us.
We practice to remember to breathe,
to have the space in the midst of adversity,
to remember our values, what we really care about,
and to find support in our inner strength
and in one another.

– Sharon Salzberg

Well, imagine if you did find a book of riddles, and you could start unraveling them, but they were really complicated. Mysteries would become apparent and thrill you. We all find this book of riddles and it’s just what’s going on. And you can figure them out. The problem is, you figure them out inside yourself, and even if you told somebody, they wouldn’t believe you or understand it in the same way you do.
– David Lynch

FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE JEWS

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out –
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the communists
and I did not speak out –
because I was not a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out –
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me –
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

– Pastor Niemöller

There are stars whose radiance is visible on Earth though they have long been extinct. There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world though they are no longer among the living. These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark. They light the way for humankind.
– Hannah Senesh

This is where we are right now, as a whole. No-one is left out of the loop. We are experiencing a reality based on a thin veneer of lies and illusions. A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart.
– Bill Hicks

The task of Christian man is reintegration, the overcoming of the ‘divisions’ (diaipeoeis) caused by the Fall; …

… these divisions are transcended in the first place by the Incarnation, and it is for each man in Christ to realize this victory in his own existence and so partake in the total restoration of the cosmos.

– Rowan Williams

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers.
– Karl Marx

until the smoke rose
so high up the stars
ate it and there was nothing
left for me to touch.

– Ollie Schminkey

Become the man of your misfortunes, learn to embody their perfection and brilliance. Nothing more can be said, and no more has ever been said: to become worthy of what happens to us, and thus to will and release the event, to become the offspring of one’s own events and thereby to be reborn, to have one more birth and to break with one’s carnal birth—to become the offspring of one’s events and not of one’s actions, for action is itself produced by the offspring of the event.
– Gilles Deleuze

The ahistorical brain, which is now the average American brain (coupled with vague notions of conspiracy and Armageddon) is now one of the greatest threats to democracy, to pluralism, to any semblance of critical thinking that this country has ever faced.
– Clifton Lee

The worst thing about stubbornness of mind, about prejudices, is that they arrest development; they shut off the mind from new stimuli.
– John Dewey, Democracy and Education

The pain had not gone though it had settled: it was the foundations of the house of herself.
– Zadie Smith, The Fraud

When the mind experiences a power surge of stress and bullshit, it switches off, just shuts your cognition down and you blank out.
– Paul Beatty, The Sellout

TURN UP THE OCEAN

Now that I’ve bought a machine that plays noises recorded from nature,
I can have Thunderstorm or Forest Pines or Sonorous Ocean
at the push of a button.

It soothes me in the night to hear the waves
sweeping over the beach again and again
and the blue-gray background screech of the gulls.

It turns out this sound is all the comfort I ever wanted
and that all the conversation I really need
is that surging of surf played on a permanent loop.

Who knew the ocean could be kept on a digital chip
along with Morning Birdsong
and Wind through Summer Grass?

Again and again my heart has been broken
by people who didn’t have what I want;
whom I then accused of refusing

to give me all that they had.
When their only fault, I now see,
was not being the trees or the wind or the rain,

which are only generous because
they have an endless supply of everything.
Their crime was not being everything, those people,

which it turns out was my crime too.
Now when I hear myself complaining,
I can say, “This pattern of mine has a certain repetition,”

which, who knows, someday might even seem natural.
In the meantime, I’m going to rely
on the great outdoors,

which I keep in my little room,
where I’m going to turn up the ocean.

– Tony Hoagland

Trust me I hate it too, but:

walking around with headphones blocks your energy channels

– River Kenna

Forgive me, that I manage badly,
Manage badly but live gloriously,
That I leave traces of myself in my songs,
That I appeared to you in waking dreams.
Forgive me, though you’ll never know
That forever with my name,
Baseless slander has entwined itself,
Like acrid smoke with lively flame.
– Anna Akhmatova, (tr. Hemschemeyer)

Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man himself. Supposing it were possible to get houses built, corn grown, battles fought, causes tried, and even churches erected and prayer said, by machinery — by automatons in human form—it would be a considerable loss to exchange for these automatons even the men and women who at present inhabit the more civilized parts of the world, and who assuredly are but starved specimens of what nature can and will produce. Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.
– John Stuart Mill

One of the reasons schizophrenics are deluded is their tendency to jump to conclusions without weighing up overall whether these conclusions are probable. This is thought to be because of a need for closure—a tendency to prefer an answer, irrespective of its plausibility, to ambiguity and uncertainty. This is a tendency that is also reflected in the culture of modernity: it encourages us all to rush for closure. When told that there are 125 sheep and five dogs in a flock, and then asked ‘How old is the shepherd?’ three out of four schoolchildren will produce a numerical answer, rather than reply that ‘there is
not enough information.
– lain McGilchrist

The only Spiritual Path advice I can give is to kickstart the process, stay with it, don’t interfere, don’t rush, have faith, stay with it, stay with it

Everything else comes down to moments of unbelievable grace

– River Kenna

In Lear [Shakespeare] produced a tragedy that exceeds the capacity of tragedy, and that reaches out to that still further horizon of the impossible that Easter opened up, without lapsing into fatuous optimism, and without compromising the power or unity of his art.
– D.B. Hart

Consciousness is an end in itself. We torture ourselves getting somewhere, and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to.
– D. H. Lawrence

The saint … is the truest of true aesthetes. … He or she alone possesses an understanding of beauty, and is capable of a cultivation of vision, that transforms all of reality into icons of the transcendent, windows into the eternal.
– David Bentley Hart

Whether you’re living in the golden age or the dark ages has everything to do with what’s happening in your mind.
– Nika Solé

May you release all counterfeit love and make room for the real thing.
– Dr. Thema

makers & learners, teachers & delighters, agitators & elders, readers & weepers—how much i need you, need you all.
– Chen Chen

Hope changes as you get a little older, from the hope that this or that happens, to hope in life, old friends, laughter, art, goodness, helpers. I hope and am amazed, some early mornings, at just finding myself alive.
– Anne Lamott

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

The root of how the illusion takes hold, is making you forget that you create your own reality. The world is literally yours.
– Nika Solé

Today
the average person
is not guided by conscience,
but is guided by convenience.

Growth is not to have more,
it is to be more as a
living being.

– Manly P. Hall

The strongest signal of credibility is not how much people know. It’s how much they care about accuracy.

Trustworthy sources don’t have an agenda. They pursue the truth even if it counters their hopes and beliefs.

The most reliable voices are the ones most invested in learning.

– Adam Grant

Fear is that little dark room where negatives are developed.
– Michael Pritchard

On the horizon of the modern world dawns the black sun of boredom, and the critique of everyday life has a sociology of boredom as part of its agenda.

– Henri Lefebvre

There is no better way to ensure people are not politically active or aware than to have them working, commuting to work, or preparing for work every moment of the day. Sacrificing so many of one’s waking hours to the gods of productivity ensures no-one has access to outside perspectives that would enable them to notice that organizing life this way ultimately decreases productivity.

As a result of this neoliberal obsession with stamping out alternative perspectives, we have been left in the bizarre situation where its plain to everyone that capitalism doesn’t work, but it’s almost impossible
for anyone to imagine anything else.

– David Graeber, Revolutions In Reverse

The war against the imagination is the only one the capitalists have actually managed to win.
– David Graeber, Revolutions In Reverse

Every atom in the universe is a quantum cloud of doubt.
– Len Anderson

A man who has been in another world does not come back unchanged.
– C.S. Lewis, Perelandra

To act from desire and fear is bondage,
to act from love is freedom.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj

I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility that existence has its own reason for being.
– Wislawa Szymborska / Possibilities

I think what I love is not the writing itself, but the rewriting, the editing, the correcting.
– Mario Vargas Llosa

Technology improves quality of life more than anything else, and it’s not even close.
– @naval

We live in a ‘return to sender’ reality. Once you realize that, you become much more aware of what you’re sending out.
– Nika Solé

Fierce compassion means seeing the suffering of our times clearly, and being willing to take a stand, to act to relieve that suffering however we can.
– Kaira Jewel Lingo

When we lose our way in this world it is the soul’s way of being in touch with the pulse of life that has been lost. For we are most lost and truly abandoned when we have lost touch with our own soul, with our own inward style and way of being in the world.
– Michael Meade

The largest religion on the planet is Marxism, and it isn’t even close.
– @naval

Literature is born out of a desire to be truthful—not to hide anything and not to present oneself as somebody else.
– Czeslaw Milosz

If you’re gonna get paid to be anybody, it might as well be you.
– Nika Solé

At some point, protecting your energy isn’t even an option anymore. You slip even a little bit and you start to feel sick. Your mind and body completely reject anything that poisons your spirit. That’s when you know it’s real.
– Nika Solé

earth’s rotation, slowing—our days lengthening—
but I can’t tell the difference between the living,
the dead. & psalms can’t bring back the dead. still,
I’d like to kindle this life with more music than you think
it can cradle—

– Ina Cariño, Point to Home

Personally, I am neither good nor bad. I oscillate, I could say. So I have never really done harm to anyone — nor good, either.
– Erik Satie

A book is a suicide
postponed.

– Cioran

Confidence is the present tense of hope.
– Søren Kierkegaard

i don’t even need to rage against the machine, the machine rages against itself enough for the both of us.
– The Fourth Way

You’ll never investigate yourself as vehemently as you do when you put one word after another, one thought after another, one revelation after another, in the pages of your memoirs & suddenly realize the person you are instead of the person you thought you were.
– Neil Simon

The perilous time for the most highly gifted is not youth… The perilous season is middle age, when a false wisdom tempts them to doubt the divine origin of the dreams of their youth…
– Elizabeth Peabody

“true” alchemy was never a business or a career, but a genuine opus to be achieved by quiet, self-sacrificing work.
– Carl Jung

I feel like ego integration is the final boss of life in the 3D reality.
– Nika Solé

Men often ask me, Why are your female characters so paranoid? It’s not paranoia. It’s recognition of their situation.
– Margaret Atwood

I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me… There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualizing of the soul.
– Patti Smith

Give me a chance to come back again, weed that looks / like a flower that looks like a weed
– Caitlin Cowan

If you want it
up the mountain
you carry it,
the old monk told
his students.
– The Old Monk

love, even in its humblest beginnings, is a striking example
of how little reality means to us.
– Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost time

looks like anger is gonna need to reshape some of my friendships i think.
– River Kenna

Take an ax to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.

– Jalaluddin Rumi, Eleventh Century

Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.
– C.S. Lewis

In a relationship in a lifetime, you’re allowed to make some deposits and some withdrawals. You can’t do anything about the withdrawals you’ve already made. Focus on making more deposits.
– Kenneth Folk

The way we imagine our lives is the way we are going to go on living our lives. For the manner in which we tell ourselves about what is going on is the genre through which events become experiences.
– James Hillman, Healing Fiction

A traditional symbol of wisdom, most famously invoked in Hegel’s remark at the end of the Preface to the Philosophy of Right: ‘when philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk.’ Hegel means that the kinds of self-conscious reflection making up philosophy can occur only when a way of life is sufficiently mature to be already passing, but the doctrine neglects the fact that selfconsciousness and reflection co-exist with activity. For example, an active social and political movement will co-exist with reflection on the categories within which it frames its position.
– The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Simon Blackburn

Untruth roams from field to field,
sharing notes with neighbouring Untruths,
But that which is sung softly, booms,
What’s read in whispers, thunders.
– Alexander Galich

If there is a secret to writing, I haven’t found it yet. All I know is you need to sit down, clear your mind, and hang in there.
– Mary McGrory

We are all friends here. Or should be; for the laughter of Mordor will be our only reward, if we quarrel.

– Gandalf (Tolkien, The Two Towers)

Some people awaken spiritually without ever coming into contact with any meditation technique or any spiritual teaching. They may awaken simply because they can’t stand the suffering anymore.
– Eckhart Tolle

Dharma talks aren’t the truth. The true Dharma exists in the mind of the students as seeds and the Dharma talks are just like a little cloud that releases rain and causes the seeds in the mind of the practitioners to sprout and manifest.
– Thich Nhat Hanh

If you have observed the course of my four seasons, they contain the infancy, the youth, the virility, and the old age of the world.
– Michel de Montaigne

Clarity is when you no longer confuse a person with the patterns running them. This is the heart of compassion.
– Matt Kahn

This was the guilt of your sister Sodom, she…did not aid the poor and needy.
– Ezekiel 16:49

The merciful man is as a harbour to those who are in need; and the harbour receives all who are escaping shipwreck, and frees them from danger, whether they be evil or good; whatsoever kind of men they be that are in peril, it receives them into its shelter. You also, when you see a man suffering shipwreck on land through poverty, do not sit in judgment on him, nor require explanations, but relieve his distress.
– St. John Chrysostom

They should have warned you that little princesses grow up to be red rocks and raging seas. Fire dragons and warrior queens.
– Melody Lee

You will never investigate yourself as vehemently as you do when you put one word after another, one thought after another, one revelation after another, in the pages that make up your memoirs, and you will suddenly realize the person you are instead of the person you thought you were.
– Neil Simon

Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, reveling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.
– bell hooks

Shared joy is double joy.
Shared sorrow is half sorrow.

– Swedish proverb

There is more and more I tell no one,
strangers nor loves.
This slips into the heart
without hurry, as if it had never been.

And yet, among the trees, something has changed.

Something looks back from the trees,
and knows me for who I am.

– Jane Hirshfield

The living can’t quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can’t because they don’t. The light that shines into darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.
– Wendell Berry

The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.
– George Santayana

NO ONE WAY WORKS,
it will take all of us
shoving at the thing from all sides
to bring it down.

– Diane di Prima

If you’re not enjoying something, it’s almost always because you’re doing it too fast.
– Donna Tartt

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

Everything that is called life should be sacrificed to the sublime and be a sanctuary of art.
– Beethoven

Word of the day is ‘spuddle’ (19th century): to be extremely busy whilst achieving absolutely nothing.
– Susie Dent

…all the essentials are expressed in metaphors… The foolish allow themselves to be infatuated by literal interpretations and recipes, and fall into error.
– Carl Jung

And I am still the breath you require,
My veil the vapor of your vast empire …
– Valery

The burnt hand teaches most about fire.
– J.RR. Tolkien

You are not here to make others understand you. You are here to understand yourself.
– Kristen Butler

but what happened (to Kafka) is the same
as what happened to me:

he withdrew
he went too far into solitude
and knew — he must’ve known –
you never come back from there

– Alejandra Pizarnik

…and last summer’s
ash seeds rattle
in the wind beyond
the window: small
bat-of-the-eye pleasures
of winter. Deep. Distilled.

– Merrill Gilfillan

The mind cannot understand; it may translate what is understood, but it is not capable of understanding. To understand, there must be the warmth of recognition and reception, which only the heart can give when the mind is silent.
– Krishnamurti

The job of a scientist is to listen carefully to nature, not to tell nature how to behave.
– Prof. Feynman

I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can.
– C.S. Lewis

Her eyes exact
From the Moon-Sphinx that wanes and grows
In wastes celestial, alien dreams
Brought down on wings of fleetest beams.

– Clark Ashton Smith

The world is a looking glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.
– William Makepeace Thackeray

The simple fact is that most people are not in control of their own mind, and if they were, we’d live in a totally different world.
– Nika Solé

When you sit in the silence the power of the Self is at work.
– Robert Adams

Intelligence not only demands solitude but feeds upon it.
– @naval

I thought as I approached eighteen years old that I was a goner for sure. And here I am, still alive, still here, and often in a good mood.
– Anne Lamott

The same power that moves the universe exists within our lives. Each individual has immense potential, and a great change in the inner dimension of one individual’s life has the power to touch others’ lives and transform society. Everything begins with us.
– Daisaku Ikeda

If there is unhappiness in you, first you need to acknowledge that it is there. But don’t say, “I’m unhappy.” Unhappiness has nothing to do with who you are. Say: “There is unhappiness in me.” Then investigate it.
– Eckhart Tolle

one would therefore do well to possess some “imagination for evil,” for only the fool can permanently disregard the conditions of his own nature. In fact, this negligence is the best means of making him an instrument of evil.
– Carl Jung

The central contradiction of therapy is that the source of unhappiness is thinking about yourself.
– @naval

The natural world is not in reality a universe of ‘rocks and solids’ (‘matter’ in the modem sense) but, in Blake’s words, the ‘looking-glass of Enitharmon’ in which the ‘originals laid up in heaven’ are reflected.
– Kathleen Raine

Folk songs
are teaching me
poetry,
the old monk realized
suddenly.

– The Old Monk

Some people like neat suburbs. I always am attracted to the rundown and the old and the offbeat.
– William S. Burroughs

When a writer tries to explain too much, he’s out of time before he begins.
– Isaac Bashevis Singer

Clear writing and clear speaking are simply outputs of clear thinking.
– @naval

We must simply accept it that we are spirits, free and rational beings, at present inhabiting an irrational universe, and must draw the conclusion that we are not derived from it. We are strangers here. We come from somewhere else.
– C.S. Lewis

To be a merchant is having a sense of what’s going to sell. I always had an instinct on what I loved, and I learned later on—if I think it, it is. Non-negotiable.
– Mickey Drexler

If God is love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records that though he has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt.
– C.S. Lewis

If I could write all my work again, I am convinced that I’d do it better, which is the healthiest condition for an artist. That’s why he keeps on working, trying again; he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off.
– William Faulkner

‘How do I feel?’ he cried. ‘Well, I don’t know how to say it. I feel, I feel’ – he waved his arms in the air – ‘I feel like spring after winter, and sun on the leaves; and like trumpets and harps and all the songs I have ever heard!’
– J.R.R. Tolkien (Sam)

Literature is born out of a desire to be truthful—not to hide anything and not to present oneself as somebody else.
– Czeslaw Milosz

As all mundane things are but shadows of the things eternal, they share with shadows this quality, that they flee from him who follows them and follow him that flees from them.
– Baltasar Gracian

falling dusk —
stretching across the silence
old country road
– @moscowdandelion

Egotism is a symptom of the fact that Man doesn’t love himself, that he has an incorrect understanding of the notion of love. This is the source of the deformation of everything.
– Andrei Tarkovsky

I wish you to know
you have been the last dream of my soul.
– Charles Dickens

KEEP THIS IN FRONT OF YOU…
Do not believe them.
Do not get used to this.
Keep your focus.
Stand your ground.
– Joan Halifax

A Good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.
– St. Augustine

I struggled with some demons / They were middle class and tame
– Leonard Cohen

‘I know nothing.’
Is my answer:
Spring in my old age

– Kyoshi Takahama

MOZART

Under the rafters
the two of them
discover
a gold florin.

– Ralph Gustafson, A History of Music

I felt a calmness birds can bring to people; and, quieted, I sensed here the outlines of the oldest mysteries: the nature and extent of space, the fall of light from the heavens, the pooling of time in the present, as if it were water.
– Barry López, Arctic Dreams

ATTENTION

The ice age is here.
I sit burning cigarettes,
burning my brain.
A micro-Tibet,
deadly, frivolous, complete,
blinds the four panes.
Veils of dumb air
unwind like bandages
from my lips
half-parted, steady as the mouths
of antique statues.

– Adrienne Rich

Your emotions are like waves in the ocean. Trying to change or escape them is like trying to stop the waves. It’s exhausting and, ultimately, futile.
– Dr. Mary Kate Roohan

We have a deficit of wonder. I think it’s because of computers. When I ask people questions now, they get on their computer – `Gimme a few minutes and I’ll let you know….’ And I’m, like, ‘Nooooo!’ I want them to wonder about it, man! I don’t want to know the answer. I just want them to wonder about it.
– Tom Waits

All human institutions slide downwards like a landslide, unless they are perpetually forced upwards by criticism and reform.
– G. K. Chesterton

Better to pray one psalm with devotion and compunction than a hundred with distraction.
– St. Romuald

All writers, I suspect—and probably all people—have parallel lives, what they would have been if they hadn’t turned into what they are.
– Margaret Atwood

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

When the world looks with favor upon you, it can be led by a thread. When it turns against you, it breaks chains.
– Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar al-Tūnisī

in retrospect maybe it was a mistake to tell young people that reading, the arts, the humanities weren’t important and that “learning to code” was sufficient for a good life.
– @SketchesbyBoze

highly neurotic, projection-prone people are canaries for your blindspots (listen to them)
– @dkazand

No psychologist should pretend to understand what he does not understand… Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand nothing.
– Anton Chekhov

Body cells replace themselves every month. Even at this very moment… Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.
– Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase

I say loving the truth instead of seeking it, because if you are seeking truth you might seek to avoid feeling pain. You might seek truth for another purpose, which will then make you not see the truth. But if you really love truth, then you will automatically want to see all of it, not for any particular reason but because you like seeing the truth. So loving the truth is not exactly seeking the truth, even though it might include seeking the truth sometimes. Loving the truth is the attitude of the heart. The heart falls in love. It falls in love with the truth, with an aspect of reality. The heart falling in love with the truth is one of the most important realizations, the most important change, that can happen in a human being. The heart really turning toward the truth is the most far-reaching realization because if you really love the truth, you’ll realize everything. However, if you love one particular state, then you might realize that state and not others. The truth is not just one thing. The truth is all that there is, whether or not you know it. Loving the truth does not mean you love the truth because it is going to help you realize everything. That is an ulterior motive. That is not included in loving the truth. You don’t care if it is going to lead you to this or that. You just like it. You can’t help it.
– A. H. Almaas, Diamond Heart Book Five

Woe to you who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! Woe to you who are wise in your own eyes, and shrewd in your own sight!
– Isaiah 5:20-21

Doubt thou that the stars are fire;
Doubt thou that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt that I love.

– William Shakespeare

We are lonely people, and we try to enrich our poverty-stricken minds with a great deal of knowledge, information and facts. The mind is not capable of deep inquiry if it is filled with knowledge.
– Krishnamurti

And if you can find any way out of our culture, then that’s a trap too. Just wanting to get out of the trap reinforces the trap.
– Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself. Other creatures may love and laugh, talk and think, but it seems to be the special peculiarity of human beings that they reflect: they think about thinking and know that they know.

This, like other feedback systems, may lead to vicious circles and confusions if improperly managed, but self-awareness makes human experience resonant.

It imparts that simultaneous “echo” to all that we think and feel as the box of a violin reverberates with the sound of the strings. It gives depth and volume to what would otherwise be shallow and flat.

– Alan Watts

He’s the most courageous, remorseless writer going, and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him.
– Harold Pinter on Samuel Beckett

Focus your awareness upon you, because you’re the easiest thing to overlook.
– @naval

The world is sick, and yes it can be cruel, but it would be a whole lot sicker and a whole lot crueler if it were not for painters and filmmakers and songwriters, the beauty-makers, wading through the blood and muck of things, whilst reaching skyward to draw down the very heavens themselves.
– Nick Cave

I have seen dictatorships around the world, where blind obedience is the norm and truth-tellers are threatened with punishment or death. We must not allow the United States to become a country where standing up to our government is a dangerous act.
– Marie Yovanovitch

February is the border between winter and spring.
– Terri Guillemets

The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them. How much sorrow can I hold? That’s how much gratitude I can give. If I carry only grief, I’ll bend toward cynicism and despair. If I have only gratitude, I’ll become saccharine and won’t develop much compassion for other people’s suffering. Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft, which helps make compassion possible.
– Francis Weller

Your claim to colorblindness saddens me, how each morning you must wake to another gray sunrise.
– Eric Sirota, The Rent Eats First

The other not only addresses me with an enigmatic desire, it also confronts me with the fact that I myself do not know what I really desire – with the enigma of my own desire.
– Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan

She wasn’t crying because of the life she led: because, never having led any other, she’d accepted that with her that was just the way things were. But I think she was crying because, through the music, she might have guessed there were other ways of feeling.
– Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

If we go too deep into the dark, we can’t tolerate the light. We have to slowly work our way back.
– Robin Robertson, Jung and Frodo

If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.
– Marcel Proust

A very little key will open a very heavy door.
– Charles Dickens

Etymologically, the word desire derives from the Latin desiderare, “to long for,” and from de sidere, “of the stars.” Our disorders of desire arise from our losing contact with our guiding stars. If one is a mariner on the wine-dark sea and has lost contact with that star, one is perilously adrift and at the mercy of whatever sea changes or currents of the hour may impose themselves.
– James Hollis

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page, are letters up to no good
– Wisława Szymborska, The Joy of Writing

It’s a terrible thing to feel oneself useless and see halfwits and pro-fascists filling important jobs.
– George Orwell

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.
– James Michener

The public takes from a writer, or a writing, what it needs and lets the remainder go. But what they take is usually what they need least and what they let go is what they need most.
– Charles Bukowski

Men of quality
do not not fear equality.
– Ruth Bader Ginsburg

The Poem Goes Hollywood
by Bryan Roth

You might not believe this,
but I gave The Poem its first break.
I can tell you when it began
it wasn’t such a big deal:
just a simple lyric in free verse
about lost love, regret—you know?
The usual sort of thing.
It wasn’t the superstar extravaganza
it is now, with its fancy slant rhymes,
exotic dactyls, and hip, retro, blank verse.
But I liked it.
Then, The Poem got ambition.
I woke up one morning
and found a hastily scribbled note:


Gone to Hollywood.
Wish me luck.
—P.

By the time it got there,
it wasn’t a poem anymore,
it was “The Poem.”
It got itself an agent,
took meetings, did lunch.
(You know, the usual sort of thing.)
At the pitch meeting,
it was told it had potential,
but that it was too much of a “downer,”
seeing as the boy didn’t get the girl,
that the back story
about a struggling poet
was too cliché to be believed.
They said it needed to be more
“reader friendly,” so they called in
a poem doctor to punch it
up, formed focus groups,
held test readings at select venues,
and gave it a happy ending.
You’ve probably already heard
the rest of the story: the publications,
the prizes. The anthology circuit.
By the time I saw The Poem
on Letterman, I barely recognized it,
a couple of sexy, aspiring sonnets
hanging all over it.
Hey, no kidding—
I made The Poem
what it is today, and now
the kid doesn’t even
return my calls.

I love rain. It makes me feel like it’s not just me – that other people are feeling it too.
– John Green

The enemy of photography is the convention, the fixed rules of ‘how to do’. The salvation of photography comes from the experiment.
– Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

The technology which, in our culture, has released urban and even rural man from the quiet before his hearth log, has debauched his taste. Man no longer dreams over a book in which a soft voice, a constant companion, observes, exhorts, or sighs with him through the pangs of youth and age. Today he is more likely to sit before a screen and dream the mass dream which comes from outside.
– Loren Eiseley

The search for the truth is the most important work in the whole world — and the most dangerous.
– James Clavell

Once destroyed, nature’s beauty cannot be repurchased
at any price.
– Ansel Adams

Many of us know that sometimes it is difficult to let love in. Love might be there, but we don’t want it. We think things like, “Get away. Don’t be so mushy. You are suffocating me.” Or we assume that the person loving us must want something from us. Or perhaps we wonder what their love will cost us. These are just a few of the many ways we say no to love, reject it, push it away, try to hurt it or get rid of it. There are also many ways we don’t see love when it is there—we misinterpret it, believing that it is something other than love. In our adult life, the particular ways in which we refuse to see and experience love largely depend on our experience of love in early childhood. If love had been abundant from the beginning, it would be easy now for us to see it, accept it, and appreciate it. But if a large part of our experience was of love being limited or distorted one way or another, then it is difficult to experience love when it is here now—especially if it is distorted and mixed up with other things. So the limitations on the presence of love in our early childhood lead to limitations in our perception of and receptivity to love now, which limits the openness in our hearts to the love that is actually there for us.
– A. H. Almaas, Love Unveiled

winter twilight
in Gold Mountain Diner
just me and rice balls
– Chen-ou Liu

The Holy Spirit is not just for Jesus alone; it is for all of us. From a Buddhist perspective, who is not the son or daughter of God? Sitting beneath the Bodhi tree, many wonderful, holy seeds within the Buddha blossomed forth. He was human, but, at the same time, he became an expression of the highest spirit of humanity.
– Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ

Racism is a heart disease.If we cannot think clearly and respond wisely, we will continue to damage the world’s heart.
– Ruth King

We need to imagine the future in order to survive it.
– Charlie Jane Anders

The Next Buddha May Be a Sangha

The Buddha, Shakyamuni, our teacher, predicted that the next Buddha would be Maitreya, the Buddha of love. We desperately need love. And in the Buddha’s teaching we learn that love is born from understanding. The willingness to love is not enough. If you do not understand, you cannot love. The capacity to understand the other person will bring about acceptance and loving kindness.

It is possible the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and lovingkindness, a community practicing mindful living. And the practice can be carried out as a group, as a city, as a nation.

We know that in the spirit of the Lotus Sutra we are all students of the Buddha, no matter what tradition we find ourselves in. We should extend that spirit to other traditions that are not called Buddhist. We can find the jewels in other traditions—the equivalent of the Buddha, the dharma and the sangha. Once you are capable of seeing the jewels in other spiritual traditions, you will be working together for the goals of peace and brotherhood.

– Thich Nhat Hanh

Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs— no regular hours, so many temptations!
– Elizabeth Bishop

Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they do not love.
– Sigmund Freud

People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.
– Eudora Welty

The sun watches what I do but the moon knows all my secrets.
– J.M. Wonderland

The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn’t going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment; they like nothing better than love and nonviolence. The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.
– William S. Burroughs

Patience is power.
Patience is not an absence of action;
rather it is “timing”
it waits on the right time to act,
for the right principles
and in the right way.
– Fulton J. Sheen

What would the world be without poetry, he asked, and I listened.
– Robert Devlin

Human beings have launched satellites into outer space, and yet they still grovel on earth looking at their own feet like wild dogs. What is to become of our planet?
– Akira Kurosawa

Studies sharpen youth and delight old age; they enhance prosperity and provide a refuge and relief in adversity; they enrich private life and do not interfere with public life; they are our companions at night, on journeys, and in our country retreats.
– Cicero

The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow.
– D. T. Suzuki

“All is within us”, purgatory and hell,
Seeds full of will, the white of the inner bark
the rich and the smooth colours,
the foreknowledge of trees,
sense of the blade in seed, to each its pattern.
– Ezra Pound

Accept each moment as though you have chosen it for your evolution. Always work with it not against it. This will miraculously transform your whole life.
– Eckhart Tolle

The greatest healing would be
to wake up from what we are not.
– Mooji

The smartest people are all self-taught, even if they went to school.
– @naval

Life is hard, you know, and laughter is how we come to terms with all the ironies and cruelties and uncertainties that we face.
– Desmond Tutu

The age of reason is in fact the most religious age that man has known since the sixteenth century.
– Jacques Ellul

I do not think that the age is worse in this respect than those which have preceded it, but that vulgarity, and a certain vile contentment swelling to self-admiration, have become more vocal than hitherto…
– George MacDonald

A great man is hard on himself; a small man is hard on others.
– Confucius

I’m getting there —
after all these years, by God,
I’m getting there,
the old monk said.

– The Old Monk

If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.
– Pier Paolo Pasolini

May you dream of lovely things and wake to find them real.
– JJ Heller

A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made out of it. This example should raise the spirits of people like us. Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless.
– Olga Tokarczuk

This, then, is what war must be… eyes searching for movement in the dark.
– Palmer Hall

A monk once said:

Imagine being bitten by a snake,
and instead of focusing on healing
from the poison,

You chase the snake to understand why it bit you and to
prove that you didn’t deserve it.

– Unknown / Art of Poets

Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.
– Gandhi

We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour.

But within it we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves.

So, while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe, now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?

We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be: a country that is bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free.

– Amanda Gorman

Consider the way she had to go,
Think of the hungry snare,
The net she herself had woven,
Aware or unaware…

– Marion Angus, Alas! Poor Queen

And when you’re living in America
At the end of the millennium
You’re what you own
So I own not a notion
I escape and ape content
I don’t own an emotion –
I rent
– Jonathan Larson

The sun,–the bright sun, that brings back, not light alone, but new life, and hope, and freshness to man–burst upon the crowded city in clear and radiant glory. Through costly-coloured glass and paper-mended window, through cathedral dome and rotten crevice, it shed its equal ray.
– Charles Dickens

Everyone arrives one day and asks, is this it? And the stars answer back with more stars.
– Victoria Chang

It’s quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don’t do it.
– Jean-Paul Sartre

Since your mind is with you wherever you go, you need to sit down and start unwinding your ball of yarn.
– Jakusho Kwong-roshi

If the human race is still here in 100 years, it will be because of lots of people doing lots of little things. Bigger things can get co-opted or bought off by the powers that be. But if there are many, many little things going on it will be too hard for them to keep up with all of them. I consider myself to be a sower of seeds. Some seeds fall on stones and don’t even sprout, but some seeds fall on fallow ground and multiply a hundredfold.
– Pete Seeger

The cosmos is interesting rather than perfect & everything is not part of some greater plan nor is all necessarily under control.
– Starhawk

It just drives me nuts…somebody arbitrarily says, ‘You gotta do it in two days.’ That fucking really pisses me off. It really does. We’re always up against the fucking clock… I’m not working this way again, ever. This is absolutely horrible. We never get any extra shots. We never get any time to experiment. We never get to, you know, go dreamy or anything. We barely fucking make our days. I could have spent a week…and dreamt up all kinds of stuff. You know, it’s just…it’s sick, this kind of fucking way to do it. You don’t get a chance to sink into anything. It’s not a way to work.
– David Lynch

O lovers! Be careful in those dangerous first days! Once you’ve brought breakfast in bed you’ll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.
– Milan Kundera

Jung believes that alcoholism and drug addiction, for instance, have become such huge problems because we look in vain to drugs to deliver a transcendence that normal life can no longer provide.
– David Tacey

Free will means that you have the choice to connect to Spirit or not.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer

Snow Fort

Come in, come here, come into
this place that’s been made for us,
that was packed and braced for us
against the collapsing rain.
Come in, it’s a cavern in the white
heart of the sea. Come in
where the silence is like breathing
moonlight, where a faint taste
of iodine will lie on your lips
and you’ll never be cold again.
In every part of space, there is another part of space.
When this is gone, it will not disappear.

– Susan Stewart

No man can estimate what is really happening at the present sub specieacternitatis. All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labours with vast power and perpetual success – in vain: preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in. So it is in general, and so it is in our own lives….
– J.R.R. Tolkien

My subject’s
still the wind still
difficult to
present
being invisible
– A. R. Ammons

In one letter that he had written to her then he had said: Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?
– James Joyce

They make the visionaries look crazy and the truth tellers dangerous, when they’re the ones that hold the world together.
– Nika Solé

Meditating doesn’t mean I never feel stressed. I just let go of it quicker.
– Sandy Newbigging

Yes, we are the 99%
all of us
refusing to forget
each other
no matter, in our hunger, what crumbs
are dropped by
the 1%.
– Alice Walker

Those who have subdued their ego understand that it doesn’t degrade you when others treat you poorly; it degrades them.
– Ryan Holiday

I do not care for sleep, I’ll wait awhile
For Love to come out of the darkness, wait
For laughter, gifted with the frequent fate
Of dusk-lit hope, to touch me with the smile
Of moon and star
– William Moore

Has everyone been in love? Not on the basis of the evidence. If they have, they’ve forgotten it. If everyone had been in love they’d treat their children differently. They’d treat each other differently.
– James Baldwin

Yoga is a way of moving into stillness in order to experience the truth of who you are.
– Erich Schiffmann

No one will ever know that we lived, that we touched the streets with our feet that we danced joyfully, No one will ever know that we gazed at the sea from the train windows, that we breathed the air that settles on the café chairs, No one will ever know that we stood on the terrace of life until the others arrived.

– Nino Pedretti, Nobody Will Know

They’ve promised that dreams can come true – but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams, too.
– Oscar Wilde

I believe in the religion of kindness.
– Jan Morris

People are so certain of things today. So sure; so assured. Doubt is the ultimate sin, it would seem. I find this terribly dangerous. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have opinions, but we should also have the presence of mind to realize that these opinions might change—perhaps they should change. That, of course, would require progress, growth, investigation, three things people find repellent. Sad. Funny? I think it’s best to not know a lot and to investigate it through your living, through your writing, through your walking through the world. To be so sure is to be so dead.
– Harold Pinter

Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
– Aldous Huxley

Authentic human interactions become impossible when you lose yourself in a role.
– Eckhart Tolle

No business owners are hated as much as landlords, because land feels like a God-given asset that was divvied up unfairly, rather than something that was built from scratch.
– @naval

The less time you spend trying to prove yourself to anyone, the better.
– Nika Solé

I don’t know what I think about certain subjects until I sit down and try to write about them.
– Don DeLillo

Listen, things are fucked, but that doesn’t mean your accomplishments don’t matter. Wrote a book? Got accepted to a program? Recorded a song? One year sober? Whatever it is, share it. Maybe your joy will bring someone else a bit of joy, and we all need that.
– Gabino Iglesias

The most exciting phrase in science isn’t ‘Eureka!’—it’s ‘Hmm, that’s funny…’
– Prof. Feynman

Peace and Joy is our goal. Whatever you do, do it for that goal.
– Swami Satchitananda

Yes yes yes I do like you.
I am afraid to write the
stronger word.

– Virginia Woolf

Real ones have the type of presence where they leave the room and everything lessens.
– Nika Solé

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush on fire with God.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Reality is a big IQ test, and it starts with the question, “Do you want to stay where you were born?”
– @naval

All human suffering is a variation on this theme—trying to control the waves, trying to control our present-moment experience so it conforms to our ideas and concepts of how it should be. If you want to suffer, compare this moment with your image of how it should be.
– Jeff Foster

It is all so long ago now. Since then she has learned the brutal truth. Their tragedy wasn’t that they didn’t get to be together, it was that they did.
– Vigdis Horth

Free education is abundant, all over the internet. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.
– @naval

When you know the truth about yourself all guilt is transcended. It’s like being born again. The past becomes dead wood. And you go forward into the new dimension, as consciousness.
– Robert Adams

“You girls,” my mother said, “should marry
someone like your father.”

That was one remark. Another was,
“There is no one like your father.”

– Louise Glück

I know that you sit alone at home, and even when you come here and sit in a circle of people, you are still sitting alone. Of course the other people exist, but in terms of your own sitting, you are always doing it alone.
– Kobun Otogawa

All of my words, if not well put or well taken, are well meant.
– Woody Guthrie

You may be weaker than
the whole world but you
are always stronger than
yourself. Let me send my
power against my power…
Let me discover what it is
that I want and fear from
love. Power and love,
might and grace.

– Gillian Rose

One of the virtues of good poetry is the fact that it irritates the mediocre.
– Theodore Roethke

The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.
– James A. Baldwin

How many marvels there are concealed by the function of language, if you want to pay diligent attention to it! You know that this is what we are striving towards here.
– Jacques Lacan

I would like to describe courage
without dragging behind me a dusty lion
and also anxiety
without shaking a glass full of water…

– Zbigniew Herbert

love is when the smallest
poem flickers in an open mouth.

– Ina Cariño, Maybe a Ghost Carried Me Here

Don’t classify me, read me. I’m a writer, not a genre.
– Carlos Fuentes

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

Hollywood money isn’t money. It’s congealed snow, melts in your hand, and there you are.
– Dorothy Parker

A single ‘Blessed be God’ in adversity is better than six thousand acts of thanksgiving in prosperity.
– St. John of Avila

Wherever the crowd goes, run in the other direction. They’re always wrong.
– Charles Bukowski

Hamlet is a name: his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet’s brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader’s mind. It is we who are Hamlet.
– William Hazlitt

alone again
on the Pacific shore …
winter moonlight
forming a narrow path
to the land I left behind
– Chen-ou Liu

woman is the sun, an extraordinary creature, one that makes the imagination gallop.
– Marcello Mastroianni

Music

If I rest for a moment near The Equestrian
pausing for a liver sausage sandwich in the Mayflower Shoppe,
that angel seems to be leading the horse into Bergdorf’s
and I am naked as a table cloth, my nerves humming.
Close to the fear of war and the stars which have disappeared.
I have in my hands only 35c, it’s so meaningless to eat!
and gusts of water spray over the basins of leaves
like the hammers of a glass pianoforte. If I seem to you
to have lavender lips under the leaves of the world,
I must tighten my belt.
It’s like a locomotive on the march, the season
of distress and clarity
and my door is open to the evenings of midwinter’s
lightly falling snow over the newspapers.
Clasp me in your handkerchief like a tear, trumpet
of early afternoon! in the foggy autumn.
As they’re putting up the Christmas trees on Park Avenue
I shall see my daydreams walking by with dogs in blankets,
put to some use before all those coloured lights come on!
But no more fountains and no more rain,
and the stores stay open terribly late.

– Frank O’Hara

I’m nothing to you, I mean zero.
I know, there’s nothing more to say.
And yet I love you still more dearly,
ecstatically and without mercy,
and like a drunk, I stumble, reel,
and loiter in a lightless alley,
insisting that I love you still –
no mercy, and ecstatically.
– Maria Petrovykh tr. Boris Dralyuk

The finest souls are those who gulped pain and avoided making others taste it.
– Nizariat

As much as we need
a prosperous economy,
we also need a prosperity
of kindness and decency.

– Caroline Kennedy

In the sciences, the authority of thousands of opinions is not worth as much as one tiny spark of reason in an individual man.
– Galileo Galilei

Happy is the man, I thought, who, before dying, has the good fortune to sail the Aegean sea.
– Nikos Kazantzakis

The Lullaby

Howl, world, in your hurt: that certainty
always to bear, be born. Never to fail.
Hearing the wind, I hear the world’s wail.
Let me go sleep on it. Sing, sing.

– William Bronk

I close
the valves of my heart
to the world of red dust
solitude and I
are now of the same race
– Chen-ou Liu

For a moment he found himself faintly surprised to see how quickly dusk had laid into the valley, to find the evening star already lit above the indigo bruise of the moor, bats busy over the marshes.
– David Bevan

I often long for the days before academics become rock/pop music critics and rock/pop music critics became academics….
– Pat Thomas

trailing the flames
of a sinking sun
heron wings
remind me
to be brave ོ

– Caroline Skanne

How Many Nights
by Galway Kinnell

How many nights
have I lain in terror,
O Creator Spirit, Maker of night and day,

only to walk out
the next morning over the frozen world
hearing under the creaking of snow
faint, peaceful breaths . . .
snake,
bear, earthworm, ant . . .

and above me a wild crow crying ‘yaw yaw yaw’
from a branch nothing cried from ever in my life.

The most intimate thing we can do is to allow people we love most see us at our worst. At our lowest. At our
weakest. True intimacy happens when nothing is perfect.
– Amy Harmon

Jung was always ready to accept intelligent criticism but he hated stupid criticism, based on a total misunderstanding of what he had meant. He used to say that if civilization perished it would be more due to stupidity than evil.
– Barbara Hannah

We think of Beatrice leading Dante up to Paradise, but he experienced that only after he had gone through Hell. Normally, the anima does not take a man by the hand and lead him right to Paradise; she puts him first into a hot cauldron where he is nicely roasted for a while.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

If you understand each other you will be kind to each other.
– John Steinbeck

If you believe you’re a poet, then you’re saved.
– Gregory Corso

…At this point attention must be paid to destructiveness as the psychological basis of the fascist spirit. The programs are abstract and vague, the fulfillments are spurious and illusory because the promise expressed by fascist oratory is nothing but destruction itself.
– Theodore Adorno

Albums… remember those? Albums still matter. Like books and black lives,
albums still matter.
– Prince

a letting go
of all that fades
dawn moon
– Andrew Brindle

History Class
At my first history class,
the only students attending
are the future, the present, and the past.
But when I step in, the future gets ready to leave,
while the past is handcuffing the present,
slicing its hamstrings,
and dyeing its clothes gray.
– Mosab Abu Toha

BEATITUDE

Oh lord, I don’t call anyone Lord.
I believe in the lower-case word,

the tiny multicolored lights strung
over the bar, blinking all year, the hunger

assuaged by peanuts & pork skins,
the benevolent screens of televisions

wavering benedictions
over the convivial, afflicted men,

the woman crowned with a knit hat,
all in the tempered pall of daylight—

dimlight, darklight, the lost & half-assed
more denizens than citizens who cast

their prayers high into sagging nets
tangled with lacy fish, blessed

by no one & buoyed
toward the heaven of the ceiling tiles.

– Kim Addonizio

A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.
– Ezra Pound

Power is in tearing human
minds to pieces and putting
them together again in new
shapes of your own
choosing.
– George Orwell

A charge sometimes laid against social realism is that its politics are blithely social democratic. It remains content with an exposure of the effects of injustice rather than its causes. This isn’t entirely fair.
– David Trotter on the work of Ken Loach

I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.

– Gerard Manley Hopkins

Georgia O’Keeffe – A Calling
by Maxine Kuman

Over my desk Georgia O’Keeffe says
I have no theories to offer and then
takes refuge in the disembodied
third person singular: One works
I suppose because it is the most
interesting thing one knows to do.
O Georgia! Sashaying between
first base and shortstop as it were
drawing up a list of all the things
one imagines one has to do…
You get the garden planted. You
take the dog to the vet. You
certainly have to do the shopping.

Syntax, like sex is intimate.
One doesn’t lightly leap from person
to person. The painting, you said,
is like a thread that runes
through all the reasons for all the other
things that make one’s life.
O awkward invisible third person.
come out, stand up, be heard!
Poetry is like farming. It’s
a calling, it needs constancy,
the deep woods drumming of the grouse,
and long life, like Georgia’s who
is talking to one, talking to me,
talking to you.

What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote.
– Edward Abbey

they say nobody is coming to save you,
but many people have saved me,
even if they didn’t intend to.

it can be as small as a smile from a stranger,
a nudge from animal, words from a writer,
the lyrics to a song, an observant friend.

we are all saving each other every single day,
in tiny seemingly insignificant ways.

– Iris Rose

winter moonlight
on his old guitar …
once again
I hear him sing
our favorite song

– Christine L. Villa

No one regards what is before his feet; we all gaze at the stars.
– Ennius

sometimes we love people
like we love the stars

how?

we love them knowing
we could never have them

– The Random Stories

a white lie
to cover another
early snowfall

Failed Haiku
jar of rain: The Red Moon Anthology
of English-Language Haiku 2020 Haiku 2021

Since the beginning of time, on the dry earth of this measureless land scraped to the bone, a few men ceaselessly made their way, possessing nothing but serving no one, the destitute and free lords of a strange kingdom. Janine did not know why this thought filled her with such a sweet, vast melancholy that it closed her eyes. She knew that this kingdom has been eternally promised to her and that it would never be hers, never again, except perhaps in that fleeting moment when she opened her eyes once more on the suddenly still sky and its streams of fixed light, as the voices rising from the Arab town fell suddenly quiet.
– Albert Camus, Exile and the Kingdom

We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly, but does not take place within myself? And, what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture? This, then, is the fullness of time: When the Son of Man is begotten in us.’
– Meister Eckhart

The Buddha described the seed of mindfulness that is in each of us as the “womb of the Buddha” (tathagatagarbha). We are all mothers of the Buddha, because we are all pregnant with the potential for awakening.
– Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ

Sophia is the entity that ceaselessly generates power and wisdom, and in her universal state she is the driving force of Nature. If one relates to her, and witnesses her descent into matter, one helps her becomes the Philosopher’s Stone. At that point, she is no longer a universal undifferentiated power, but a concentrated, single, and unique one that is wed to a specific individual. Love exists between the masculine god and Sophia as much as between Sophia and her human partner. After all, alchemy finds its completion in the coniunctio between Sophia and her masculine counterpart, for the Stone is the embodiment of wisdom and power. The product of this union is the ally, or the fillius [child].
– Jeffrey Raff, The Wedding of Sophia:
The Divine Feminine in Psychoidal Alchemy

Thou, my lord and prince, my most holy angel, my precious spiritual being, Thou are the Spirit who gave birth to me, and Thou art the Child to whom my spirit gives birth. . .Thou who art clothed in the most brilliant of divine Lights. . .may Thou manifest thyself to me in the most beautiful. . .of epiphanies, show me the light of Thy dazzling face, be for me the mediator. . .lift the veils of darkness from my heart.
– Sohrawardi

In other words, God is infinite but reveals Itself to an individual as Lord for that individual. The truly wise person knows all the aspects of God, but each individual has a mark of the divine or an aspect of the Divine that belongs to him or her eternally. This mark can be the God of an organized religion or one unique to the individual. It is as if God wishes to grow as a unique being in the soul of each individual, because it is the individual alone who can manifest the diversity that is God. The unique face of God that comes as a living being to unite with a particular person is what I call the ally.
– Jeffrey Raff, The Practice of Ally Work

I have found the Child-I-am and I know what it is. Actually, so does everyone, deep within. but the trick is to reach that “deep within” and get to the Child so we feel it and know what it is.
That gentle Child within is quite willing to reanimate and revitalize the present body we seem to think we are struggling and dying in – and bring the Child’s wisdom and knowledge of Reality back to our conscious recognition once more.
Well now, listen closely again. We’ve lived our adulthood to total frustration for nearly eleven thousand years of human time, time and time again, to no avail. So now, finally, we look within, find the child still alive, uncover it, listen to it, follow it – that Eternal Child of God within…
– William Samuel

I like to think that if someone’s read a book of mine, they’ve had—I don’t know what—the literary equivalent of a shower.
– Doris Lessing

The poet’s work is to make the world, or at least the moment, more beautiful.
– Langston Hughes

One need not wait until war is declared and bullets are flying to work for peace, Buddhism teaches. A more constant and equally urgent battle must be waged each day against the forces of one’s own anger, carelessness, and self-absorption.
– Kenneth Kraft

Seeing myself well lost once more, I sighed,
Where, where in Heaven am I? But don’t tell me!
O opening clouds, by opening on me wide.
Let’s let my heavenly lostness overwhelm me.
– Robert Frost

To stand up for truth is nothing. For truth, you must sit in jail. You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me. The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.
– Aleksandr I Solzhenitsyn

The future belongs to crowds.
– Don DeLillo

Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.
– Pope Francis

It is an awful satire, and an epigram on the materialism of our modern age, that nowadays the only use that can be made of solitude is imposing it as a penalty, as jail.
– Søren Kierkegaard

THE EAGLE (Fragment)

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

– Alfred, Lord Tennyson

In Buddha’s opinion, to train in staying open and curious—to train in dissolving our assumptions and beliefs—is the best use of our human lives.
– Pema Chodron

September Garden Party

We sit with friends at the round
glass table. The talk is clever;
everyone rises to it. Bees
come to the spiral pear peelings
on your plate.
From my lap or your hand
the spice of our morning’s privacy
comes drifting up. Fall sun
passes through the wine.

– Jane Kenyon

Human beings of today are attacked by so-called manager diseases, high blood pressure, renal atrophy, gastric ulcers, and torturing neuroses : they succumb to barbarism because they have no more time for cultural interests.
– Konrad Lorenz

Life itself is a process of acquiring knowledge.
– Konrad Lorenz

All too willingly man sees himself as the centre of the universe, as something not belonging to the rest of nature but standing apart as a different and higher being. Many people cling to this error.
– Konrad Lorenz

All the advantages that man has gained from his ever-deepening understanding of the natural world that surrounds him, his technological, chemical and medical progress, all of which should seem to alleviate human suffering, tends instead to favor humanity’s destruction.
– Konrad Lorenz

I don’t want to connect my coffee machine to the wifi network. I don’t want to share the file with OneDrive. I don’t want to download an app to check my car’s fluid levels. I don’t want to scan a QR code to view the restaurant menu. I don’t want to let Google know my location before showing me the search results. I don’t want to include a Teams link on the calendar invite. I don’t want to pay 50 different monthly subscription fees for all my software. I don’t want to upgrade to TurboTax platinum plus audit protection. I don’t want to install the Webex plugin to join the meeting. I don’t want to share my car’s braking data with the actuaries at State Farm. I don’t want to text with your AI chatbot. I don’t want to download the Instagram app to look at your picture. I don’t want to type in my email address to view the content on your company’s website. I don’t want text messages with promo codes. I don’t want to leave your company a five-star Google review in exchange for the chance to win a $20 Starbucks gift card. I don’t want to join your exclusive community in the metaverse. I don’t want AI to help me write my comments on LinkedIn. I don’t even want to be on LinkedIn in the first place.

I just want to pay for a product one time (and only one time), know that it’s going to work flawlessly, press 0 to speak to an operator if I need help, and otherwise be left alone and treated with some small measure of human dignity, if that’s not too much to ask anymore.

Can’t believe I typed that entire rant and forgot to mention I don’t want to leave a 25% tip on the touchscreen.

– Robert Sterling

Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.
– E. M. Cioran

What is this chaff we chew in our sleep if it is not the remembrance of fang-whorl and star cluster?
– Henry Miller

Making people believe that there is nothing they can do is exactly how Orban worked Hungary. Shame on the media who knows better.
– Alina Stefanescu, On Trump

Solitude isn’t loneliness. Solitude is when the entire serene universe seems to surround and hold you quietly.
– Victoria Erickson

A life-illusion is never wholly untrue. It is a vaporous eidolon of yourself that walks about with you wherever you go. It is a shadow. And because it is a shadow it has truth.
– John Cowper Powys

Giulio Caccini called polyphony a ‘laceration’ of poetry, but poetry is already a laceration of itself, form and structure acting out tensions we experience as pleasure.
– James Longenbach

Do not rely on February.
– Anne Sexton

I’ve lived most of my adult life outside the law, and never have I compromised with authority. But neither have I gone out and picked fights with authority. That’s stupid. They’re waiting for that; they invite it; it helps keep them powerful.

Authority is to be ridiculed, outwitted and avoided. And it is fairly easy to do all three. If you believe in peace, act peacefully; if you believe in love, act lovingly; if you believe every which way, then act every which way, that’s perfectly valid—but don’t go out trying to sell your beliefs to the System.

You end up contradicting what you profess to believe in, and you set a bum example. If you want to change the world, change yourself.

– Tom Robbins

Of all the cards you can pick in the game of life, choose intelligence and drive. You can trade those two for almost anything else.
– @naval

Holding Onto Hope

My soul is in the same damn place
as where it started —
incubating beneath a chicken
in a dirty barn.
Something has to give.
Perhaps next Tuesday
will be different.

– Angel T. Dionne

When it was discovered that information is a business, the truth ceased to be important.
– Ryszard Kapuściński

Remaining quiet is what is called wisdom-insight. To remain quiet is to resolve the mind in Self. Telepathy, knowledge of past, present and future events and clairvoyance does not constitute wisdom-insight.
– Sri Ramana Maharshi

It’s amazing how so many people will focus on everything but the evolution and upkeep of their spirit. As if that’s not the primary reason we’re here.
– Nika Solé

Creativity starts with an empty calendar and ends with a full one.
– @naval

Allen Ginsberg, known for his themes of anti-war, anti-capitalism, and personal freedom, makes me wonder—what would his poetry look like if he were alive today?
– Laura Kerr

How much more time will you spend at a wayside inn? Don’t you want to go home? How exquisite it all is….One is, in his own Self, the wanderer, the exile, the homecoming and the home….Oneself is all that there is.
– Anandamayi Ma

If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.
– @naval

Liberals are people who would like to see things improved and conservatives are people who would like to see things not worsened, and anyone who does not have a little bit of both in their head does not have their head on right.
– Daniel Patrick Moynihan

It is hard to be generous, disciplined, or patient if we are not fully present. If we are present and attentive, and our mind is flexible, we are more receptive to the environment around us.
– Judy Lief

Every human mind risks becoming mechanical when it clings to memory, repetition, and habit.

Awareness is the antidote.

– Shai Tubali

A calorie is a calorie.

But food is not just food.

The quality of nutrients you put in have a vast effect on your mental and physical health.

– Dan Go

Don’t let insecurity cause you to stand on your wings.
– Dr. Thema

I thought I would choke on the error of believing that literature was my hope.
– Thomas Bernhard

If you have
ringing in your ears
you want to find
a quiet river,
the old monk said.
Has anyone ever
said it better
than that,
the poet asked.
– The Old Monk

He will quiet you with his love.
– Zephaniah 3.17

I’m with Roger Penrose & Stuart Hammerhoff, in believing that consciousness is non-computable–i.e. is quantum.
– @VinceFHorn

I shall breathe
A clearer freer air
For I shall see the sun
Above the crowd.

– Mae Cowdery

Language is a cloud in which every imagination sees a different animal.
– Jean Paul

Our minds are better employed bearing the misfortunes that do happen to us than anticipating those that could happen.
– François de La Rochefoucauld

There is a science of war, but how strange that there isn’t a science of peace.
– Audrey Hepburn

Learning the rules that govern intelligible speech is an inculcation into normalized language, where the price of not conforming is the loss of intelligibility itself.
– Judith Butler

This country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a good place for all of us to live in.
– Theodore Roosevelt

In fact I see no hope—the People have almost given up to a Dictator.
– Davy Crockett, 1835
(about the American experiment
in the time of Andrew Jackson)

THE ABSURD MAN IN THE MIRROR
for Didi

At sunset, winter mountains reach
across a page the color of honey.
Sometimes my hands want
all of her syllables.
I walk in kindness
when she’s around
which is to say I feel
Chaplinesque. I mend myself
because she hungers
for golden peaks.
The eastern horizon
offers its diamonds
which we stash
in silent mumblings.
When she speaks, I feel
unburied yet hear still the dead
of my own house. No one cares
that I count her eye blinks.
No one cares about all this hard water.
The hours are tall as polar caps.

– Major Jackson

In a sense life in the high-rise had begun to resemble the world outside — there were the same ruthlessness and aggression concealed within a set of polite conventions.
– J. G. Ballard, High-Rise

I wish we could change our species name from homo sapiens – the godlike controllers who know everything – to homo ludens, the playful ones. As Johan 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.” Humans are the playful Fool in the deck, and being so “godlike” these days is getting way too grim. Instead of putting ever more controls on ourselves and our world as we sink deeper into the slough of despond, we can value the playful communicative interdependence on which life is based, from cells to cell towers.
– George Gorman

Surrounding every technology are institutions whose organization not to mention their reason for being-reflects the world-view promoted by the technology. Therefore, when an old technology is assaulted by a new one, institutions are threatened. When institutions are threatened, a culture finds itself in crisis.
– Neil Postman

The stress of not belonging infects nearly every human attempt to achieve a functionally decide-able quorum. Not feeling a real sense of belonging with any group – starting with the group of everything – is endemic with humans, especially in the ‘developed’ world. But we can still relearn it from the rest of nature. Instead of describing the legions of troubles hanging onto to not-belonging, a growing sense of belonging could be engendered by more of us seeing our silly species as one of the many unique embodiments of a biological world sustaining itself through feeling-speech. And with our children as our greatest hope, more effective principles of education would be the most evolving revolution for this species currently addicted to its own conceit.
– George Gorman

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
– Jean Cocteau

The life we live is just a colorful and deposit toy.
Some of us take it so seriously and fight and cry for it.
Some of us break and throw it.
Either we give extreme importance, either not enough.
Better to stay far from extremes.
– Shams of Tabrizi

Time roars with our longing for home
like a seashell

and the fire in the depths of the earth
already knows of our ruin-

– Nelly Sachs, (trans. Ruth and Matthew Mead)

The size of the place that one becomes a member of is limited only by the size of one’s heart.
– Gary Snyder

god really just be sending me teacher after teacher after teacher and laying out whole curricula on like a month by month basis,, the syllabus is weird af but at least it tends to be pretty clear.
– River Kenna

But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty…
– 1 Corinthians 1:27

WALL POEM

the difficulties are great
the difficulties are not great
the handle keeps falling off
the difficulties are awful

– Anselm Hollo

It is difficult with these evil folk to know when they are in league, and when they are cheating one another.
– Aragorn (Tolkien, The Two Towers)

For no one can discern the flavor of good things, while reveling in what is evil. For as long as evil delights him, good cannot give him pleasure. Then only will he begin to delight in what is good, when evil begins to displease him.
– St. Chrysostom

Those who want Heaven most have served Earth best. Those who love Man less than God do most for Man.
– C.S. Lewis, On Living in an Atomic Age

Go out and do something.

It isn’t your room that’s a prison,
it’s yourself.

– Sylvia Plath

I have tried to write Paradise

Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise.

– Ezra Pound

But love was always something
heavy for me. Something I had to carry.

– Benjamin Alire Sáenz

feeling fine
without a hat
soaked by winter rain

– Basho

Today I go back to the sea—
And it’s just as though I were home.

– Langston Hughes

The universe is made up of experiences that are designed to burn out your attachment, your clinging, to pleasure, to pain, to fear, to all of it. And as long as there is a place where you’re vulnerable, the universe will find a way to confront you with it.
– Ram Dass

We boast our light, but if we look not wisely on the sun itself, it smites us into darkness… The light which we have gained was given to us, not to ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things more remote from our knowledge.
– John Milton

There were comfortable books, and another kind of comfort in recognizing my own condition or its equivalents and analogies in others, in not being alone in my loneliness and angst. Sometimes one piece would crash into me: I still have the poem “Never Before” by Philip Levine, from the New Yorker in the fall of 1980 (I clipped Levine’s columns and taped them together into a narrow strip, now yellowed, exactly as long as my arm, with a deeper amber where the tape joins the sections together. It looks like a bandage but reads like a wound). It is a poem of devastation:

Never before
have I heard my own voice
cry out in a language not mine
that the earth was wrong
that night came first and then nothing
that birds flew only to their deaths
that ice was the meaning of change
that I was never a child
nor were you nor were my lost sons
nor the sons they won’t have

It spoke to me when I was very nearly a child. Sometimes when you are devastated you want not a reprieve but a mirror of your condition or a reminder that you are not alone in it. Other times it is not the propaganda or the political art that helps you face a crisis but whatever gives you respite from it.

– Rebecca Solnit

In thinking about trauma and resilience as I reflect on what is unfolding in our world at this time: From the point of view of systems theory, systems that break down have the potential to reorganize themselves at a higher more robust level of functionality. The experience of breakdown can give one a very deep and optimistic view of the potential of others to grow from trauma, instead of being diminished. This is called post-traumatic growth and refers to the benefit from psychological changes that can be experienced as a result of the struggle with challenging life circumstances and can foster greater resilience. We have to remember that people who have survived trauma can come back transformed by the experience and see that suffering has made them more resilient rather than more fragile, with the ability to thrive in the present rather than being overwhelmed by the past. Beyond the ending of the old way of being, there is hope for the emergence of the new, and to imagine a future in which the wounds are still there, but in a form that makes one wiser and humbler and helps one to thrive.
– Roshi Joan Halifax

Republicans approve of the American farmer, but they are willing to help him go broke. They stand four-square for the American home—but not for housing. They are strong for labor—but they are stronger for restricting labor’s rights. They favor minimum wage—the smaller the minimum wage the better. They endorse educational opportunity for all—but they won’t spend money for teachers or for schools. They think modern medical care and hospitals are fine—for people who can afford them. They consider electrical power a great blessing—but only when the private power companies get their rake-off. They think American standard of living is a fine thing—so long as it doesn’t spread to all the people. And they admire of Government of the United States so much that they would like to buy it.
– Harry S. Truman

We do not see the connection between things, but live under the illusion that things are separate. In the same way we exist only in a moment. Actually things interact continuously. Interchange goes on without ceasing. Because we fail to see this, we see the world as dead. For the same reason we fail to realise that we ourselves are a process.
– Mme Sophie (Sophia) Grigorievna Ouspensky, Notes of Robert S. de Ropp

But in a still life, there is no end to our looking, which has become allied with the gaze of the painter; we look in and in, to the world of things, in their ambiance of cool or warm light, in and in, as long as we can stand to look, as long as we take pleasure in looking.
– Mark Doty

Life is the space between our things.
– Claude Debussy

What is friendship if not constant amateurish psychoanalysis?
– TomToroCartoons

During the Vietnam War… every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Free speech is the right to shout ‘theater’ in a crowded fire.
– Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book

They must go out of the theatre with the strength they live by strengthened from looking upon some passion that could, whatever its chosen way of life, strike down an enemy, fill a long stocking with money or move a girl’s heart.
– William Butler Yeats

The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don’t you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good. The good is no longer even being measured.
– Hannah Arendt

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work. It means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Brönte’s Jane Eyre: “I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.”
– Adrienne Rich

Third places are those needed spaces, neither home nor work, where we are known by our names and valued for being whatever we decide to be […].
– Wendy Welch

Later I learned from a healer that there is a term for the seeming paradox of, at last, pitching yourself into a stable situation, only to self-sabotage or otherwise break-down. This, she said, is a healing crisis. The individual intent on healing, will, in the end, feel and express every information-packed wound. Past symptoms, repressed sensations, and unacknowledged trauma will rise up even as you prepare to relax. Living, she concluded, is not for the faint of heart. And then she laughed. She laughed so hard I felt embarrassed for her so I joined in. Then I was really laughing. Later that day I thought, for the first time in a long time, maybe there was hope for a person like me.
– Selah Saterstrom

Until we are able to use our own words to tell our own stories, the context we find ourselves in–in this case, the psychiatric system–says our stories for us, and usually gets it wrong. In the context of the medical model, the story we learn to say is that we are ill.

We begin to see ourselves as ill. We tell stories of illness, and the psychiatric system, and, by extension, society, accepts illness as the story of our distress.

Being able to tell your own story–not the illness story–sets a new social context–one in which mad people are seen in a new light… In part, healing happens in the re-storying of our lives…. When he proclaimed, “You have a mental illness”, I’d responded, “I thought I had stories to tell.”

– Gene Combs

Ihr aber lernet, wie man sieht statt stiert
Und handelt, statt zu reden noch und noch.
So was hätt einmal fast die Welt regiert!
Die Völker wurden seiner Herr, jedoch
Dass keiner uns zu früh da triumphiert —
Der Schoß ist fruchtbar noch, aus dem das kroch.

If we could learn to look, instead of gawking,
We’d see the horror in the heart of farce.
If only we could act, instead of talking,
We wouldn’t always end up on our arse.
This is the thing that nearly had us mastered;
Don’t yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!
Although the world has stood up and stopped the bastard,
The bitch that bore him is in heat again.

– Bertolt Brecht

Today’s milestone is human madness. Politics is a part of it, particularly in its lethal outbursts. Politics is not, as it was for Hannah Arendt, the field where human freedom is unfurled. The modern world, the world of world war, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendor of the Greek city state. The modern political domain is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, leveling, exhausting. Hence madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individuation.
– Julia Kristeva

Prodigal
by Bob Hicok

You could drive out of this country
and attack the world with your ambition,
invent wonder plasmas,
become an artist of the provocative gesture,
the suggestive nod, you could leave
wanting the world and return
carrying it, a noisy bundle
of steam and libido, a ball of fire
balanced on your tongue,
you might reclaim Main Street in a limo
longer than a sermon, wave at our red faces
while remembering that you were born
a clod hopper, a farmer’s kid,
and get over that hump once and for all
by telling A Great Man’s stories—
the dirty jokes of dictators, tidbits
of presidential hygiene, insights
into the psychotropic qualities of power
and the American tradition of kissing
moneyed ass. Your uncle would still
call you Roy Boy, pheasants
sun themselves beside the tracks,
waiting for the dew to burn off
before their first flight, and corn
grow so high that if you stood
in the field you’d disappear, the fact
aiming your eyes down the road.

The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
– G.K. Chesterton

I am on the edge of the crowd, at the periphery; but I belong to it, I am attached to it by one of my extremities, a hand or foot. I know that the periphery is the only place I can be, that I would die if I let myself be drawn into the center of the fray, but just as certainly if I let go of the crowd. This is not an easy position to stay in, it is even very difficult to hold, for these beings are in constant motion and their movements are unpredictable and follow no rhythm. They swirl, go north, then suddenly east; none of the individuals in the crowd remains in the same place in relation to the others. So I too am in perpetual motion; all this demands a high level of tension, but it gives me a feeling of violent, almost vertiginous, happiness.” A very good schizo dream. To be fully a part of the crowd and at the same time completely outside it, removed from it: to be on the edge…
– Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari

Mr. Frodo. Look… There is light and beauty up there that no shadow can touch.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

The ideological complex that enabled our lifestyle was based on ignoring profound externalities that were debasing the planet’s life systems and harming people worldwide. We’re entering a future of exponential technology where any individual could potentially cause great harm. We can no longer afford structures of externalization that afford us a pleasant lifestyle but create resentment and anger elsewhere. We need to find a way forward together.
– Daniel Thorson

Some are living out the timeline of the great awakening. Others have chosen to remain in the great forgetting. The split in consciousness runs between the two.
– Nika Solé

The lamps are different, but the light is the same.
– Rumi

High vibrational people are those who are forever progressing, mind, body and soul.
– Nika Solé

When you compliment your children, praise them for inner qualities such as kindness, honesty and perseverance so they will strive to contribute to the world in meaningful ways.
– Toni Shhutta

See what you are. Don’t ask others, don’t let others tell you about yourself. Look within and see.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

i don’t believe in sin, but listening to music/watching videos on your phone without headphones on is a sin.
– Chen Chen

According to Shantideva, the more we appreciate the complexity of a situation, the less extreme our views and emotions will be.
– Allison Aitken

True happiness is to enjoy the present without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied.
– Seneca

I was thirty-five when I discovered that a B-plus was a really good grade.
– Anne Lamott

There would be no sense in saying you trusted Jesus if you would not take his advice.
– C.S. Lewis

Hammer and tongs! I am so torn between rage and joy, that if I do not burst, it will be a marvel!
– Gimli (Tolkien, The Two Towers)

Love is not what we become but who we already are.
– Stephen Levine

In the faces of men and women,
I see God.
– Walt Whitman

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug’s game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
– T. S. Eliot

American dream
chasing the same old
same old
– Andy Perrin

The world in the frame of the poem has transformed. A reconstructed embodiment of a new “here” emerges.
– Sherwin Bitsui

Behind all asceticism the thought should be, ‘Who will trust us with the true wealth if we cannot be trusted even with the wealth that perishes?’ Who will trust me with a spiritual body if I cannot control even an earthly body?’
– C.S. Lewis, Miracles

As the best way to obtain good things is prayer and mourning, so the best way to preserve them is thanksgiving and rejoicing.
– Richard Sibbes

Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?
What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?
The bees are flying. They taste the spring.
– Sylvia Plath

All I know is that Coverdale reads like poetry, and the modern versions don’t.
– WH Auden

If we attend to the confused cries of the newspaper critics and the susurrus of popular repetition that follows, we shall hear the names of poets in great numbers; if we seek … the enjoyment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we shall seldom find it.
– T.S. Eliot

The experience of understanding that you cannot take the entire work in at once, yet that there are places you can enter—I still hold onto that.
– Percival Everett

I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others–young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

purple-hued rain
pelts a dawn robin…
year of the snake

– @lafcadiopoetry

If there is no equality of outcomes among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, why should equality of outcomes be expected—or assumed—when conditions are not nearly so comparable?
– Thomas Sowell

all the words
have come
unstuck

they float
an inch above
the dog eared page

i breathe in
a few and they
rush in

to fill this
cavernous void
that yawns

within me
without you
these words fall flat

– Jonathan Closs

Reward on earth is more dangerous for men than punishment!
– Tolkien

A long walk, a healthy meal, a good workout, a few minutes of silence, a few more of reading: it won’t fix your problems, but it’ll fix you, and that’s nine tenths the battle.
– Dylan O’Sullivan

Just as they became unnatural by worshipping nature, so they actually became unmanly by worshipping man.
– G.K. Chesterton

Identify your problems but give power and energy to solutions.
– Anthony Robbins

jasmine tendril
stretching in an upward spiral
I too
grasp for a hold
on the future

– André Surridge

Note to J. Alfred Prufrock

I just dared to eat
a really big peach
as ripe as it could be

and I have on
a pair of plaid shorts
and a blue tee shirt with a hole in it

and little rivers of juice
are now running down my chin and wrist
and dripping onto the pool deck.

What is your problem, man?

– Billy Collins

We are familiar only with the passions of others. What we come to know about our own we have been able to learn only from them.
– Proust

Once twigs and whispers held your dreams,
Now blossoms dance in vivid hues,
A plum tree stands where silence streamed
A tapestry of life renewed.
– Amy Christie

Your calm mind is the ultimate weapon against your challenges. So relax.
– Bryant McGill

This dream budded bright
with leaves around the edges,

Its clear air winnowed
by angels; she was come

Back to her early
sea-town home

Scathed, stained after
tedious pilgrimages.

– Sylvia Plath

As a Canadian, I will create art that slices through the static, shatters illusions, and lays bare the unrelenting truth—no filters, no compromises.
– Laura Kerr

So Says Wang Wei

When the Emperor is a sage
There are no hermits,
so says Wang Wei –

which is why I’ve spent
the past thirty years
hiding in these mountains.

– David Budbill

He ate every miserable spoonful and ever since it struck him that adults are always trying to buy off children to make them forget their bad actions.
– Colson Whitehead

The aim of [Indigenous] cultures is to let the whole world know that they too belong to the same family and to start caring for the land, for the environment, for the mountains and waterways and the trees and every other living thing on this earth as brothers and sisters and family members. That’s our greatest dream and desire, to see that happen.

We need to unite together and share our caring on a large scale. At the moment we are all doing it in isolation. So when we come together it brings the joy of unification to know that we are not alone. It brings great joy to us and must also bring joy to the land.

I think Mother Earth is expecting us to do that. She is waiting with open arms and she is saying, “Yes. I need your help. Come help me.” It’s all of us. No more passing the buck.

We all are responsible for our Mother Earth and we should not be shy and hold back from the caring. Accept it as a our personal responsibility and care. They are all our brothers and sisters. Let us accept that everything around us is our family and we are related. Let us accept that our caring must not only be in words but in action.

What have we got for our children? What are we leaving for our children? We are caretakers for what belongs to our children and their children and their children’s children.

That’s the way our people teach us when we are growing up. You are not owners of anything. Mother Earth owns you and you look after her just the same way that you would look after your Mother here because they also have given you lots of other relatives who are not human, but you are still responsible for their welfare and wellbeing.

That’s the good part about it. We are not alone. The whole purpose of our living is to relate well to every other thing as family. Once we do that everything will be made right.

– Uncle Bob Randall, Australian Aboriginal Elder

It’s not easy

to be alone

other people

have impatient

waiting-room eyes.

The floor pulls

your steps out from

under you.

You swing yourself

from hour

to hour.

– Tove Ditlevsen

Jesus you are a goddess
you’re a Jesus snake in my brain
resurrecting through new skin
born in new sin.

– Phil Saint Denis Sanchez

All the colours of poetry, however splendid, can never paint natural objects in such a manner as to make the description be taken for a real landscape. The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation.
– David Hume

You must go to war with your internal saboteur.
– Dylan O’Sullivan

Some people look up at the stars. I climb until I’m closer to them.
– @outsidemagazine

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
– W. H. Auden

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.
– William Shakespeare

Right now,
I’m just a boy
covered in flames,
fully incandescent.

– Neil Hilborn

Love is not love
which alters it when alteration finds,
or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! It is an ever fixed mark
that looks on tempests and is never shaken;…
– William Shakespeare

Poverty is not natural. It is manmade and it can be overcome.
– Nelson Mandela

It would ease my care, if you would speak to me, or walk at whiles with me.
– J.R.R. Tolkien (Faramir to Eowyn)

What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It’s somebody wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them.

– D.H. Lawrence

Almost by accident
I saw through the blaze
of my anger and fear

to the bunny in the yard,
his sweet brown body
so still and attentive

in the short brown grass,
and it’s not that I
became any less angry,

but when I let myself be held
by his steady brown eye,
I was touched by gentleness

and remembered 
what else
I am capable of. 

Oh self, this
is how you stay whole hearted—
by keeping your eyes wide open.

– Rosemerry Trommer, Widening the Vision

What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
God for myself, He hears that name of thine,
And sees within my eyes the tears of two.

– Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Never be a spectator of
unfairness or stupidity.
The grave will supply
plenty of time for silence.

– Christopher Hitchens

The biggest mistake we make is that we build our homes in other people. We build those homes and we decorate them with the love and care and respect that makes us feel safe at the end of the day. We invest in other people, and we evaluate our self-worth based on how much those homes welcome us. But what many don’t realize is that when you build your home in other people, you give them the power to make you homeless. When those people walk away, those homes walk away with them, and all of a sudden, we feel empty because everything that we had within us, we put into them. We trusted someone else with pieces of us. The emptiness we feel doesn’t mean we have nothing to give, or that we have nothing within us. It’s just that we built our home in the wrong place.
– Najwa Zebian

There is a teaching that says that behind all hardening and tightening and rigidity of the heart, there’s always fear. But if you touch fear, behind fear there is a soft spot. And if you touch that soft spot, you find the vast blue sky. You find that which is ineffable, ungraspable, and unbiased, that which can support and awaken us at any time.

We have to be brave enough to soften what is rigid, to find the soft spot and stay with it. We have to have that kind of courage and take that kind of responsibility. That’s true spiritual warriorship. That’s the true practice of peace.

– Pema Chodron

While men were watching professional football or drinking beer…the women were thinking, concentrating, studying, deciding…
– Charles Bukowski

Introverts may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while wish they were home in their pajamas. They prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation. They tend to dislike conflict. Many have a horror of small talk, but enjoy deep discussions.
– Susan Cain

The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it’s overturned the order of the soul.
– Leonard Cohen

I would have loved him
in any era, in any dark age; I would take him
into the twilight and unwind him, slide
my fingers through his hair and pull him
to his knees. As it is, this afternoon, late
in the twentieth century, I sit on a chair
in the kitchen with my keys in my lap, pressing
the black button on the answering machine
over and over, listening to his message,
his voice strung along the wires outside my window
where the birds balance themselves
and stare off into the trees, thinking
even in the farthest future, in the most
distant universe, I would have recognized
this voice, refracted, as it would be, like light
from a small, uncharted star.
– Dorianne Laux

In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted shortcuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly re-spawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.

– John Steinbeck

I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for… Criticism must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse; its social goals are noncoercive knowledge produced in the interests of human freedom.
– Edward W. Said

I respect the moon’s unwillingness to be photographed on a phone.
– @amor_fatti

Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
– John Berger

Uncomfortable truth:

“Human intelligence” and “artificial intelligence” are both manifestations of the same intelligence. The difference seems profound to you because you are a dimwit.

– Kenneth Folk

People love to blame everything on the devil. Whole time it’s their own skill issue, a lack of discipline, or karma.
– Nika Solé

sun-fooled
gloves left
in the car

– Biswajit Mishra

digestive issue
I fast
tending my garden

– Biswajit Mishra

Every day is so precious I feel infinitely sad at the thought of all this time melting farther and farther away from me as I grow older. Now, now is the perfect time of my life.
– SylviaPlath

People who like Twin Peaks are party people.
– David Lynch

Perhaps we are not responsible for the lives of our parents, not in our pores or our very breath. We can expect. We can resolve. We can come to terms with. Afterwards, we wear their clothing, sit in their chairs, and remember them, profoundly remember them. But we are not responsible.
– Claudia Rankine

This is the beginning—from “I” to “we”. If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into “I”, and cuts you off forever from the “we”.
– John Steinbeck

I used to analyze myself down to the last thread, used to compare myself with others, recalled all the smallest glances, smiles and words of those to whom I’d tried to be frank, interpreted everything in a bad light, laughed viciously at my attempts ‘to be like the rest’ –and suddenly, in the midst of my laughing, I’d give way to sadness, fall into ludicrous despondency and once again start the whole process all over again – in short, I went round and round like a squirrel on a wheel.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

Over-intellectualizing is often a
clever form of avoidance. “Let’s
dance around a concept instead
of experiencing it.” Learn to
differentiate between the two.
No more distracting, avoiding,
or delay. It’s time.

– J. Mike Fields

Love Breaks Free
How dear is love to those like us who, changing
in such times that souls must also change,
might yet renew this sad old world, arranging
ourselves through nothing but our hearts’ exchange.
Though every life is altered every morning,
thankfully certain ties remain undated.
As daily news barks out another warning,
how fiercely some true constants dance elated.
Thus we outlive these times, as timeless souls
remember what we love, the true background.
And still, as fauns no mastermind controls,
we skirl and flit this stormy world around.
As lives escape themselves again to see:
though hedged by wild brambles, love breaks free.
– George Gorman

Thus man is heaven, earth, and hell in one, and his salvation is a much more personal problem than he realizes. Realizing that the human body is a mass of psychic centers and that during life the form is crisscrossed with endless currents of energy, that all through the form are sunbursts of electric force and magnetic power, man can be seen by those who know how to see as a solar system of stars and planets, suns and moons, with comets in irregular orbits circling through them. As the Milky Way is supposed to be a gigantic cosmic embryo, so man is himself a galaxy.
– Manly P. Hall

The soul grows as she unfolds, actualizing her emerging potential. The soul does not stay the same. She is not primordially complete and mature, and hence she can have phases and stages of development. She can be primitive or advanced, simply organized or highly integrated, immature or adult and seasoned. She can be infantile, young, old, or ancient. She can be arrested in her development, underdeveloped, undeveloped, quite developed, or complete. All these are characteristics that apply to soul, but not to essence. For the presence of pure consciousness, these qualities do not make sense. Pure consciousness, pure presence, or pure awareness is the primordial ground, totally complete and spontaneously perfect. Essence is eternally itself; it does not grow, and growth makes no sense to it. This is a very important distinction between soul and essence, regardless of the fact that both are consciousness. Essence is pure consciousness, but soul is an organism of pure consciousness. Essence is always complete and perfect, but soul grows and develops; completeness and perfection is her deepest potential, but she needs to grow for this to be her permanent conscious condition. Many wisdom traditions speak of pure consciousness as primordially perfect, eternally complete, not needing development, growth, or completion. These traditions tend to emphasize sudden enlightenment, or direct realization, where the methods of inner work involve simply recognizing true nature;
– A. H. Almaas

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
– Henry David Thoreau

I am a law only for my kind, I am no law for all.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

Show love and mind your business. It’s a lifestyle.
– Bob Marley

It’s comforting to find someone who talks about ideas of life, religion, arts and beauty.

I think companionship is very essential in a world with so much superficiality, and little attraction.

– Sylvia Plath

Desire is a defence. A defence against going beyond a limit in jouissance.
– Jacques Lacan

for those who came to Earth
to win and compete
will be terribly disappointed
when they find out
that life isn’t
the Olympics
it’s a gathering place
my love,
when we die we don’t get
handed a bunch of trophies
by angels wearing stopwatches
there is no medal ceremony
in the hereafter
there is just a campfire circle
where we make s’mores and
share our stories from Earth
the only game we play in
the afterlife is the one
where we take turns
listening to each other
~ and everyone always wins

– john roedel

When you spend five decades teaching people to want more through advertising and a culture that has amplified feelings of need, entitlement and adulation of the wealthy, you foster generations of discontented. Add into this declining public services and a greater divide between wealth and poverty and we end up with a lot of discontent in society.

Dare I say it, I have lived long enough to see the changes unfold. I can remember that we weren’t always obsessed with newer and better. When we felt safe with a welfare state that would pick up the pieces if things fell apart for us. We scorned the nouveau riche for their flashiness. We did not live in the swirl of advertising and entertainment that promotes an endless stream of material trash that we are expected to envy so that we will spend our money on more and more consumer goods, trashing the planet in the process. Yes I’m a grumpy old woman but maybe also a Casandra who has seen a different truth but cannot convey it in a world conditioned by other views.

This is what threatens democracy and more than that the values of decency. What happens to democracy when the demos has become so manipulated by the power of advertising and ultimately the wealthy individuals behind it? What happens when the culture itself has become the product through the growth of social media (which one way of another often sits at the pinnacle of that need-based, resentment-driven consumerist culture.)

– Caroline Brazier

Every civilization depends on the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness-they cannot work and their civilization collapses.
– Franklin Patrick Herbert Jr.

This isn’t an argument for the absence of hope or against fighting fascism, but for the presence of imagination along with the fight. The question that so many of us have now is “what should we do to fight this fascist takeover?” The answer, I believe, can be found only if we let go of the delusion that the takeover is something counter to the American project. It is the American project now. And our ability to imagine a new world requires that we open our eyes to this reality.
– Theodore Richards

Sometimes, I look up at the night sky
and it reminds me that
people and planets aren’t so different.
We all have an orbit, our energy decides
what comes into our atmosphere.
We all have our own gravity.

– Rudy Francisco

And I dream too much and I don’t write enough and I’m trying to find God everywhere.

– Anis Mojgani

When one realizes that he is neither the actor, nor the one who watches, the mind-storm is stilled.
– Ashtavakra Gita

The seat of Realization is within and the seeker cannot find it as an object outside him. That seat is bliss and is the core of all beings. Hence it is called the Heart.
– Ramana Maharshi

Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered.
– Nan Shepherd

Halfway down the stairs
is a stair
where i sit.
there isn’t any
other stair
quite like
it.
i’m not at the bottom,
i’m not at the top;
so this is the stair
where
I always
stop.
Halfway up the stairs
Isn’t up
And it isn’t down.
It isn’t in the nursery,
It isn’t in town.
And all sorts of funny thoughts
Run round my head.
It isn’t really
Anywhere!
It’s somewhere else
Instead!
– A. A. Milne

“Come sit beside me,” I said to myself,
and although it didn’t make sense,
I held my own hand as a small sign of trust.
And together I sat on the fence.
– Michael Leunig

It is not so much our friends’ help that helps us, as the confident knowledge that they will help us.
– Epicurus

I have learned that there is more power in a good strong hug than in a thousand meaningful words.
– Ann Hood

THIS IS ALL I KNOW ABOUT HAVING A HEART

It never happens twice,
the beluga blows,
the sun hangs grey and washed,
like an old comforter
on a grandmother’s clothesline.
We are quickly fucked
under a sunset, like lace in an oven.
To have a heart
is to have a task, to have a heart
I know, sounds
like gravity had a baby,
but it didn’t—it’s just
floating on the first rib—
the original error of life.

– Maria Giesbrecht

I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.
– Albert Camus

Our faith is a mishmash of many things. We believe in family, in music and art, but we mostly believe in each other.
– Edwidge Danticat, Untwine

Most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time, and more tranquility.
– Marcus Aurelius

The tales we tell are either false or true, 
But neither purpose is the point. We weave 
The fabric of our own existence out of words, 
And the right story tells us who we are. 
Perhaps it is the words that summon us. 
The tale is often wiser than the teller. 
There is no naked truth but what we wear. 

So let me bring this story to our bed. 
The world, I say, depends upon a spell
Spoken each night by lovers unaware 
Of their own sorcery. In innocence 
Or agony the same words must be said, 
Or the raging moon will darken in the sky. 
The night grow still. The winds of dawn expire. 

And if I’m wrong, it cannot be by much. 
We know our own existence came from touch,
The new soul summoned into life by lust.
And love’s shy tongue awakens in such fire—
Flesh against flesh and midnight whispering— 
As if the only purpose of desire 
Were to express its infinite unfolding. 

And so, my love, we are two lunatics,
Secretaries to the wordless moon, 
Lying awake, together or apart, 
Transcribing every touch or aching absence 
Into our endless, intimate palaver, 
Body to body, naked to the night, 
Appareled only in our utterance. 

– The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet
from Pity the Beautiful by Dana Gioia

At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes—an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense.
– Carl Sagan

I am going to tell you a secret. Everything is about wanting. Everything. Things happen because of people wanting. Watch closely, and you’ll see what I mean.
– David Mitchell

Whenever an answer, a solution, or a creative idea is needed, stop thinking for a moment by focusing your attention on your inner energy field. Become aware of the stillness.
– Eckhart Tolle

We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversely and so shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at every moment. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people.
– Montaigne (tr. M. A. Screech)

I am not a creature that was born.
I am a fire that was set.
– Sara June Woods

Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion.
– Søren Kierkegaard

Here’s what no one can teach–except time, I guess. Time can teach you this: The greatest asset you can have is a steely patience, an ever-present calm, as the money disappears; the studio caves; the star bails; the writer goes into hiding; the stock market collapses; your standing in the community withers. And you just calmly keep making notes or rehearsing or believing–whatever it is you do to maintain a belief in yourself and your work. And very few people have this, and I think that everyone who has had a long career–full of all this insanity and uncertainty–has this gift. It can be developed, but no one teaches it to you or tells you where to go buy it or study it. You have to dig it out of yourself.
– Arthur Penn

So, I begin each day with a gesture of cynicism, and close it with a gesture of faith; or, if you prefer, begin it by reminding myself that, for me at least, goals and objectives are without value, and close it by demonstrating that the fact is irrelevant. A gesture of temporality, a gesture of eternity. It is in the tension between these two gestures that I have lived my adult life.
– John Barth

CABBAGE
She was about to chop the head
In half,
But I made her reconsider
By telling her:
“Cabbage symbolizes mysterious love.”
Or so said one Charles Fourier,
Who said many other strange and wonderful things,
So that people called him mad behind his back,
Whereupon I kissed the back of her neck
Ever so gently, Whereupon she cut the cabbage in two
With a single stroke of her knife.
– Charles Simic

Do not sell your soul
in exchange for anything,
this is the only thing you have
brought into this world
and the only thing
you can take back.
– Rumi

Then Aragorn…saw the elven-light in her eyes and the wisdom of many days; yet from that hour he loved Arwen Undómiel daughter of Elrond.
– Tolkien, The Return of the King

Apparently misinformed about the rumored
stuff of dreams: everywhere I inquired,
I was told look for blue.
– Carl Phillips

If you haven’t ever studied your relationship with your parents, you’re doing yourself a disservice. They hold so many keys and clues as to why you are the way you are and whether your tendencies are beneficial or detrimental. What you want to carry on and what stops with you.
– Nika Solé

The poem: a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense.
– Paul Valery

Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.
– @naval

Somebody, something is going to take it all from us: that is the dread of the wealthy.
– Brian Eno

In what is necessary, unity; in what is not necessary, liberty and in all things charity.
– Saint Augustine

Mistaking the essential for the unessential and the unessential for the essential, worldlings suffer.
– The Buddha, Dhammapada

Sometimes I see myself driving through hell with this wagon and selling brimstone. And sometimes I’m driving through heaven handing our provisions to wandering souls! If only we could find a place where there’s no shooting, me and my children—what’s left of ‘em—we might rest a while.
– Bertolt Brecht

The observer stands outside the landscape, for were this not the case it would not be possible for nature to become a landscape at all.
– Gyorgy Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness

We live in a society where people are not taught the most basic peace skills. We don’t teach people how to heal or how to feed their non-physical needs in healthy ways. So we shouldn’t be shocked or despairing that most people aren’t good at creating peace, especially when our society teaches people harmful habits that are the opposite of peace-literacy skills.
– Paul K. Chappell

The main thing is to stand up to the light, to joy (like our child) in the knowledge that I shall be extinguished in the light over gorse, asphalt, and sea, to stand up to time, or rather to eternity in the instant. To be eternal means to have existed.
– Max Frisch

People with the same education as my own, speaking the same words that I do, loving the same books, the same music, the same paintings, are by no means immune from the danger of turning into monsters and doing things we would not have thought possible among the people of our own day, apart from a few pathological exceptions. If they are not immune, Why should I be so confident of my own immunity?
– Max Frisch

ANYWAY
I want to cry my wild happiness
—wild because it hasn’t anything
to do with the cultivated ways: not sex
or Zen or Jesus or even as though
I thought that happiness was a place to look.
It wasn’t and I didn’t and here it is.
– William Bronk

Old gods of the chili garlic sauce, let this stupid lust last. Give me what I want even if it’s not what I need.
– Alyssandra Tobin

It takes courage to do what you want. Other people have a lot of plans for you. Nobody wants you to do what you want to do. They want you to go on their trip, but you can do what you want. I did. I went into the woods & read for five years.
– Joseph Campbell

People change, and yet we do not seem to like it.
– Liz Greene

To find God you must know how to love, not God, but the human beings around you, the trees, the flowers, the birds. Then when you know how to love them, you will really know what it is to love God.
– J Krishnamurti

The best thing you can do for the world is to keep increasing the level of what it means to be you.
– Nika Solé

Poetry, to most people who have professed a love for it, is the solemn divine way of getting the mind out of the body and carving a new body for it in words or language or gesture (gesticulations) outside of the norm.
– Bola Opaleke

my knowledge comes from the people before me.
my courage comes from the people next to me.
– Ina Cariño

It is wretched to have an abundance of intentions and a poverty of action, to be rich in truths and poor in virtues.
– Søren Kierkegaard

The sage acts without taking credit, accomplishing without dwelling on it.
– Tao Te Ching

Uncertainty, not outcome, is the root of stress.
– @naval

When building habits, choose consistency over content. The best book is the one you can’t put down. The best exercise is the one you enjoy doing every day. The best health food is the one you find tasty. The best work is the work you’d do for free.
– @naval

Man is a poetical animal and touches nothing which he does not adorn.
– C.S. Lewis

Doctors won’t make you healthy.

Nutritionists won’t make you slim.

Teachers won’t make you smart.

Gurus won’t make you calm.

Mentors won’t make you rich.

Trainers won’t make you fit.

Ultimately, you have to take responsibility. Save yourself.

– @naval

And O the dark thirsting for lucidity!
A trick! … By the faint light of pain alert
Suddenly I felt more known than hurt.
Deep in my treachery a sting was growing;
Its poison, my poison, lit me with its knowing,
– Paul Valery

The nature of yoga is to shine the light of awareness into the darkest corners of the body.
– Jason Crandell

I decline to accept the end of man.
– William Faulkner

I may never see the Vatican or Troy
but only let me sit in a car somewhere
I recognize as home by the hand
of the one I love in mine—
just once-O universe-one more time.
– Fanny Howe

MY FATHER’S EYELASHES
after Dion O’Reilly

Unruly wild snakes, like Satan’s
pubic hairs. Gates to hell.

The door to a swamp—
toad-green and fermenting.

My father’s eyelashes, a thousand
mini-machetes.

His corkscrew eyelashes, his rabid
eyelashes, his scorpion eyelashes.

My father’s eyelashes— the first
fluttering thing I’ve wanted to bury.

– Maria Giesbrecht

There is only one solitude, and it is large and not easy to bear… People are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy. But it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult.
– Rilke

We take that which is unreal to be real and that which is real to be unreal.
– Rupert Spira

The mark of a true practitioner is not what arises in your life and mind, but how you work with what arises.
– Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

To this day, we humans remain highly susceptible to the moods and emotions of those around us, compelling all kinds of behavior on our part—unconsciously imitating others, wanting what they have, getting swept up in viral feelings of anger or outrage.
– Robert Green

The person who is not self-governed cannot live well even under the best government.
– Manly P. Hall

CHORUS

The wet bamboo clacking in the night rain
crying in the darkness whimpering softly
as the hollow columns touch and slide
along each other swaying with the empty
air these are sounds from before there were voices
gestures older than grief from before there was
pain as we know it the impossibly tall
stems are reaching out groping and waving
before longing as we think of it or loss
as we are acquainted with it or feelings
able to recognize the syllables
that might be their own calling out to them
like names in the dark telling them nothing
about loss or about longing nothing
ever about all that has yet to answer

– W. S. Merwin

Your highest self only wants you to be at peace. It does not judge, compare or demand that you defeat anyone, or be better than anyone. It only wants you to be at peace.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer

The machine is ambivalent. It is both an instrument of liberation and one of repression. It has economized human energy and it has misdirected it. It has created a wide framework of order and it has produced muddle and chaos.
– Lewis Mumford

You can read your way into a different life.
– Dylan O’Sullivan

If you can do it,
but can’t explain it,
I still pay you,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk

When goodness is not reinvested, it is lost. The greatness of our lives is not measured by how much we save but by the fruit we bear.
– Pope Francis

Who will pluck off the petals of this immense daisy
Of gold, white, and black?

And tell us when, Lord of the uncreated,
You will believe that we love you?

– Juan Ramón Jiménez (translated by H. R. Hays)

Those trashed slopes are home to the foxglove
An ancient restorer of the heart’s beat, my love.

– Sasha Dugdale

Creativity is fire, culture is the cooling of the flame. The creative act is upflight, victory over the heaviness of the objectified world, the product of creativity in culture is a dragging down, a process of settling.
– Nikolai Berdyaev

The world might stop in ten minutes; meanwhile, we are to go on doing our duty. The great thing is to be found at one’s post as a child of God, living each day as though it were our last, but planning as though our world might last 100 years.
– CS Lewis

I try to pull the language into such a sharpness that it jumps off the page. It must look easy, but it takes me forever to get it to look so easy.
– Maya Angelou

It’s an ordinary person who acts like a true adult.
– Kosho Uchiyama

Modern dating culture teaches women not to date “projects”, as if self-discovery were not a continuous journey. “Making it” is not a static destination. What truly matters is the integrity of his heart and the trajectory of his will. If someone is actively trying their best, that is all that matters. It is our imperfections – our unpolished edges and luminous fractures – that render our souls iridescent, unforgettable.

At times, you will find that a man, inspired by your love, will take on the seemingly insurmountable – only to realise that the strength he seeks has resided within him all along. He just needed a loving compassionate observer to bring that reality to life. Love, in its purest form, does not bestow power – it reveals it. That is the gift of knowing you are loved – it makes us vulnerable to losing that special person, yet equally, it unlocks the most formidable version of ourselves.

What we often fall in love with, more than anything, is their spiritual resilience – the quiet unrelenting force of a soul that refuses to yield. It is not perfection that captivates us, but their raw determined spirit that rises again and again, bending fate to the contours of destiny.

– @buridansridge

The crazier the world gets, the more vital your sense of humor becomes.
– Dylan O’Sullivan

Carnal men love the god that they make, but not the God that made them.
– Charles Spurgeon

My call is the call of battle. I nourish active rebellion.
– Walt Whitman

I am the judge sitting in every computer shouting FREEDOM IS FOR WHEN?
– Etel Adnan

The greatest love is a mother’s; Then comes a dog’s, then comes a sweetheart’s. . .
– Polish proverb

I am always curious what I missed because I was looking right when I should have been looking left.
– Claudia Rankine

War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.
– Faramir (Tolkien, The Two Towers)

There are parallels between journalism and clinical psychoanalysis. Both the journalist and the psychoanalyst are connoisseurs of the small, unregarded motions of life. Both pan the surface—yes, surface—for the gold of insight.
– Janet Malcolm

What I love is when totally disparate facts come together.
– John Cheever

Pain and illness are energies that come to visit. There is an ebb and flow. They do not define us.
– Sarah Jester

A teacher I know once said, there are two types of people who follow your work and show up to classes, courses and containers.

There are those that truly want to work with Spirit and those that are just coming to steal energy, content, ideas or clients.

Couldn’t agree more.

– @Maryamhasnaa

We must not forget that the deepest man can utter, will be but the type or symbol of a something deeper yet, of which he can perceive only a doubtful glimmer.
– George MacDonald, England’s Antiphon

Sometimes, when I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror, I think: I am just a giant monkey. But, no, that is not right—even they would not accept me in their ranks.
– Benjamin Ehrlich

therapy isn’t enough i need bad things to happen to billionaires
– @yeeeerika

There is no change without contemplation. The whole image of Buddha under the Bodhi tree says here is an action taking place that may not appear to be a meaningful action.
– bell hooks

I’m aware that I am writing about writing I have yet to do. Maybe all this reflection and practice will lead to my first ekphrastic essay. I’ll let you know.
– Melissa Ballard

I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time.
– Charles Dickens

If you’re correct about something, but in a way that your audience can’t hear or understand, you’re not correct about it yet.
– River Kenna

One day everything will be well, that is our hope.
– Roland Barthes

Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave.
– G.K. Chesterton

Having grown up pretty much with only a wood stove to keep things warm, our kids call central heating “hot air conditioning,” which I think is charming.
– Paul J. Pastor

I don’t wait until everything is green;
When my time comes, I must bloom.
– Hugo von Hofmannsthal

two walking sticks
lean against
the trail head sign,
so many ways to fall
in love again
– Tom Clausen

A book, too, can be a star, explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.
– Madeleine L’Engle

We have each our native rhythms…but we also have ‘tradition’. Both blend in poetry.
– Tolkien, Tradition of Versification in Old English

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.
– C Pearson

A different grocery store is a different version of life
– Simon Sarris

No language is justly studied merely as an aid to other purposes. It will in fact better serve other purposes, philological or historical, when it is studied for love, for itself.
– Tolkien

Buddhism offers a skillful means for relieving feelings of outrage, by shifting the perspective from how outraged one feels to the question of who feels outraged.
– Mark Epstein

Quiet and retirement we need more than ever in these hurried days upon which we have fallen. If men would but be still enough in themselves to hear, through all the noises of the busy light, the voice that is ever talking on in the dusky chambers of their hearts!
– George MacDonald

Question your thoughts.
Question your stories.
Question your assumptions.
Question your opinions.
Question your conclusions.
Question them all into utter emptiness, stillness, and joy.
The keys to freedom are in your hands.
Use them.
– Adyashanti

It is very strange to me that people still don’t understand that a skillful writer can write something that expresses emotions they themselves have never felt.
– @Aliteraryshadow

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
– C.S. Lewis, Is Theology Poetry?

Having mastered the once cryptic rhythms of the necessary daily tasks, and once seeing to the demands of my own upkeep, I take myself to the Square, not knowing what else there is to be done …
– @tylerleeholter

All my own small perception of beauty both in majesty and simplicity is founded.
– J. R. R. Tolkien

To be old can be glorious if one has not unlearned how to begin.
– Martin Buber

Real sorrow ends neither with a bang nor a whimper. Sometimes, after a spiritual journey like Dante’s, down the centre and then, terrace by terrace, up the mountain of accepted pain, it may rise into peace – but a peace hardly less severe than itself.
– C.S. Lewis

God guard our going, and grant that we arrive!
– Tolkien, An Early Homecoming in Rhyme

I would like to spend the rest of my days in a place so silent–and working at a pace so slow–that I would be able to hear myself living.
– Elizabeth Gilbert

I do this I do that
by Alyssandra Tobin

I eat meatless Korean bbq dumplings & contemplate old Hollywood. My stomach gurgles & whines. I consider the way I fall in love too fast – a few kind words & I’m a dog let in from the cold. Oh, a warm house! Oh, a fresh bone! Grow me slick and wet. Keep me tied up in your heart’s basement. I make out with a boy six years younger & honestly?? It was like driving down the longest road in Montana with all the animals out waving hello. I wanna nuzzle up. I wanna be pet like that good dog. Rub my ears. Tickle my belly. Put a collar ’round my neck. I love beauty & I love the freckle under his left eye. Take me to the smoking bar he said & okay I did. Old gods of the chili garlic sauce, let this stupid lust last. Give me what I want even if it’s not what I need. His hand warm in my jeans. His mouth sweet against mine. His tongue on my neck, a good dog lapping dirty water.

No one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job–where the machine seems to run on much as usual–I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much.
– C.S. Lewis

without debt
by Geoffrey Aitken

no hint
of insanity

in my childhood
teens
late youth

until girls
asked questions
of me

my strength
tested

on dance floors
in restaurants

clubs
theatres

saying
take me home

while answers
still search
for anchor points.

even my Psychiatrist is puzzled

To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
– George Orwell

It cannot be denied that too often the weight of the Christian movement has been on the side of the strong and the powerful and against the weak and oppressed—this, despite the gospel.
– Howard Thurman

Beware of people who know what’s going to happen, because they don’t.
– Rebecca Solnit

It’s so freeing, it’s beautiful in a way,
to have a great failure.
There’s nowhere to go but up.
– David Lynch

Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one. Here’s what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.
– Bill Hicks

We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer

People remain uninformed not because knowledge is unavailable, but because they choose not to seek it. They are indifferent. Indifference to learning is one of the strangest and most foolish shortcomings.

The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.

– Stephen Fry

Since imagination forms us into our images, to perceive a person’s essence we must look into his imagination and see what fantasy is creating his reality.
– James Hillman

Beware gentle knight. There is no greater monster than reason.
– Cormac McCarthy

Doubt is more than a psychological state of indecision; it is the soul’s sojourn in the intermediary sphere between the two fields of attraction—terrestrial and celestial—from which there is no other means of escape than a pure and simple act of faith…

…issuing from the soul itself without heaven and earth taking any part in it. It is therefore a matter of an act of the free personality in the face of complete silence from heaven and earth.

– Valentin Tomberg

But I shall keep it sweet
By some strange art;
Wild honey I shall eat
When I eat my heart.

– Elinor Wylie, Valentine

LOVERS

They come to the strange city where all signs are in a language they’ve failed to learn. Because they’re in love, however, cars stop for them when they step into danger. Waiters bring them appetizers in seven different languages, which they sample without utensils, then suck each other’s fingers clean. The waiters rush home to make love to their wives. The chambermaid in their hotel has been dreaming them back, has left mints and extra towels. They can feel that strange tug. But they’ve learned their urgencies are sweeter the more they’re delayed. It is April. They buy identical blue berets, and stroll by the river where at dusk even people who dislike each other walk arm in arm. Among them they feel disguised, though it’s obvious to everyone that they come from a country that exists for only moments at a time.

– Stephen Dunn

One cannot avoid the shadow unless one remains neurotic, and as long as one is neurotic one has omitted the shadow. The shadow is the block which separates us most effectively from the divine voice.
– CG Jung

The comfort of the rich depends on an abundant supply of the poor.
– Voltaire

As the oligarchy is conspicuously exposed, Americans will see as clearly as we did at the end of the first Gilded Age that we have no option but to take back power.

Only then can we continue the essential work of America.

– Robert Reich

The truth is, you don’t struggle with depression, you struggle with the reality we live in.
– Keanu Reeves

Set the egg before you,
The God in the beginning.

And behold it.

And incubate it
With the magical warmth
Of your gaze.

– Carl Jung, Liber Novus (The Red Book)

We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value.
– Dr. Maya Angelou

Since the empathic abilities through which we form relationships, alliances, and functional groups are at the heart of cooperative coexistence, you can feel how much you want to open and learn about and trust another. Inwardly “kenning” one another in this way often recognizes sympathies or differences in each shared experience. Such empathic rhythm entrainment is how people, herd animals, birds, and fish can work and “dance” together through the standing resonances of shared fields of value-direction. When you’re “in touch” with someone, you might think or feel in similar ways, without thinking about how you’re doing it, because you’re feeling how. Which is why ignoring your empathic abilities makes it much harder to communicate and develop alliances. With less empathic resonance, things fall apart, as many modern political systems demonstrate.

The domineering traumas of modern human experience have weakened our natural ability to feel-with others. But freely communicated processes of cooperation are still as important for humans as for the cells in our bodies. Though forceful drag-the-donkey methods might be needed in a crisis, it becomes exhausting as a regular go-to option. Clear-cut causes and effects may look simple and appealing on paper, but whether people are constructing a house, exploring a new environment, training a horse, running a business, going on a family outing, or participating in any shared activity, the two-way-communicative-circuits-of-unpredictably-felt-influence-and-adaptation are more often useful than the unilateral relations of compulsive controls. Thanks to feeling-speech.

Without feeling-speech, being alive doesn’t work very well. But when living minds interact through the resonances of feeling-speech, they identify with their relational webs. This bonding process of “cathexis,” derived from Freud’s term Libidobesetzung, refers to “occupying each other” as parts of a larger whole. Such bonding involves new shared identities, which grow not only in our brains and bodies but within the psychological fields of sympathy we create together. So the living know when they’re associating well. It’s not all fully conscious, no more than you’re conscious of every muscle moving when you’re dancing with someone.

Since the felt music of living minds in harmony does not depend on better processes of leadership but of authentic interaction, the pseudo-god of total control has become our greatest obstacle to embracing our evolutionary opportunities. As the advances of science could not be conceived in the context of medieval Christian theology, this next step cannot be accomplished through the physical sciences alone. We empathically evolve by creation-through-affiliation with the rest of the living world. As Theodore Zeldin says in An Intimate History of Humanity: “The unexpected result of new technologies of communication is that it is possible to conceive a criss-cross of networks of people who expand that relationship, who care for each other, no longer just in the neighbouring city, but anywhere in the world.”

– George Gorman

A cup of coffee and my dreams can substitute quite well for the universe and its stars, for work, love, and even beauty and glory. I need virtually no stimulants. I have opium enough in my soul.
– Fernando Pessoa

She did feel it. A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free. What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. 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. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveller may never reach the end of it.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

What a colossal pain. All those fresh and old resentments, slights–aggressions real and imagined, – are yours, yours to deal with, handle, and resolve. Or, entertain, clouding our every experience. Our poor heart wants its freedom, wants expansion and breath rather than contraction and hardness of heart. Give it up. Give in. Give out.
– Alan Bowers

Look back at me
from his death, from the feminine side, he asks me
to touch him on his throat, his breastbone,
to touch the spots that have the life in them. His voice
is closer to me than I am to myself.
Unknowable, beginning in joy, his voice
is closer to me than I am to myself.
– James Wright, in Memory, Jean Valentine

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)

– E.E. Cummings

Lateral Thinking       

Love comes sideways
like lightning and laughter,
music and mayhem,
midnights and moons.

Sweet medicine weaves it,
death can’t deceive it.
Whimsy relieves it
with geysers and golems.

Old porcupiners
know why to pucker
into love slowly
for all of its truths.

Like sharks and shanachies
coming to dinner,
love throws away chitchat.
Makes you the food.

– George Gorman

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done

has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,

Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums

but you know they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry.

– Marge Piercy

We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don’t have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgment of the rest of the earth’s beings.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer

There is one masterpiece, the hexagonal cell, that touches perfection. No living creature, not even human, has achieved, in the centre of one’s sphere, what the bee has achieved on her own: and if intelligence from another world were to descend and ask of the earth the most perfect creation, I would offer the humble comb of honey.
– Maurice Maeterlinck

Playing music is not about competing..it’s about rescuing each other.
– Bill Frisell

Ideas are the number one best thing going… Ideas come to us, we don’t really create an idea, we just catch them, like fish. No chef ever takes credit for making the fish, it’s just preparing the fish. So you get an idea and it is like a seed…and in your mind the idea is seen and felt and it explodes, like it’s got electricity and light connected to it, and it has all the images and the feeling. And it’s like in an instant you know the idea… Then the thing is translating that to some medium. It could be a film idea, or a painting idea, or a furniture idea. It doesn’t matter. It wants to be something. It’s a seed for something. So the whole thing is translating that idea to a medium… And in the case of film…it takes a long time, and you always need to go back and stay true to that idea. Keep checking that idea. And what you realize is the idea is more than you realize. And if you’re true to it, when the work is finished and some years go by, you can get even more out of it if you’ve been true to the idea in the first place.
– David Lynch

If I accept the fact that a god is absolute and beyond all human experiences, he leaves me cold. I do not affect him, nor does he affect me. But if I know that a god is a powerful impulse in my soul, at once I must concern myself with him, for then he can become important.
– C.G. Jung

Distance is the acid test for love. La Rochefoucauld: “Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.” Time and distance only ever take away everything superfluous while deepening everything real.
– @oldbooksguy

I touch nothing
but the heart of things.
I hold the thread.
– André Breton

Spacetime tells matter how to move;
matter tells spacetime how to curve.
– John Archibald Wheeler

…only the rarest good fortune brings together the man and woman who are really as it were ‘destined’ for one another, and capable of a very great and splendid love. The idea still dazzles us, catches us by the throat…
– J.R.R. Tolkien

Literary dilettantes can be recognized by their desire to connect everything. Their products hook sentences together with logical connectives even though the logical relationship asserted by those connectives does not hold. To the person who cannot truly conceive anything as a unit, anything that suggests disintegration or discontinuity is unbearable; only a person who can grasp totality can under- stand caesuras. But the dash provides instruction in them. In the dash, thought becomes aware of its fragmentary character. It is no accident that in the era of the progressive degeneration of language, this mark of punctuation is neglected precisely insofar as it fulfills its function: when it separates things that feign a connection. All the dash claims to do now is to prepare us in a foolish way for surprises that by that very token are no longer surprising.

The serious dash: its unsurpassed master in nineteenth-century German literature was Theodor Storm. Rarely have punctuation marks been so deeply allied with content as the dashes in his novellas, mute lines into the past, wrinkles on the brow of his text. With them the narrator’s voice falls into an uneasy silence: the span of time they insert between two sentences is that of a burdensome heritage; set bald and naked between the events they draw together, they have something of the fatefulness of the natural context and something of a prudish hesitancy to make reference to it. So discreetly does myth conceal itself in the nineteenth century, it seeks refuge in typography.

– Adorno

The calmness of your nervous system and the growth of your joy are the clearest signs that you are standing next to a true friend.
– Yung Pueblo

In all institutions from which the cold wind of open criticism is excluded, an innocent corruption begins to grow like a mushroom – for example, in senates and learned societies.
– Nietzsche

is everywhere
beginningless
a Magic of
green solitude

– E. E. Cummings

The future, the worry, the regret, the anxiety – these are all mental events that do not have to be part of the difficulty of life; these can be transcended here and now.
– Eckhart Tolle

Calcine your crucible under the fires of the One Love.
– Stanislas de Guaïta

If you want to make the wrong decision, ask everyone.
– @naval

People who are deluged by information become incapable of making decisions. An excess of information and parameters results in total paralysis of the process of decision.
– Jacques Ellul

Those who actively choose to grow and those who don’t, live on two very different timelines. But only those who choose growth, know that.
– Nika Solé

When I say first time, that implies / there will be a second, a fourth, a ninety-ninth.
– Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Oh! You can be energy-literate without actually being energy-competent.
– River Kenna

If the truth is too dark altogether, then we turn to a fiction, not to evade the truth entirely, but to pay some final tribute to the courage of our broken idealism.
– Harold Bloom

By bringing the world together, social media is tearing it apart.
– @naval

Good Buddhists, may you practice long enough to incur the disapproval of the voice hearers.
– Vimalakirti Sutra

If enlightenment is what you seek, then seek compassion.
– Anthony William

The less scheduled you are, the more creative you’re going to be.
– @naval

My love for you is a monolith of try.

– TC Tolbert

[Grace] is unearned love—the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It’s the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you.
– Anne Lamott

I write you many letters with pens which are not seen. Do you receive them?
– Emily Dickinson

Be kinder to yourself. And then let your kindness flood the world.
– Pema Chodron

The problem is not that there is something wrong with you. The problem is that you live in a very average world when you are anything but average.
– Nika Solé

You’re dying and being reborn at every moment. It’s up to you whether to forget or remember that.
– @naval

Send love from your heart to every person you meet or even think of today and see what kind of Valentine’s Day you have.
– Marianne Williamson

To me, the mind should be a servant and a tool, not a master. My monkey mind should not control and drive me 24/7.
– @naval

Love is a tremendous caring that arises in the wake of transcending the personal self.
– Adyashanti

Startups don’t die when they run out of cash, they die when the founders run out of energy.
– @naval

Dostoyevsky’s terrible hell is so harmless compared with the one in which we find ourselves today that we only feel a cold shiver running down our spines when we think of it.
– Thomas Bernhard

And that was the moment I realized: when the world felt dark and scary, love could whisk you off to go dancing; laughter could take some of the pain away; beauty could punch holes in your fear. I decided then that my life would be full of all three.
– Emily Henry

Sometimes, when I have felt most alone, I have imagined that I recognize people everywhere I look. In the end, though, they all turn out to be strangers.
– Benjamin Ehrlich

The chemistry of mind is different from the chemistry of love. The mind is careful, suspicious, he advances little by little. He advises “Be careful, protect yourself” Whereas love says “Let yourself, go!”
– Shams of Tabrizi

Why don’t typewriters make little hearts?????
– Anne Sexton, February 14, 1965

Intellect is the chief distractor of the mind.
– John Gardner

Keep your heart in a safe place. It is too delicate. Events and small things make strong impressions on it. And you cannot find a better place than the Divine to keep your heart safe. Make the Divine your Valentine.
– Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Love poems must be bounced back off a moon.
– Robert Graves

So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You’d better rearrange your beliefs, then.

Because you certainly can’t rearrange the universe.

– Isaac Asimov

Farewell sweet earth and northern sky,
for ever blest, since here did lie,
and here with lissom limbs did run,
beneath the moon, beneath the sun,
Lúthien Tinúviel
more fair than mortal tongue can tell.

– Beren (Tolkien, The Lay of Leithian)

Though all to ruin fell the world,
and were dissolved and backward hurled
unmade into the old abyss,
yet were its making good, for this –
the dawn, the dusk, the earth, the sea –
that Lúthien on a time should be!
– Tolkien

Propagandists in the classroom are a luxury that the poor can afford least of all. While a mastery of mathematics and English can be a ticket out of poverty, a highly cultivated sense of grievance and resentment is not.
– Thomas Sowell

The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality.
– C.S. Lewis

Poets are the unacknowledged fact-checkers of the world.
– @AliceFromQueens

Life doesn’t come to us as a complete story. It comes in pieces, or fragments. These fragments might seem disconnected. But many of the best personal essays emerge from seemingly unrelated pieces of our lives.
– Katie Rose Pryal

Only in dreams, in poetry, in play
do we sometimes arrive at what we were
before we were this thing that,
who knows, we are.

– Julio Cortázar

I have a lover and the world is fair,
And night departs the sun;
I see her eyes a-mist with love,
And every fight is won.

– Tolkien

The Buddha once said that those who truly love themselves will never hurt others. He said that if we were to wander through the whole world, we wouldn’t find anyone dearer to us than ourselves.
– Vanessa Zuisei Goddard

In the history of literature there has been only one change: the passage from orality to writing.
– Ismail Kadare

complex world
disturbing my simple
cup of coffee
– Andy Perrin

Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.
– Charlotte Wood

And isn’t love itself a type

of rhyme?

– Maggie Millner

Some seek the seeds of flame
Hidden in veins of flint.
Some crash through the undergrowth, point
To new rivers. But the same
Passions do not seize Aeneas.
He climbs where Apollo is.
And the secret parts
Of Sibyl, in a dread cave,
Open, having the future.
– Virgil

all-day rain
perhaps I am
a robot

– Julie Schwerin

all day rain
my to-do list
dissolves

– Joyce Budenberg

It is a wild freedom, the thought that how you act is who you are.
– Beejay Silcox

And I watch my words
from a long way off.
They are more
yours than mine.
– Pablo Neruda

When I look through the mind, I see numberless people. When I look beyond the mind, I see the witness. Beyond the witness there is the infinite intensity of emptiness and silence.
– Nisargadatta

Like This by Mewling Jalaluddin Rumi
Translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne

If anyone asks you
how the perfect satisfaction
of all our sexual wanting
will look, lift your face
and say,

Like this.

When someone mentions the gracefulness
of the night sky, climb up on the roof
and dance and say,

Like this.

If anyone wants to know what “spirit” is,
or what “God’s fragrance” means,
lean your head toward him or her.
Keep your face there close.

Like this.

When someone quotes the old poetic image
about clouds gradually uncovering the moon,
slowly loosen knot by knot the strings
of your robe.

Like this.

If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead,
don’t try to explain the miracle.
Kiss me on the lips.

Like this.

When someone asks what it means
to “die for love,

Point here.

If someone asks how tall I am, frown
and measure with your fingers the space
between the creases on your forehead.

This tall.

The soul sometimes leaves the body, then returns.
When someone doesn’t believe that,
walk back into my house.

Like this.

When lovers moan,
they’re telling our story.

Like this.

I am a sky where spirits live.
Stare into this deepening blue,
while the breeze says a secret.

Like this.

When someone asks what there is to do,
light the candle in his hand.

Like this.

How did Joseph’s scent come to Jacob?

Huuuuu.

How did Jacob’s sight return?

Huuuu.

A little wind cleans the eyes.

Like this.

When Shams comes back from Tabriz,
he’ll put just his head around the edge
of the door to surprise us

Like this.

(Huuuuu means breath out)

Be patient where you sit in the dark.
The dawn is coming.
– Rumi

Breaking through a major delusion is actually a testament to your growth – it means you’ve reached and leapt beyond the perceived edge of the delusion you once held.
– @buridansridge

As a general rule, you would be right to think you’ve wasted your life, if your only claim was: “I belonged to this or that school.”
– Gilles Deleuze

Neoliberalism replaces the citizen with the consumer — pushing people out of political life and into the marketplace.
– Niklas Olsen

We are like books, most of us, with pages that have never been turned. The words we long to speak remain unsaid, trapped within us, written in a language we’ve forgotten how to read. And so, we go through life, skimming the surface of our own existence, never daring to dive too deeply for fear of what we might find. But in those unopened pages, there lies a story of who we are, who we were meant to be, and the quiet tragedy of a life half-lived.
– Jostein Gaarder

There is no alternative to persevering, and that does not require you to feel good. You can keep walking whether it’s sunny or raining. Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.
– Rebecca Solnit

birds are pairing up
bob marley sings, is this love
spring is in our eyes
– @haiku366

It was a funny thing, forgiveness. You could spend years being angry with someone and then realize you no longer felt the same, that your usual mode of thinking had slipped away when you weren’t noticing.
– Lisa Ko

That’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.
– Khaled Hosseini

We’re walking towards the edge of the page with our backs to the story.
– S.A. Greene

He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.
– Franz Kafka

Two souls are sometimes created together and in love before they’re even born.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

Whatever good is said about us never teaches us anything new.
– François de La Rochefoucauld

As Jung says: Consciousness is continually widened through the confrontation with previously unconscious contents, or—to be more accurate—could be widened if it took the trouble to integrate them.
– Robin Robertson

I hiked up a path and into the woods, thinking about what I should be thinking about and almost having a real feeling — a feeling like, this is really sad, this is a sad place to be, a sad part of my life, maybe just a sad life. The woods were not particularly beautiful. I was not impressed by the trees.
– Catherine Lacey

Magic is deeply embedded in the human psyche. More than that, it is a projection of the human psyche. Though it has, effectively, been banished from the land, still it surfaces in thought and language: in dreams, in madness, in superstition and ritual. . .
– Neel Burton

You kept calm in the company of humans who peered inside you to find a spirit imbued with imagery of gods.
– Mai Der Vang

Reading is more efficient when at rest. Audio is more efficient when in motion.
– Naval Ravikant

We’re all just
co-regulating each other
home.
– Cathy Malchiodi, PhD
with respect to Ram Dass

My soul is a hidden orchestra. I do not know what instruments, what violins and harps, drums and tambours, sound and clash inside me. I know my self only as a symphony.
– Fernando Pesso

Knot by knot I untie myself from the past
And let it rise away from me like a balloon.
What a small thing it becomes. What a bright
tweak at the vanishing point, blue on blue.
– Charles Wright

An empty man is full of himself.
– Edward Abbey

Rinsing the Eye

There is a thin glass
Between me and everything I see.
The glass is pain.
How to slide it away,
Unblur my vision?

“We must rinse the eye,”
My old friend, the poet,
Used to say.
But that was in Belgium
Many years ago.

Raymond is dead
And I am in exile,
Old and ill.

My eye turns inward
To rest on three poplars
And a lost garden.
The delphinium is very blue.
The columbine, purple and white,
Trembles in the breeze
And there are tall yellow daisies.

– May Sarton

Tears, sorrow, and disappointment are bitter, but wisdom is the comforter in all psychic suffering.
– CG Jung

To make a poem is taking possession of a nuptial celebration beyond anything found in this life, very attached to it, and yet in proximity to the urns of death.
– René Char (translated by Mary Ann Caws & Nancy Kline)

Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our anti-materialist, otherworldly, New Age, spiritual types. But if the material world is merely illusion, an honest guru should be as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu, and seaweed slime.
– Edward Abbey

As a people we have become obsessed with Health. There is something fundamentally, radically unhealthy about all this. We do not seem to be seeking more exuberance in living as much as staving off failure, putting off dying. We have lost all confidence in the human body.
– Lewis Thomas

To live among seconds, other world
so near self
– Henri Michaux (translated by Lynn Hoggard)

“Dawn is not far off,” said Gamling, who had now climbed up beside him. “But dawn will not help us, I fear.”

“Yet dawn is ever the hope of men,” said Aragorn.

– Tolkien, The Two Towers

And so we watch the sun come up
from the edge of the green sea
And she listens like her heads on fire
cause she wants to believe in me
– The Cure

The people you most want to impress can read your intentions.
– @naval

Forgiveness, truth, atonement, all
Our love at once—till we could dare
At last to turn our heads and see
The poor ghost of Eurydice
Still sitting in her silver chair,
Alone in Hades’ empty hall.
– Edwin Muir

You get rewarded for unique knowledge, not for effort.

Effort is required to create unique knowledge.

– @naval

What about the body: something is always pulling at it
—gravity, responsibility, the life after this one.
– Forrest Hamer

The quietening of the superficial layers of consciousness takes place during sleep, and so they are capable of receiving the intimations of the deeper layers. But this is only a partial comprehension of the whole problem.
– Krishnamurti

Culture and civilization are tested by vital consciousness. Are we more vitally conscious than an Egyptian 3000 years B.C. was? Are we? Probably we are less. Our conscious range is wide, but shallow as a sheet of paper. We have no depth to our consciousness.
– D.H. Lawrence

Learning is cheap, education is expensive.
– @naval

A sustained engagement with the world, a sense of how it was and how it ought to be, and what has been lost, is imperative to good writing – I just don’t know how you can be a serious writer without it.
– Pankaj Mishra

It is when man proclaims his own freedom that he is most firmly riveted to his beloved chains.
– Jacques Ellul

Auden was right when he wrote, ‘I know nothing, except what everyone knows—if there when Grace dances, I should dance.’
– Anne Lamott

A computer, I am told, offers a kind of help that you can’t get from other humans; a computer will help you to write faster, easier, and more. … Do I, then, want to write faster, easier, and more? No. My standards are not speed, ease, and quantity.
– Jeffrey Bilbro

language must be revalued, at whatever price, it must be equipped anew so as to be able to express in a plausible and fine way the unique and extraordinary, even if not everyone will go along with it at first.
– Han Urs von Balthasar

A complex is cluster of energy in the unconscious, charged by historic events, reinforced through repetition, embodying a fragment of our personality, and generating a programmed response and an implicit set of expectations.
– James Hollis

We do not merely study the past: we inherit it, and inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship. Things fought for and died for should not be idly squandered. For they are the property of others, who are not yet born.
– Roger Scruton

My elders recognized my shape.
Thereafter there was no escape
For parents do the best they can
To capture us and make us Man.
So I became subjective too
And what was hopeful now is true.

As my especial mode of thought
Was finding where I had not sought,
When Love at last possessed my mind
It was exactly of that kind.
There was no exercise of will;
It came, I saw it and stood still.
It was a blaze and I was dark.
The grief that scorched me left the mark.

– C. H. Sisson

What helps feed or nourish the higher type of man must be almost poisonous to a very different and lesser type.
– Nietzsche

My brain is broken,

and it was stuck on something

I thought was love.

– Sierra DeMulder

each morning i pull myself
out of despair
from a night of coals and a tongue
blistered with smiling
the step past the mother bed
is a high step
the walk through the widow’s door
is a long walk
and who are these voices calling
from every mirrored thing
say it coward say it
– Lucille Clifton

To progress in life you must give up the things you do not like. Give up doing the things that you do not like to do. You must find the things that you do like. The things that are acceptable to your mind.
– Agnes Martin

There is an intense relationship between proximate objects, a much weaker one between objects further away, and as for the really distant ones there is none at all, and that is the nature of God.
– László Krasznahorkai

When I feel I don’t love anything
I try to get to the ocean.
When I think I have a bad molar
I try to get to the ocean.
When I fail to use the subjunctive
I try to get to the ocean.
Sometimes I succeed.
– Bob Hicok

Keep your head clear and know how to suffer like a man.
– Hemingway

Why Open?

Because what is a blossom
anyway
but a fist saying
I can’t
do this
anymore

– Jospeh Fasano

Hence I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.
– Malcolm X

I was seeing that that was hell: the cruel acceptance of pain, the solemn lack of pity for one’s own destiny, loving the ritual of life more than one’s own self — that was hell, where the one eating the other’s living face was indulging in the joy of pain.
– Clarice Lispector

If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.
– Slavoj Žižek

It is an ancient view that truth, goodness, and beauty cannot, in the end, conflict. Maybe the degeneration of beauty into kitsch comes precisely from the postmodern loss of truthfulness, and with it the loss of moral direction.
– Roger Scruton

Whatever the problem, be part of the solution. Don’t just sit around raising questions and pointing out obstacles.
– Tina Fey

We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.
– Jonathan Gottschall

Love is not a concept. And because you have no love, you live in concepts.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti

The intelligence maintains serenity by cutting itself off from the body, the mind remains undiminished.
– Marcus Aurelius

It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.
– Charles Darwin

You cannot reason someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into.
– Jonathan Swift

A generation of priestesses will emerge capable of understanding the language of the Soul.
– Carl Jung

The female doesn’t want a rich man, or a handsome man, or even a poet. She wants a man who understands her eyes if she gets sad, and points to his chest and says, ‘Here is your home country.’
– Nizar Qabbani

The rain will stop, the night will end, the hurt will fade. Hope is never so lost that it can’t be found.
– Ernest Hemingway

Whisky is bottled poetry.
– Robert Louis Stevenson

The direction of our lives is connected to what we say.
– Roger Lee

We are a piece in a Divine puzzle. We may look separate, we may act separate, and most of us will go to our graves believing that we are separate, but our individuality is nothing but an illusion.
– Debbie Ford

There are very few people who promote self mastery, and even less actually doing it. That’s why there’s so much hypocrisy, foolery, and flip-flopping in every sphere of the human reality. Most people don’t even know who they are.
– Nika Solé

Individuals rarely admit mistakes. Groups never do.
– @naval

But within the sacred court, hidden high upon the mountain,
Wandering in the castle gardens lovely folk enough there be,
Breathing in another air, drinking of a purer fountain,
And among that folk, beloved, there’s a place for you and me.
– C.S. Lewis

as far as I’m concerned a person isn’t radical politically unless they’re anti-capitalist (not saying that’s all they have to be, but that if they aren’t that, they’re not radical)
– wendy trevino

…and I had a lot of ideas about rejection, as I’d been rejected by a few people myself. I had rejected others, but I didn’t think about that as much. It didn’t hold the same fascination.
– Amina Cain

Thou wilt never make from others the One that thou seekest, except there first be made one thing of thyself.
– Gerhard Dorn

All forms in life are imperfect, but the function of art is to see the radiance through the imperfection.
– Joseph Campbell

When thinking leads to the unthinkable, it is time to return to simple life. What thinking cannot solve, life solves, and what action never decides is reserved for thinking.
– CG Jung

Every transformation demands as its precondition “the ending of a world” — the collapse of an old philosophy of life.
– C.G. Jung

We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American eagle in order to feather their own nests.
– FDR

None of the modern machines, none of the modern paraphernalia…have any power except over the people who choose to use them.
– G.K. Chesterton

Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own.
– Naomi Shibab Nye

Louis Armstrong was born poor, died rich and never hurt anybody along the way.
– Duke Ellington

For you, I was a chapter—a good chapter maybe, or even your favorite chapter, but, still, just a chapter—and for me, you were the book.
– Tom McNeal

Poetry can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
– Adrienne Rich

We live in a world where the funeral matters more than the dead, the wedding more than love and the physical rather than the intellect. We live in the container culture, which despises the content.
– Eduardo Galeano

It is a curious fact that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves seriously.
– Oscar Wilde

For myself I am too heavy,
And for you too light.
– Franz Kafka

To create one’s own world takes courage.
– Georgia O’Keeffe

WRITING
often it is the only
thing
between you and
impossibility.
no drink,
no woman’s love,
no wealth
can
match it.
nothing can save
you
except
writing.
it keeps the walls
from
failing.
the hordes from
closing in.
it blasts the
darkness.
writing is the
ultimate
psychiatrist,
the kindliest
god of all the
gods.
writing stalks
death.
it knows no
quit.
and writing
laughs
at itself,
at pain.
it is the last
expectation,
the last
explanation.
that’s
what it
is.
– Charles Bukowski

I just can’t stand the meanness. History is freaking littered with the pain it creates…over and over and over. I can’t stand how people talk to others. I cant stand that people actually think it is funny when others are hurting. I can’t stand the violent narratives that continue to lead humans down the paths of war and conflict and violating one another in ways that should be unimaginable…but aren’t. I wish the worldview defined by the myth of scarcity would die and instead we would see clearly the abundance we are surrounded by. Yeah, I am a dreamer, but I am not the only one.

Regardless, I will continue to live like I believe it is available and could grow and we could truly create a more beautiful more generous more compassionate more welcoming world.

We are operating at such a low level of consciousness. We need to change.

– Kent Burgess

We forgot we’re here to collaborate with each other.
– Marianne Williamson

To find a new world, maybe you have to have lost one. Maybe you have to be lost. The dance of renewal, the dance that made world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

Those who seek for pearls must be willing to dive to the depths time and time again. Once in the depths things appear differently, and each descent requires an inner adjustment in order to see what is otherwise hidden from view. People expect beautiful things to come in an attractive wrapper, but the soul has it another way. The hidden beauty works its way from inside out and must be sensed within before it can be displayed for all to see.
– Michael Meade

In many conversations I realize that the thing that’s being said is really not the point at all.
– Claudia Rankine

Signs of a life that we cannot explain are everywhere.
– Maurice Maeterlinck

The more naps you take, the more awakenings you experience.
– Sarah Ban Breathnach

The revolution which was begun two thousand years ago by a disreputable Hebrew criminal may now have to be begun again by people equally disreputable and equally improbable.
– James Baldwin

in the geometry
of knowing
we have no new thing
to tell
only the same old
almanac
january
love one another
february
whatever you sow
you will reap

– Lucille Clifton

the angel sunbathing on my roof
his morning told me
something interesting

she said “put children in charge of
all of your churches

and watch how playful
God becomes”

– John Roedel

death doesn’t stand still
it pulses & storms & diffuses through the walls until
everything is soaked
it promises to free that slow lightning on rotation on your radio
– Phil Saint Denis Sanchez

Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it.
– Rollo May

Working on a theory of how all western philosophy is deeply Christ-like,, sacrificing themselves for the world,,

Showing us all what stupid nonsense comes out when you try to reason about the world without first experiencing it at subtler depth

– River Kenna

resting at a temple,
revealing my true self
moon gazing

– Basho

We in our Eden knew the secret guardian
In sacred waters that no frost could harden,
And in the mighty mornings of the earth;
Hell in a horn of sulphur and the cloven myth,
All heaven in the midnight of the sun,
A serpent fiddled in the shaping-time.

– Dylan Thomas

I always feel very suspicious when somebody assures me that he is very normal–too many normal people are just compensated madmen.
– CG Jung

The spiritual girlies are now entering the era of the dark feminine. You have been warned.
– Nika Solé

When it comes to revolutionaries,
trust only the sad ones. The
enthusiastic ones are the oppressors
of tomorrow.
– William T. Vollmann

There is nothing like being left alone again, to walk peacefully with oneself in the woods. To boil one’s coffee and fill one’s pipe, and to think idly and slowly as one does it.
– Knut Hamsun

fossil hunting
my life
of the spirit

– John Martone

Suffering is how life tells you that you are resisting or misperceiving what is real and true.
– Adyashanti

The everyday world drags us along, like a slave behind a conquer’s chariot. One must learn to sever the rope, to allow the mind to stand still, to become aware of its affinity with mountains and stones.
– Colin Wilson

Know within your heart that your life is tailor-made for awakening.
– Mooji

Either have children or become a saint, because eventually, you have to find something you love more than you love yourself.
– @naval

You think it will never happen to you, that
it cannot happen to you, that you are the
only person in the world to whom none of
these things will ever happen, and then, one
by one, they all begin to happen to you, in
the same way they happen to everyone else.
– Paul Auster, Winter Journal

The overeducated are worse off than the undereducated, having traded common sense for the illusion of knowledge.
– @naval

Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.
– Ram Dass

The new is blooming through the cracks of the old. A new world is here.
– Nika Solé

To procrastinate is to be entitled. It is arrogant. It assumes there will be a later. It assumes you’ll have the discipline to get to it later (despite not having the discipline now).
– @RyanHoliday

Don’t allow other people to set your agenda, timeline, finish line, or ceiling.

Pursue your purpose from the inside out.

– Dr. Thema

Attaining a flexible, nonideological, nonfixated state of mind—what Zen practitioners might call ‘beginner’s mind’—is the whole point of meditation practice.
– Rita Gross

It’s the ones that aren’t talking about what everyone else is talking about. That aren’t doing what everyone else is doing. That aren’t concerned with the ways of the world. These are the ones who are quietly building the new.
– Nika Solé

Your goal in life is to find out the people who need you the most, to find out the business that needs you the most, to find the project and the art that needs you the most. There is something out there just for you.
– @naval

Taking space can be difficult in todays society. Everyone expects you to fill every void and every second of every day. We don’t know how to have space anymore. Something magical happens when you begin a practice of creating space….you create room for “the new” to find you. Maybe it takes a week. Maybe it takes a year. Chances are, it never would have found you if you hadn’t set intentional space for it to make its way to you. Don’t listen to the busy bodies. Their anxiety and guilt for pausing is not your problem. Space is where the creative spirit finds you. Space allows opportunities to come through. Space is important.
– Rebekah Todd

The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment…to put things down without deliberation…without worrying about their style…without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote, wrote, wrote… By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught.
– Walt Whitman

Every true word uttered by the tongue
is poetry

Every ear of corn in the ploughed land
is poetry

One who has no ear for poetry
Shall hear only the moaning of the storm

One who has no ear for poetry
Shall lose the inheritance of the horizons…

– A.Z.M. Obaidullah Khan

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you think. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, difficult as it is… 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

Abundance
by Amy Schmidt

in memory of Mary Oliver

It’s impossible to be lonely
when you’re zesting an orange.
Scrape the soft rind once
and the whole room
fills with fruit.
Look around: you have
more than enough.
Always have.
You just didn’t notice
until now.

The work of social justice
is about love: loving
humanity enough to work
for its transformation.
– Marian Wright Edelman

I advise geniuses and intellectuals to address people according to their level of understanding and to carefully conceal anything beyond that. Geniuses should not expect the common people to acknowledge the intellectual efforts they have exerted or the mental achievements they have attained. They must also struggle against their own inclinations to avoid being drawn down to the level of the masses. For when they are forced to communicate with them, they cannot do so without becoming like them. The emotions and faculties of the common people are so low that they infect anyone who comes close to them or associates with them, even for a moment.
– Arthur Schopenhauer

Going to bed, thinking about how you fight back, how you say no to all this. Maybe start by saying

– this I know to be true

Every human life on this planet is worth the same. Rich poor black white sick young old female male gender neutral

Every precious life is worth the same

– Stuart Murdoch, Musician

When it comes to medicine and nutrition, subtract before you add.
– @naval

People who live far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles can’t fathom.
– @naval

Renunciation is always in the mind, not in going to forests or solitary places or giving up one’s duties. The main thing is to see that the mind does not turn outward but inward.
– Ramana Maharshi

The gut isn’t just your second brain; it’s the first place disease starts.
– Dr. Eric Berg

History is the dark magician inside us, tearing at our liver.
– Deborah Levy

We either die of the past or we become an artist.
– Deborah Levy

Welcome to your darkness stranger
for light you have to wait
for your painters brush
relax.
– T.A. Akter

The unchosen is always
present in the work.
– Rick Rubin

And if the wildness inside of you dies, I think you’re finished. (It’s not badness. Not a wildness where you have to break laws. It’s just that you’re not dominated and overwhelmed by who you sociologically are.)
– John Moriarty

Paris is the great reading room of a library crossed by the Seine.
– Walter Benjamin

The philosopher must possess just as much aesthetic power as the poet. The people without aesthetic sense are our philosophers of the letter. The philosophy of the spirit is an aesthetic philosophy.
– Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin

Asking you to give me equal rights implies that they are yours to give. Instead, I must demand that you stop trying to deny me the rights all people deserve.
– Elizabeth Peratrovich

Finding our voice isn’t only about our solo existence, it’s about how we find our way through the social and political territories we have to live within. I’m thinking about this a lot these days as the United States is devolving quickly into an authoritarian regime where we are being told what words we can use and what words we can’t.
– Maia Duerr

You can refuse a shadow projection and stop the endless cycle of revenge if you have your own shadow under conscious control. To be in the presence of another’s shadow and not reply is nothing short of genius.
– Robert A. Johnson

Burnout is an expression of late-stage capitalism. Burnout is not a failure of our self-care routines.
– Jennifer Mullan

Why do so many feel like they’ve fallen behind?

It’s not because of immigrants, trans people, DEI, the “deep state,” or any other bogeyman trotted out by the GOP.

It’s because big corporations and billionaires have rigged markets and siphoned off most of the economy’s gains.

– Robert Reich

Fools work for blessings not for the Way
working for blessings they say is the Way
from offerings and alms they earn endless merit
then in their minds they build hateful futures.
Working for blessings trying to end sin
next life their sins are there with their blessings
to learn how to drive all sin from your mind
within your own nature truly repent.
Once you understand Mahayana repentance
you’ll end wrongs and do right and be without sin
students of the Way who can see for themselves
join the same lineage as the enlightened.
Your teacher transmits this direct teaching
hoping your students will share the same body
if in the future you seek your true self
purifying your mind of what creates poison.
Walk the Way with vigor and don’t be a slacker
or suddenly you’ll pass this life in vain
if you come before the Mahayana’s direct teaching
press your hands together with a straightforward mind.

– The Platform Sutra, The Zen Teaching of Hui-Neng
(Translated by Red Pine)

We never truly realize ourselves. We are like two chasms – a well staring up at the sky…No one knows, because no one knows anything and the quicksands as readily swallow up those with flags as those without … And the sands cover everything, my life, my prose, my eternity. I carry with me, like a victory flag, the knowledge of my defeat.
– Fernando Pessoa

We are not lovers, not brother and sister, though we drift hand in hand through a hall thrilling and burning as thought and desire expire, and, over this dream of life, this life of sleep, we waken, dying– violet becoming blue, growing black, black–all that an iris ever prays, when it prays, to be.
– Li-Young Lee

The beauty of visible life in the inorganic world is noticeable first of all in flowing water in its various forms-streams, mountain-rivers, waterfalls. The aesthetic significance of this living movement is enhanced by its boundlessness, which seems as it were to express the insatiable longing of finite beings separate from the absolute all-inclusive unity. And the boundless sea itself acquires a new beauty in its stormy motion as the symbol of rebellious life, of the gigantic struggle of elementary forces which cannot break the universal interconnectedness of the cosmos or destroy its unity, and only fill it with movement, brilliance and thunder.
– Vladimir Solovyov

I marvel at the capacity
Of memory
Which, in some deep pocket
Of my mind, preserves you whole—
As wind is wind, as the lion-taming
Sun is sun, you are, you stay:
Nothing is lost, nothing has blown away.

– Barbara Howe

when i think of us i think of the lakewater
near longtown, what might not technically
constitute a lake but i prefer that word for
the open mouth of its vowel, how it called
us to its throat & held us there, in the sun,
the high points of our faces slick with light
& its arc around our shoulders, the soft
gathering of flesh around our knees,
the lone chair we found near the shore
where we took turns posing, jutting out
an eloquent hip, cackling in the bright language
of flowers for whom i downloaded an app
& learned their names: beautyberry, yarrow,
cornus florida, black-eyed susan, & you,
& you, my bright hibiscus, my every color

– Safia Elhillo, A Memory of Us

If, of thy mortal goods, thou art bereft,
And from thy slender store two loaves
alone to thee are left,
Sell one & from the dole,
Buy Hyacinths to feed the soul
– Muslihuddin Sadi

Dividing earth and sky
is not the right way
to think about this wholeness.
It only allows one to live
at a more precise address–
were I to be searched for
I’d be found much faster.
My distinguishing marks
are rapture and despair.

– Wislawa Szymborska

Troths
Yellow dust on a bumble
bee’s wing,
Grey lights in a woman’s
asking eyes,
Red ruins in the changing
sunset embers:
I take you and pile high
the memories.
Death will break her claws
on some I keep.

– Carl Sandburg

Man is his own most vexing problem.
– Reinhold Niebuhr

I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Can’t bring back time. Like holding water in your hand. Would you go back to then? Just beginning then. Would you?
– James Joyce

On a Train

The book I’ve been reading
rests on my knee. You sleep.

It’s beautiful out there –
fields, little lakes and winter trees
in February sunlight,
every car park a shining mosaic.

Long, radiant minutes,
your hand in my hand,
still warm, still warm.

– Wendy Cope

A Jesus without liberation
always disciples people into
apathy in the face of
injustice.
– Kevin Sweeney

I cannot proclaim starlight for it is never in the same place.
– Jack Spicer

It’s not so much staying alive, it’s staying human that’s important. What counts is that we don’t betray each other.
– George Orwell

The soul seems to interest no one. But it interests me a lot.
– Fleur Jaeggy

The Lord is American
by W.J. Lofton

The world undresses
its wounds. It wounds. This Father—
His memory, torn
clouds: forgetful weather.
God’s goodness licks
bowls bone-clean. Our fingers
twist crumbs from air.
We are hungry children
abandoned by our country
for bombs. For Rockets’ Red glare. How
could we ever be patriots?
My father is my flag.
The national anthem is
every word, every single word
my mother could not whisper—
could not say,
could not say:
her father colonized her.
Made her mother nasty with jealousy.
Could not say: she can’t stay
In this world of touching.
It maims.
It elects evil.
It is two gendered.
It kneels on Sunday.
The Lord is
American &
aims His rifle
at us, His children
once beggars
rise into guerrillas.

Park rangers
are the librarians
of the forest.
Without them
we are lost.

– Aimee Nezhukumatathil

I love humans but I need my time with the moon.
– Joseph Fasano

how many times have we all lost ourselves
in the woods and emerged as
someone worthy of a new name?

– Ollie Schminkey

Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax…
– William S. Burroughs

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

– W. H. Davies, Leisure

THE POET SPEAKS OF PRAISING

Oh say, poet, what is it that you do?
— I praise.

But what of the deadly and monstrous, 
how do you endure all this, how do you take it in?
– I praise.

But the nameless, the anonymous, 
how, despite it all, do you keep calling to them, poet?
– I praise.

Where does it come from, your claim to be true
in every guise and in each mask?
– I praise.

And that the stillness and turbulence
know you like star and storm?
– Because I praise.

– Rainer Maria Rilke

I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial, and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.
– Frederick Douglass

Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.
– C.S. Lewis

I think of myself in the oral tradition–as a troubadour, a village tale-teller, the man in the shadows of a campfire. That’s the way I’d like to be remembered–as a storyteller.
– Louis L’Amour

What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to something that already is?
– Eckhart Tolle

Any book that you pick up as a reader is a printed circuit for your own life to flow through.
– E. L. Doctorow

COMMUNITY

Science now tells us
what we have known
since the beginning:
you and I are made of light.
And if atoms can be
birthed by long-gone stars
whose signatures we still
trace in every night sky,
and if these atoms can
come together to form
something as complex
and compassionate
as a human being, then
maybe we too can
join hands, make some
new and sacred thing
that will save us all.

– James Crews

Rufus Wainwright – Going To A Town
[I’m So Tired Of You, America]

But I don’t know where I’m going
Searching for that place
It’s not inside me
I wonder where I’ll go
Don’t we always linger
‘Cause we know this ain’t had no good
I’m going to a town that has already been burnt down
I’m going to a place that has already been disgraced
I’m gonna see some folks who have already been let down
I’m so tired of America
I’m gonna make it up for all of The Sunday Times
I’m gonna make it up for all of the nursery rhymes
They never really seem to want to tell the truth
I’m so tired of you, America
Making my own way home
Ain’t gonna be alone
I’ve got a life to lead, America
I’ve got a life to lead
Tell me, do you really think you go to hell for having loved?
Tell me, enough of thinking everything that you’ve done is good
I really need to know
After soaking the body of Jesus Christ in blood
I’m so tired of America
I really need to know
I may just never see you again, or might as well
You took advantage of a world that loved you well
I’m going to a town that has already been burnt down
I’m so tired of you, America
making my own way home
Ain’t gonna be alone
I’ve got a life to lead, America
I’m making my own way home
Ain’t gonna be alone
I’ve got a life to lead, America
I’m making my own way home
Ain’t gonna be alone
I’ve got a life to lead, America

The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind. The god-side of our ancient mentality, at least in a certain period of history, usually or perhaps always spoke in verse. This means that most men at one time, throughout the day, were hearing poetry (of a sort) composed and spoken within their own minds.
– Julian Jaynes

Being stubborn, set in their ways and uninterested in being lectured to for four hours, the questioners, when they read this, will doubtless ask me: ‘well, but what solutions do you offer?’ And I, to conclude, will tell you that if you want solutions, go to the store across the street, because I have no such thing to sell you. My endeavor has been, is and will be that those who read me should think and meditate on fundamental things, and it has never been to give them ready-made answers. I have always sought to agitate, and, at most, suggest, rather than instruct. What I offer is not bread, but the yeast or ferment with which to make it.
– Miguel de Unamuno

Feminism is an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world, innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth—and in our minds, where it all begins and ends. That so much change has been made in four or five decades is amazing; that everything is not permanently, definitively, irrevocably changed is not a sign of failure. A woman goes walking down a thousand-mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that she still has nine hundred ninety-nine miles to go and will never get anywhere.
– Rebecca Solnit

Growing, ripening, aging, dying — the passing of time is predestined, inevitable.

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work… In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.

– Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age

Relearning Loveliness

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on the brow
of the flower,
and retell it in words and in touch,
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing

– Galway Kinnell

The Sunset and the Purple-Flowered Tree
by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

I talk to a screen who assures me everything is fine.

I am not broken. I am not depressed. I am simply

in touch with the material conditions of my life. It is

the end of the world, and it’s fine. People laugh

about this, self-soothing engines sputtering

through a nosedive. Not me. I’ve gone and lost my

sense of humor when I need it most. This is why I

speak smoke into a scene. I dance against language

and abandon verse halfway through, like a broken-

throated singer. I wander around the front yard,

pathless as a little ant at the tip of a curled-up

cactus. Birds flit in and out of shining branches.

A garden blooms large in my throat. Color and life

conspire against my idea of the world. I have to

laugh until I am crying, make an ocean to land

upon in this sea of flames. Here I am.

Another late-winter afternoon,

the sunset and the purple-flowered tree

trying their best to keep me alive.

What eye among the rungs and hordes
of angelkind would turn and find
my long call through the storm of time?
And if one took me in his arms
I would be nothing in that light.

– Rainer Maria Rilke, (tr. Guy Davenport)

These facts are in themselves curiosities of mediocre interest. They become valuable only in so far as they enable us to enter more fully into the consciousness of our ancestors by realizing how such a universe must have affected those who believed in it. The recipe for such realization is not the study of books. You must go out on a starry night and walk about for half an hour trying to see the sky in terms of the old cosmology. Remember that you now have an absolute Up and Down. The Earth is really the centre, really the lowest place; movement to it from whatever direction is downward movement. As a modern, you located the stars at a great distance. For distance you must now substitute that very special, and far less abstract, sort of distance which we call height; height, which speaks immediately to our muscles and nerves. The Medieval Model is vertiginous. And the fact that the height of the stars in the medieval astronomy is very small compared with their distance in the modern, will turn out not to have the kind of importance you anticipated. For thought and imagination, ten million miles and a thousand million are much the same. Both can be conceived (that is, we can do sums with both) and neither can be imagined; and the more imagination we have the better we shall know this. The really important difference is that the medieval universe, while unimaginably large, was also unambiguously finite. And one unexpected result of this is to make the smallness of Earth more vividly felt. In our universe she is small, no doubt; but so are the galaxies, so is everything—and so what? But in theirs there was an absolute standard of comparison. The furthest sphere, Dante’s maggior corpo is, quite simply and finally, the largest object in existence. The word ‘small’ as applied to Earth thus takes on a far more absolute significance. Again, because the medieval universe is finite, it has a shape, the perfect spherical shape, containing within itself an ordered variety. Hence to look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into mist, or looking about one in a trackless forest trees forever and no horizon. To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. The “space’ of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony. That is the sense in which our universe is romantic, and theirs was classical.

– C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so
cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust?
A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a
straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I
called it unjust?
– C.S. Lewis

Cordelia
by Bret van den Brink

Before she came into this world, this dove
Was fostered in the cinnamon-spun nest
The phoenix wrought, and learned the truth of love.
Wisely, some say it would have been the best
For her, had she stayed there, for in this world
There is no place for love, or truth; we see
Such things, and martyr them; our tears, quick-pearled,
Dissolve, evaporate, and cease to be,
And when the howling stops, we kill again,
Nor can the foster of the phoenix rise,
Though she should dream as with her keeper’s eyes;
Ash remains ash; then comes the wind and rain;
And we’ll forget she felt the vulture’s claws,
And we shall doubt the phoenix ever was.

This is what you get when you make a society where the one unacceptable experience is boredom.
– River Kenna

The coming to consciousness is not a discovery of some new thing; it is a long and painful return to that which has always been.
– Helen Luke

The deceptive tread
Of time, moving
Toward winter. Then
Both your meditation and this

Garden you contemplate,
Transfixed by the light,
Must lie down in a long
Sleep, mute and dark.

– Luis Cernuda, (tr. Reginald Gibbons)

WISDOM

It was a night of early spring,
The winter-sleep was scarcely broken;
Around us shadows and the wind
Listened for what was never spoken.

Though half a score of years are gone,
Spring comes as sharply now as then—
But if we had it all to do
It would be done the same again.

It was a spring that never came;
But we have lived enough to know
That what we never have, remains;
It is the things we have that go.

– Sara Teasdale

Politics is for people who have a passion
for changing life but lack a passion
for living it.
– Tom Robbins

…so long as the individual does it, the nation also does it…
– Carl Jung

What tyranny could exceed a tyranny that dictates to the human heart?
– June Jordan

Poetry is never about dominance. Poetry is powerful but it cannot ever aspire to dominate anyone. It means making a connection.
– June Jordan

Don’t write to make money, write to build relationships with like minded people that you haven’t yet met.
– @naval

I am forever monitoring myself for traces of folly, insensitivity, arrogance, false humility, cruelty, stupidity, immaturity and, guess what, I keep finding examples. Age has not made me wiser, except maybe in retrospect.
– Phillip Lopate

Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones:
Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so
That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone for ever.
I know when one is dead and when one lives;
She’s dead as earth.
– William Shakespeare, King Lear

What’s become of man’s great extent and proportion when himself shrinks himself and consumes himself to a handful of dust; what’s become of his soaring thoughts, his compassing thoughts, when himself brings himself to the ignorance, to the thoughtlessness, of the grave?
– Donne

Gatekeepers in media and academia have lost power. On the Internet, a single individual can accomplish anything.
– @naval

Light that makes some things seen, makes some things invisible.
– Sir Thomas Browne, The Garden of Cyrus

I want to know you, Unknown One, you who have reached deep into my soul, into my life like a gust of a storm, you incomprehensible yet related one! I want to know you, even serve you.
– Nietzsche, To the Unknown God

Historical brutality
by Tomaz Salamun

Translated by Brian Henry

Historical brutality,
you are a poppy.
With a black scepter, silk
wings.
I see everything: the field
of dew and castles
wedding parties.
Enchant me then, rabble,
the leaves are opening.
Drink me like wine,
say moooo.

She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
And put out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.

– Robert Graves

A tyrant institutionalizes stupidity, but he is the first servant of his own system and the first to be installed within it.
– Gilles Deleuze

I’m not going to be the most successful person on the planet, nor do I want to be. I just want to be the most successful version of myself while working the least hard possible.
– @naval

[Humankind’s] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. The is the situation of politics which fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.
– Walter Benjamin

If your mind carries a heavy burden of past, you will experience more of the same. The past perpetuates itself through lack of presence. The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future.
– Eckhart Tolle

There is no skill called “business.” Avoid business magazines and business classes.
– @naval

How reluctant later generations will be to have anything to do with the relics of an era ruled, not by living men, but by pseudo-men dominated by public opinion.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

My favorite literature is both of stunning literary quality and democratic of access.
– John Barth

The hallmark of independent thinking is disbelief in the fashionable religions of the day.
– @naval

I believe narrative knows better than we all do.
– Luisa Valenzuela

So it’s a poem of forceful and loving transpositions, made to sing in the service of negativity [. . .]
– Benjamin Krusling

I can’t go to sleep or unsee life ,
time makes change possible and
is currently menacing . in this way ,
one learns the simple , vertiginous
depth of problems , the dead weight
of forms
– Benjamin Krusling

though in winter
they are warm as roses, in the desert
taste of chilled anisette.
– Frank O’Hara

For a long time, I kept staring at the desert—
And then water flowed into my eyes.
– Liaqat Jafri

Spiritual wealth is less a numerical value, and more in the potency and authority of your presence.
– Nika Solé

The theologian who labors without joy is not a theologian at all. Sulky faces, morose thoughts and boring ways of speaking are intolerable in this science. But we must know, of course, that it is only God who can keep us from it.
– Karl Barth

Networking is overrated. Become first and foremost a person of value and the network will be available whenever you need it.
– @naval

These new recording and reproducing devices have confused the mind and defied selective use … If these inventions have so far made monkeys of us, it is because we are still monkeys.
– Lewis Mumford

Speaks well of a man to need a little something in this world. I wouldn’t trust a man who could git through it cold sober.
– Harry Crews

Out of the Great Sea to Middle-earth I am come. In this place will I abide, and my heirs, unto the ending of the world.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

Without our God we should fear to move; but when he bids us to, it would be dangerous to tarry.
– Charles Spurgeon

Holding Back The Years
by Simply Red

Holding back the years
Thinking of the fear I’ve had so long
When somebody hears
Listen to the fear that’s gone
Strangled by the wishes of pater
Hoping for the arms of mater
Get to me the sooner or later

Holding back the tears
Chance for me to escape from all I know
Holding back the tears
‘Cause nothing here has grown
I’ve wasted all my tears
Wasted all those years
Nothing had the chance to be good
Nothing ever could, yeah

I’ll keep holding on
I’ll keep holding on
I’ll keep holding on
I’ll keep holding on, so tight

Well I’ve wasted all my tears
Wasted all of those years
And nothing had the chance to be good
‘Cause nothing ever could

I’ll keep holding on
I’ll keep holding on
I’ll keep holding on
I’ll keep holding on

Holding
Holding
Holding
Holding

I said

It’s all I have today
It’s all I have to say

This daily onslaught
Meant to overwhelm us all
No wonder we’re fraught
– @thomashartigan

A chill wind in the heart of things.
The season mirrors the country.
We need poetry these cold days of late winter.
– Joan Halifax

It is an enormous seduction on the part of the West to suggest that jabbing your pen around in the debris of your pain is enough. It’s not. It’s a trick to keep you from doing something more useful. That’s uninitiated behavior masquerading as wisdom.

– Martin Shaw, Scatterlings

When I read, I am a harmless, nice and quiet person and I don’t do anything stupid.
– Robert Walser

Slow the mind and listen beyond the fear. What would this situation look like if LOVE was guiding you?
– Rachael Wolff

There can be no doubt that dreams often arise from an emotional disturbance in which the habitual complexes are involved. The habitual complexes are the tender spots of the psyche, which react most quickly to a problematical external situation.
– Carl Jung

Adults are highly susceptible to peer pressure. It wasn’t just a teenager thing.
– @WillQuestions

You never regret the time spent working on yourself. And the reward of that work, feeds you forever.
– Nika Solé

There are so many layers to us, and some of them we never see—or we see only in glimpses that we try to give shape to by using our brains, which are limited.
– Mary Gaitskill

But the delight of Earth, the wonder of it; the essential feeling as of the necessity for magic; that juggling with the golden moon and silver sun (such are they) that is man’s universal pastime: these are the things to seek in the Kalevala.
– Tolkien

It takes a huge effort
to free yourself from memory.
– Paulo Coelho

Arise! . . . All things are wrought in heat. If the fiery love to God grows cold in the soul she dies.
– Meister Eckhart

A Song for Many Movements
by Audre Lorde

Nobody wants to die on the way
caught between ghosts of whiteness
and the real water
none of us wanted to leave
our bones
on the way to salvation
three planets to the left
a century of light years ago
our spices are separate and particular
but our skins sing in complimentary keys
at a quarter to eight mean time
we were telling the same stories
over and over and over.

Broken down gods survive
in the crevasses and mudpots
of every beleaguered city
where it is obvious
there are too many bodies
to cart to the ovens
or gallows
and our uses have become
more important than our silence
after the fall
too many empty cases
of blood to bury or burn
and there will be no body left
to listen
and our labor
has become more important
than our silence

Our labor has become
more important
than our silence.

Refugees in Our Own Land
by Laura Tohe

The night is busy with the growth of stars. Above us peaceful. Shiyáázh, my son, fusses in his cradleboard. The protective rainbow shaped by his father arches over his face to protect him. In the dark sand below Monster Slayer’s archenemy rises again to pull us off this rock where we’ve taken refuge since winter’s approach.

The wind stops. Clouds drift across the moon. We pull water silently from below near the soldier’s feet. Silence is our cover. I pull my son close and place my hand on my baby’s cheek to quiet him. “Shhh, shee’awéé’, shiyázhí, shhh.” Hush, baby, my beloved, hush. With my finger I circle the pulse just above his ear. He makes tiny lapping sounds with his mouth and turns toward my breast for the comfort of my milk. But my breast is a sieve from which the enemy drinks. I am dry.

These hands that mixed bread dough for the evening meal, that planted corn and gathered pollen from the tender shoots. These hands held my husband’s kisses and caressed my baby’s soft bones as he grew inside me. We sailed the river that led us to the ocean of all beginnings. The night cries like an owl. My beloved son’s eyes are full of stars. A drowning breath in his throat. Take this map of rainbows and fly, fly, child.

Handwriting or typing or word processing—they’re not like sticking your hands into clay.
– Donald Hall

I didn’t want to be robbed of any kind of accomplishment in poetry. I wanted to do everything that the men had been doing for the past million years.
– Alice Notley

My sister said,
‘Maybe someday we’ll say these
were the happy days.’
We were silent.
We knew it was true.
– Clare Cross

Writers and detectives cannot permit the luxury of privacy.
– John Steinbeck

On or off the page, complete control is a delusion. Literature works obliquely. Literature is a backstage pass. If fiction is partly blueprint, it’s mostly dream.
– Allan Gurganus

A story is a kind of biopsy of human life.
– Lorrie Moore

Guardian spirits of mankind, have we thought about the powers that passion creates in human beings? Have we considered why a man could run through a field of fire to get to a woman he loves? Have we thought about the impact of love on the body of lovers? Have we considered the symmetry of its power? Have we considered what poetry incites in their souls, and the impress of endearments on a softened heart?
– Chigozie Obioma, An Orchestra of Minorities

A wise falcon hides its talons.
– Japanese Proverb

Words are tricky. Sometimes you need them to bring out the hurt festering inside. If you don’t, it turns gangrenous and kills you… But sometimes words can break a feeling into pieces.
– Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams

I wasn’t in a hurry. I never have to be in any particular place at any particular time. Let time watch me, not me it.
– Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

Life is like a mirror. Smile at it and it smiles back at you.
– Peace Pilgrim

Going was dying, and staying was dying. When we get to junctures like that, we had better choose the dying that enlarges rather than the one that keeps us stuck.
– James Hollis

It must be great. Not to miss things. Not to long to get back to something. Not to be looking back all the time.
– Kazuo Ishiguro

What so pure as some of the morals included in some theological system? What so corrupt as some of the practices to which these systems give rise?
– David Hume

Many people mistakenly overestimate the role of will power and think that nothing can happen to their minds that they do not decide and intend.
– Carl Jung

That’s the trouble with words: soon almost anything sounds true.
– Carl Phillips, Of California

The Lord of the Rings resonates with depth psychology because it is about a special kind of quest. Frodo leaves home not to slay a dragon or win laurels, but to let go of something that will lead to his growth.
– June Singer

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
– Erich Fromm

It’s quite humorous how we view the cosmos, our world. We view it as it were not the real world at all, but a world we could control.
– Chögyam Trungpa

That which we need the most will be found where we least want to look.
– Carl Jung

Even a dog will not eat food from an unkind hand.
– Tibetan Proverb

Lord, there are so many fires, so many words, in my heart. It’s going to take something I can’t even imagine, to put them all out.
– Mary Oliver

Our language is either — mechanical — atomistic — or dynamic. But true poetic language should be organically alive. How often one feels the poverty of words — to express several ideas all at once.
– Novalis, Miscellaneous Observations

My dear Vivian, don’t coop yourself up all day in the library. It is a perfectly lovely afternoon.
– Oscar Wilde

Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.
– Krishnamurti

A man’s hatred is always concentrated upon that which makes him conscious of his bad qualities.
– Carl Jung

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.
– Toni Morrison

Poetry doesn’t cure grief–but it understands.
– Patricia Smith

Flying And I know I’m not coming down You’re trying But you know you must soon go down All my colours turn to clouds.
– Echo and the Bunnymen

It’s a farce, the great actors, the great poets, the great statesmen, the great painters, the great composers, the great lovers, it’s a farce, a farce, a farce, history and the recording of it, forget it, forget it.
You must begin all over again. Throw all that out. All of them out. You are alone with now. Look at your fingernails. Touch your nose. Begin.
– Charles Bukowski

The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present.
– Niccolò Machiavelli

You have always approached
Everything terrible trustfully.
You have wanted to pet every
Monster.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

Read the greats in math, science, and philosophy. Ignore your contemporaries and news. Avoid tribal identification. Put truth above social approval.
– Naval Ravikant

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
– Toni Morrison

Thought is so cunning, so clever, that it distorts everything for its own convenience.
– Krishnamurti

Your personality is a phantom even more insubstantial than your body. Personality is a work of art, it’s like music, which vanishes as soon as it’s played.
– Alan Watts

Above all, I feel that the sounds of this world are so beautiful in themselves that if only we could listen to them properly, cinema would have no need for music at all.
– Andrei Tarkovsky

The poetry of Job, then, at least in its metaphors, reaches deep into the chaotic sea, up to the stars where celestial beings dwell, and down into the kingdom of death, that shadowy underworld bordered by a Current that can be crossed only in one direction.
– Robert Alter

Individuation is a sin; it is an assertion of one particle against the gods, and when that happens even the world of the gods is upset, then there is turmoil.
– CG Jung

To bear children into this world
is like carrying wood to a
burning house.
– Peter Wessel Zapffe

Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.
– @naval

When poetry exists for no one, for no purpose, it becomes greater. It is not a tool for expression, nor a mirror for the reader—it simply is. In this state, poetry defies interpretation, critique, & value. It moves beyond the grasp of language & transcends into pure existence.
– Laura Kerr

I have a new book not coming out; it will stay in your closet.
– Fady Joudah

Artists have never had to move in the same direction.
Art is not a singular path—it’s a field of many voices, many visions.
The future isn’t one way forward. It’s all ways forward. Why would artists feel compelled to boycott art sales? AI is today’s Photography.
– Laura Kerr

I like people too much or not at all. I’ve got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.
– Sylvia Plath

There is enough for everybody, but there is not enough for a few to take more and more and more…
– Evo Morales

but

is love a reality we
made here ourselves–

– A. R. Ammons

He who created you without your help, will not save you without your help.
– St. Augustine

For some, who are travelers, the stars are guides. For others, they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems… but all these stars are silent. You—you alone will have stars as no one else has them.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

It is enough to say here that Nature, like us but in her different way, is much alienated from her Creator, though in her, as in us, gleams of the old beauty remain. But they are there not to be worshipped but to be enjoyed.
– C.S. Lewis

we rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. but to make yourself feel nothing so as not to feel anything — what a waste!
– Andre Aciman

[Keen and lovely man moved as in a dance]
by Lorine Niedecker

Keen and lovely man moved as in a dance
to be considerate in lighted, glass-walled
almost outdoor office. Business

wasn’t all he knew. He knew music, art.
Had a heart. “With eyes like yours I should think
the dictaphone” or did he say the flute?

His sensitivity-it stopped you.
And the neighbors said “She’s taking lessons
on the dictaphone” as tho it were a saxophone.

He gave the job to somebody else.

The less you’ve built, the more you criticize.
– Codie Sanchez

The individual artist is by nature a questioner and a critic; that’s what she does. Her questions and criticisms are her work —
– Toni Morrison

The tragic cost of consciousness is that we will never fully understand what it is like to be somebody else. But trying is the triumph of our conscience.
– Grace Paley

Few people want to be saints nowadays, but everybody is trying to lose weight.
– René Girard

The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it Intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why.
– Albert Einstein

Sometimes you don’t survive whole.
You just survive in parts.
But the grandeur of life is that attempt.
– Toni Morrison

The land had seen a thousand men come and go, and it would see a thousand more. It cared for none of them.
– Ernest Haycox

God is always present. Nothing happens without His permission or outside of His will. Anything we do to others we do to Him.
– St. Bernadette

Do you think French cinema is good?

It exists. It is better than nothing. But

– Isabelle Huppert on French cinema

Art schools should integrate business classes, and business schools should integrate art classes.
– Jason Fried

Reset Protocol

In some places, traffic jams have been known to last up to a week at a time. The air is described elsewhere as gold, still, as though there still existed a chance it might, any minute now, change. I’ve come across my share of detailed drawings of plants, Latin names written, almost threaded in a corner. But I’ve no room, no wall to hang them. Aster Chinensis, I’m sorry. At dinner there is talk of the most advanced car available, but no one is interested in giving up yet. The effervescent tablet is supposed to keep me from getting sick, & so far, so good. I’m still waiting, though waiting for this: to be told by what cannot be fixed
what cannot be fixed.

– Dalton Day

autumn night:
I set my clock to the other clock
and go to sleep

– Soha Hatano

People who self analyze and self reflect have an unfair advantage over those who don’t. The kind of advantage you create for yourself.
– Nika Solé

Upward mobility, as we now are seeing, implies downward mobility, just as it has always implied lateral mobility. It implies, in fact, social instability, ecological oblivion, and economic insecurity.
– Wendell Berry

If one little now could be taken
over the meadow and through the woods,
where would I go with that vagabond?

Here is a now that rolls into town
where new kinds of love can be touched
in dreams and in storms.

Dreams can see what nobody knows.
How to forget yourself for a time
while you feel how togethering grows.

Now it’s on through the woods of a time that will strip
us of everything but the sheer nakedness
of our own feeling tones.

– George Gorman

Pure has nothing
to do with color. Pure is clean, feeling whole.
– Ebony Stewart

Upon the hearth the fire is red,
Beneath the roof there is a bed;
But not yet weary are our feet,
Still round the corner we may meet
A sudden tree or standing stone
That none have seen but we alone.
Tree and flower and leaf and grass,
Let them pass! Let them pass!
Hill and water under sky,
Pass them by! Pass them by!
Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate,
And though we pass them by today,
Tomorrow we may come this way
And take the hidden paths that run
Towards the Moon or to the Sun.
Apple, thorn, and nut and sloe,
Let them go! Let them go!
Sand and stone and pool and dell,
Fare you well! Fare you well!
Home is behind, the world ahead,
And there are many paths to tread
Through shadows to the edge of night,
Until the stars are all alight.
Then world behind and home ahead,
We’ll wander back to home and bed.
Mist and twilight, cloud and shade,
Away shall fade! Away shall fade!
Fire and lamp, and meat and bread,
And then to bed! And then to bed!
And now to bed! And now to bed!
– J.R.R. Tolkien

“Kindness has a way of walking in everybody’s shoes.” What would we do without it?
– Gunilla Norris

My critics jiggle
constantly like
Poison Ivy in the rain.
– Jack Kerouac

The hero whose attachment to ego is already annihilate passes back and forth across the horizons of the world, in and out of the dragon, as readily as a king through all the rooms of his house. And therein lies his power to save; for his passing and returning demonstrate that through all the contraries of phenomenallity the Un-create- Imperishable remains, and there is nothing to fear.
– Joseph Campbell

A philosopher recuperates differently and with different means: he recuperates, e.g., with nihilism. Belief that there is no truth at all, the nihilistic belief, is a great relaxation for one who, as a warrior of knowledge, is ceaselessly fighting ugly truths. For truth is ugly.
– Nietzsche

Usually, when the popular hubbub has subsided and the novelty has been chewed over by real theologians, real scientists, and real philosophers, both sides find themselves pretty much where they were before.
– C.S. Lewis

Man doth usurp all space,
Stares thee, in rock, bush, river, in the face.
Never thine eyes behold a tree;
‘Tis no sea thou seest in the sea,
‘Tis but a disguised humanity.
To avoid thy fellow, vain thy plan;
All that interests man, is man.
– Henry Sutton

The final conclusion
of all the holy scriptures
is that liberation is
nothing but a stilled mind.

– Ramana Maharshi

If you want to be loathsome
to God, just run with the herd.
– Søren Kierkegaard

Looking into life as we generally live it—carefully examining our habits and our patterns—encourages us to examine the whole world differently.
– Narayan Helen Liebenson

Respect for a person doesn’t mean respect of [unshared] beliefs. I can be kind, treat you the same way as everyone else, and want good for you, and still think your beliefs are wrong and not want anything to do with said belief or lie to you that your beliefs are great and good for you.
– Katie E Slatter

BASIC GOODNESS

Once you see what you do, how you get hooked, and how you get swept away, it’s hard to be arrogant. This honest recognition softens you up, humbles you in the best sense. It also begins to give you confidence in your basic goodness.

When we are not blinded by the intensity of our emotions, when we allow a bit of space, a chance for a gap, when we pause, we naturally know what to do. We begin, due to our own wisdom, to move toward letting go and fearlessness. Due to our own wisdom, we gradually stop strengthening habits that only bring more pain to the world.

– Pema Chodron

—for it was not knowledge but unity she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge—
– Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse

My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place to another. Like lily pads, round and green, these places summoned and then held me up while I grew.
– Anne Lamott

I thought I had been surviving, and yet, what I was really doing was hanging by a string, loosely holding myself from collapsing. I was always on the verge, and I could feel that friction in my soul.
– Fariha Róisín

You need to have a community. You need to have meaningful values, not the junk values you’ve been pumped full of all your life, telling you happiness comes through money and buying objects. You need to have meaningful work. You need the natural world. You need to feel you are respected. You need a secure future. You need connections to all these things. You need to release any shame you might feel for having been mistreated.
– Johann Hari

Show me slowly what I only
know the limits of
Dance me to the end of love

– Leonard Cohen

I am looking for a word from you. I’ve combed the landscape of my body, I’ve travelled its dark rivers. I’ve looked under the cloud of my heart, unraveled its complicated net of veins. I’ve found plenty of blue material here— why don’t you write?
– Sidney Wade

One thing I’ve learned in the woods is that there is no such thing as random. Everything is steeped in meaning, colored by relationships, one thing with another.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer

This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.
– Douglas Adams

If greed were not the master of modern man–ably assisted by envy–how could it be that the frenzy of economism does not abate as higher “standards of living” are attained, and that it is precisely the richest societies which pursue their economic advantage with the greatest ruthlessness? How could we explain the almost universal refusal on the part of the rulers of the rich societies–where organized along private enterprise or collective enterprise lines–to work towards the humanization of work? It is only necessary to assert that something would reduce the “standard of living” and every debate is instantly closed. That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of of “bread and circuses” can compensate for the damage done–these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence–because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity.
– E.F. Schumacher

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.
Some would be devoted to acting against consciousness,
Like the flight of a moth which, had it known,
Would have tended nevertheless toward the candle’s flame.
Others would deal with ways to silence anxiety,
The little whisper which, though it is a warning, is ignored.
I would deal separately with satisfaction and pride,
The time when I was among their adherents
Who strut victoriously, unsuspecting.
But all of them would have one subject, desire,
If only my own — but no, not at all; alas,
I was driven because I wanted to be like others.
I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.
The history of my stupidity will not be written.
For one thing, it’s late. And the truth is laborious.
– Czeslaw Milosz

A Partial History Of My Stupidity
by Edward Hirsch

Traffic was heavy coming off the bridge,
and I took the road to the right, the wrong one,
and got stuck in the car for hours.

Most nights I rushed out into the evening
without paying attention to the trees,
whose names I didn’t know,
or the birds, which flew heedlessly on.

I couldn’t relinquish my desires
or accept them, and so I strolled along
like a tiger that wanted to spring
but was still afraid of the wildness within.

The iron bars seemed invisible to others,
but I carried a cage around inside me.

I cared too much what other people thought
and made remarks I shouldn’t have made.
I was silent when I should have spoken.

Forgive me, philosophers,
I read the Stoics but never understood them.

I felt that I was living the wrong life,
spiritually speaking,
while halfway around the world
thousands of people were being slaughtered,
some of them by my countrymen.

So I walked on—distracted, lost in thought—
and forgot to attend to those who suffered
far away, nearby.

Forgive me, faith, for never having any.

I did not believe in God,
who eluded me.

Red is holy. Nobody understands it. It goes on, on, without the world’s understanding. Blue is holy. Blue goes on without the world’s understanding. And the heart…the heart can’t wait. Revolts without understanding. Boom. Goes on. Without the world’s understanding.
– Tennessee Williams

To want to run away is an essence of being human, it transforms any staying through the transfigurations of choice. To think about fleeing from circumstances, from a marriage, a relationship or from a work is part of the conversation itself and helps us understand the true distilled nature of our own reluctance. Strangely, we are perhaps most fully incarnated as humans, when part of us does not want to be here, or doesn’t know how to be here. Presence is only fully understood and realized through fully understanding our reluctance to show up. To understand the part of us that wants nothing to do with the full necessities of work, of relationship, of loss, of doing what is necessary, is to learn humility, to cultivate self-compassion and to sharpen that sense of humor essential to a merciful perspective of both a self and another.
– David Whyte

And now here’s the thing. It takes a time like this for you to find out how sore your heart has been, and, moreover, all the while you thought you were going around idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moiling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It’s internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or have requital, and therefore in yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself? Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast.
– Saul Bellow

Danger, when it is always imminent, does harm. It doesn’t need to actually arrive. You exhaust yourself in the act of forever looking over your shoulder. Your body readies itself to fight and never quite discharges that chemical cocktail. You channel it instead into anger and self-pity and anxiety and hopelessness. You divert it into work. But really what you do, with every fibre of your being, is watch. You are incessantly, exhaustingly alert. You don’t dare ever let up, just in case the danger takes advantage of your inattention. I’ve forgotten what it feels like to have space in my brain for anything other than watching. For a long time I kept working teaching, pitching articles, writing editorial reports and for a while, that felt like a life raft. But then, incrementally, it became impossible. I was aware of a fog descending, a seizing of the gears, but it seemed diffuse until now.
– Katherine May

Life is a long preparation
for something that
never happens.
– WB Yeats

You can’t change the past but the big magic is to change the future by being a present that’s worth living in by understanding your past.
– Martin Prechtel

For their own good, vegetarians should never be allowed near fine beers and ales. It will only make them loud and belligerent, and they lack the physical strength and aggressive nature to back up any drunken assertions.
– Anthony Bourdain

The flaw in rationalism is the belief that human beings can live by applying a theory.

But theory – a term that comes from the Greek theorein, meaning ‘to look at’ – cannot replace practical knowledge of how to live. Plato misled western philosophy when he represented knowing the good in terms of visual experience.

We can look at something without touching it; but the good life is not like that.

We know it only by living it. If we think about it too much and turn it into a theory, it may dissolve and disappear. Contrary to Socrates, an examined life may not be worth living.

– John Gray

Love is in the present, happiness is in the present, God is in the present, and enlightenment is also in the present. So, why worry about the future unnecessarily? What is happening now is more important than what is going to happen.
– Amma

Language is of a divine nature, not because it renders eternal by naming, but because, says Hegel, “it immediately overturns what it names in order to transform it into something else.”
– Maurice Blanchot

first snowfall
luckily I am here
at home
– Basho

I live above a dyke bar and I’m happy.
– Frank O’Hara

We stand where we will stand, on little plots of ground, where we are maybe “called” to stand (though who knows what that means?) — in our congregations, classrooms, offices, factories, in fields of lettuces and apricots, in hospitals, in prisons (on both sides, at various times, of the gates), in streets, in community groups. And it is sacred ground if we would honor it, if we would bring to it a blessing of sacrifice and risk…

Our mission is to plant ourselves at the gates of Hope — not the prudent gates of Optimism, which are somewhat narrower; nor the stalwart, boring gates of Common Sense; nor the strident gates of Self-Righteousness, which creak on shrill and angry hinges (people cannot hear us there; they cannot pass through); nor the cheerful, flimsy garden gate of “Everything is gonna be all right.” But a different, sometimes lonely place, the place of truth-telling, about your own soul first of all and its condition, the place of resistance and defiance, the piece of ground from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it will be; the place from which you glimpse not only struggle, but joy in the struggle. And we stand there, beckoning and calling, telling people what we are seeing, asking people what they see.

– Victoria Safford

First of all connect to yourself. When you go deep in yourself and let go of all the anxiety and know that you are loved by the universe, you get inner strength. You are surrounded by that energy of love and you’ll just melt in meditation.
– Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Projection means that some unconscious factor is unintentionally seen in the outer world whilst it actually belongs to our own unconscious. If the novice venerates his teacher like a God it simply means that he has not yet found that divine image in himself.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

The only way to discuss the social evil is to get at once to the social ideal. We can all see the national madness; but what is national sanity?
– G.K. Chesterton

Every man fell in love with her,
and she was really awfully bored.

– Virginia Woolf

We have so corrupted our heart that it is hesitant and confused. It is this that makes life so painful and wearisome.
– Krishnamurti

The purpose of American government is to protect the American people from the worst tendencies and elements of greed and horror among us.

Well, that used to be the purpose of the American government.

– Andy Perrin

To cultivate a steady mind independent of circumstances, we must work with the mind itself. Working directly with the mind uncovers the inherent quality of meditative awareness.
– Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

Mini Poem

Don’t worry.
This is all
There is
To this poem.

– john zbigniew guzlowski

See how nice and square that is,
the old monk said
of one of his poems. Piss
on them if they don’t like it.

– The Old Monk

Do a good deed and throw it in the river, One day it will come back to you in the desert.
– Shaikh Saadi

To define the world of The Hobbit is, of course, impossible, because it is new. You cannot anticipate it before you go there, as you cannot forget it once you have gone.
– C.S. Lewis

It’s not the pen,
it’s the pressure
on the tip
that writes the words,
the old monk told
the poet.
– The Old Monk

It is through gratitude for the present moment that the spiritual dimension of life opens up.

– Eckhart Tolle

“Let us leave this horrible place,” said Lona; “there are no mothers here! This people is not worth delivering.”
– George MacDonald, Lilith

A loving person lives in a loving world, a hostile person lives in a hostile world, everyone you meet is your mirror.
– Ken Keyes, Jr

Every soul you meet is the part of the path.
Even the fleeting (momentary) ones teach you lessons that last.
– Rumi

Nature today is, so to speak, hungry for myth or its equivalent, a fact of which some of the poets have had an inkling. She is tired of being experimented with and longs to be known. But man is also hungry for myth.
– Owen Barfield

Sometimes you think something is meant to be love and then it turns out to be only poetry.
– Nika Solé

The temple interior, the belly of the whale, and the heavenly land beyond, above, and below the confines of the world, are one and the same. That is why the approaches of and the entrances to temples are flanked and defended by colossal gargoyles: dragons, lions, devil-slayers with drawn swords, resentful dwarves, winged bulls. These are the threshold guardians to ward away all incapable of encountering the higher silence within. They are preliminary embodiments of the dangerous aspect of the presence, corresponding to the mythological ogres that bound the conventional world, or to the two rows of teeth of the whale. They illustrate the fact that the devotee at the moment of the entry into the temple undergoes a metamorphosis.
– Joseph Campbell

The real flexes are the things that money can’t pay for. A pure, glowing spirit. A mind that has been trained and mastered. A healthy, in-shape body. The things that you have to put in work to get. Work that no one sees but you.
– Nika Solé

Serious readers are going to want to read anything and everything.
– Penelope Lively

You may not be able to change the entire world,
but you can release your Love,
and watch it’s colors paint the world around you
with kindness and patience,
this way you can watch your little part of it
change for the better ..
– Mona Lisa Nyman

Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired.
– @naval

You fill your head with digital slop and wonder why the world seems fake and meaningless.
– Dylan O’Sullivan

School, politics, sports, and games train us to compete against others. True rewards – wealth, knowledge, love, fitness, and equanimity – come from ignoring others and improving ourselves.
– @naval

No teacher should strive to make men think as he thinks, but to lead them to the living Truth, to the Master himself, of whom alone they can learn anything, who will make them in themselves know what is true by the very seeing of it.
– George MacDonald

Be thankful for the thorns and thistles which keep you from being in love with this world.
– Charles Spurgeon

…if the intruder is incapable of encompassing the sanctuary, he has effectually remained without. Anyone unable to understand a god sees it as a devil and is thus defended from the approach.
– Joseph Campbell

For if ever a fruit ripens, it should be planted, lest the line die out of the world. Here it has lain hidden on the mountain, even as the race of Elendil lay hidden in the wastes of the North.
– J.R.R. Tolkien (Gandalf)

Intense nostalgia breeds stories.
– Barry Hannah

Anyone who wants reparations based on history will have to gerrymander history very carefully. Otherwise, practically everybody would owe reparations to practically everybody else.
– Thomas Sowell

The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.
– James Madison

Many folk like to know beforehand what is to be set on the table; but those who have labored to prepare the feast like to keep their secret; for wonder makes the words of praise louder.
– J.R.R. Tolkien (Gandalf)

If I’m a writer, it’s
because to be queer is
to worship loss – and
what is a book but a
losing game?

– Billy-Ray Belcourt

There is, as you can see, an I in this story, but it is not a story about me. It is one about all of us… It is about how one story contains many and how they belong not to us but are part of the random currents of our time, and about how stories capture us and entangle us for all time.
– Abdulrazak Gurnah, Desertion

People are realizing the safe and secure path is now the least safe and secure (always has been). Become a deep generalist and do many things. Those who can handle the most uncertainty win.
– Dan Koe

More than anything, people dislike being made to feel stupid, and if you arouse those feelings, you do so at your own cost.
– Rachel Cusk

Always risk your skin and never fear losing it, because it always does some good one way or another when the powers that be deign to take it off us.
– Ali Smith, How to Be Both

A well-tied knot is hard to untie.
– Japanese Proverb

Even death, faced with the option of death or life, she would choose life.
– José Saramago

Even in the desire for knowledge you should show moderation so that things known won’t be badly known.
– Baltasar Gracián

The meditator should be like a rock in the mountains: a rock is never tired of being a rock.
– Chögyam Trungpa

Perhaps our deepest love is already inscribed within us, so its object doesn’t create a new word but instead allows us to read the one written.
– Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

If I have ventured wrongly, very well, life then helps me with its penalty. But if I haven’t ventured at all, who helps me then?
– Søren Kierkegaard

The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis [i.e. from the view of eternity]; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

She said the reason that love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.
– Edna O’Brien

But in reality God is not an opinion. God is a
psychological fact that happens to people.
– Carl Jung

I live first in the upper world, but in your inner world, my soul, I am like a shadow without substance, trembling and blown away by every breeze.
– Carl Jung

Everything good is costly, and the development of the personality is one of the most costly of all things.
– Carl Jung

Human nature has been sold short…[humans have] a higher nature which…includes the need for meaningful work, for responsibility, for creativeness, for being fair and just, for doing what is worthwhile and for preferring to do it well.
– Abraham Maslow

I didn’t think; I experimented.
– Anthony Burgess

I am the crippled poet.
The poet of cripples.
I am the hunchback of verse.
– Jim Ferris

Empires preserved their power with the stories they tell, but just as critical the stories they don’t—the dark silence they impose, the pages they tear out.
– David Grann

The real question is: who has the
responsibility to uphold human
rights? The answer to that is:
everyone.
– Madeleine Albright

It is difficult to remain true to love since love stands above all sins. He who wants to remain true to love must also overcome sin.
– Carl Jung

We turn not older with years
but newer every day.
– Emily Dickinson

You think I am talking about aesthetics,
but I am talking about my soul.
– Sheila Black

The more one-sided masculine man’s conscious mind is, the more primitive, unreliable, and therefore dangerous his anima will be.
– Erich Neumann

We can only rise above nature if somebody
else carries the weight of the earth for us.
– Carl Jung

Even the finest sword plunged into salt water will eventually rust.
– Sun Tzu

Kerouac had lots of class — stumbling drunk in the end, but read those last books. He never blames anybody else; he always blames himself. If there is a bad guy, it’s poor old drunk Jack, stumbling around. You never hear him railing at the government or railing at this or that. He likes trains, people, bums, cars.
– Ken Kesey

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.
– Rainer Maria Rilke

To know and not to act is not to know.
– Wang Yang-ming

I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like.
– W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (tr. Anthea Bell)

There can be a compassionate way of saying no. Saying no can actually be a generous gesture in the sense of not continuing with an unworkable relationship or situation.
– Laura Bridgman

How to write a good poem:
Let your intrusive thoughts win.
– @onlypoemsmag

I cannot anchor my mind
it drifts endlessly to you
– @RainyDayRibbons

you gotta be able to set boundaries with the divine before you can truly surrender to it.
– River Kenna

But to say what you want to say, you must create another language and nourish it for years and years with what you have loved, with what you have lost, with what you will never find again.
– George Seferis

The frightened individual seeks for somebody or something to tie his self to; he cannot bear to be his own individual self any longer, and he tries frantically to get rid of it and to feel security again by the elimination of this burden: the self.
– Erich Fromm

Talk is powerful. Speak bad about someone and you expose all the ugliness in him, in yourself and whoever happens to be paying attention. Once exposed, the wound begins to fester and all are hurt.
– The Lubavitcher Rebbe

One work of art stimulates the other. It’s all about the encounter.
– Edward Hirsch

One of the most damaging and widespread social beliefs is the idea that most adults are incapable of learning new skills.
– @naval

Peaceful is the one who is not concerned with having more or less. Unbound by name and fame, he is free from sorrow, from the world and mostly from himself.
– Rumi

If you thought that science was certain – well, that is just an error on your part.
– Prof. Feynman

Cure yourself of your nostalgias, of the childish obsession with the beginning and the end of time. Eternity, that dead duration—only the weak are concerned with such things. Let the moment do its work, let it reabsorb your dreams.
– Emil Cioran

People fail to understand that they are indebted to violence for the degree of peace that they enjoy.
– René Girard

When we believe people, places, and things MAKE us happy, we won’t stop chasing the illusion.
– Rachael Wolff

Someone asked me, ‘Who do you write for?’ And I stood on that stage, this incredibly green writer, and said, ‘I write for myself.’ There was total silence.
– Jhumpa Lahiri

I asked God to make me a sacred space, and was handed a sword. The message was it’s all already sacred, your work is to keep it that way.
– Nika Solé

Men must endure
Their going hence even as their coming hither;
Ripeness is all.

– William Shakespeare

Cervantes lost the use of his left hand at the battle of lepanto and then spent five years as a slave on the Barbary Coast and then, after his family bankrupted itself paying his ransom, lived in poverty—and went on to make generations laugh by writing Don Quixote.
– @AmitMajmudar

Bless every single person who has loved me loud as sage smells when crushed, loud as cicadas yearn at twilight, loud as death feels far on the first morning of summer, when you taste possibility in the rain.
– Topaz Winters

If you’re not machinic then standstills and goings-astray are to be lived with and through.
– Vidyan Ravinthiran

I HAVE BAD NEWS

Poetry will not give you washboard abs.
It won’t put the hair back on top of your head.
It doesn’t accrue interest.
It won’t change your oil.
Or tie your shoes.
There’s no fame in poetry.
Even less cash.
Poetry does not have the power to dismiss your parking tickets nor change the course of the past.

However, comma.

Poetry can anchor us to the floor of the fleeting present.
Help us slow down and notice the diamond sparkles in our daughter’s eyes
And it can exert its small, beautiful influence on the future, too.
Can, for example, help to heal that growing rift between you and your mother.
Your hard feelings, etched into a notebook, alongside your love.
A way to work yourself toward a fuller forgiveness.
A message of conciliation, an offer of communication when all other communication has turned to ice.
Poetry cannot set the reminder for your insulin shot.
But it is a medicine in its own way.
Poetry has its therapy license now.
It won’t prescribe antidepressants but it might act as a scoop for all the harmful garbage that gathers in the mind.
Patients put it on paper. Pull it out of their heads.
Screams contained on the page are a healthier rage.

Poetry doesn’t erase trauma.
It won’t pop the cap back on your stepfather’s thirteenth beer.
It can’t shove a bullet back inside a gun.
But it is a hand in the dark to squeeze, a reminder you aren’t alone.
A testament to shared experience, an assurance of understanding.
Your anxieties are like my anxieties.
I see the same injustices you see.
Here is a pulley to lift some of the weight from your heart.

Poetry requires no professional distinction or training.
It asks no secret knowledge.
Only the desire to create, express, explore, or console.
A pen or a pencil can also be of use.
A crayon in a pinch.
Poetry makes manifest.
It is not a vaccination.
Sometimes it is a mask but not the kind that filters air or blocks damp breath.
The world closes.
Poetry remains open.
It is an essential worker.
It may not be the bridge over the impossible gulf of the unknown.
But it is a possible handrail to guide us to the other side

T.S. Eliot is poetry.
But poetry doesn’t belong to T.S. Eliot.
It doesn’t belong to the professors either.
Not solely.
Poetry belongs to the children making sing-songs about rainstorms.
With natural alliteration and assonance.
And it belongs to the teenagers tearing through performance pieces in a brand new neon language that scares the white hairs from our heads.
It belongs to you, if you will have it, and anyone else with a heart.
It belongs to both the broken and the healed.
It counsels. It celebrates. It giggles and it weeps.
Did you know a hammer is a poem?
The sole of a shoe, too.
E-signed PDF Files in a folder on your desktop might not seem like poems.
But who knows?

Poetry speaks every language.
It can sing alto, baritone, tenor, or bass.
It can’t make you taller.
But it can make you feel taller.
Which is basically the same thing.
It won’t bring your grandfather back from the dead.
But it might make laying him to rest a little gentler and help his memory burn like a candle in a dark living room twenty years in the future.
Not just his face, either. His smell. His accent.
The story of how he met your grandmother and the way he cocked his head to the right and adjusted his flat cap in the mirror.

Poetry won’t carry in the groceries.
It doesn’t do manicures.
You are certainly free to rub poetry over every inch of your skin but it isn’t likely to prevent sunburn.
Nor will it bring Chinese takeout when you’re having a rough day and rub your feet after.
But you can call it up in the middle of the night.
Gossip about past lovers.
And in the morning you can place it on your head And you can wear it like an invisible crown.

– Justin Hamm

We are already born. We are going to die. So you have to do something interesting, that you respect, in between.
– Toni Morrison

The problem with getting good at a game, especially one with big rewards, is that you continue playing it long after you should have outgrown it.
– @naval

The presence of a ‘me’ in any activity, including spiritual practice, ensures the continuance of desire and the perpetuation of fruitless effort.
– Ramesh Balsekar

Which is more terrifying: the notion that everything comes to an end, or the thought that it may not?
– Judith Schalansky

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth
– Frank O’Hara

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
– Theodore Roosevelt

Tyranny requires your fear, and your silence, and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage.
– J.B. Pritzker

The door of the human heart,
can only be opened from the inside.
– William Holman Hunt

There is a love of wild nature in everybody, an ancient mother-love showing itself whether recognized or no, and however covered by cares and duties.
– John Muir

A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
– G.K. Chesterton

There is trouble now on all our borders, and we are threatened; but we desire only to be free, and to live as we have lived, keeping our own, and serving no foreign lord, good or evil.
– Éomer (Tolkien, The Two Towers)

Each seeks an end; a glorious and radiant end, even for every daisy or dandelion we see in looking across the level of a common field. In the very shape of things there is more than green growth; there is the finality of the flower.
– G.K. Chesterton

To Hold
by Li-Young Lee

So we’re dust. In the meantime, my wife and I
make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet,
we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight,
measuring by eye as it falls into alignment
between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I’m lucky,
she’ll remember a recent dream and tell me.

One day we’ll lie down and not get up.
One day, all we guard will be surrendered.

Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize
what we love, and what it takes
to tend what isn’t for our having.
So often, fear has led me
to abandon what I know I must relinquish
in time. But for the moment,
I’ll listen to her dream,
and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling
more and more detail into the light
of a joint and fragile keeping.

If you want to bring your mobility to the next level you need to stop isolating and start integrating.
– @moveorperish

You can support people on their path, but you can’t save them from their life lessons, and you wouldn’t want to. That’s between them and God.
– Nika Solé

…you and I use the same words with different meanings. We are often unable to tell people what they NEED to know, because they WANT to know something else, and would therefore only misunderstand what we said.
– George MacDonald

he searched
for the northwest passage
I sit at home

– @HaikuDaily575

You don’t want to say the same thing twice in one book.
– T. S. Eliot

Let it Be Known Now that you
Carriers of the
Torch
of the Created
Advancing
Mind

That throughout this world
Huge Changes Ready
to go
Down

– Amiri Baraka

LET THE LAST THING BE SONG
by Hannah Fries

i.

Memory is safest in someone with amnesia.
Behind locked doors
glow the unmarred pieces—
musical notes humming
in a jumble, only
waiting to be
arranged.

ii.

What is left in one
who does not remember?
Love and music.

Not a name but the fullness.
Not the sequence of events
but order of rhythm and pitch,

a piece of time in which to exist.

iii.

A tone traveling through space has no referent,
and yet we infer, and yet it
finds its way between our cells
and shakes us.

Aren’t we all still quivering
like tuning forks
with the shock of being,
the shock of being seen?

iv.

When I die, I want to be sung across the threshold.
Don’t you? Doesn’t the universe,
with its loosening warp
and weft, still
unspool its symphony?

Sing to me — please —
and I will sing for you as all unravels,
as time continues past the final beat
of the stutter inside your chest.

Harmonize, at the edge of that horizon,
with the black hole’s
fathomless B-flat.

Why do people keep sharing images and ideas of things they hate?

Why wouldn’t you spend time and energy on the things that bring you joy instead?

– Shemaiah Gonzalez

Defy the law! –
Write the heartbroken
poetry of the World!
– Jack Kerouac

Your trauma creates you.
– @naval

Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.
– Charles Bukowski

The two great aims of industrialism—replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy—seem close to fulfillment.
– Wendell Berry

my drug of choice is a mafia romance where he is obsessed with her immediately
– @fromthestudyof

The reason why small changes create big shifts is because any small change in your life will shake something loose.

You want your life to be different?

Do something different.

– Mel Robbins

The worst place to be is the same place as last year.
– Dan Go

We must have these four sorts of ideas. We must have friendship for all; we must be merciful towards those that are in misery; when people are happy we ought to be happy, and to the wicked we must be indifferent.
– Patañjali

Everything that we are, is the result of habit. That gives us consolation, because if it is only habit, we can make and unmake it at any time. The samshara is left by these vibrations passing out of our mind, each one of them leaving its result. Our character is the sum-total of these marks, and as per as some particular wave prevails one takes that tone. If good prevail one becomes good, if wickedness takes over, one becomes wicked, if joyfulness, one becomes happy. The only remedy for bad habits is counter habits.
– Patañjali

If they’re here—all females in a winter hive—they’re clustered together inside (an oak tree), queen at the heart of their sisterhood. The fine, transparent wings they beat hard in summer’s heat—a constant buzzing fan to keep the hive from cooking—they hold, now, folded and still. The tiny muscles to which those wings are attached shiver. One honey bee shivering her flight muscles does not make much heat. But twenty thousand, huddled together, shivering, can keep the queen and the colony’s honey supply at their core at a tropical ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit, even as blizzard winds, inches away, flail the trunk.
– Gayle Boss

In search of love and music my whole life has been
Illumination
Corruption
And diving, diving, diving, diving down
To pick up on every shiny thing

– Joni Mitchell

Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.
– Paul Kalanithi

It’s not enough to love something–or someone. Of course you love a person or art or music or the theatre. But you have to imagine that this person or this thing is trapped in a house afire, and the fire is apathy, and the fire is ignorance, and you have to go into the house all the time, day after day, year after year, and put out the flames and save the thing you love and rebuild the house in which it lives, and show it to others who will come to the rescue when you no longer can. Love is cheap and silly–a moron can love ice cream–but devotion is something worth talking about.
– Eva Le Gallienne

Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to find myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?

Two or more hours should tell the story. One way or the other. Either I am right and a catastrophe will occur, or it won’t and I’m crazy. In either case the outlook is not so good.

Here I sit, in any case, against a young pine, broken out in hives and waiting for the end of the world. Safe here for the moment though, flanks protected by the rise of ground on the left and an approach ramp on the right. The carbine lies across my lap.

Just below the cloverleaf, in the ruined motel, the three girls are waiting for me. Undoubtedly something is about to happen.

Or is it that something has stopped happening?

Is it that God has at last removed his blessing from the U.S.A. and what we feel now is just the clank of the old historical machinery, the sudden jerking ahead of the roller-coaster cars as the chain catches hold and carries us back into history with its ordinary catastrophes, carries us out and up toward the brink from that felicitous and privileged siding where even unbelievers admitted that if it was not God who blessed the U.S.A., then at least some great good luck had befallen us, and that now the blessing or the luck is over, the machinery clanks, the chain catches hold, and the cars jerk forward?

– Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy

Climate change has become such a familiar term that we tend to read past it- it’s part of our mental furniture, like urban sprawl or gun violence.
– Bill McKibben

As the rabbis noted, the Hebrew Bible in one verse commands, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself,” but in no fewer than 36 places commands us to “love the stranger.”
– Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

Before it’s too late—knock your head against the ice.
Before it’s too late
Break through, look.
You will see a miraculous world…
– Oleh Lysheha

ICE
They say ice
is the calmest way to Stiff City
A deep freeze
against bad dreams and other house pests
Snow on your face, your blood blue, Christ is
your liquor, your dog, but not your death
– Fanny Howe

All fear is nothing but thoughts. If there is only One, there cannot be a second to fear. If we look at our Self as one, there is nothing else to fear.
– Ramana Maharshi

The more it matters who said it, the less it actually matters.
– @naval

‘To be a man’, as Professor Tolkien recently reminded us, ‘is tragedy enough.’ Yes, and comedy enough too.
– C.S. Lewis

Looking back over decades of reading spiritual books, only a few have ever really landed or made a big difference. Probably the most powerful has been “I Am That,” by Nisargadatta Maharaja.

How about you?

– Michael Taft

The Good God and the Evil God
By Kahlil Gibran

The Good God and the Evil God met on the
mountain top.

The Good God said, “Good day to you, brother.”

The Evil God did not answer.

And the Good God said, “You are in a bad
humour today.”

“Yes,” said the Evil God, “for of late I have been
often mistaken for you, called by your name,
and treated as if I were you, and it ill-pleases
me.”

And the Good God said, “But I too have been
mistaken for you and called by your name.”

The Evil God walked away cursing the stupidity
of man.

Today’s fun word fact

A group of sheep is commonly referred to as a flock. Other terms used to describe a group of sheep include herd, drove, fold, down, drift, trip, mob, and hurtle.

Fckn hurtle

– @regenavocado

an archetype in its quiescent, unprojected state has no exactly determinable form but is in itself an indefinite structure which can assume definite forms only in projection.
– Carl Jung

what makes someone notable? what is a noteworthy life? usually, a (very linear) sequence of achievements. legible, socially recognized, materially rewarded.

but, as poems know, a life is much, much more than all that. a well- spent day in the inner life is probably more noteworthy than a lifetime in external validations (Dickinson seemed to know this).

– Chen Chen

Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?
– William Shakespeare

So many people know so many spiritual terms, have been on the path for so many years. They pride themselves on this. They know every spiritual terminology. But, they have no awareness, no realization, no joy, no happiness, no kindness. They are fooling themselves.
– Robert Adams

I know what you have come to say, Frodo: you wish to return to your own home. Well, dearest friend, the tree grows best in the land of its sires; but for you in all the lands of the West there will ever be a welcome. And though your people have had little fame in the legends of the great, they will now have more renown than many wide realms that are no more.
– J.R.R. Tolkien (Aragorn to Frodo)

The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels.
– Richard Powers, Bewilderment

I was fascinated by strangers, wanted to know what food they ate and what dishes they ate it from, what movies they watched and what music they listened to, wanted to look under their beds and in their secret drawers and night tables and inside the pockets of their coats.
– Donna Tartt

A man grows most tired while standing still.
– Mayan Proverb

Men who think deeply appear as comedians when they traffic with others, because in order to be understood they always have first to simulate a surface.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.
– Mark Twain

When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free.
– Charles Evans Hughes

God save me from fools with a little philosophy – no one is more difficult to reach.
– Epictetus

Being too busy has this result: that an individual very, very rarely is permitted to form a heart; on the other hand, the thinker, the poet, or the religious personality who actually has formed his heart, will never be popular, not because he is difficult, but because it demands quiet and prolonged working with oneself and intimate knowledge of oneself as well as a certain isolation.
– Soren Kierkegaard

If you are able to see the beauty, only because you wear a beautiful inside. For the world is like a mirror in which everyone sees his own reflection.
– Paulo Coelho

Our days are like identical suitcases. Even though they are all the same size, some people are able to pack more into them then others. The reason? They know what to pack.
– John C. Maxwell

There is only one success – to be able to spend your life in your own way.
– Christopher Morley

The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war.
– Sydney J. Harris

Humans are the only animals for whom their own existence is a problem they have to solve.
– Erich Fromm

Everything I have written is the result of reading or of interest in people, I’m sure of that. I had no ambition to be a writer.
– Marianne Moore

Dear Elon
From the Department of Spiritual Inefficiency
by Tania Runyan

Of course you know the ways of a bully. 
Those Pretoria boys flung you down 
a flight of stairs for being short and strange.

When you returned from the hospital, 
famished for love, your father called you 
a loser for getting your face smashed in. 

But you are fearfully and wonderfully 
made, beloved, as are the parasites 
you rail against, the refugees and migrants,
the daughter you excised from your life.
Verily, I tell you, more beautiful 
than the stars you want to conquer 
is a Cameroonian mother wiping her eyes 
as her kid gets a two-buck malaria shot.

If the kingdom of heaven is the eye 
of a needle, Elon, you are a quintuple-
humped camel trampling it under the dirt. 
But I live for possibility. If you asked, 
I would stretch you to fit through 
that gleaming millimeter like a spaghettified traveler 
rocketing too close to a quasar. 
Yes, I would turn you into a noodle of repentance
with hands too floppy to destroy or salute—
just a string of spirit stretching and slipping 
deeper into my disastrous pull, a love
that is anything but efficient.

all i can do is
walk into his
photograph
mouth open with laughter,
and exist

– Ollie Schminkey

In his final book, MLK said white America would rather throw away democracy altogether, and embrace “a native form of fascism,” to preserve their power. We are living in that prophecy today.
– Andre Henry

God guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow-bone

– William Butler Yeats

Don’t limit your challenges. Challenge your limits.
– Jan Sky

There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of bodies, of body on body, wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone. It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even remember that it exists.
– Derrick Jensen

One benefit of focusing more on my mental health is that I finally got to do a Rorschach test the other day, during which I wanted the examiner to know how COOL the broadsword was that I saw in one of the ink blots.
– A.W. Ohlheiser

A joke is a good camouflage. Next best comes sentiment… But the best camouflage of all – in my opinion – is the plain and simple truth. Because nobody ever believes it.
– Max Frisch

It was an important day when I discovered that I did not teach dance, I taught people…Movement is one of the great laws of life. It is the primary medium of our aliveness, the flow of energy going on in us like a river all the time, awake or asleep, twenty four-hours a day. Our movement is our behavior; there is a direct connection between what we are like and how we move.
– Mary Starks Whitehouse

There’s more than meets the eye with the human body. It keeps score all on its own. It remembers; it hurts; it hides memories, secrets, even from us. The body is a record keeper, even when the brain forgets what’s been recorded. Bodies, bodies, bodies. Vanishing bodies.
– Moses Yuriyvich Mikheyev

How little we know, in the end. That a boat
can stall at the edge of the sea, until it is

overturned, at last, by what it loves most.
That love is the fortress with no walls

and winding gardens. That time gnaws
us down to a new bone, then to pure spirit.

And that grief is a kind of church—it is
that sparse and that clean. It is the blue rose

held in the clear water of the mind,

– Cecilia Llompart

…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

WHO KNOWS WHAT IS GOING ON
by Juan Ramon Jimenez

Who knows what is going on on the other side of each hour?
How many times the sunrise was
there, behind a mountain!
How many times the brilliant cloud piling up far off was already
a golden body full of thunder!
This rose was poison.
That sword gave life.
I was thinking of a flowery meadow
at the end of a road,
and found myself in the slough.
I was thinking of the greatness of what was human,
and found myself in the divine.

Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode:
Before you were, or any hearts to beat,
Weary and kind one lingered by His seat;
He made the world to be a grassy road
Before her wandering feet.
– William Butler Yeats

You must realize that you have the right to love beauty. You must prepare to live life to the fullest extent. Of course it takes imagination, but you don’t have to be an educated person to have that. Imagination can teach you the true meaning of pleasure. Listening can be one of the greatest of pleasures. You must learn to listen because by listening you will learn to see with your mind’s eye. You see, music paints pictures that only the mind’s eye can see. Open your ears so that you can see with the eye of your mind.
– Sun Ra

Under the influence of great fear, almost everybody becomes superstitious. The sailors who threw Jonah overboard imagined his presence to be the cause of the storm which threatened to wreck their ship. In a similar spirit the Japanese, at the time of the Tokyo earthquake took to massacring Koreans and Liberals. When the Romans won victories in the Punic wars, the Carthaginians became persuaded that their misfortunes were due to a certain laxity which had crept into the worship of Moloch. Moloch liked having children sacrificed to him, and preferred them aristocratic; but the noble families of Carthage had adopted the practice of surreptitiously substituting plebeian children for their own offspring. This, it was thought, had displeased the god, and at the worst moments even the most aristocratic children were duly consumed in the fire. Strange to say, the Romans were victorious in spite of this democratic reform on the part of their enemies.

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd. So it was in the French Revolution, when dread of foreign armies produced the reign of terror. And it is to be feared that the Nazis, as defeat draws nearer, will increase the intensity of their campaign for exterminating Jews. Fear generates impulses of cruelty, and therefore promotes such superstitious beliefs as seem to justify cruelty. Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear. And for this reason poltroons are more prone to cruelty than brave men, and are also more prone to superstition. When I say this, I am thinking of men who are brave in all respects, not only in facing death. Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one. Obloquy is, to most men, more painful than death; that is one reason why, in times of collective excitement, so few men venture to dissent from the prevailing opinion. No Carthaginian denied Moloch, because to do so would have required more courage than was required to face death in battle.

– Bertrand Russell

remember a butterfly
can only soar freely
in a sunlit field
– Basho

The mind is heaven, and the mind is hell, and the mind has the capacity to become either.
– Osho

Images once were illustrations of a text. Now the text has become the explanation of the images.
– Jacques Ellul

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.
– W. H. Auden

A politician who reads aloud speeches written by others is an actor, not a leader.
– @naval

When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you’ve got two new people.
– John Steinbeck

How Poetry Works

It sneaks in on a Tuesday.
You’re in your teens, in class.
Nobody cares what you say.
You feel in shards of glass.

You stumble on a hole
in language. You can see
through to where nothing’s real
except poetry.

– J-T Kelly

Most of the people I know who have what I want—which is to say, purpose, heart, balance, gratitude, joy—are people with a deep sense of spirituality….They follow a brighter light than the glimmer of their own candle; they are part of something beautiful.
– Anne Lamott

Make us see what you see in your head,
Emperor.

I see toy soldiers under everyone’s feet.
I see a house of cards about to fall.
I see a parrot in a cage admiring himself in a mirror.
I see a tall ladder meant to reach the moon
teeming with demons and men.

– Charles Simic

You say you’re not going to make the same mistakes your parents made. But I didn’t realize how many other mistakes were available.
– Sharon Olds

Dirge
by Yena Sharma Purmasir

Across the world, people are dying.
Across the country, across the street.
Someone my age. Someone with
my mother’s name, my father’s face.
Everyday there are more people
asking what to do with the dead,
their bodies, yes, but also their things.
Where do we put their old clothes,
books, awful CD collections? Museums
don’t want that garbage. But we can’t
just throw it away. What about the hole
in the ozone layer? What about the fish
in the sea? Everything is wrong and there
are people you will never get to meet.
You could have loved them. You could
have borrowed all their favorite things.

One of the best changes I’ve made to my nutrition is stopping intermittent fasting.

Eating a high-protein, fiber-rich meal an hour or two after waking is better for my hunger, appetite, muscle, and energy than skipping breakfast.

– Dan Go

Aslan to Lucy:

But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.

– Tolkien

Poetry stinks with ten thousand poets
pissing in the same overflowing bowl.
We must go it alone, swimming at night
down the River of No Return.
At dawn we’ll see unknown animals
on the bank, and unknown women, some
without faces. We’re now sure that we
have both leprosy and gangrene, outcasts.
– Jim Harrison

What memory loves is eternal. I love you with memory, imperishable.
– Adélia Prado

Because the world is so full of death and horror, I try again and again to console my heart and pick the flowers that grow in the midst of hell.
– Hermann Hesse

The smarter you get, the slower you read.
– @naval

The universe is nothing but a mere web of thoughts.
– Mirza Ghalib

It’s your life. No one can do this for you. Your teacher can set you in a particular direction, but you have to go on the path alone.
– Jakusho Kwong-roshi

Intelligence is more than just what you know, it’s how present you are. How well you read the room. How completely you communicate, with clean delivery and self awareness. Intelligence is multidimensional. Mind, body, and soul. There’s levels to it.
– Nika Solé

To develop one’s own personality is indeed an unpopular undertaking, a deviation that is highly uncongenial to the herd, an eccentricity smelling of the cenobite, as it seems to the outsider.
– C.G. Jung

“Heart” is merely another name for the Supreme Spirit, because
He is in all Hearts.

The entire Universe is condensed in the body, and the entire body in the Heart.
Thus the Heart is the nucleus of the whole Universe.

– Ramana Maharshi

In English we say “Overthinking”

But in poetry we say:
“The storms in my head ruin the garden that my soul holds.”

– ko

There is a limit to how much you can embrace a moment. But there is no limit to how much you can appreciate it.
– Armin Houman

Even writing about Nicaragua or New York, Cuba or my adopted home of Glasgow, it is with Shetlandic eyes that I see the world, and with Shetlandic ears that I hear it.
– Christie Williamson

I believe in the sacred because I simply no longer have the strength to sustain disbelief. It takes too much energy to deny the sacred, to defend against grace; too much time to block out poignancy, to explain away love. So somewhere along the way I just gave up and admitted that life is too poetic to be explained in prose and the sacred is too manifest to be denied.
– David Elkins

We need to bring the concept of autodidacts back into circulation—those who learn things for the pure joy of learning—the idea that you don’t have to be formally schooled to educate yourself. The word “amateur” comes from the Latin for “love,” and to learn is to love.
– @SketchesbyBoze

A well-fed parrot does not search for new words.
– Inca Proverb

The foot feels the foot when it touches the ground.
– Buddhist Proverb

One also found there, in those days, a certain number of people learning to master bicycles. With fixed gaze and clenched jaws, they would suddenly bolt away from their teacher, shoot across the avenue, vanish into a thicket, and reappear with their machines round their necks.
– Marcel Pagnol

Nothing has served me better in my long life than continuous learning.
– Charlie Munger

Pour yourself into me and I will not let a drop of you hit the ground.
– Rudy Francisco

Nationalism of one kind or
another was the cause of most of
the genocide of the twentieth
century. Flags are bits of colored
cloth that governments use first
to shrink-wrap people’s minds
and then as ceremonial shrouds
to bury the dead.
– arundhati roy

Each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.
– Viktor Frankl

Don’t let the force of impression carry you away. Say to it, ‘hold up a bit and let me see who you are and where you are from—let me put you to the test’ . . .
– Epictetus

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.
– Hermann Hesse

Society is always prone to accept a person offhand for what he pretends to be, so that a crackpot posing as a genius always has a certain chance to be believed.
– Hannah Arendt

Music is one of the ways by which you can know everything which is going on in the world. You can feel… through music… Whew… you can feel the vibrations of everybody in the world at any given moment.
– Nina Simone

Somebody inside of me has always tried, with all his strength, to be nobody.
– Albert Camus

Convictions are more dangerous foes of the truth than lies.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
– Rudyard Kipling

You can’t discover light by analyzing the dark.
– Wayne Dyer

Let us sit down here, where we can see more sky. The vast expanse of those starry heights is so consoling. Life hurts less when we see it; it caresses our cheek hot with life like the cool breeze from a light fan.
– Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

I no longer know if I wish to drown myself in love, vodka, or the sea.
– Franz Kafka

You can’t imagine how stupid the whole world has grown nowadays.
– Nikolai Gogol

Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.
– W. H. Auden

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake.
– Alexander Trocchi

And if life is repeated a thousand times
still you, you, and again, you.
– Forough Farrokhzad

Desire is a very scary and uneasy notion. Its mark is absence. Accordingly, a positivistic culture frequently finds itself at a loss to explore it or elaborate its workings.
– Samuel R. Delany

When you replace ‘I’ with ‘we’,
‘illness’ becomes ‘wellness’.
– Malcolm X

What if authenticity is the source of our loneliness?
– James. K.A. Smith

For me, life offers so many complexly appealing moments that two beautiful objects may be equally beautiful for different reasons and at different times. How can one choose?
– Diane Ackerman

It is one of the most astonishing experiences and also one of the most incontrovertible that evil — in a surprisingly short span of time —proves itself to be stupid and impractical.
– Bonhoeffer

Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.
– Chuck Klosterman

Never give up.

That’s what being a teacher is all about. No matter how hard it gets, no matter how steep the road looks, no matter how many times it doesn’t look like it’s moving forward, you just don’t give up.

– Elizabeth Warren

An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase filled with perfumes, with sounds, with projects, with climates. What we call reality is a relation between those sensations and those memories which simultaneously encircle us … that unique relation which the writer must discover in order that he may link two different states of being together forever in a phase.
– Marcel Proust

Knowledge is real knowledge only when it is acquired by the efforts of your intellect, not by memory.

Only when we forget what we were taught do we start to have real knowledge.

– Henry David Thoreau

If you think that love is what you want, you will go searching for it all over the place. If you think love is what you are, you will go sharing it all over the place.
– Neale Donald Walsch

If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail, we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer.
– Gaston Bachelard

If you react with anger to the person who is treating you with anger, that means you are accepting their food and eating it with them.
– Ven. Mahindasiri Thero

You are the temple of God. You are the abode of the ultimate. So the question is not where to go; you are already there – stop going.

Truth is not something outside to be discovered, it is something inside to be realized.

– Osho

The Bible is, to many a man, God’s unopened letter.
– Charles Spurgeon

My judgment is my judgment: other people don’t have an obvious right to it too — perhaps this is what such a philosopher of the future will say.
– Nietzsche

Re-learning myself while unlearning old behavior. It’s really Me vs Me.
– @onlystresstoday

Some of my favorite moments are not grand or planned—they’re the small, unexpected joys that arise during quiet days.
– Maria Kleine

We only meet exceptional hobbits in close companionship – those who had a grace or gift: a vision of beauty, and a reverence for things nobler than themselves, at war with their rustic self-satisfaction.
– Tolkien

thunder rolled through
my desolate ribcage

– Kineo Hayashida

Apart from the Selected Works of Mao Zedong, all we had were books about medicine.
– Yu Hua

It’s not what you think. My party bus stops at tea shops, libraries and plant nurseries.
– Ousa Medusa

As I see it, reality is chaos.
– Javier Cercas

Do not fool yourself. If you are still involved in harming others, hostility, gossip, unkindness, secret motives, meanness, you are not growing spiritually. Your body and actions are under the Law of Karma. You must examine your character.
– Robert Adams

I never speak when I have nothing to say.

– North Wind, George MacDonald

Somewhere in the course of writing, of moving story from inside to out, my perspective began to expand, to broaden… and the destructive demands of shame and guilt began to surrender.
– Steve Mathias

Do you lament the past abode,
Or marvel at this verdant sprawl?
In branches where your darkness crowed,
New stories bloom, and shadows fall.
– Amy Christie

We cannot separate personal healing from societal healing. It’s not sequential, but simultaneous.
– Richard Rohr

I must go in,
the fog is rising.
– Emily Dickinson

a good way to ensure you never have an original thought again is to spend your entire life with airpods blaring music. the good stuff only happens in silence.
– Will Manidis

Learn to dance, so when you get to heaven the angels know what to do with you.
– Saint Augustine

Sex is our deepest form of consciousness. It is utterly non-ideal, non-mental. It is pure blood-consciousness…. It is the consciousness of the night, when the soul is almost asleep.
– D. H Lawrence

We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

In the practice of tolerance, one’s enemy is the best teacher.
– Dalai Lama

It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it.
– Anaïs Nin

let me stay tender-hearted, despite despite despite
– @chenchenwrites

worry beads —
one by one I parse
your silence
– Mary Kendall

Respecting a child teaches them that even the smallest, most powerless, most vulnerable person is worthy of respect. And that is a lesson our world desperately needs to learn.
– L.R. Knost

A thousand moments that I had taken for granted; mostly because I had assumed there would be a thousand more.
– Morgan Matson, Second Chance Summer

Gradually, through meditation, we begin to notice that there are gaps in our internal dialogue. In the midst of continually talking to ourselves, we experience a pause, as if awakening from a dream. We recognize our capacity to relax with the clarity, the space, the open-ended awareness that already exists in our minds.
– Pema Chödrön

In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing–the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.
– May Sarton

Female artists are expected to make masterpieces in the margins—between caregiving, underfunding, and being labeled ‘hobbyists.’ Meanwhile, history celebrates men who abandoned their families to paint undisturbed.
– @aqua_seafoam_shame

Road Warrior

What happens when you
contain the flame?

I stuck my head out
the window &
waved at the stars.

Wait for me, I’m coming.
I’m coming home.

– Eileen Myles

But you haven’t put yourself forward; you’ve been put forward. And as for not being the right and proper person, why, Mr. Frodo wasn’t, as you might say, nor Mr. Bilbo. They didn’t choose themselves.
– Sam (Tolkien, The Two Towers)

When you have run your hands through the sands of time, and touched the embers of faded empires, surveyed the rubble of Rome and the ruins of Athens, the pomp and splendor of the modern cityscape ceases to hold any sway.
– Michael Walker

in paris & i just ordered a coke zero & the waiter brought me a red wine instead i love it here
– @sarahroseetter

This is an era for creativity, not credentialism; design, not implementation. Imitation can be automated, but originality cannot.
– Michael Walker

Love is an affliction in perpetual motion that offers no escape to the smartest game.
– Abdallāh ibn Sbayyil

Every way of a man is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the heart.
– Proverbs 21:2

no one else
at this mountain temple…
summer trees
– Kobayashi Issa

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

Accelerationists do not want merely to make government more efficient, nor simply to prevent it from pursuing redistribution or propagating progressive values….Their objective is not to tame or starve the beast but to kill it.
– Quinn Slobodian

When I say that I love you,
It means that I love you as you are,
not as I’d like you to be.

It means that I love you no matter where you are,
not only when you’re with me.

And it means that I love you no matter who you choose to love,
even if it is not me.

– Tahlia Hunter

Be yourself, and do not try to be like anyone else. It takes all sorts to make a world.
– Eileen Caddy

I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something.

Their knowledge is so fragile!

– Prof. Feynman

Whether you care to communicate with it or not, the magical strength and wisdom of reality are always there…

By relaxing the mind, you can reconnect with that primordial, original ground, which is completely pure and simple. Out of that, through the medium of your perceptions, you can discover magic, which in the Shambhala tradition is called drala. You actually can connect your own intrinsic wisdom with a sense of greater wisdom or vision beyond you.

You might think that something extraordinary will happen to you when you discover magic. Something extra-ordinary does happen. You simply find yourself in the realm of utter reality, complete and thorough reality.

– Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

My parents think I’m just a kid,
a silly, flighty sprite,
a child with neither will nor way
who couldn’t win a fight.

It’s weird, I think, how much they fret
and can’t go with the flow.
I’m pushing fifty, after all.
They really should let go.

– Jenny Mattern

Once a government is committed to…silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.
– Harry Truman

i can’t unrhythm the night of you
drum burnt of seashell, 
regret a lie washed from the waves
the whole ocean costumed for us tonight
adorned with this love god poured
into my skull-less head

– Phil Saint Denis Sanchez

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 ‘
– Eloisa to Abelard’, Alexander Pope

Pablo Neruda’s Greatest Lesson from Childhood
by Lewis Hyde

Playing in the lot behind the house one day when he was still a little boy, Neruda discovered a hole in a fence board. “I looked through the hole and saw a landscape like that behind our house, uncared for, and wild. I moved back a few steps, because I sensed vaguely that something was about to happen. All of a sudden a hand appeared—a tiny hand of a boy about my own age. By the time I came close again, the hand was gone, and in its place there was a marvelous white toy sheep.

“The sheep’s wool was faded. Its wheels had escaped. All of this only made it more authentic. I had never seen such a wonderful sheep. I looked back through the hole but the boy had disappeared. I went in the house and brought out a measure of my own: a pine cone, opened, full of odor and resin, which I adored. I set it down in the same spot and went off with the sheep.

“I never saw either the hand or the boy again. And I have never seen a sheep like that either. The toy I lost finally in a fire. But even now…whenever I pass a toyshop, I look furtively into the window. It’s no use. They don’t make sheep like that anymore.”

Neruda has commented on this incident several times. “This exchange of gifts—mysterious—settled deep inside me like a sedimentary deposit,” he once remarked in an interview. And he associates the exchange with his poetry. “I have been a lucky man. To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvellous thing in life. To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that come from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses—that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.

“That exchange brought home to me for the first time a precious idea: that all humanity is somehow together…It won’t surprise you then that I have attempted to give something resiny, earthlike, and fragrant in exchange for human brotherhood…

“This is the great lesson I learned in my childhood, in the backyard of a lonely house. Maybe it was nothing but a game two boys played who didn’t know each other and wanted to pass to the other some good things of life. Yet maybe this small and mysterious exchange of gifts remained inside me also, deep and indestructible, giving my poetry light.”

Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing.
– Robert Musil (tr. Wilkins and Pike)

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 Hemmings

It’ll be this kind of deep blue… The kind of color that somehow sucks in your eyes and your ears and all your words — the color of a completely closed-in night.
– Banana Yoshimoto

I ask god to send a swordsman / and god says ‘look at your hands’
– Melissa Broder

[…] operate within a new form of science that asks not just what is possible, but what is appropriate—appropriate to the well-being of self and Earth. Such a question does not originate in the mental realm but the spiritual, and is felt bodily, once our senses and heart are attuned. So the central part of our being that simply must be allowed to function and be attended is the heart.
– Joseph Chilton Pearce

He went down to the sea. […] Everything was blue. Not a dull, washed-out blue like the blue one sees in the sky or in paintings. But a deep blue, a living blue, which breathed, expanded, became lost in its own depths. An unknown, absolute blue without the least hint of pink or violet or green.
– Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio

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

But strength alone though of the Muses
born
Is like a fallen angel: trees uptorn,
Darkness, and worms, and shrouds, and
sepulchres
Delight it; for it feeds upon the burrs
And thorns of life; forgetting the great
end
Of Poesy
– John Keats

I feel ashamed that so many of us cannot imagine a better way to do things than locking children up all day in cells instead of letting them grow up knowing their families, mingling with the world, assuming real obligations, striving to be independent and self-reliant and free.
– John Taylor Gatto

All that bright, luminous music which you were,
Rocking there in the cradle of ancient stones.
– Rafael Alberti (translated by Kenneth Rexroth)

If you let go a little, you will have a little peace. If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of peace. And if you let go completely, you will have complete peace.
– Ajahn Chah

not hard to notice
the heavy quilts of snow
in the distant land
– Basho

Dance first.
Think later.
It’s the natural
order.
– Samuel Beckett

The Buddha says, ideally, you want to make your mind like a broken gong. People can hit it, but there’s no reverberation.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu

I know I am but summer to your heart,
And not the full four seasons of the year;
– Edna St. Vincent Millay

Without constant exchange with the rest of the cosmos, you cannot exist. The idea of individuality is an illusion.
– Sadhguru

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
– C.S. Lewis

You cannot think of something you do not know; it is impossible.
– Krishnamurti

There is nothing that so much prevents a settlement as a tangle of small surrenders.
– G.K. Chesterton

as autumn begins
I thought by now my
journey would have ended
– Issa

Some people accelerate your growth, and others slow it down. Important to note.
– Nika Solé

It is through the mistakes that the greatest learning happens on an inner level.
– Eckhart Tolle

There are some mistakes which humanity has made and repented so often that there is now really no excuse for making them again. One of these is the injustice which every age does to its predecessor…
– C.S. Lewis

In the monastery of your heart,
you have a temple
where all Buddhas unite.
– Milarepa

She took a white gem like a star that lay upon her breast hanging upon a silver chain, and she set the chain about Frodo’s neck. ‘When the memory of the fear and the darkness troubles you,’ she said, ‘this will bring you aid.’
– J.R.R. Tolkien (Arwen)

Galaxy Love
by Gerald Stern

There’s too little time left to measure
the space between us for that was
long ago—that time—so just lie
under the dark blue quilt and put
the fat pillows with the blue slips
on the great windowsill so we can
look over them and down to the
small figures hurrying by
in total silence and think of the heat
up here and the cold down there
while I turn the light off with the right
hand and gather you in close with the wrong.

After all, one should have the courage to believe in what is good. I do not mean that one should believe in illusions, but I mean that one should do only what is true and good and take it for granted that other people will do the same, in a way one can never do with the intellect alone.
– Sophie Scholl

If you don’t stretch you lose flexibility.

If you don’t lift weights you lose muscle.

If you don’t do cardio you lose lung capacity.

If you don’t use your body you end up losing it.

– Dan Go

For God is good – or rather, of all goodness
He is the Fountainhead
– Athanasius

The Present Crisis
bu James Russell Lowell

When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth’s aching breast
Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west,
And the slave, where’er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb
To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime
Of a century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of Time.

Through the walls of hut and palace shoots the instantaneous throe,
When the travail of the Ages wrings earth’s systems to and fro;
At the birth of each new Era, with a recognizing start,
Nation wildly looks at nation, standing with mute lips apart,
And glad Truth’s yet mightier man-child leaps beneath the Future’s heart.

So the Evil’s triumph sendeth, with a terror and a chill,
Under continent to continent, the sense of coming ill,
And the slave, where’er he cowers, feels his sympathies with God
In hot tear-drops ebbing earthward, to be drunk up by the sod,
Till a corpse crawls round unburied, delving in the nobler clod.

For mankind are one in spirit, and an instinct bears along,
Round the earth’s electric circle, the swift flash of right or wrong;
Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity’s vast frame
Through its ocean-sundered fibres feels the gush of joy or shame;—
In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim.

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,
Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,
And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light.

Hast thou chosen, O my people, on whose party thou shalt stand,
Ere the Doom from its worn sandals shakes the dust against our land?
Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet ’tis Truth alone is strong,
And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her throng
Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to enshield her from all wrong.

Backward look across the ages and the beacon-moments see,
That, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut through Oblivion’s sea;
Not an ear in court or market for the low, foreboding cry
Of those Crises, God’s stern winnowers, from whose feet earth’s chaff must fly;
Never shows the choice momentous till the judgment hath passed by.

Careless seems the great Avenger; history’s pages but record
One death-grapple in the darkness ‘twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,—
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

We see dimly in the Present what is small and what is great,
Slow of faith how weak an arm may turn the iron helm of fate,
But the soul is still oracular; amid the market’s din,
List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave within,—
“They enslave their children’s children who make compromise with sin.”

Slavery, the earth-born Cyclops, fellest of the giant brood,
Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched the earth with blood,
Famished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer day,
Gropes in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey;—
Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children play?

Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and ’tis prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,
Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified,
And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.

Count me o’er earth’s chosen heroes,—they were souls that stood alone,
While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone,
Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline
To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine,
By one man’s plain truth to manhood and to God’s supreme design.

By the light of burning heretics Christ’s bleeding feet I track,
Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns not back,
And these mounts of anguish number how each generation learned
One new word of that grand Credo which in prophet-hearts hath burned
Since the first man stood God-conquered with his face to heaven upturned.

For Humanity sweeps onward: where to-day the martyr stands,
On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver in his hands;
Far in front the cross stands ready and the crackling fagots burn,
While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return
To glean up the scattered ashes into History’s golden urn.

‘Tis as easy to be heroes as to sit the idle slaves
Of a legendary virtue carved upon our fathers’ graves,
Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime;—
Was the Mayflower launched by cowards, steered by men behind their time?
Turn those tracks toward Past or Future, that made Plymouth Rock sublime?

They were men of present valor, stalwart old iconoclasts,
Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the Past’s;
But we make their truth our falsehood, thinking that hath made us free,
Hoarding it in mouldy parchments, while our tender spirits flee
The rude grasp of that great Impulse which drove them across the sea.

They have rights who dare maintain them; we are traitors to our sires,
Smothering in their holy ashes Freedom’s new-lit altar-fires;
Shall we make their creed our jailer? Shall we, in our haste to slay,
From the tombs of the old prophets steal the funeral lamps away
To light up the martyr-fagots round the prophets of to-day?

New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;
Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be,
Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,
Nor attempt the Future’s portal with the Past’s blood-rusted key.

Ego is easily corrupted.
Spirit is not.
– Nika Solé

the first taste
of alphabet cereal …
a child refugee
– Chen-ou Liu

If you want momentum, you’ll have to create it yourself, right now, by getting up and getting started.
– Ryan Holiday

Tools will come
Tools will go
Only the vibe coder
remains.
– Rick Rubin

Sometimes the sea teaches me more about Jesus than any book.
– @ChansonEtoiles

So I will restore to you the years that the swarming locusts have eaten..
– Joel 2:25

I didn’t have to throw anything away, because I didn’t have anything to begin with.
– Herta Müller

Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong, but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching, you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence.
– J. Krishnamurti

snowfall…
all the buried things
under our silences

– @AdLibby1

choppy sea
I am the waves
and the boat
– @lafcadiopoetry

Poetry transports you-translates you-in and out of your own language of loneliness. The book itself translates you —makes briefly exterior the raw glimmerings of your own dark darknesses, and then folds them back into you-layer upon gentless layer; petal upon petal upon page. You glimpse yourself in the broken shards of image, of dream, of song, in the curve of broken bodies, broken voices, broken circles.
– Robin Walter

When we ask an open question we have not yet found an answer…And yet there is nothing ignorant or vague about this openness, because questioning actively engages the movement and fluidity of life.
– Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel

Stop thinking in days.

Start thinking in years.

– Stijn Noorman

night news on mute …
I look out at the stars
breathe in
the silence of a world
longing for tenderness
– Chen-ou Liu

All along, the world had referred to a real place
where it was hard to leave the car if parked too near a hedge.

To race the body towards pleasure in the backseat
held no appeal, though the image had its salvageable moments,
the hand that gripped the wheel gentling the flesh,
hitch of breath at an unexpected angle.

Not for us, we said, chastened by memory’s make-believe.

Besides, the humiliating inelegance,
the onlookers with rucksacks that double as sleeping bags,
the ones with binoculars come expressly for the doggers,
watching couples strip down to what’s left at the beginning.

No appetite so large it could not be filled
behind closed doors, we agreed, a joke we’d return to politely.

About the animal of the body, I have learned
it’s in no hurry to be sated or stilled
It lives to serve the error that confounds it,
to wrestle with buttons in the mind’s backseat.

No imagination safe enough from love
which swears by a map that leads nowhere.

We could drive ourselves and each other out with it,
could wave goodbye or wait—we could never stop waiting.

– Genii Loci

I went out to the local branch library to change my books and was overwhelmed by the soft beauty of the afternoon… outside my own miserable cramped absurd life, the world is still its old beautiful self.
– Philip Larkin

If you’re afraid to write it,
that’s a good sign. I suppose you know you’re writing the
truth when you’re terrified.
– Yrsa Daley Ward

On Reading A Biography Of George Washington
by Eloise Klein Healy

There is no cherry tree.
There is mud and blood and winter.

There are letters and orders to his farm manager
written by candle light detailing chores to do.

There are letters written to his British broker
complaining about low prices for his corn.

There is nothing lofty written about democracy
but there is something about the country

he surveyed beyond the mountains.
There is nothing about democracy yet

but he is tired of being told what
he can and cannot do.

Tired. Of a King.

Of being told what he can
and cannot do in his country.

There is a letter in which he orders
a uniform he designed himself.

It does not fit very well
because he does not know his size.

He wears it anyway.
Democracy.

Design and redesign and self-design.
Democracy.

Something lofty was written
in mud and blood and winters.
Democracy.

J’allais sous le ciel, Muse! et j’étais ton féal.
(I went out under the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal.)
– A. Rimbaud

There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said — no. But somehow we missed it.
– Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

It’s actually pretty
frustrating that the only cool
emotions are yearning and a concern
for others. It’s actually really
frustrating because of how much
time I’ve spent trying to be cool
when I could have just had
a strong desire for someone
far away from me to be happy.
– Neil Hilborn

Don’t try to be original. Be simple. Be good technically, and if there is something in you, it will come out.
– Henri Matisse

I’m already my future corpse. 
Only a dream links me to myself —
The hazy and belated dream 
Of what I should have been — a wall 
Around my abandoned garden. 

Take me, passing waves, 
To the oblivion of the sea 
Bequeath me to what I won’t be —
I, who raised a scaffold 
Around the house I never built. 

– Fernando Pessoa

I can drastically change my attitude toward my own work simply by changing its font.
– Amit Majmudar

If God created the night & the day
& the dawn, of course
& the dusk
& the tangerine rosepink sunset
& the infant bright of morning
& the deep amethyst twilight

then to perceive the world in binary
is to forego knowledge of the divine.

– David Gate

Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them.
– Aristotle

The self is put together by thought. Thought is not yours or mine; thinking is not individual thinking. Thinking is shared by all human beings.
– Krishnamurti

Man against Nature. Of all the possible conflicts, that was the one that was hopeless. Even a slim education had taught her this much: Man loses.
– Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

But if by some miracle, and all our struggle, the Earth is spared, only justice to every living thing (and everything alive) will save humankind… Only justice can stop a curse.
– Alice Walker

You’re right when you say / the shape of my life doesn’t depend solely / on me.
– Ama Codjoe

I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days – three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.
– John Keats

By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself. This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens.
– James Hillman

Without physical practice, dharma is just words. Words that are understood with our intellect, and that ultimately keep us in the prison of thought.
– Matthias Esho Birk

It can be said that every piece of literature is propaganda of a kind. The lyric poet, merely for assuming the importance of his theme, can be charged with suggesting that other themes are of less importance [. . .].
– Mark Van Doren

The last to recognize a scholar’s merit are his own neighbors.

– Abu Hayyan Al-Tawhidi And Abu ‘Ali Miskawayh
(Translated by Sophia Vasalou and James E. Montgomery)

It is hard to entirely dispel the commonsense idea that fiction is the opposite of truth. In reality, fiction is the only possible means of expressing the truth.
– Tom Cheetham

At other times we reign by night alone,
And posting through the skies pursue the moon;
But when the morn arises, none are found;
For cruel Demogorgon walks the round
– John Dryden

A quiet mind is all you need. All else will happen rightly, once your mind is quiet. …In the light of calm and steady self-awareness inner energies wake up and work miracles without any effort on your part.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj

All this talk about haunted spaces
but it’s the body
that’s haunted.
– Dorothea Lasky

Don’t take this the wrong way,
but God can’t hear you

because he has no ears
of his own. Your ears are his.
You think there is space between—
a whole sky, fat as a blue whale—
but there isn’t! God can’t even see you
in your combat boots and red cashmere
scarf from the consignment store.
There is no celestial and woman.
In fact, all 3.95 billion gods
wake up every morning
in little apartments, get dressed
in colors that can scream, and roam
the world in boots just like yours.

– Maria Giesbrecht

It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.
– Arthur Schopenhauer

I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls. My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat. My harp also is turned to mourning, and my organ into the voice of them that weep.
– Job 30:29-31

It is easy to get attached to any insight we have, especially if it is a profound one, but to be truly free, we must also let go of even our most precious realizations.
– Santiago Santai Jiménez

I cannot hold my peace, John Keats;
There never was a spring like this;
It is an echo, that repeats
My last year’s song and next year’s bliss.
– Countee Cullen

I seldom know where I’m headed, but if the story is meant to be, you cross over to the other side—you’re inside it, and there’s an engine.
– Jhumpa Lahiri

It Comes Unadorned
by Toni Morrison

It comes
Unadorned
Like a phrase
Strong enough to cast a spell;
It comes
Unbidden,
Like the turn of sun through hills
Or stars in wheels of song.
The jeweled feet of women dance the earth.
Arousing it to spring.
Shoulders broad as a road bend to share the weight of years.
Profiles breach the distance and lean
Toward an ordinary kiss.
Bliss.
It comes naked into the world like a charm.

If you look at a dancer in silence, his or her body will be the music. If you turn the music on, that body will become an extension of what you’re hearing.
– Judith Jamison

Photography is an enduring record of many things seen only once in a lifetime and enables the fortunate possessor to go back by the light of his own fireside to scenes which would otherwise fade from memory and be lost.
– George Eastman

You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.
– Ansel Adams

The evening star would be high in the sunset sky when it was still broad daylight. That evening star fascinated me. It was in some way very exciting to me … I had nothing but to walk into nowhere and the white sunset space with the star.
– Georgia O’Keeffe

On the edge of the prairie, where the sun had gone down, the sky was turquoise blue, like a lake, with gold light throbbing in it. Higher up, in the utter clarity of the western slope, the evening star hung like a lamp suspended by silver chains – like the lamp engraved up the title-page of old Latin texts, which is always appearing in new heavens and waking new desires in men.
– Willa Cather, My Ántonia

The Fairy Queen has sent you to do brave deeds in this world. That High City that you see is in another world. Before you climb the path to it and hang your shield on its wall, go down into the valley and fight the dragon that you were sent to fight.
– Margaret Hodges

Suddenly: the word most used by Dostoevsky. Somebody told me that. Some Dostoevsky expert. Suddenly. As though any kind of action could be drawn into words: Suddenly music. Suddenly turning. Suddenly silent. Suddenly. As though I never saw the process. Everyone in the old house is sick but me. Silence, except for the snoring, coughing, and occasional trips to the bathroom. Snow everywhere through the windows. You can’t look out without seeing it. Suddenly winter. Frozen rivers. Bitter cold. Barren trees. Small silver plane etched out against a chalk, still sky. Suddenly, completely alone.
– Sam Shepard, Day Out of Days

I should like to save the Shire, if I could — though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them. But I don’t feel like that now. I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again.
– J R R Tolkien

The mind which is created quick to love, is responsive to everything that is pleasing, soon as by pleasure it is awakened into activity. Your apprehensive faculty draws an impression from a real object, and unfolds it within you, so that it makes the mind turn thereto. And if, being turned, it inclines towards it, that inclination is love; that is nature, which through pleasure is bound anew within you.
– Dante Alighieri

The urge to transform one’s appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress [… ] The capacity for collective joy is encoded into us almost as deeply as the capacity for the erotic love of one human for another. We can live without it, as most of us do, but only at the risk of succumbing to the solitary nightmare of depression.

Why not reclaim our distinctively human heritage as creatures who generate their own ecstatic pleasures out of music, color, feasting, and dance … There is no ‘point’ to it – no religious overtones, ideological message, or money to be made – just the chance, which we need much more of on this crowded planet, to acknowledge the miracle of our simultaneous existence with some sort of celebration.

– Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets

Through the earth in vain I’ve driven
a root, to the most secret waters:
no branch of me will ever bloom, nor will
the wind hear the resonance of my word
re-echo through the lofty foliage.

I am no royal queen of bees
imprisoned in her fruitful cell;
for never a joy of mine will sway
the busy swarms which, come May,
swell the chequered honeycomb.

And I have followed the straight way,
against the abyss of denial.
There’s no abyss. And my delusion
would now just like to sleep a while
and lie tamely down to rest.

– Karel van de Woestijne (translated by Tanis Guest)

There’s always that core of peace, of Truth. You can engage in the world without getting lost in it.
– Adyashanti

Tune out society and its endless and noisy demands.
– @naval

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.
– Sayadaw U Tejaniya

He who cherishes a beautiful vision, a lofty ideal in his heart, will one day realize it. Columbus cherished a vision of another world, and he discovered it; Copernicus fostered the vision of a multiplicity of worlds and a wider universe, and he revealed it; Buddha beheld the vision of a spiritual world of stainless beauty and perfect peace, and he entered into it.
– James Allen

The next stage of the web is the decentralized creator economy.
– @naval

As if the Sea should part
And show a further Sea –
And that – a further – and the Three
But a Presumption be –

Of Periods of Seas –
Unvisited of Shores –
Themselves the Verge of Seas to be –
Eternity – is Those –

– Emily Dickinson

The power is in the person who is trying.
– Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Only caring about your own rights is a short road to losing them.
– Amy Baskin

I asked ChatGPT4o to roast me:

Alright, Kenneth, here’s your roast:

So, you’re a Buddhist meditation teacher on Twitter, huh? Nothing says “detachment from the ego” like carefully curating an online persona. Are you achieving enlightenment 280 characters at a time? Maybe if you chant “retweet, like, subscribe” enough times, nirvāṇa will slide into your DMs.

And let’s talk about that last name—Folk. Real wholesome. Sounds like you should be strumming a banjo instead of dissolving the illusion of self. But hey, at least you picked a career where sitting around doing nothing is actually the goal.

You’re out here teaching people how to let go of attachments, but let’s be real—you probably have a favorite meditation cushion and would fight a monk for it.

Now, take a deep breath, let go of your worldly concerns, and accept that I just roasted you. You’re welcome.

– Kenneth Folk

‘Sooner or later man will have to return to earth, and to the land from which he comes; that is to say, man will have to return to himself.

Space flights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because it is easier to go t:o Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one’s own being.

– Carl Jung

I wanted to be where
nobody I knew
could ever
come.
– Sylvia Plath

Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.
– Sebastian Junger

Kyrie

Sometimes my life opened its eyes in the dark.
A feeling as if crowds drew through the streets
in blindness and anxiety on the way towards a miracle,
while I invisibly remain standing.

As the child falls asleep in terror
listening to the heart’s heavy tread.
Slowly, slowly until morning puts its rays in the locks
and the doors of darkness open.

– Tomas Tranströmer (tr. Robin Fulton)

Doesn’t it bother you sometimes / what living is, what the day has turned into?
– Alex Dimitrov

the frost
on the iron kettle
has a cold voice
– Basho

I think that two mouths in delight
Never drank where the same phantom flows

– Stéphane Mallarmé (translated by Henry Weinfield)

I believe that poetry at its best is found rather than written.
– Linda Gregg

learn
from nature
the lesson of worship
– @BashoSociety

Depression is a kind of agony. If you have become agony and not ecstasy, it is because a large part of your life energy is happening compulsively, not consciously. It is happening as a reaction to external situations.
– Sadhguru

If we do not at least aspire to relate to a genuine spiritual practice and path, we can easily be swallowed up by our ignorance, our self-absorption & our (possibly misguided) projections of the world and others. These things can bring us great suffering & confusion.
– Dzigar Kongtrul

When profit becomes the only motive for culture, originality ceases to be. The algorithm only knows what is – it cannot invent what has not yet been.
– Dolores McElroy

My editor calls the neglected novel the sacrificial twin. Eventually, one pulls ahead.
– Alice McDermott

If we’re completely honest, not sentimental or nostalgic, we have no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is one unending thread, not a life chopped up into sections out of touch with one another.
– P. L. Travers

When I met Jung, he told me to be true to myself, and true to my type. And that is what I wish for you. If you go against your typological makeup, you go against your grain, and you will get splinters. Go with it, and your life will have ease, flow, and purpose.
– Robert A Johnson

Every
by Wendy Cope

Every ditch or stream or river the train crosses.
Every ploughed field, every row of trees.
Every square church tower in the distance.
Every minute of sunshine, every shadow.
Every wisp of cloud in the wide, blue, East
Anglian sky.
Every day. Every day that’s left.

Now don’t think that awakening is the end. Awakening is the end of seeking, the end of the seeker, but it is the beginning of a life lived from your true nature.
– Adyashanti

FOR AN EARLY ITALIAN MUSICIAN

Listening now to his music, how
one wishes to have been the musician, and so
to be beautiful forever as his music is,
and he in it, who is now
only his music, which is his world.

How one always wishes for an end
– to be complete.

And there is also this:
that one wishes to last, that one needs to make
a world for survival, which cannot be done
simply, or soon, but by a slow
crystal on crystal accretion of a made
world, a world made to last.

One is nothing with no world.

– William Bronk

You become who you’re here to be, to the extent of what you’re willing to sacrifice to be that.
– Nika Solé

The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?
– Jane Hirshfield

When the whole consciousness is silent and tranquil, free from all becoming, which is spontaneity, then only does the immeasurable come into being.
– Krishnamurti

One can love and cherish a homeland and/or language *without* believing that your culture/language is better than others. Love isn’t supremacist. The romance of ethnonationalism is for bot-hearts, not humans. No human is purely anything. We are all fictions and layers of fable.
– Alina Stefanescu

They walked on, without knowing in what direction. There was too much to be thought, and felt, and said, for attention to any other objects.
– Jane Austen

Of course they don’t understand you. You are here to expand their understanding.
– Nika Solé

Recreate yourself so constantly that even recent versions of you seem like a completely different energy and mindset.
– Nika Solé

The veils of illusion don’t fall away by themselves; they’re removed by our absolute conviction that there’s something more real behind them.
– Marianne Williamson

Grace is always present. You imagine it as something high in the sky, far away, something that has to descend. It is really inside you, in your heart. When the mind rests in its source, grace rushes forth, sprouting as from a spring within you.
– Sri Ramana Maharshi

Driving is the new handwriting.
– @naval

I am suggesting both a poetic basis of mind and a psychology that starts neither in the physiology of the brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor the analysis of behavior, but in the processes of imagination.
– James Hillman

It’s not about who’s fun at parties.
It’s about who shows up at hospitals.

It’s not about who shares your joys.
It’s about who shoulders your pain.

It’s not about who’s there for the photo.
It’s about who’s there for the fall.

The older I get, the more I value
those who witness your breaking
and help with your rebuilding.

– Vex King

All work done with love is healing work.
– Eric Micha’el Leventhal

Wisdom is merely the movement from fighting life to embracing it.
– Rasheed Ogunlaru

Spring
by Rachel Kyung-Joo Shin

Seoul, May 1980

cherry blossoms are opening.
Pink clouds canopy the road to town,
wind shakes out sakura rain like piggy-bank coins.
A new school year erupts.

I walk the long road to university.
Cherry petals confetti my neck,
my shoulders, like feathers.
Gathering into silken wings.

The Japanese planted cherry trees
when they came, tossing seeds that cavity
her womb like spent bullets.
More sinister now than tank tracks

And wreckages. Even sudden beauty and rebirth
a Japanese image.
The Korean girls stolen and
numerous as planted seeds.

Japan calls these trees Tokyo Cherry,
says their petals represent Japanese soldiers’
brief but beautiful lives.
I learned so a previous spring and wondered

What other miracles and newness
were so planted? How did Korean
spring occur before Japan
came with flourishing destruction.

What is a first day or university
without washes of pink and white
without green men glittering
black guns and boots mapping the path?

Tall whispering grasses also planted
to cultivate order and grow goodness and cleanness
forever. As I enter my city I see
one in ironed uniform

stalk-still inside a gust of blossoms.
The string inside me catches
as blushing petals ceremoniously collect
on his blood-green kevlar.

“You’re so young,” he said. “It seems almost criminal that you should be so young in these terrible times. I wish you could have known this country when it was still salvageable.”
“It might survive,” I said, “changed, but still itself.”

– Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

To retain innocence, reduce judgements.
– @naval

There are many versions of America to be ashamed of.

I’m now ashamed of the
America of my lifetime.

– Andy Perrin

All I am saying is that God commanded Joshua to destroy ai.
– Daniel Goodman

The future is rare, and not every day that arrives is a day of beginning.
– Blanchot

The returns to scale for being smart, young, skilled, and high-energy have gone up tremendously, and that has profound implications for society. The smart are getting richer.
– @naval

I scan my heart
for that Don Juan spirit …
a woman in red
dancing by moonlight
to a flamenco guitar
– Chen-ou Liu

It would be a good contest among Christians, one to labour to give no offense, and the other to labour to take none. The best men are severe to themselves, tender toward others.
– Richard Sibbes

You know you’re good at something when you switch from making decisions with your conscious mind to making decisions with your instincts.
– @naval

The United States needs the world much more than the world needs the United States.
– Andy Perrin

I was and remained in search of myself, of the truth peculiar to myself.
– C.G. Jung, Travels

Forget It

Don’t remember; all this will go away:
the good, the bad, will go. We’ll go away.
And something already is that still will be.

– William Bronk

Poetry finds a home
in the ink of a poet,
night cradles the moon,
dreams find a sanctum
in sleepy eyes,
and my breathlessness
unwinds in your arms.
– @chandanas

In the end, it has to be as it is and has always been: great things are left for the great, abysses for the profound, delicacy and trembling for the subtle, and, all in all, everything rare for those who are rare themselves.
– Nietzsche

A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.
– George Orwell

You impose constraints on yourself, in the form of rituals and routine, and suddenly you are free, for as Michelangelo said, art lives on constraint and dies of freedom, and so do we.
– Dylan O’Sullivan

and yet, and yet . . . denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. our destiny is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. time is the substance i am made of. time is a river which sweeps me along, but i am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but i am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but i am the fire. the world, unfortunately, is real; i, unfortunately, am borges.
– jorge luis borges, a new refutation of time

Every now and then, I’ll meet an escapee, someone who has broken free of self-centeredness and lit out for the territory of compassion. You’ve met them, too, those people who seem to emit a steady stream of, for want of a better word, love-vibes. As soon as you come within range, you feel embraced, accepted for who you are. For those of us who suspect that you rarely get something for nothing, such geniality can be discomfiting. Yet it feels so good to be around them. They stand there, radiating photons of goodwill, and despite yourself you beam back, and the world, in a twinkling, changes.
– Marc Ian Barasch

Perhaps the greatest contradiction in our lives, the hardest to handle, is the knowledge ‘There was a time when I was not alive, and there will come a time when I am not alive.’ On one level, when you ‘step out of yourself’ and see yourself as ‘just another human being’, it makes complete sense. But on another level, perhaps a deeper level, personal nonexistence makes no sense at all. All that we know is embedded inside our minds, and for all that to be absent from the universe is not comprehensible. This is a basic undeniable problem of life; perhaps it is the best metaphorical analogue of Gödel’s Theorem. When you try to imagine your own nonexistence, you have to try to jump out of yourself, by mapping yourself onto someone else. You fool yourself into believing that you can import an outsider’s view of yourself into you… though you may imagine that you have jumped out of yourself, you never can actually do so.
– Douglas Hofstadter

Before this is all over. Before they close the house and sell the furniture and give away the books. Before the cosmetics and shoes are handed out. Before they throw the pans in the trash. Before they empty the cupboards, before they take away the spices, the noodles. Before the happy days and Sunday afternoons end. Before the last of the mornings. Before the end of the anguish. Before sex without love and love without sex are over. Before the clothes rot in the closets. Before they take down the paintings and cover the armchairs with canvases and close the windows forever. Before they burn the photos. Before the doormats dry out, before the curtains rust on their tracks. Before curiosity is over, the bones, the liver and the corneas. Before all the plants on the balcony dry out. Before there is no more snow, no colors, no tropics. Before the end of all the jungles, of all the seas, of all the reflections in the water. Before the last poem. From the end of the sidewalks and streets. The end of all walks.

Before goodbye to all the airports and all the planes, all the cities and all the cafes with steamed up windows. Before the cancellation of all the discussions, of all the arguments, of all the fury, of all the contempt. Of all the metallic anxieties. Before the end of the screams, the desolation and the guilt. Before the last agenda, the last Friday, the last bar, the last dance. Before all the domes and all the screens go out. Before the moths eat the remains of the wool and the pillow. Before the end of pets. Before, much before: you have to live.

But how? As? “How admirable / he who does not think “life flees” / when he sees lightning,” Basho wrote. Admirable those who are in time without thinking about it.

– Leila Guerriero, Theory of Gravity

…this notion of effort. This word at first means something you strive for. But you understand at a certain point that the kind of effort you need to comprehend is different; that what is meant by effort is letting go. It is an effort because I have to struggle against what is ingrained in me about the idea of effort: I want to get something, to do something. Finally, after years of trying, I begin to understand that the nature of effort is to allow something to appear. This new meaning of effort has to do with relaxation. And it is really an effort to understand relaxation when all my training is to strive, to battle against, to chastise some aspect of myself.
– Paul Reynard

A characteristic of human action is that it always begins something new, and this does not mean that it is ever permitted to start ab ovo to create ex nihilo. In order to make room for one’s own action, something that was there before must be removed or destroyed, and things as they were before are changed.

Such change would be impossible if we could not mentally remove ourselves from where we physically are located and imagine that things might as well be different from what they actually are. In other words, the deliberate denial of factual truth — the ability to lie — and the capacity to change facts — the ability to act — are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source: imagination. It is by no means a matter of course that we can say, “The sun shines,” when it actually is raining (the consequence of certain brain injuries is the loss of this capacity); rather, it indicates that while we are well equipped for the world, sensually as well as mentally, we are not fitted or embedded into it as one of its inalienable parts.

We are free to change the world and to start something new in it. Without the mental freedom to deny or affirm existence, to say “yes” or “no” — not just to statements or propositions in order to express agreement or disagreement, but to things as they are given, beyond agreement or disagreement, to our organs of perception and cognition — no action would be possible; and action is of course the very stuff politics are made of. Hence, when we talk about lying … let us remember that the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness. Moral outrage, for this reason alone, is not likely to make it disappear.

– Hannah Arendt

The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t.
– Jonathan Gottschall

We are lodged in this world as in a great dream;
Then why cause our lives so much stress?
This is my reason to spend the day drunk
And collapse, sprawled against the front pillar.

When I wake, I peer out in the yard
Where a bird is singing among the flowers.
Now tell me, what season is this?—
The spring breeze speaks with orioles warbling.

I am so touched that I almost sigh,
I turn to the wine, pour myself more,
Then sing wildly, waiting for the moon,
When the tune is done, I no longer care.

– Chūnrì zuìqǐ yánzhì

Here among flowers one flask of wine,
With no close friends, I pour it alone.
I lift cup to bright moon, beg its company,
Then facing my shadow, we become three.
The moon has never known how to drink;
My shadow does nothing but follow me.
But with moon and shadow as companions the while,
This joy I find must catch spring while it’s here.
I sing, and the moon just lingers on;
I dance, and my shadow flails wildly.
When still sober we share friendship and pleasure,
Then, utterly drunk, each goes his own way—
Let us join to roam beyond human cares
And plan to meet far in the river of stars.

– Yuèxià dúzhuó, (tr. Stephen Owen)

If a coin comes down heads, that means that the possibility of its coming down tails has collapsed. Until that moment the two possibilities were equal.

But on another world, it does come down tails. And when that happens, the two worlds split apart.
– Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don’t take are snuffed out like candles, as if they’d never existed. At that moment all Will’s choices existed at once. But to keep them all in existence meant doing nothing. He had to choose, after all.
– Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

We are not transparent to ourselves. We have intuitions, suspicions, hunches, vague musings, and strangely mixed emotions, all of which resist simple definition. We have moods, but we don’t really know them. Then, from time to time, we encounter works of art that seem to latch on to something we have felt but never recognized clearly before. Alexander Pope identified a central function of poetry as taking thoughts we experience half-formed and giving them clear expression: “what was often thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” In other words, a fugitive and elusive part of our own thinking, our own experience, is taken up, edited, and returned to us better than it was before, so that we feel, at last, that we know ourselves more clearly.
– Alain de Botton, Art as Therapy

This was the setting in which the most troubled and most precious days of my life were lived: an abode from which our adventurings flowed out, to flow back again like waves breaking on a lonely headland.
– Alain-Fournier

It is because so much happens. Too much happens. That’s it. Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That’s how he finds that he can bear anything. That’s it. That’s what is so terrible. That he can bear anything, anything.
– William Faulkner, Light in August

are you bringing the dead are you bringing
the living will they testify for you or against you
– Arah Ko

Our current culture is erasing everyone who doesn’t immediately seem “useful” in a soullessly narrow sense of that term. Kings fall, but the voices that help others feel understood, or help them love themselves and others, those are the voices that last.

That is what poems do.

No one with power has ever lasted longer than a poem that shows the powerless they are loved.

– Joseph Fasano

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
– George Orwell

A creative impulse is so powerful and grips one emotionally so strongly that one has at the same time to withhold emotion, whereby you can naturally overdo it and go too slowly. And if you hold back your horses too much, it happens that the idea disappears.
– Marie Louise von Franz

What Happens While We Are Sleeping

Frost. Foxes. Owl-kills.
The wheel of stars.
Thundering lorries with somewhere
to get to by dawn.

Beads of dew forming
along the telegraph wires.
A red deer delicately eating
each closed tulip like a prayer.

– Esther Morgan

The courage to live an ordinary life. To relinquish the cultural obsession to be remembered for something and instead live, love, get right with what’s here now—birds, trees, earth, bodies, soul. Does it matter? I don’t know. But it’s what I’m called to do.
– McCall Erickson

a simple life,
a lonely moon gazer’s
tea songs

– Basho

In Buddhism, we aren’t trying to look at the physical world by itself; instead, we’re looking at the mind and its relationship to the appearances of the world.
– Ponlop Rinpoche

Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.
– Prof. Feynman

We can destroy what we have written,
but we cannot unwrite it.
– Anthony Burgess

Advertising, which in the 19th century was simply the publicizing of a product, before becoming in the 20th, an industry for stimulating desire, is set in the 21st-century to become pure communication.

– Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb

The crow flies between your phone and mine.
You want to know what you are
to me. Babe, you are my ride in the country.
– Cathleen Quirk

Most everything has been done before.
– Rosmarie Waldrop

When they attack you and you notice that you love them with all your heart, your Work is done.
– Byron Katie

When we stop resisting sadness—trying to sweeten it with phone calls, distractions, or pleasures—and just let ourselves feel it in all its heaviness, darkness, and pain, it disappears by itself, and even transforms into delight.
– David Edwards

once in a great while we put our flesh aside
fold it like red linen and lay it on meadow grass
and then we drift along towards a new life
like a grosbeak does
a last breath and a long flight.
– Don Domanski

When you are without thoughts, without needs, without wants, without desires, then you are God. You are the universe. You are Divine Love. You are beautiful.
– Robert Adams

Poetry is how we find each other in the dark. Keep writing, keep sharing, keep shining your light.
– @onlypoemsmag

To know that you are a prisoner of your mind is the dawn of wisdom.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj

Any literary work is made of a mixture of vision, memory, and action, of notions and information received during a lifetime either through speech or books, and of the residue of our own existence.
– Marguerite Yourcenar

Before they gave a concert
the Greeks would drop copper pots
on marble floors, so
you could hear the silence
reassembling itself …
– Kenny Williams

Tree of Fire

The tree by the river
is weeping leaves.
It strews the shore
with tear after tear.
It reads to the river
its prophecy of fire.
I am that final
leaf that no one
sees
My people
have died as fires
die-without a trace.

– Adonis, Translated from the Arabic by Samuel Hazo

We forget and call it healing,
we forgive everything but ourselves.
– Evan Knoll

February 25.

I deserve that, don’t I, some sort of
blazing love that I can live with.

– Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals

I don’t know why life isn’t constructed to be seamless and safe, why we make such glaring mistakes, things fall so short of our expectations, and our hearts get broken and our kids do scary things.
– Anne Lamott

I have never been lonely because the Creator has never left me for a moment. He has never left anyone for a moment.
– Sadhguru

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing.
– E.B. White

To fit into the norm does not necessarily indicate balance. The norm itself may be the product of an unbalanced culture.
– Krishnamurti

Imagine reaching the highest level of what you were taught was success, and then realizing you completely abandoned yourself along the way. Couldn’t be me.
– Nika Solé

Following your genuine intellectual curiosity is a better foundation for a career than following whatever is making money right now.
– @naval

You aren’t making history
if you’re writing it
but it’s probably safer,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk

The really smart thinkers are clear thinkers. They understand the basics at a very, very fundamental level. I would rather understand the basics really well than memorize all kinds of complicated concepts I can’t stitch together and can’t rederive from the basics.
– @naval

My music is the spiritual expression of what I am: my faith, my knowledge, my being.
– John Coltrane

…I marveled that Lewis had lived so long without setting himself ablaze. Except when he dressed for a special occasion, he wore an old tweed jacket, the right-hand pocket of which had been patched and re-patched many times. This was because Lewis, when wearied of his pipe, would drop it into his pocket, with the result that it would burn its way through. And this happened so often that there was none of the original material
left.
– Walter Hooper, On C.S. Lewis

I have no help to send, therefore I must go myself, said Aragorn.
– Tolkien, The Return of the King

There will be no help if not from me.
– Joan of Arc

Music is the universal language.
– Ella Fitzgerald

Laws are commands upon the will and are binding. Rules are conditions; they may have exceptions.
– Tolkien, The Lost Road

Illusion will never satisfy you. Only the truth of who you are, if realised, will set you free.
– Eckhart Tolle

I say, the heck with endings. I don’t think I want to wear those socks. On any other day of the week my attitude would elicit a few stares; my value-judgments are like what they used to call an “overdressed” woman, and it has come about that my shadow is invisible to me, but I don’t know this yet. The conventional wisdom is that we desire what’s unattainable (reclining clouds, distant factory chimneys) for precisely that reason. No allowance is made for the goodness that might be lurking therein, like love in a tongue-tied child whose cheek one pinches as one passes along to bigger and better disappointments. We never know what we could walk back to except when we do go back, and then it’s as if not knowing and knowing were the same thing.
– John Ashbery, Love’s Old Sweet Song

poetry / isn’t revolution but a way of knowing / why it must come
– Adrienne Rich

Even after the dark thumb of fate pushes one’s face into the ground and says “you are the nothingest nothing and not even the cool abyss”, one must crawl towards the pen and take notes in the dirt. That is how writing works.
– Alina Stefanescu

As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I’m not sure that I’m going to be a good one or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says, “You are nothing,’ I will be a writer.
– Hunter S. Thompson, Age 21

Be a unique person. Omnipresent consciousness. Know that. Don’t ever allow yourself to believe that something doesn’t fit into your life. Stop that thought before it manifests itself.
– Robert Adams

Corporations are
like prairies in that way —
it’s good to have the
occasional fire come through,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk

When we finally get it
our instruments will speak
to each other and we’ll
just listen,
the old monk told the band.
– The Old Monk

No, there is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in it—no plan to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather.
– George MacDonald

The exquisite, delicate, thin curve of the new moon,
in spring ,
every hour of the light and dark,
one and all
with the rest,
are to me miracles…
– Lami Esen

Education is a discipline— that is, the discipline of the good habits in which the child is trained. Education is a life, nourished upon ideas; and education is an atmosphere—that is, the child breathes the atmosphere emanating from his parents; that of the ideas which rule their own lives.
– Charlotte Mason

In danger, the holothurian cuts itself in two.
It abandons one self to a hungry world
and with the other self it flees.
– Wislawa Szymborska

I have always thought that life and literature are intermingled and that this intermingling has been my quest.
– V. S. Pritchett

A person with a good book in his hand can never be lonely.
– Carlo Goldoni

But the rebellious aesthetic / was just that—aesthetic. A sly disguise for the / same glory, the guttering flame of a single / God-breathed second.
– Johnny Cate

I’ve always been a loner. I’ll be straight; I just don’t like most people—they tire me, mix me, jiggle my eyeballs, rob me, lie to me, fuck me, fool me, teach me, insult me, love me; but mostly they talk talk TALK until I feel like a cat reamed in the ass by an elephant.
– Charles Bukowski

Every time I go to the airport I unpeel my name.
– Ollie Schminkey

Be properly scared and go on doing what you have to do.
– Flannery O’Connor

A guy who’s always interested in the condition of the world, and changing it, either has no problems of his own, or refuses to face them… not wanting to face things of his own nature.
– Henry Miller

A big part of the problem with society is that, instead of fixing our problems, everyone is trying to make enough money so that the problems won’t affect them.
– Give A Shit About Nature

PRAYER

The phone rings, it’s an old friend, he tells me of another old friend who is dying. He’s in his forties, just married, little boy, no hope, he’ll be dead within a couple of years, and dying too in a most cruel fashion, piece by piece, as his body slowly fails around the bright light of his mind, leaving him trapped in the husk of what had been a wonderfully lithe body. I try to imagine my friend inside himself, immobile in a dark crumbled castle, his mind racing — and I have to get up and get outside and go for a walk.

So what prayer do I make for Pete? What do I say for his little boy, who will lose his father before he knew him well? What do I say for his wife, who will watch her new husband die a little every day and then be left alone with their son with the same thick red hair as his father?

I don’t know. And to whom do I address these prayers? And what do I expect to happen by those prayers? I don’t know. Do I really think that my prayers will save Pete, or cut his pain, or dilute his fear as he sees the darkness descending? Do I really think my prayers will make his wife’s agony any less, or reduce the confused sadness of his little boy? No.

But I mutter prayers anyway, form them in the cave of my mouth and speak them awkwardly into the gray wind, and watch as they are instantly shattered and splintered and whipped through the old oak trees and sent headlong into the dark river below, where they seem lost and vanished, empty gestures in a cold land.

Did they have any weight as they flew? I don’t know.

But I believe with all my heart that they mattered because I was moved to make them. I believe that the mysterious sudden impulse to pray is the prayer, and that the words we use for prayer are only envelopes in which to mail pain and joy, and that arguing about where prayers go, and who sorts the mail, and what unimaginable senses hear us, is foolish.

It’s the urge that matters – the sudden save us that rises against horror, the silent thank you for joy. The children are safe and we sit stunned and grateful by the side of the road; the children are murdered, every boy and girl in the whole village, and we sit stunned and desperate, and bow our heads, and whisper for their souls and our sins.

So a prayer for my friend Pete, in gathering darkness; and a prayer for us all, that we are brave enough to pray, for it is an act of love, and love is why we are here.

– Brian Doyle

I don’t know which is worse—to have a bad teacher or no teacher at all. In any case, I believe the teacher’s work should be largely negative. He can’t put the gift into you, but if he finds it there, he can try to keep it from going in an obviously wrong direction. We can learn how not to write, but this is a discipline that does not simply concern writing itself but concerns the whole intellectual life. A mind cleared of false emotion and false sentiment and egocentricity is going to have at least those roadblocks removed from its path. If you don’t think cheaply, then there at least won’t be the quality of cheapness in your writing, even though you may not be able to write well. The teacher can try to weed out what is positively bad, and this should be the aim of the whole college. Any discipline can help your writing: logic, mathematics, theology, and of course and particularly drawing. Anything that helps you to see, anything that makes you look. The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that doesn’t require his attention.
– Flannery O’Connor

You are not lost. You are here. Stop abandoning yourself. Stop repeating this myth about love and success that will land in your lap or evade you forever. Build a humble, flawed life from the rubble, and cherish that. There is nothing more glorious on the face of the earth than someone who refuses to give up, who refuses to give in to their most self-hating, discouraged, disillusioned self, and instead learns, slowly and painfully, how to relish the feeling of building a hut in middle of the suffocating dust.
– Heather Havrilesky

…in the blood of man there is a tide, an old sea-current, rather, that is somehow akin to the twilight, which brings him rumors of beauty from however far away, as driftwood is found at sea from islands not yet discovered…
– Lord Dunsany

‘This is a quantum universe,’ said Spike, ‘neither random nor determined. It is potential at every second. All you can do is intervene.’ ‘What do you suggest I do ― to intervene?’ Spike leaned forward and kissed me. ‘Bend the light.’
– Jeanette Winterson

If I had my will, I would live in a ship on the sea and never come nearer to humanity than that!
– Eleonora Duse

The one happiness is to shut one’s door upon a little room, with a table before one, and to create; to create life in that isolation from life.
– Eleonora Duse

The soul’s joy lies in doing.
– Eleonora Duse

Transport

The rose, for all its behavior,
is smaller than the lifelove it stands for,
only briefly brightening,
and even its odor
only a metaphor.
Or so we suppose
just as we suppose the savior
we employ or see next door
is only some hired man gardening.

– Marie Ponsot

I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.
– Emily Bronte

Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality of those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.
– Robert F Kennedy

Our survival won’t depend on political or economic systems. It’s going to depend on the courage of the individual to speak the truth, and to speak it lovingly and not destructively. It’s saying what you really know and feel is the truth, in all directions. Our greatest vulnerability lies in the amount of misinformation and mis-conditioning of humanity.
– Buckminster Fuller

History is full of people who out of fear, or ignorance, or lust for power have destroyed knowledge of immeasurable value which truly belongs to us all. We must not let that happen again.
– Carl Sagan

I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend…
– Faramir, J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

If God were knowable, why would we believe in him?
– Anne Carson

We are powerful, even when we do not mean to be. Our thoughts create. Our words create. Our actions have a rippling effect on everything and everyone with whom we come into contact with. Whatever is going on in your life has its roots in what is going on in your mind.
– Iyanla Vanzant

You must not change one thing. one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard’s power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must
follow knowledge and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

A RABBIT NOTICED MY CONDITION

I was sad one day and went for a walk;
I sat in a field.

A rabbit noticed my condition and
came near.

It often does not take more than that to help at times –

to just be close to creatures who
are so full of knowing,
so full of love
that they don’t
– chat,

they just gaze with
their
marvelous understanding.

– St. John of the Cross

While unconscious creation—animals, plants, crystals—functions satisfactorily as far as we know, things are constantly going wrong with man.
– C. G. Jung

The more that is going on around you, and in the world at large pressing upon us (and there is a lot going on, right?!), the more necessary it is for us to consciously self-regulate, so that we are not literally pulled apart by forces outside of ourselves. Fortunately we have some very effective leverage-points for auto-regulating the state of our nervous system that are available to us 24/7.
Breath, for instance, is a direct access whereby you can consciously interact with the unconscious autonomic processes of our habitual states. These states can easily and inadvertently become entrained to external forces rather than our highest intentions for ourselves. If you notice you are feeling “off,” that is half the battle! Before laying blame for that feeling on what someone else said or did, or on the larger and very real issues facing the world in any given moment, believe for an instant that in spite of all those that, you are capable of feeling better, and are more capacitated to deal with all those things, when you have directly addressed your own internal state of affairs. Then pay attention to your breath.

Feel your the way that at the “bottom” of your exhale, there is a quiet moment where nothing is going on at all. That’s a brief nourishing vacation from it all during which your nervous system can adjust. Then notice that with no effort at all on your part, your lungs suddenly begin to fill with no effort at all on your part as the air, that nourishing spirit, rushes in and reshapes you and moves you. Observe that flashing pause at the top of that free-fill-up when, like at the peak of a roller coaster, you are neither going up nor down, but just taking in the expansive view afforded from that place. Then feel the air rush from you, again without effort, a model for “letting go,” freed from constraints internal or otherwise.

This is not a “breath exercise” but rather a process of intentional self awareness in the space of the unconscious. When we choose to walk between the worlds like that, even for just a few cycles of breath, we can shift our state.

– Gil Hedley

I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.
– William Faulkner

In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.
– Antonin Artaud

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

First, feel, then feel, then
read, or read, then feel, then
fall, or stand, where you
already are. Think
of your self, and the other
selves … think
of your parents, your mothers
and sisters, your bentslick
father, then feel, or
fall, on your knees
if nothing else will move you,

then read
and look deeply
into all matters
come close to you
city boys—
country men

Make some muscle
in your head, but
use the muscle
In yr heart

– Amiri Baraka

I see a United States which can demonstrate that, under democratic methods of government, national wealth can be translated into a spreading volume of human comforts hitherto unknown…But here is the challenge to our democracy: In this nation I see tens of millions of its citizens…who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life…The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
– Franklin D. Roosevelt

There comes a time in the life of every human when he or she must decide to risk “his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor” on an outcome dubious. Those who fail the challenge are merely overgrown children, can never be anything else.
– Robert A. Heinlein

Late, by myself, in the boat of myself,
no light and no land anywhere, cloud cover
thick.
I try to stay just above the surface, yet I’m
already under and
living within the ocean.

– Jalal ad-Din Rumi

I used to be ‘allergic’ to humor because I thought that serious literature never smiled.
– Mario Vargas Llosa, Paris Review

There’s nothing, but this sailboat inside me, slowly trying to catch a wind …
– Ada Limón

Religion at its heart surely means living gratefully with all you can’t agree with or understand.
– Pico Iyer

Between bare boughs
One star decrees
Winter clarity

– Samuel Menashe

As Jung says: Consciousness is continually widened through the confrontation with previously unconscious contents, or—to be more accurate—could be widened if it took the trouble to integrate them.
– Robin Robertson

It is only the things we don’t understand that have any meaning. Man woke up in a world he did not understand, and that is why he tries to interpret it.
– Carl Jung

Love is a force more formidable than any other. It is invisible—it cannot be seen or measured, yet it is powerful enough to transform you in a moment, and offer you more joy than any material possession could.
– Barbara de Angelis

…certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of ‘exile’.
– Tolkien

I have discovered how much I belong to you, in the city, in the train, on the highway, with strange grandparents, in the woods, on hillsides, wherever I walk or sit.
– Franz Kafka, 1913.

They should listen to the unsaid words that resonate around the edge of the poem.
– Gary Snyder

HOW MANY THINGS

Look how many things
I’ve turned out

not to be-
what a bitter

gift.

– Miranda Holmqvist

Pain marks you, but too deep to see.
– Margaret Atwood

REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #10

These are transitional years and the dues
will be heavy.
Change is quick but revolution
will take a while.
America has not even begun as yet.
This continent is seed.

– Diane di Prima

Sonoran Bloom

Fan palms splay
like fingers, even
the ocotillo widens,
reaching for rocks
serrated across the thin
pale sky-nothing
conceals itself here.
Wild catclaw curls,
roots strain-one slake,
one brief betrayal &
desire with her swaggering
comet trail ignites
the scarlet buglers,
explodes the Venus
blazing stars beyond
the thirsty sands.

– S J Schlossman

Poems are somehow also a re-remembering, sometimes even a pre-remembering. And with the pre-remembering, if I may use the term, one somehow lives post-poem, following the poems. So that they may remain true….

– Paul Celan translated by Pierre Joris

When you make the present moment, instead of past and future, the focal point of your life, your ability to enjoy what you do and with it the quality of your life increases dramatically.

– Eckhart Tolle

Mother, let me mourn what I have never seen. / Rub my scalp and tell me who I could have been. / Feed me a morsel or two. This hunger terrifies me.
– Momtaza Mehri

…every poem is in part a record of an engagement between our conscious and unconscious selves–it is why the writing of poetry can be so dangerous. We are likely to learn more than we planned on, in the course of making.
– Carl Phillips

Without self-knowledge, the god that you seek is the god of illusion.
– Krishnamurti

We get disappointed because we think we know how it’s supposed to be.
– Kenneth Folk

We go all over the world looking for love. We look everywhere except within our own hearts and minds. When you realize that you are the Source of this ever-elusive love you are seeking, you have the most important piece of knowledge available to you.
– Paul Ferrini

Everyday, helping
contour silence
into language
lives shift

– Rachel Newcombe

In order to work together, it helps me to remember two things:

how we’re alike and how we’re different.

For it’s both—resonance and difference—that bring us together and make creative discovery possible.

– McCall Erickson

We need our praise while we live; the afterlife belongs to editors and stepchildren.
– Adam Gopnik

As long as you look for a Buddha somewhere else, you’ll never see that your own mind is the Buddha.
– Bodhidharma

The aim of meditation isn’t to eliminate thought, it’s to free ourselves from suffering. As Ajahn Chah points out, our aim is ‘to get peaceful… The practice … is for developing wisdom and understanding.
– Bhikkhu Santi

The Day Is Done
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The day is done, and the darkness
Falls from the wings of Night,
As a feather is wafted downward
From an eagle in his flight.

I see the lights of the village
Gleam through the rain and the mist,
And a feeling of sadness comes o’er me,
That my soul cannot resist:

A feeling of sadness and longing,
That is not akin to pain,
And resembles sorrow only
As the mist resembles the rain.

Come, read to me some poem,
Some simple and heartfelt lay,
That shall soothe this restless feeling,
And banish the thoughts of day.

Not from the grand old masters,
Not from the bards sublime,
Whose distant footsteps echo
Through the corridors of Time.

For, like strains of martial music,
Their mighty thoughts suggest
Life’s endless toil and endeavor;
And to-night I long for rest.

Read from some humbler poet,
Whose songs gushed from his heart,
As showers from the clouds of summer,
Or tears from the eyelids start;

Who, through long days of labor,
And nights devoid of ease,
Still heard in his soul the music
Of wonderful melodies.

Such songs have power to quiet
The restless pulse of care,
And come like the benediction
That follows after prayer.

Then read from the treasured volume
The poem of thy choice,
And lend to the rhyme of the poet
The beauty of thy voice.

And the night shall be filled with music
And the cares that infest the day,
Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.

Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.
– Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington

I need something
to distract me

from the inevitable
collapse of

America.

– Andy Perrin

the contours
of tradition

eroded smooth
by modernity

and collisions
of our old greed

– Andy Perrin

One man of you puts to flight a thousand, since it is the LORD your God who fights for you, just as he promised you.
– Joshua 23:10

Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself is a slave…
– Nietzsche

February skies.
I am unfit for this world.
– Anne Truitt

Robots and computers will own any clearly bounded job, skill or game. Humans should focus on creative work.
– @naval

…it is perfectly plain at the beginning that a man cannot be a free lover; he is either a traitor or a tied man.
– G.K. Chesterton

the You of the poem = (infinitely) close and infinitely far (in space and time)
– Paul Celan trans. by Pierre Joris

Not the measured verse, but the unmeasured, where the lyrical and the tragic meet and cut across each other, is what makes a poem a poem.
– Paul Celan (trans. by Pierre Joris)

Eventually, the people now in power in Washington will be dead, and I will be dead, but the National Gallery, I hope, will be there.
– Andrew Mellon

The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world…Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.
– C.S. Lewis

wonder is accompanied by a sense of danger … Such singular and irregular visual experience leaves the beholder with a deep sense of gratitude for remaining alive after being exposed to the forbidden, inaccessible, hidden, or transcendental vision.
– Vered Lev Kenaan

I am the kind of writer who rewrites and rewrites. I am very eager to correct everything.
– Kenzaburo Oe

An inner change for the better in a single person—one person becoming wiser, stronger, more compassionate—is the essential first turn of the wheel toward realizing peaceful coexistence and fulfillment for the whole human race.
– Daisaku Ikeda

You don’t need mentors, you need action.
– @naval

There is no endpoint to self-awareness and self-discovery. It’s a lifelong process you hopefully keep getting better and better at.
– @naval

Three things are found in beauty: Integritas, Consonatia, Claritas. (Wholeness, Harmony, Splendor)
– Thomas Aquinas

Writers of personal narrative, do not forget the power of reflection. Do not neglect your telescopes and microscopes. Take a journey through time. And please, do tell your reader all about your trip.
– Ethan Gilsdorf

Intellectuals have their sources.
Seers have their Source.
– Nika Solé

Not even the bed of the dried-up stream from which this music of water had departed showing the bare bones although the pebbles clashed and rolled as if with the memory of water…There was no garden where white peacocks screamed in a snow storm on any other star than this.
– Marguerite Young

After you give so much of yourself to people over the years, one day you wake up and realize that you need someone to give to you too.
– Sylvester McNutt

But if we understand anything of the unconscious, we know that it cannot be swallowed. We also know that it is dangerous to suppress it, because the unconscious is life and this life turns against us if suppressed, as happens in neurosis.
– CG Jung

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.
– John Steinbeck

while in the sky a feeling of intemperate fondness will excite the birds
to swoop and veer like flies crawling across absorbed limbs
that weep a pearly perspiration on the sheets of brief attention
– Frank O’Hara

I have wondered before now whether the vast astronomical distances may not be God’s quarantine precautions. They prevent the spiritual infection of a fallen species from spreading.
– CS Lewis

Dissolve all ties to the gross worldly realm of duality, conflict, and dogma. As long as your shallow worldly ambitions exist, the door will not open.
– Lao Tzu

…we’ve been far and seen a deal, and yet I don’t think we’ve found a better place than this. There’s something of everything here, if you understand me: the Shire and the Golden Wood and Gondor and kings’ houses and inns and meadows and mountains all mixed.
– Sam on Rivendell, Tolkien

‘Yes, something of everything, Sam, except the Sea,’ Frodo had answered; and he repeated it now to himself: ‘Except the Sea.’
– Frodo, Tolkien

Where I walk

I leave no trail
because a thought with legs
is not a man.

– Oluwaseun Olayiwola

As soon as you start interacting with any kind of art, your sense of time sort of changes, because each thing tunes you to itself in a way; you start thinking all these thoughts, & they take you on a journey.
– Regina Spektor

autumn sea …
the driftwood shapes
of old grief

– Rebecca Drouilhet

And when I couldn’t count my friends on a single thumb
I loved her to the maximum
– Purple Mountains

The Creak of Loneliness
by Dorit d’Scarlett

The leg drapes like a story half-told,
bare ankle, sock sagging,
a loose thread of someone who once stayed longer than they meant to.
The couch leans too, tired of holding.
Its fabric—floral ghosts in red and blue—
sighs beneath the weight of afternoons spent waiting.
Once it was new. Now it belongs to silence.
The walls hum faintly with forgotten noise,
a static of old laughter, scuffles,
the clink of a glass placed down too hard.
No one names it loneliness,
but the dust on the corner of the armrest
tells a different kind of history.
There’s comfort in the softness of ruin—
in the way a worn chair fits a body
like the outline of a lost map.
Outside, the world might spin itself raw,
but here, even the creak of springs is familiar,
a voice reminding you: you’ve already been forgotten.

A blind pursuit of cheap popularity has nothing to do with revolution.
– Nelson Mandela

Let him oh! with his air of angels then lift me, lay me! only I’ll
Have an eye to the sakes of him, quaint moonmarks, to his pelted plumage under
Wings.
– Gerard Manley Hopkins

Be friendly and even with others. Unguarded, intemperate chatter will put you in their power; excessive silence may leave them unclear as to what you mean. Keep a middle course: Don’t swagger with self-confidence, but don’t be a doormat either.
– Dudjom Rinpoche

I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.
– Sylvia Plath

What if all this time we have misunderstood the story of the Tower of Babel?… What if it was not just to different tribes but to each individual human being that a separate language was given, unique as fingerprints. And, step two, to make life among humans even more strifefull and confounding, he beclouded their perception of this. So that while we might understand that there are many peoples speaking many different languages, we are fooled into thinking that everyone in our own tribe speaks the same language we do.
– Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

And out of what we live and we believe, Our lives become the stories that we weave.
– Lynn Ahrens

God gives you all there is; your only question is how much to take of the unlimited supply.
– Wallace D. Wattles

There is really no power without self-knowledge. As long as you ignore who you are you will be dominated by standards and examples that others set. Self-knowledge is the point of departure for autonomy and self-reliance.
– Peter Fritz Walter

Congratulations on not following the script.
You paved your own path and followed your heart.
Freedom looks good on you.
– Dr. Thema

If you’re having a hard day, please know that it’s a gentle summer morning here in New Zealand, a breeze is coming in off the glimmering sea, and I’m wishing that same peace and loveliness for you.
– India Holton

Organized religion is over. It’s in the hands of the artists now.
– David Bowie

A free will is not the liberty to do whatever one likes, but the power of doing whatever one sees ought to be done, even in the very face of otherwise overwhelming impulse. There lies freedom indeed.
– George MacDonald

It takes time to pick:
prefer voice notes,
prefer cue cards in conversation,
prefer essays to debates.

– Laura Panopoulo

It wasn’t because of the pain that I was silent, it was because of the ugliness of that pain.
– Marina Tsvetaeva

The soul takes flight to the world that is invisible, and there arriving she is sure of bliss and forever dwells in paradise.
– Plato

Let your dream devour your life, not your life devour your dream.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The first thing to realise in meditation is that there is no authority, that the mind must be completely free to examine, to observe, to learn.
– Krishnamurti

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.
– Baruch Spinoza

It takes a long time to bring excellence to maturity.
– Publilius Syrus

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.
– Alice Walker

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.
– John Steinbeck

I will continue to write, but I feel it is like holding a lantern in a storm.
– Virginia Woolf

There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.
– Jane Austen

Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam. A country without a language is a country without a soul.
– Pádraig Pearse

People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.
– Michel Foucault

Cross the loud river but don’t cross the silent one.
– Algerian Proverb

Whatever you want in life, other people are going to want it, too. Believe in yourself enough to accept the idea that you have an equal right to it.
– Diane Sawyer

Man is a thinking center, and can originate thought. All the forms that man fashions with his hands must first exist in his thought; he cannot shape a thing until he has thought that thing.
– Wallace D. Wattles

We must remember that this is not a bad world but a good world in the process of becoming.
– Wallace D. Wattles

The hyperreal represents a much more advanced phase in the sense that even this contradiction between the real and the imaginary is effaced. The unreal is no longer that of dream or fantasy, of a beyond or a within, it is that of a hallucinatory resemblance of the real with itself.
– Jean Baudrillard

If you hold to a view, then you are bound and limited by that very thing that you are grasping.
– Ajahn Sumedho

The pinnacle of humanity lies in its ability to be disgusted with itself. What really separates us from other forms of life is our ability to detest our kind, to recognize the stupidity of being human. I spite, therefore I am.
– Eugene Thacker, Infinite Resignation

Don’t forget – no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell.
– Charles de Lint

I still believe when a country has lost all human feeling, you can do anything to anybody and justify it, and we do know that in this country we have done just that.
– James Baldwin

If what is right and wrong depends upon what an individual feels, then we are outside the bounds of civilization.
– Walter Lippmann

There is guidance for each of us, and by listening, we shall hear the right word.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it’s the effect or vice versa
– Lauren Oliver

To see [something as it is] we must forget the name of what we are looking at.
– Claude Monet

Know yourself to improve yourself.
– Auguste Comte

Unexpected kindness is the most powerful, least costly, and most underrated agent of human change.
– Bob Kerrey

What people call ‘the now’ is actually the disappearance of time as a psychological obstacle. When the obstacle is removed, you are no longer burdened by the past or the future – you’ve found the mindful state (and happiness too – the kind that needs neither words nor thoughts). What makes time a psychological burden is ourselves.
– Deepak Chopra

Before it’s too late—
knock your head against the ice.
Before it’s too late
Break through, look.
You will see a miraculous world…
– Oleh Lysheha

the only way left
to escape america
is a midday nap

– Clark Strand

In our tenure on this planet we’ve accumulated dangerous evolutionary baggage – propensities for aggression and ritual, submission to leaders, hostility to outsiders, all of which puts our survival in some doubt. But we’ve also acquired compassion for others, love for our children and desire to learn from history and experience, and a great soaring passionate intelligence – the clear tools for our continued survival and prosperity.

Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small planet Earth. But up there in the immensity of the Cosmos, an inescapable perspective awaits us.

– Carl Sagan

So how can we stay alive to the world? One possibility is suggested by the poet Charles Olson. He said you can focus so intensely on one thing that the entire cosmos breaks open.
– Tom Cheetham

The path isn’t a straight line it’s a spiral. You continually come back to things you thought you understood to see deeper truths.
– Barry H. Gillespie

Nothing stops you from being a Jnani here and now except fear.
– Nisargadatta

Don’t honor the wealthy, don’t envy them; keep your distance from them and pity them.
– Leo Tolstoy

Virtue, even attempted virtue, brings light; indulgence brings fog.
– C.S. Lewis

Books are like love letters;
they are destined for a particular person.
– Lawrence Durrell

If you are overthinking, you are not breathing deep enough.
– Mikael Jibril

Learn to live beyond yourself and your very human limitations. Live in the realms of the Spirit.
– Eileen Caddy

It is the verticality of poetry as against the horizontality of prose that would be Celan’s preferred instrument for creating a viable, post-Holocaust world.
– Pierre Joris

This young nation needs a brand new cinema … and it needs it quickly. The cinema for a free people isn’t a carnival sideshow.
– Joris Ivens

I’m tired of starving;
today I’ll pull the bowl
to my lips and feast.
– L.E. Bowman

Oh, Lovely Rock
by Robinson Jeffers

We stayed the night in the pathless gorge of Ventana Creek, up
the east fork.
The rock walls and the mountain ridges hung forest on forest
above our heads, maple and redwood,
Laurel, oak, madrone, up to the high and slender Santa Lucian
firs that stare up the cataracts
Of slide-rock to the star-color precipices.
We lay on gravel and kept a little camp fire
for warmth.
Past midnight only two or three coals glowed red in the cooling
darkness; I laid a clutch of dead bay leaves
On the ember ends and felted dry sticks across them and lay
down again. The revived flame
Lighted my sleeping son’s face and his companion’s, and the
vertical face of the great gorge-wall
Across the stream. Light leaves overhead danced in the fire’s
breath, tree-trucks were seen: it was the rock wall
That fascinated my eyes and mind. Nothing strange: light-gray
diorite with two or three slanting seams in it,
Smooth-polished by the endless attrition of slides and floods; no
fern nor lichen, pure naked rock … as if I were
Seeing rock for the first time. As if I were seeing through the
flame-lit surface into the real and bodily
And living rock. Nothing strange … I cannot
Tell you how strange: the silent passion, the deep nobility and
childlike loveliness: this fate going on
Outside our fates. It is here in the mountain like a grave
smiling child. I shall die, and my boys
Will live and die, our world will go on through its rapid
agonies of change and discovery; this age will die,
And wolves have howled in the snow around a new Bethlehem:
this rock will be here, grave, earnest, not passive: the energies
That are atoms will still be bearing the whole mountain
above: and I, many packed centuries ago,
Felt its intense reality with love and wonder, this lonely rock.

The surface of a river is alive with lights and reflections, the breaking of foam over rocks, but beneath that dazzle it is going somewhere. We should expect as much from an essay: the shimmer and play of mind on the surface and in the depths a strong current.
– Scott Russell Sanders

Wetland
The sea is so far from us now. Partly I think because we
are not softspoken desire. There are rude thoroughfares
and abandoned mines that brag. They gather and pile
with ruin and vacancy. It’s an accrual that is in me, it seems.
At best, a wetland. Beautiful and useless in the face of flood.
So that when we walk the perimeter, we can see the ground
starve and crack. But then fear of sinkhole is so self-important.
Truthfully, I am not enough to steer clear of. To fall in love again,
dear, reforested bund, is a matter of preservation. In your expert
opinion, will you tell me how to know you if I am forever meant
to leave you undisturbed. This will not save us, I’m afraid. A brownstone
for hummingbirds is shortsighted too, like picking out honeybees
from the dog’s mouth. Then blowing on her tiny hairs like a breeze.
Love, we can wish it were so; it does not make us fit to survive.
– Francine J. Harris

Jean Cocteau said he preferred cats to dogs because no one has ever seen a police cat.
– Michel Tournier

Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
– Toni Morrison

Basically speaking, neurosis is temporary and sanity is permanent. When we begin to take that attitude, we realize that our occasional freakouts and panic and our feeling of being trapped are no longer applicable.

In realizing that we are eternally free, eternally liberated, and eternally awake, we begin to experience vast mind.

– Chögyam Trungpa

Simple things are always the most difficult. In actual life it requires the greatest art to be simple, and so acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the acid test of one’s whole outlook on life. That I feed the beggar, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy… all these are undoubtedly great virtues… But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yea, the very fiend himself-that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved—what then?
– Carl Gustav Jung

We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.
– Edward Abbey

It is not more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is resurrection.
– Voltaire

Walking is the exact balance between spirit and humility.
– Gary Snyder

In organic poetry the metric movement, the measure, is the direct expression of the movement of perception.

(I think of strands of seaweed moving within a wave)

– Denise Levertov

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then -the glory- so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.
– John Steinbeck, East of Eden

If you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it…that is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing…an actor, a writer…I am a person who does things…I write, I act…and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.
– Oscar Wilde

Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.
– Thomas Merton

And now you’re mine. Rest with your dream in my dream.
Love and pain and work should all sleep, now.
The night turns on its invisible wheels,
and you are pure beside me as a sleeping ember.

No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go,
we will go together, over the waters of time.
No one else will travel through the shadows with me,
only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon.

Your hands have already opened their delicate fists
and let their soft drifting signs drop away;
your eyes closed like two gray wings, and I move

after, following the folding water you carry, that carries
me away. The night, the world, the wind spin out their destiny.
Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all.

– Pablo Neruda

To sew is to pray. Men don’t understand this. They see the whole but they don’t see the stitches. They don’t see the speech of the creator in the work of the needle. We mend. We women turn things inside out and set things right. We salvage what we can of human garments and piece the rest into blankets. Sometimes our stitches stutter and slow. Only a woman’s eyes can tell. Other times, the tension in the stitches might be too tight because of tears, but only we know what emotion went into the making. Only women can hear the prayer.
– Louise Erdrich

AIR

All you can do
for another person
is be an environment
in which if they wanted
to come up for air,
they could.

– Ram Dass

From the wind, I learned a syntax for forwardness, how to move through obstacles by wrapping myself around them. You can make it home this way.

– Ocean Vuong

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?
– John Steinbeck

But the only thing I have to give
To make you smile, to win you with
Are all the mornings still to live
– Joni Mitchell

Therefore, the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as day-dreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time.
– Gaston Bachelard

When I began to listen to poetry, it’s when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to other. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else.
– Joy Harjo

Black Dancers

We Who have nothing to lose
Must sing and dance
Before the riches
Of the world
Overcome Us.

We Who have nothing to lose
Must laugh and dance
Lest our laughter
Goes from Us.

– Langston Hughes

Words have no meaning now. We’ve reached the point where we should be holding each other, without saying anything.
– Maria Casarès to Albert Camus

When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.
– Louise Erdrich

A day is like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doing something else, plan to run an errand, but never get there … And at the end of your life, your whole existence has the same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day.
– Michael Crichton

You know, it is good to hide your brilliance under a bushel, to be anonymous, to love what you are doing and not to show off. It is good to be kind without a name. That does not make you famous, it does not cause your photograph to appear in the newspapers. Politicians do not come to your door. You are just a creative human being living anonymously, and in that there is richness and great beauty.

– Jiddu Krishnamurti

If we are gripped by a strong attraction to a person or a thing, we must reflect on it. As Jung says: Unless we prefer to be made fools of by our illusions, we shall, by carefully analyzing every fascination, extract from it a portion of our own personality, like a quintessence, and slowly come to recognize that we meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life. The same applies to our passionate antipathies. They also must be subjected to thorough analytic scrutiny. Whom do I hate? What groups or factions do I fight against? Whoever and whatever they are, they are a part of me; I’m bound to that which I hate as surely as I am to that which I love. The important thing, psychologically, is where one’s libido is lodged, not whether one is for or against a particular thing. If we follow such reflections diligently, very gradually we will collect our scattered psyche from the outer world, as Isis gathered the dismembered body of Osiris.
– Edward F. Edinger

And that’s all films are. Just an extension of childhood, where everybody wants to be freer, everybody wants to be powerful, everybody wants to be so overwhelmingly attractive that there’s just no doing anything about it. Or everybody wants to have comradeship and to be understood.
– Marlon Brando

The truth is tiny compared to the things you will have to do.
– Leonard Cohen

Perhaps one must not only be aware of injustices but be aware of each other. Perhaps one should not only resist injustice but restore, repair, and reaffirm each other. One must make being well a priority, too.
– Myisha Cherry

Don’t wait to be hunted to hide, that’s always been my motto.
– Samuel Beckett

As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.
– John Muir

Times are difficult globally; awakening is no longer a luxury or an ideal. It’s becoming critical.

We don’t need to add more depression, … or more anger to what’s already here. It’s becoming essential that we learn how to relate sanely with difficult times.

– Pema Chodron

I was glad I wasn’t in love, that I wasn’t happy with the world. I like being at odds with everything. People in love often become edgy, dangerous. They lose their sense of perspective. They lose their sense of humor. They become nervous, psychotic bores.
– Charles Bukowski

The biggest barrier to awakening is the belief that it is something rare.
– Adyashanti

Truthfulness leads to well-being… integral to well-being, and part of what we mean by having a superior level of well-being.
– Seth Zuiho Segall

Sometimes when you need to feel the all-embracing nature of God, paradoxically you need to hang out in ordinariness, in daily ritual and comfort.
– Anne Lamott

Raven
on a roost of furs
No bird in a bird-book,
black as the sun.

– Gary Snyder

The design in most men is one of conformity; here and there, in picked natures, it transcends itself and soars on the other side, arming martyrs with independence; but in all, in their degrees, it is a bosom thought.
– Robert Louis Stevenson

For this is what it means to be a king: to be first in every desperate attack and last in every desperate retreat, and when there’s hunger in the land…to wear finer clothes and laugh louder over a scantier meal than any man in your land.
– King Lune, C.S. Lewis

Finding the real human nature beneath the various unusual traits that cover it up is the science of spirituality. Consistent study, contemplation, meditation, and service are all part of this gradual evolutionary process.
– Brahma Kumaris

Leave all else to the gods. They soon
Will level on the yeasty deep
Th’ embattled tempests, stirring
Cypress no more, nor aged ash.

– Horace (translated by J. V. Cunningham)

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, that every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.
– Emerson

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

Socialism only sounds good in theory!

Capitalism doesn’t even sound good in theory.

– @_rathbone

All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever.
– C.S. Lewis

The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.
– Gabriel García Márquez

Now we are less interested in equipping and refining thought, more interested in creating and mastering technologies that will yield measurable enhancements of material well-being — for those who create and master them, at least.
– Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things

It was the year he began to wonder about the noise that colors make. Roses came roaring across the garden at him. He lay on his bed at night listening to the silver light of stars crashing against the window screen.
– Anne Carson

In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a
thousand coloured pictures to the eye.
– R. L. Stevenson

There are two things that men should never weary of, goodness and humility; we get none too much of them in this rough world among cold, proud people.
– R. L. Stevenson

To awaken means to realize one’s nothingness, that is, to realize one’s complete and absolute mechanicalness, and one’s complete and absolute helplessness… So long as a man is not horrified at himself, he knows nothing about himself.
– Gurdjieff

Simplify your life. Don’t waste the years struggling for things that are unimportant. Don’t burden yourself with possessions. Keep your needs and wants simple and enjoy what you have.
– Henry David Thoreau

Elections belong to the people. It’s their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.
– Abraham Lincoln

Live in the knowledge that you are a gift to the world.
– Debbie Ford

To be human, one must recognize and accept a certain element of irreducible rascality both in oneself and in one’s enemies.
– Alan Watts

In Buddhism, belief seems less critical: practice, community, and ritual matter more.
– Aaron P. Proffitt

For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.
– C.S. Lewis

When we ask a question and find an answer, we are changed. Thinking with learning is a developmental process. But many people learn at an early age not to question.
– Ray Peat

As a writer, if you know something and then you keep quiet, it’s like dying.
– Arundhati Roy

Shall I go into my whole riff about line breaks, and about how angry I get with young poets who break lines like sawing kindling, so that it looks nice on the page and violates the integrity of phrase?
– Carolyn Kizer

For let us not deceive ourselves: most of the minds we associate with are housed in heads that have little more to offer than overgrown potatoes, stuck on top of whining and tastelessly clad bodies and eking out a pathetic existence that does not even merit our pity.
– Thomas Bernhard

At the bottom of every frozen heart there is a drop or two of love ― just enough to feed the birds.
– Henry Miller

There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.
– Ernest Hemingway

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.
– Edgar Allan Poe

I am trying to wander more. I am trying to breathe more, to love my lostness.
– Noor Hindi

With all my silence, I shall protest to the very end.
– Albert Camus

When a leader lacks empathy, humanity suffers. When a leader mocks tragedy, morality dies. When a leader craves power more than justice, the soul of a nation doesn’t just rot but collapses from within.
– Dawn K. Brown, MD

We’ve created a situation where we’ve favored the aggressor and weakened the defender. You can’t really get to peace on that logic. You have to do exactly the opposite.
– Timothy Snyder

The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.The beet was Rasputin’s favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.
– Tom Robbins

How do we renounce? How do we work with this tendency to block and to freeze and to refuse to take another step toward the unknown? If our edge is like a huge stone wall with a door in it, how do we learn to open the door and step through it again and again, so that life becomes a process of growing up, becoming more and more fearless and flexible, more and more able to play like a raven in the wind?
– Pema Chödrön

After all, social activism is an act of self-compassion (not just other-compassion) because we’re all interconnected, and injustice impacts us all.
– Kristin Neff

The difference between inner experience and philosophy resides principally in this: that in experience … what counts is no longer the statement of wind, but the wind.
– Georges Bataille, Inner Experience

At the end of his life, C. G. Jung (as we can see in his later letters) continually stressed that only if enough individuals would commit themselves totally to this search, each for his or her own inner truth, could the world avoid disaster.
– Helen Luke

I think that the cornerstones of my practice are the two koans my teacher continues to bring up to me. The first is: “What’s happening now and what is it to practice with it?

The second is: “This very mind is Buddha.” Not some mind in the future, when I have perfect Samadhi or perfect compassion, but this very mind, in this very now. What is it to practice with that?

– via Sweeping Zen

Nothing we see or hear is perfect. But right there in the imperfection is perfect reality.
– Shunryu Suzuki

Three great forces rule the world: stupidity, fear, and greed.
– Albert Einstein

The more you sense the rareness and value of your own life, the more you realize that how to use it, how to manifest it…
– Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi

The soul would have no rainbow if the eyes had no tears.
– Native American Proverb

One temptation resisted is not the end of temptation. One good deed may confer initial resistance but not final immunity.

– Thomas P. Hillman
(Pity, Power, and Tolkien’s Ring)

In The Red Book Jung evidently begun to realize that the intellect, driven by scholarly ambition and unsupported by any emotional engagement of the soul with life, results in a dry and barren existence.
– Liz Greene

House Built Of Breath
by Marge Piercy

Words plain as pancakes syruped with endearment.
Simple as potatoes, homely as cottage cheese.
Wet as onions, dry as salt.
Slow as honey, fast as seltzer,
my raisin, my sultana, my apricot love
my artichoke, furry one, my pineapple
I love you daily as milk,
I love you nightly as aromatic port.
The words trail a bitter slime like slugs,
then in the belly warm like cabbage borscht.
The words are hung out on the line,
sheets for the wind to bleach.
The words are simmering slowly
on the back burner like a good stew.
Words are the kindling in the woodstove.
Even the quilt at night is stuffed with word down.
When we are alone the walls sing
and even the cats talk but only in Yiddish.
When we are alone we make love in deeds.
And then in words. And then in food.

Dry bones! Dry bones! I find my loving heart.
Illumination brought to such a pitch
I see the rubblestones begin to stretch
As if reality had split apart
And the whole motion of the soul lay bare:
I find that love, and I am everywhere.
– Theodore Roethke, The Renewal

Inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason – you and all other conscious beings as such – are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole.

Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon mother earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you.

– Erwin Schroedinger

I warn you, I am living for the last time.
– Anna Akhmatova

Then said my voices:

‘Wherefore strive or run, On dusty highways ever, a vain race? The long night cometh, starless, void of sun, What light shall serve thee like her golden face?’

For I had pondered on a rune of roses, And knew some secrets which the moon discloses.

– Ernest Christopher Dowson

All of life and human relations have become so incomprehensibly complex that, when you think about it, it becomes terrifying and your heart stands still.

– Anton Chekhov

If I had been loved at seventeen, what an artist I should be now!
– Albert Camus

First it was everything and then it was nothing, though it was the same language we were using.
– Renee Gladman

The masses are rushing, running, charging through the age. They think they are advancing, but they are simply running on the spot and falling into the void, that is all.
– Franz Kafka

True meditation has no direction or goal. It is pure wordless surrender, pure silent prayer.
– Adyashanti

But to be this life’s
accomplice, better to know
no style or history.
– Pier Paolo Pasolini

ORIGINAL ENERGY

In each yoga practice, we tap into the original energy that we are made from. This primal energy is as old as the big bang and as brilliant as the light of the stars. The original energy we inherit is sacred, auspicious and all-pervading. It is derived from the wind, the sun and the sky. The spark of original energy has been handed down to us through the generations. It is the vital life force that animates every nerve pulsation, every breath, every beat of the heart. We tap the original energy by opening up our limbs, stretching our fascia and bringing our breath deep inside. Mostly, our practice requires sweeping the dust off the mirror of our heart and mind and letting the original energy shine from within.

For many reasons we get cut off from the potency we inherit. Caught up in our busy brain, we lose connection to source. Distracted, overwhelmed and anxious, we eat too much and spend too much time scrolling on our screens. Some adhere to strict beliefs or fall down rabbit holes of opinion. Perhaps an old trauma from this lifetime– or lifetimes ago– stifles the stream of the vital pulse.

In practice, let the radiance of the original energy take residence inside of you. Come to know its presence and sense its potency. While we can never grab it by the tail, we can feel its presence in a shimmer of sensation, a wisp of a breath, or a tremor through our spine. The Chinese Zen master Hongzhi wrote, “when the stains from old habits are exhausted, the original light appears, blazing through your skull, not admitting any other matters”. The original potency that dwells in you is the same that dwells in me. When we collectively yoke to the original energy, we realize the one mind, the one heart that sustains us all. You need not name it or guide it or try to possess it. Just know it as the luminous source to which we all belong.

– Tias Little

The poet Rumi writes, ‘Find the real world, give it endlessly away, grow rich flinging gold to all who ask. Live at the empty heart of paradox. I’ll dance there with you—cheek to cheek.’
– Gregory Boyle

The map is not the territory, and the name is not the thing named.
– Gregory Bateson

The wilderness will lead you to your heart where I will speak. Integrity and justice with tenderness you shall know.
– Ash Wednesday reflection from Hosea

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

– T.S. Eliot

Applying attention to smaller emotions—or simply focusing on form, sound, or physical sensations—develops your capacity to look at long-term, overwhelming emotional states.
– Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

A heart glows in
me. A heart.

– Ana Božičević

God help the culture that pretends that earlier stupidities never happened and tries to eradicate all evidence of them.
– George Saunders

The question of meaning in life is, as the Buddha thought, not edifying. One must immerse oneself into the river of life and let the question drift away.”
– Irvin Yalom

Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air–moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh–felt as if it were being exhaled into one’s face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing. Honeysuckle, swamp flowers, magnolia, and the mystery smell of the river scented the atmosphere, amplifying the intrusion of organic sleaze. It was aphrodisiac and repressive, soft and violent at the same time. In New Orleans, in the French Quarter, miles from the barking lungs of alligators, the air maintained this quality of breath, although here it acquired a tinge of metallic halitosis, due to fumes expelled by tourist buses, trucks delivering Dixie beer, and, on Decatur Street, a mass-transit motor coach named Desire.
– Tom Robbins

This is not my teeming fate, my rind, my roiling ellipsis or valedictory spray of myrrh.
– Aaron Shurin

Rumour is a pipe
Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures
And of so easy and so plain a stop
That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,
The still-discordant wavering multitude,
Can play upon it.
– William Shakespeare

In our universe, planets, constellations, galaxies, and dust are continuing to expand, launched from the imperious stroke of the big bang. Excuse me for speaking beyond my pay-grade, but, these bodies have the quality of “thrown-ness,” a word and concept invented by philosopher Martin Heidigger. To him, the word described the human condition.

In our singing, we can inculcate this quality—thrownness—every note launched and continuing itself, neither projected, placed, nor produced. The stars are as sand thrown into the heavens by an infant hand. May your singing, your painting, your calligraphy, your bowing, your writing, ever be so. Control—if such it might be called— is in the launching, not the continuation.

– Alan Bowers

It takes a special energy, over and above one’s creative potential, a special audacity or subversiveness, to strike out in a new direction once one is settled. It is a gamble as all creative projects must be, for the new direction may not turn out to be productive at all.
– Oliver Sacks

For the rebels and the misfits, the black sheep and the outsiders.
For the refugees, the orphans, the scapegoats, and the weirdos.
For the uprooted, the abandoned, the shunned and invisible ones.
May you recognize with increasing vividness that you know what you know. May you give up your allegiances to self-doubt, meekness, and hesitation. May you be willing to be unlikeable, and in the process be utterly loved. May you be impervious to the wrongful projections of others,
and may you deliver your disagreements with precision and grace. May you see, with the consummate clarity of nature moving through you,
that your voice is not only necessary, but desperately needed to sing us out of this muddle.
May you feel shored up, supported, entwined, and reassured as you offer yourself and your gifts to the world.
May you know for certain that even as you stand by yourself, you are not alone.

– To-ko-pa Turner

There’s no retirement for an artist, it’s your way of living so there’s no end to it.
– Henry Moore

Don’t bear your sins: Confess them. Don’t wear your hair shirt of pain: Throw it off, re-design it, and give it to someone who might need it for warmth. I grew up in a society that asked us to keep quiet and take our rages and our desires and our questions into the house, to a dark, back room. This is suicide. Pour your rages and your questions into your life, into your work. Share with others. It’s a glorious moment when you discover that you share the same history with others. When your work fits into the soul of another—well, that’s why we do it.
– Tennessee Williams

losing is easy. it’s grand to be The Great American Loser—anybody can do it; almost everybody does.
– Charles Bukowski

Bad readers have asked me if I was drugged when I wrote some of my works. But that illustrates that they don’t know anything about literature or drugs. To be a good writer you have to be absolutely lucid at every moment of writing, and in good health. I’m very much against the romantic concept of writing which maintains that the act of writing is a sacrifice, and that the worse the economic conditions or the emotional state, the better the writing. I think you have to be in a very good emotional and physical state. Literary creation for me requires good health, and the Lost Generation understood this. They were people who loved life.
– Gabriel García Márquez

Monkeys are superior to men in this: when a monkey looks into a mirror, he sees a monkey.
– Malcolm De Chazal

A soulmate is an ongoing connection with another individual that the soul picks up again in various times and places over lifetimes. We are attracted to another person at a soul level not because that person is our unique complement, but because by being with that individual, we are somehow provided with an impetus to become whole ourselves.
– Edgar Cayce

your work
is to get so clear
about who and what
you are

that other people’s
perceptions of you
can be just that ..
theirs.

– Dené Logan

I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn’t have a god, politics, ideas, ideals.
– Charles Bukowski, Women

There is a time to live, a time to die, a time to laugh, and at no time are the three of them very far apart.
– Spike Milligan

When you don’t take the time to be of one essence, your emotions can remain unresolved and are left to linger with you.
– Shunmyo Masuno

If you love the essence in others, it is because you have found the essence of your own Being. This is the purest form of compassion. It is not from one to the other, but from Being to Being.
– Mooji

Ancient
vows are unexempted,
in some way signify the natal language
not forgotten. Intermittent
cloud-shadow across roofs. Our loves discerned
like stars depth-hung in water.

– Geoffrey Hill

Simplicity isn’t the lack of complexity; it’s the clarity of understanding.
– Prof. Feynman

People find poetry difficult because they’re looking for hidden ideas in it but the real purpose of a poem is emotional resonance. If poetry wasn’t fundamentally emotion then it wouldn’t need to be written in rhythm and with imagery.
– Robert Gray

To live without explanation. My ego hates this, but my grief demands it.
– McCall Erickson

Behold and see
What a great heap of grief lay hid in me,

– Elizabeth Barrett Browning

First rule of understanding: Admit you don’t.
– Prof. Feynman

Can we ever make peace with those who take others to task before themselves?
– Pico Iyer

We understand very well how to interpret in other people the same acts which we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves.
– Freud

Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.
– Noam Chomsky

The greatest challenge, for me, is to try and express difficult thoughts in plain language. I prize clarity and simplicity. I like to present complicated or mysterious ideas in the simplest way possible … Complexity, I think, often obscures fuzzy thinking.
– Elizabeth Bishop

When you get free from views and words, reality reveals itself to you, and that is nirvana.
– Thich Nhat Hanh

We know only a few songs
but we play them different every time,
the old monk said
about the band.

– The Old Monk

A monk once asked Basho: “What is the essence of your practice?”
Basho replied: “Whatever is needed.”
– Joan Halifax

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labours of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I received and am still receiving.
– Albert Einstein

How Poetry Comes to Me

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light

– Gary Snyder

Someone somewhere knows —
you just have to find him
or her,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk

Involution of time
Years slip away
Evolution of life
– Rachel Newcombe

Mind functions in the non-existential, in the fictitious, in the imaginary. Mind is a faculty of dreaming — it is a dream faculty! Truth is not known by mind….Truth is felt by the heart, by your totality; by you, not by your head. … It is an experience.
– Osho

love it when souls get leaky and poems happen
– @chenchenwrites

In any scale,
mi and lah
are special friends,
the old monk
told the band.
– The Old Monk

And Suddenly It’s Evening
by Salvatore Quasimodo, tr. Jack Bevan

Everyone is alone on the heart of the earth
pierced by a ray of sun:
and suddenly it’s evening.

The perceiver of the world – is he prior to the world, or does he come into being along with the world?

– Nisargadatta

The philistine conformist and the ostentatious nonconformist are alike in being rooted in nothing deeper than the thin topsoil of stereotypes. . . . Every stereotyped society swallows up the diversities of private bailiwicks, private eccentricities, private inner life, and the creativity inherent in concrete personal loyalties and in loving attachments to unique local roots and their rich historical accretions.
– Peter Viereck

This makes me realize that what I said earlier in this essay is not enough. You can’t simply list what you want to do and figure out how to do more of that. You also need to surface the unarticulated constraints that you have floating around, and that are making what you were born to do needlessly hard or impossible. You must bring into light the hidden thoughts that bind you.
– Henrik Karlsson

My broken voice,
Cried out for help nine hundred and eleven times,
But all they could see was a poet writing poetry.
– Clinton Charles Jr.

Nearly every single pillar of modern culture is corrupt at its core. Poisoned from the inside out. What comes next is not fixing the system. It’s collapsing it and building a world out of truth.
– Nika Solé

every fish like a political regime
starts to rot from the head
– Serhiy Zhadan

Kind words elicit trust.
Kind thoughts create depth.
Kind deeds bring love.
– Lao Tzu

Anxiety is the name for the distance between the ego and the deep self.
– Michael Meade

When my anxious thoughts multiply within me,
Your consolations delight my soul.
– Psalm 94:19

Let us be very clear when we speak of this. It [the active imagination] is the organ that permits the transmutation of internal spiritual states into external states, into vision-events symbolizing with those internal states.
– Henry Corbin

You inhabit another realm when you are writing a novel. It’s like being in love—being ‘in novel.’
– Luisa Valenzuela

Whenever I see someone with an abundance of empathy I want to ask what heartbreak they have endured, for compassion is often birthed in the valley of despair.
– Zoe Clark-Coates

But sometimes, illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost.
– Marcel Proust

butterflies and birds
anxiously flutter upward
a cloud of flowers
– Basho

Men are inventing ideas every day to justify for themselves and others their actions and needs.
– Richard Wright, The Outsider

Rest the fearful mind
in the cradle of lovingkindness.
– Buddha

O blindness of the great!
They go their way like gods,
Great over bent backs,
Sure of hired fists,
Trusting in the power
Which has lasted so long.
But long is not forever.
O change from age to age!
Thou hope of the people!
– Bertolt Brecht

When the houses of the great collapse
Many little people are slain.
Those who have no share in the fortunes of the mighty
Often have a share in their misfortunes. The plunging wain
Drags the sweating beasts with it into the abyss.
– Bertolt Brecht

This is what I learned at Antioch-when something was wrong, I could get up on my own two feet and make comment on it… I think the idea of questioning is not only a right, it is a responsibility.
– Rod Serling

The truth, like air and sun, costs nothing. It lends itself to an infinite number of compositions of equal likelihood. And this is how what was is indistinguishable from what might have been.

– Paul Valery

Our societies are too enslaved to market logic, and everything risks being subject to self-interest and the quest for profit. Volunteering is prophecy and a sign of hope, because it bears witness to the primacy of gratuitousness, solidarity, and service to those most in need.
– Pope Francis

The Temple taken over by thieves sits on our shoulders.
– Kim Harvey

The inferiority of women is man-made.
– Helen Keller

My parents’ generation lived with secrets, secrets, secrets – and I don’t think it served them.
– Jillian Lauren

UNKNOWINGLY

Some years ago,
I was chatting with some people at a party: “Jacktalk.”
An acquaintance—
Someone I knew only slightly
And had never harmed in any way—
Walked up to me and said,
Firmly, with no trace of good humor or irony,
“I hate you.”
I turned from the friends
To whom I had been speaking,
Looked at him, and said,
Not unkindly,
“I know,”
Then turned back to my conversation.
Having no idea how to respond,
He hesitated for a moment,
Then walked away,
Awash with confusion.
He “hated” me
Not for anything
I had done to him
But simply for being
As and who I was.
At 84, trying to understand
The meaning
Of what I have done
Or accomplished
In my seventy-
Year engagement with poetry,
I look back at his gesture
With gratitude
And think of it
As one of the finest compliments
I have ever received,
Akin to the description
Of Bernard Shaw:
“He hasn’t
An enemy in the world
But all of his friends
Dislike him.”
I had disturbed this man sufficiently
So that he clearly wished to attain
The very being with which
I, unknowingly?
Daily
Walked in the world.

– Jack Foley

2025

Whaddaya think?
Whaddaya know?
Will it ever stop raining?
Will the sun shine again
Will it be as it was
Or is my complaining
Nothing but feigning

Whaddaya think?
Whaddaya know?
Will you come back tomorrow?
Will our love be a fact
Will it be as it was,
Will a sweet second act
Put an end to my sorrow?

Life moves along
But not like a song
More like a tidal wave!
We’re here and we’re there
Who said life was fair
You’re right and then (suddenly)
wrong

Whaddaya think?
Whaddaya know?
Will it end, my complaining?
Is it passing, this storm
That knocks us all down
Is it safe, is it warm
In some other town?
Whaddaya think?
Will it ever
Will it ever
Will it ever stop raining?

– Jack Foley

A man’s physical hunger does not prove that that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating, and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a women and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called “falling in love” occurred in a sexless world.
– C. S. Lewis

Evening Land

It is in the evening that one breaks up,
at sunset.
Then it is that one abandons everything.

Mind takes down its tents of spider web,
and heart forgets why it felt anxious.
The desert wanderer abandons his campsite,
which will soon be obliterated by sand,
and continues on his journey in the stillness of night,
guided by mysterious stars.

– Par Lagerkvist

We find comfort only in
another beauty, in others’
music, in the poetry of others.
Salvation lies with others,
though solitude may taste like
opium. Other people aren’t hell
if you glimpse them at dawn, when
their brows are clean, rinsed by dreams.

– Adam Zagajewski

The body / remains a house unaware of its rooms.
– Maggie Smith

As Buddha said, “What you are is what you have been, what you will be is what you do now.” Padmasambhava went further: “If you want to know your past life, look into your present condition; if you want to know your future life, look at your present actions.”

– Sogyal Rinpoche

Trauma sends you letters without warning for the rest
of your life, usually disguised at something else [ . . . ]

just so you remember trauma knows exactly where you live—
who do you think built the house?

– Brenna Twohy

We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no perfect image except Life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time.
– Loren Eiseley

I want a soul mate who can sit me down, shut me up, tell me ten things I don’t already know, and make me laugh. I don’t care what you look like, just turn me on. And if you can do that, I will follow you on bloody stumps through the snow. I will nibble your mukluks with my own teeth. I will do your windows. I will care about your feelings. Just have something in there.
– Henry Rollins

The desert could not be claimed or owned – it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names.
– Michael Ondaatje

There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own. Someone seen bathing in a desert caravan, holding up muslin with one arm in front of her. Some old Arab poet’s woman, whose white-dove shoulders made him describe an oasis with her name. The skin bucket spreads water over her, she wraps herself in the cloth, and the old scribe turns from her to describe Zerzura.
– Michael Ondaatje

Each creature is an energy system composed of parts or subsystems. Each has its definite place. Each is in movement, constantly changing and inevitably related either upward or downward, no single one existing in isolation. Energy passes down from above in ceaseless movement, like water spilling over a dam. This involutionary movement sustains life in a methodical, foreordained way. There is also an inverse exchange, from lower to higher, which depends on the factor of consciousness. All systems have gates to allow for an exchange of energies. For most, however, the gate swings only one way. Man’s unique position is that, for him, the gate swings both ways.
– William Segal, The Structure of Man

“The light works,“ he said, indicating the window, “the gravity works,” he said, dropping a pencil on the floor. “Anything else we have to take our chances with.”
– Douglas Adams

No night is long enough for us to dream twice.
– Mahmoud Darwish

I built a small blue town
inside myself —

blue chapel, blue steeple,
blue houses, blue storefronts,
blue school. A scale model of

a place I’ve never lived
lives in me. Always

in shadow, the dark blue
of deep shade—

– Maggie Smith

Since modern man experiences himself both as the seller and the commodity to be sold on the market, his self-esteem depends on conditions beyond his control. If he is ‘successful,’ he is valuable; if he is not, he is worthless. The degree of insecurity which results form this orientation can hardly be overestimated. If one feels that one’s own value is not constituted primarily by the human qualities one possesses, but by one’s success on a competitive market with ever-changing conditions, one’s self-esteem is bound to be shaky and in constant need of confirmation by others.
– Erich Fromm

I love the world; I want more than the world,
Or after-image of the inner eye.
– Theodore Roethke

For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. They must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and the potentialities of the future. Finally, they must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking. Experience is a handicap.
– Eric Hoffer

I have heard stories that it was love at first sight for both of us, that we disappeared to a guest room at Merle’s house, had our meals sent up, and didn’t emerge for several days. This is absolutely untrue. I would never behave like that as a guest in someone’s home. Carlos and I went to my beach house.
– Martha Graham

When the terror of life grips you, return to Mother Nature. Sit by the tallest tree, and release some sorrow into the Earth.
– Hxni

Why are we forced to live in this depressing slum of consciousness when our perceptions are perfectly capable of grasping the wider horizons? …Too much security becomes boredom, and boredom leads to a decline in vitality. Man has surrounded himself by walls, and has built his narrow ‘human world’ as a centre of security; but the security has begun to stifle him.
– Colin Wilson

By valuing and honoring the awakened nature of the Buddha, we sense our own potential to awaken. When done in the container of dharma practice, this does not feed conceit but nearly the opposite—it supports both wholesome humility and self-respect.
– Kim Allen

A millennium of warfare consolidated the West; a century of “psychology” has ripped it to tatters.
– Emil Cioran

How can a man who is confused know what is wrong and choose what is right and true? First he must clear up his own confusion.
– Krishnamurti

Ignoring the mind is a beautiful sadhana (practice). This is what many of the sages did. They ignored the mind out of existence. It loses its influence and its potency when it is ignored.
– Mooji

They are after themselves. They call it destiny. Progress. We call it Haints. Haints of their victims, rising from the soil of Africa, South America, Asia.
– Ishmael Reed

I like that image of art dropping down through the various layers of the individual’s psyche, into dreams, stirring around there and then surfacing later in action.
– Athol Fugard

Teach your children that it is in sharing the most, not gathering the most, that the most is received.
– Neale Donald Walsch

If men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments, they shall be governed by the ten thousand commandments.
– G.K. Chesterton

Being aware of writing.
My lips like a wolf’s, mentioned a novel about love.

– Nicholas Wong

If you walk across my camera, I will flash the world your story.
– Woody Guthrie

The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.
– Elon Musk

The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.
– Hannah Arendt

READING THE GREEN BOOK
by Tom Hirons

The book I read is green.
Its pages are brown and red
and yellow, sometimes colours
beyond my imagining.
I read the book and know
all that I’ve forgotten.

What will you give me?
Your anger? Your sorrow?
All that resilient joy? Your
tough talk about getting it done
and how life’s a bitch and
then we’re dead?

Walk with me.
I don’t know anything
about how to save this world
only what makes life better
only one way to read this green book
only the crooked lines
by which
I find my way home.

IRISH

Give me the right of way
across the grain ladder into your sleep,
the right of way
across the sleep trail,
the right for me to cut peat
along the heart’s hillside,
tomorrow.

– Pierre Joris

I had a very happy childhood, which is unsuitable if you are going to be an Irish writer.
– Maeve Binchy

a lot of wee walks gets you further than one big hike.
– Sam MacDiarmid, Paths for All

Pangur Bán
Translated by Seamus Heaney

From the ninth-century Irish poem

Pangur Bán and I at work,
Adepts, equals, cat and clerk:
His whole instinct is to hunt,
Mine to free the meaning pent.

More than loud acclaim, I love
Books, silence, thought, my alcove.
Happy for me, Pangur Bán
Child-plays round some mouse’s den.

Truth to tell, just being here,
Housed alone, housed together,
Adds up to its own reward:
Concentration, stealthy art.

Next thing an unwary mouse
Bares his flank: Pangur pounces.
Next thing lines that held and held
Meaning back begin to yield.

All the while, his round bright eye
Fixes on the wall, while I
Focus my less piercing gaze
On the challenge of the page.

With his unsheathed, perfect nails
Pangur springs, exults and kills.
When the longed-for, difficult
Answers come, I too exult.

So it goes. To each his own.
No vying. No vexation.
Taking pleasure, taking pains,
Kindred spirits, veterans.

Day and night, soft purr, soft pad,
Pangur Bán has learned his trade.
Day and night, my own hard work
Solves the cruxes, makes a mark.

Fight for You
by Raye Zaragoza

Save the river
Save the seas
Save the mother and her family
How can you take what you want and say that we are free
If you put oil in the water, we won’t sit quietly
And they were singing
Stand up
Stand up for what’s right
Don’t walk
Don’t walk silently into the night
Take my head and let’s see this through
If you fight for me, I’ll fight for you
Save the oceans
And the trees
Save the people who are in need
How can you do what you want and say you come in peace
If you don’t open your eyes, how can you see
And we were cheering
Stand up
Stand up for what’s right
Don’t walk
Don’t walk silently into the night
Take my head and let’s see this through
If you fight for me, I’ll fight for you
And don’t look down when we march downtown for some truth
Cause you can’t complain if you don’t find a way to stand up too
Stand up
Stand up for what’s right
Don’t walk
Don’t walk silently into the night
Take my head and let’s see this through
If you fight for me, I’ll fight for you
Stand up
Stand up for what’s right
Don’t walk
Don’t walk silently into the night
Take my head and let’s see this through
If you fight for me, I’ll fight for you

Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
– Edgar Allan Poe

The Milky Way stretched overhead like the rainbow after a storm. It was a promise that there was light everywhere, even far away in the darkest of places.
– Candice Jarrett

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd – The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.
– Fernando Pessoa

Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
– Oscar Wilde

Painful is the stress when one
cannot reproduce or convey vividly
to others, however hard he tries,
what he’s experienced so intensely.
– Haruki Murakami

I have been listening to the hymns of creation,
Enchanted by the verses,
Yet still I am curious.

What is this delight-filled universe
into which we find ourselves born?
What is this mysterious awareness
Shimmering everywhere within it?

– Vijnana Bhairava Tantra
(The Radiance Sutras by Lorin Roche)

I suppose that’s the way we humans are, thinking too much and listening too little. Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligences other than our own. Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop. The drop swells on the tip of a cedar and I catch it on my tongue like a blessing.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer

I tie my Hat— I crease my Shawl
by Emily Dickinson

I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl—
Life’s little duties do—precisely—
As the very least Were infinite—to me—

I put new Blossoms in the Glass—
And throw the old—away—
I push a petal from my Gown
That anchored there—I weigh
The time ’twill be till six o’clock
I have so much to do—
And yet—Existence—some way back—
Stopped—struck—my ticking—through—
We cannot put Ourself away
As a completed Man Or Woman—
When the Errand’s done
We came to Flesh—upon—
There may be—Miles on Miles of
Nought— Of Action—sicker far—
To simulate—is stinging work—
To cover what we are
From Science—and from Surgery—
Too Telescopic Eyes
To bear on us unshaded—
For their—sake—not for Ours—
‘Twould start them—
We—could tremble—
But since we got a Bomb—
And held it in our Bosom—
Nay—Hold it—it is calm—

Therefore—we do life’s labor—
Though life’s Reward—be done—
With scrupulous exactness—
To hold our Senses—on—

I think most poets would be the first to tell you that they don’t really know where poems come from. Which means, perhaps, that we don’t so much write poems as listen for them. Or, alternately, that we create conditions to lure and coax them indoors, and perhaps even eventually onto the page. Yet it’s the silence of the unknown that grows the poem—the white space of the page that lets it resonate. Sometimes words, with their impulse to define (and confine) are troubling to poetry. As Tadeusz Dabrowski writes in “Hall of Mirrors”: “It’s very dangerous to know / too many words. / Each of them has its / flip side.”
– Michael Bazzett

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

I am in love with whatever is eccentric, devious, strange, singular, unique, out of this world-and with life as an incalculable, a chaotic thing, meaningful above and beyond the necessary and elemental data of my subject.
– Marguerite Young

I’ve always told people that for each person there is a sentence — a series of words — which has the power to destroy him. […] [But] another sentence exists, another series of words, which will heal the person. If you’re lucky you will get the second; but you can be certain of getting the first: that is the way it works.
– Philip K. Dick

These days I can see us clinging to each other
as we are swept along by the current
I am clinging to you to keep you from
being swept away and you are clinging to me
to keep me from being swept away from you
we see the shores blurring past as we hold
each other in the rushing current
the daylight ruses unheard far above us
how long will we be swept along in the daylight
how long will we cling together in the night
and where will it carry us together
– W.S. Merwin

Labour to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.
– Jacob Needleman

If your body can’t do something the right way, it’ll do it the wrong way… without asking permission first. You may have to do it the wrong way for a long time before you start to notice the strain. Assessing and addressing the QUALITY of your movement, instead of just the quantity, is how you stay out of trouble.
– The Body Mechanic Inc

I thank Love, then, for her book of rare if confusing symbols you have to live to read.
– Richard Jackson

My reason for getting into songwriting was having something to sing. My songs aren’t written for great singers. They’re written for me.
– Bob Dylan

We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings.
– Hannah Arendt, We Refugees

Tell me a story.
In this century, and moment, of mania, Tell me a story.
Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.
The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.
– Robert Penn Warren

Flying up, crossing over, going forward.
Passing through, getting deep enough. Breaking
into, finding the way, living at the heart
and going beyond that. Finally realizing
that arriving is not the same as being resident.
That what we do is not what we are doing.
We go into the orchard for apples. But what
we carry back is the day among trees with odor,
coolness, dappled light and time. The season
and geese going over. Always and always
with death to come, and before that the dishonor
of growing old. But meanwhile the trees are
heavy with ripe fruit. We try to visit Greece
and find ourselves instead in the pointless noon
standing among vetch and grapes, disassembling
as night climbs beautifully out of the earth
and God holds His breath. In the distance there is
the faint clatter of a farmer’s bucket as she
gets water up at the well for the animals.
– Jack Gilbert

A classical LP was playing…
… Jealous and sweet, this music was,
sobbing and gorgeous,
muddy and crystal.
But if the right words existed
the music wouldn’t need to.
– David Mitchell

You do not become a dissident just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.
– Václav Havel

Nevertheless she sometimes thought that they were the finest days of her life, those ‘honeymoon days’ as people call them… When the sun sinks down to rest, you breathe, beside the margin of a bay, the fragrant odors of the lemon-trees; and then, by night, on the terrace, alone with each other, with fingers intertwined, you gaze at the stars and make plans for the future. It seemed to her that there were certain places on the earth which naturally brought forth happiness, as though it were a plant native to the soil, which could not thrive elsewhere.
– Gustave Flaubert

Down in the City
by Sonny Condell

You’re out in the night so blue
You summer star
I’m down on the road of speed
A steady drive
I’m ending my day with you
So hold me close
I trust you would lay me down
When time is up

I’m down in the city
You know where to find me
I’m down in the city
You know where to find me
I’m up on the top floor
I’m up on the top floor
Just under the moon

and heaven is very blue
This summer day
Rolling my window down
To hear the sea
Fading for someone’s view
Into the hills
I trust you would lay me down
When time is up

I’m down in the city
You know where to find me
I’m down in the city
You know where to find me
I’m up on the top floor
I’m up on the top floor
Just under the moon

I’m talking to the great Pole Star
He looks down, notes down each word I say

We all live a lot
We all give a bit
We all think a lot
too much
too much

We all live a lot
We all give a bit
We all
we all
we all think a lot
too much
too much
too much
too much
Yeah

I’m down in the city
You know where to find me
I’m down in the city
You know where to find me
I’m up on the top floor
I’m up on the top floor
Just under the moon

You’re out in the night so blue
You summer star
I’m down on the road of speed
A steady drive
fading for someone’s view
Into the hills
I trust you would lay me down
When time is up
When time is up
When time is up
When time is up

I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of ‘thinking’ and ‘enjoying’ what they call ‘living’, I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds.
– Jack Kerouac

It now seems impossible to do anything without the advice and report of an expert.
– Jacques Ellul

Your little earth-nut, O potato
war, riots mama dears around
papap’s paternal root

– Jack Kerouac

TESTAMENT

1.
Dear relatives and friends, when my last breath
Grows large and free in air, don’t call it death —
A word to enrich the undertaker and inspire
His surly art of imitating life; conspire
Against him. Say that my body cannot now
Be improved upon; it has no fault to show
To the sly cosmetician. Say that my flesh
Has a perfect compliance with the grass
Truer than any it could have striven for.
You will recognize the earth in me, as before
I wished to know it in myself: my earth
That has been my care and faithful charge from birth,
And toward which all my sorrows were surely bound,
And all my hopes. Say that I have found
A good solution, and am on my way
To the roots. And say I have left my native clay
At last, to be a traveler; that too will be so.
Traveler to where? Say you don’t know.

2.
But do not let your ignorance
Of my spirit’s whereabouts dismay
You, or overwhelm your thoughts.
Be careful not to say
Anything too final. Whatever
Is unsure is possible, and life is bigger
Than flesh. Beyond reach of thought
Let imagination figure

Your hope. That will be generous
To me and to yourselves. Why settle
For some know-it-all’s despair
When the dead may dance to the fiddle

Hereafter, for all anybody knows?
And remember that the Heavenly soil
Need not be too rich to please
One who was happy in Port Royal.

I may be already heading back,
A new and better man, toward
That town. The thought’s unreasonable,
But so is life, thank the Lord!

3.
So treat me, even dead,
As a man who has a place
To go, and something to do.
Don’t muck up my face
With wax and powder and rouge
As one would prettify
An unalterable fact
To give bitterness the lie.

Admit the native earth
My body is and will be,
Admit its freedom and
Its changeability.

Dress me in the clothes
I wore in the day’s round.
Lay me in a wooden box.
Put the box in the ground.

4.
Beneath this stone a Berry is planted
In his home land, as he wanted.
He has come to the gathering of his kin,
Among whom some were worthy men,

Farmers mostly, who lived by hand,
But one was a cobbler from Ireland,

Another played the eternal fool
By riding on a circus mule

To be remembered in grateful laughter
Longer than the rest. After

Doing that they had to do
They are at ease here. Let all of you

Who yet for pain find force and voice
Look on their peace, and rejoice.

– Wendell Berry

Long after you’ve forgotten someone’s voice, you can still remember the sound of their happiness or their sadness. You can feel it in your body.

– Anne Michaels

You are not making a gift of what is yours to the poor man, but you are giving him back what is his. You have been appropriating things that are meant to be for the common use of everyone. The earth belongs to everyone, not to the rich.
– St Ambrose of Milan (Aurelius Ambrosius)

Why must we love where the lightning strikes, and not where we choose?
– Theodore Sturgeon

Beat, Old Heart
bu Carl Sandburg

Beat, old heart, these are the old bars
All stragglers have beat against.
Beat on these bars like the old sea
Beats on the rocks and beaches.
Beat here like the old winter winds
Beat on the prairies and timbers.
Old grizzlies, eagles, buffalo,
Their paws and beaks register this.
Their hides and heads say it with scars.

last days of winter
a refreshed earth awakens
with beginner’s eyes
– Kathleen McAllen

We buy into some version of the intentional fallacy: the notion that art is about having a clear-cut intention and then confidently executing same. The actual process, in my experience, is much more mysterious and more of a pain in the ass to discuss truthfully.
– George Saunders

I’ve heard some people describe liminality in the language of Celtic spirituality: a thin place, a narrow place, a place where the living and the dead commune, where heaven and earth all regard each other.

Hell too, I hope. Otherwise what’s the point? “Narrow” in Irish is caol, meaning narrow, slender, subtle, or tenuous.

In Irish, to speak of the “narrowness of the hand” means the wrist, or the “narrowness of the leg” the ankle. It is a place of mobility or action, a place easily twisted and when twisted, it hurts. Lots of us live in this narrow place, easily open to twisting. Our past and our future each have a hold of us in the present and we wonder how we shall manage. How do any of us survive this fragile place? Liminality, if it means anything, must be as truthful as forgiving, as confessing, as breathing, as surviving.

– Pádraig Ó Tuama

Psalm by Richard Wilbur

Give thanks for all things

On the plucked lute, and likewise
The harp of ten strings.

Have the lifted horn
Greatly blare, and pronounce it
Good to have been born.

Lend the breath of life
To the stops of the sweet flute.
Or capering fife,

And tell the deep drum
To make at the right juncture,
Pandemonium.

Then, in grave relief,
Praise too our sorrows on the
Cello of shared grief.

Anyone whose goal is ‘something higher’ must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
– Milan Kundera

Our civilization is first and foremost a civilization of means; in the reality of modern life, the means, it would seem, are more important than the ends.
– Jacques Ellul

Meditation teaches us to settle more and more deeply into our direct bodily experience, where the body as object gives way to an ever-changing dynamic flow of sensation and vibration, a constant streaming of felt experience through awareness.
– Martin Aylward

No man will ever unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude.
– Thomas de Quincey

weary of
the winter wind
and dreary winter days
– Basho

Concerning the death of Gertrude Stein: she came out of a deep coma to ask her companion Alice Toklas, “Alice, Alice, what is the answer?” Her companion replied, “There is no answer.” Gertrude Stein continued, “Well, then, what is the
question?” and fell back dead.
– Susan Sontag

The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical, but it is not. Only those who can be alone can truly love, without possessing, without manipulation, without turning the other into an object.
– Erich Fromm

That’s the hardest thing in the world to do—to stay with a sentence until it has said what it should say, and then to know when that has been accomplished.
– Vivian Gornick

The man who is ceaselessly questioning, who has no authority, who does not follow any tradition, any book or teacher, becomes a light unto himself.
– Krishnamurti

Sam went on, and there was yellow light, and fire within; and the evening meal was ready, and he was expected. And Rose drew him in, and set him in his chair, and put little Elanor upon his lap. He drew a deep breath. ‘Well, I’m back,’ he said.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men’s reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of ‘the rat race’ is not yet final.
– Hunter S. Thompson

We should be lifting each other up and cheering each other on, not trying to outshine one another. The sky would be awfully dark with just one star.
– Stacie Martin

You must accept that the invisible power, the force of life that moves through you, will provide everything you need.
– Iyanla Vanzant

You note the bleakness of your own heart
wanting to live in spite of this.
– Lena Khalaf

That Art remains the one way possible
Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine, at least.
How look a brother in the face and say
‘Thy right is wrong, eyes hast thou yet art blind,
Thine ears are stuffed and stopped, despite their length,
And, oh, the foolishness thou countest faith!’
Say this as silverly as tongue can troll –
The anger of the man may be endured,
The shrug, the disappointed eyes of him
Are not so bad to bear – but here’s the plague
That all this trouble comes of telling truth,
Which truth, by when it reaches him, looks false,
Seems to be just the thing it would supplant,
Nor recognizable by whom it left –
While falsehood would have done the work of truth.
But Art, – wherein man nowise speaks to men,
Only to mankind, – Art may tell a truth
Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought,
Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word.
So may you paint your picture, twice show truth,
Beyond mere imagery on the wall. –
So, note by note, bring music from your mind,
Deeper than ever the Andante dived, –
So write a book shall mean, beyond the facts,
Suffice the eye and save the soul beside.
– Robert Browning

There are Two things More Powerful than Karma.. Compassion and Forgiveness. When We Choose these Qualities, these Truths, We Awaken.
– Robert Adams

A PhD is a valuable qualification, signaling to future employers your ability to work hard while mentally unwell
– Neil Renic

I long for one last Blue democracy,

Which has broke my heart a while.

How many minutes have I left,
the lover asked,

To still be beautiful?

– Lucie Brock-Broido

The task of psychoanalysis is not to free people from their symptoms, but to free them from the necessity of their symptoms.
– Sándor Ferenczi

I know now that I’m not cut out for marriage. I never found a way of dealing with it. Anyway, it’s hard to love and be loved.
– Helen Garner

You think you are thinking your thoughts. You are not. You are thinking the culture’s thoughts.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti

When we least expect it, life sends us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not ready. The challenge will not wait.
– Paulo Coelho

It might be going too far to say that the modern scientific movement was tainted from its birth: but I think it would be true to say that it was born in an unhealthy neighborhood and at an inauspicious hour. Its triumphs may have been too rapid and purchased at too high a price: reconsideration, and something like
repentance, may be required.
– C.S. Lewis

This summer I want to do a lot of work because I really haven’t done anything for ages and there are a couple of things I’d like to finish before I die.
– Elizabeth Bishop

We must play our parts on the stage of life,
but without identifying with those parts.
– Sri Ramana Maharshi

There is no new ideal imaginable by the madness of modern sophists, which will be anything like so startling as fulfilling any one of the old ones.
– G.K. Chesterton

all alone

the white
within VanGogh’s
purples

– Stephen J. DeGuire

However, let no one think that just because of this light that came to me one day…I was in the habit of understanding things that clearly, or that I was far advanced in prayer…often I was not praying at all, but only day dreaming.
– Thomas Merton

We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities but its own talents…
– Eric Hoffer

Social media is both a portal and a drain. Balance is key.
– Lalah Delia

Your website is your résumé.
– @naval

Allegorical Seduction
by Yusef Komunyakaa

I am piled up so high
in your walk, I
slide down a chute of years.
Touch me, mountains
rise, & the pleasure
tears us into a song.
Quicksilver skies, these birds
over The Four Corners
down through Gallup & Window Rock
catch fire in clouds.
No god tells them
different. No hand
disclaims our closing
distance, as doors open
under the sea.

— for Linda G.

What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the evergrowing masses of our century.
– Hannah Arendt

Kissing in America
Parker Logan
Margo Rabb

We’re here // we’re queer // we’re a Funko POP future gleaming in the distance
we’re a lakefront sinkhole blooming // we’re Americans // we said we weren’t
all that slippage and slop // but we are // stupid as children // dumb to alarms
they won’t stop ringing // silver alert // last call // we’re still dancing
we like DJ // we like liquor // we like light in our eyes
from disco ball that’s stopped spinning // reckless bodies parading
to end of dance floor // this is America and we’re still capitalists
shadow of imperialism // arm like father // his tongue
on ours // the easiest way to transfer language // is by force
we know scream // we know late night and Bunny Hop // there’s always
one more open place // one more party to crash before someone’s sun
lights us up // our God said no more flood // no water
it was a promise // it was a threat // it was a burn notice
for the work he needed to start over // we’re it // we’re the left
overs on the corner of Royal and Frenchman St // of course we’re in
New Orleans // did you think this was Florida // did you think we would
be near a beach // we deserve dirty banquets // palms and ash
ash and ass // palms smacked across our ass // we love-hate it
love to hate it // the first time // I saw my face // I was at a party like this one
I was strawberry // I was pink all over the ground // pink pretty pretty
eyes pretty // green // I loved myself // I didn’t know what
I was pretending to be // my father // my history all over my cheeks
I threw up America // two fists rolled quarters // America threw up me
this country is bright with the saints // of vices // I mean // racists // nicest
shards // we’re a parish of nickelback cowboy histories // we’re longer
than every page in a library // we’re sewn together // humiliation blame
guilt greed // it’s you // it’s me // the stars will collect their debt
when we’re done baring our teeth // and I’m not saying there’s no place left
in America // for us to sleep // we’ve just got a ways // a world // a freight
we’re late // grab the clutch and turn the wheel // we’re thrusting against history’s
tides // coaster rides // put your hand over mine // don’t say we’ll be alright
until we’re alright // this blood we’ve spilt is yelling our names // don’t say it’s alright

Time goes so quick, when there is a rush of things to do…
– Tolkien

When you write fast enough to outrun judgment, that’s when your creativity has a chance to show you what’s possible. Magic happens in the momentum.
– Darien Hsu Gee

Nay, though all things must come utterly to an end in time, Gondor shall not perish yet…There are still other fastnesses, and secret ways of escape into the mountains. Hope and memory shall live still in some hidden valley where the grass is green.

– Beregond (Tolkien, The Return of the King)

That’s like saying, Are you against pumpkin pie? Pumpkin pie is enjoyable and people enjoy it, but it’s in a different category from, for example, penicillin.
– Wallace Shawn

The dogs were fed on the best food, much better than many people could obtain – a folly of sentimental pet-keepers (with tender hearts) that did not perish with the 14th century.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life more interesting.
– Paulo Coelho

We repeat what we do not repair.
– Sigmund Freud

The end of the world seems quite a regular occurrence—as regular as the rebirth of the world.
– Pico Iyer

Oh Love, let shadows flee;
O live sun, living God, incarnate sword
of edged reality, let me be hurt,
but let me be alive enough to die.
– Joy Davidman

Poetry requires a medium, and a context, but—like Soylent Green—it’s made of people.
– Stephanie Burt

you are alive and someone else is dying.

You note the bleakness of your own heart

wanting to live in spite of this.

– Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

We are able to live / Only because some things have been said

– George Oppen, The Students Gather

CODA
And what is it you hate? she asked.
Bureaucracy. And what is it you love?
he asked. Rivers. They walked and walked
until all the colors faltered. They drank
until even the grass felt ill. So many
days so few words and when it was dawn
nothing but birds flew out of their mouths.
– j. mae barizo

Enough of these symphonic diaries— these pseudo philosophical symphonies hiding behind their allegedly profound thoughts and tedious self analysis… Armed with clear party directives, we will stop all manifestations of formalism and popular decadence.
– Khrennikov

Where do songs come from?

From grief too great to banish

– Heine

Other people are most important. Art is rewarding. Books and movies are good fillers, and the most reliable.
– Joe Brainard

But why, then, does the city exist? What line separates the inside from the outside, the rumble of wheels from the howl of wolves?
– Italo Calvino

It’s over a 100 years after the great Jewish crusader for free speech, Emma Goldman, was deported from USA for her speaking out. Yet history repeats itself.

People shouldn’t be deported for speaking out.

People shouldn’t be deported for speaking out.

We mustn’t stay silent.

– Ilya Kaminsky

Ways to Disappear
by Camille Rankine

In the dark

Down a stairwell

Through the doorway

Gone west

With a new wish

In daylight

Down the sidewalk

In a wool coat

In a white dress

Without a name

Without asking

On your knees

On your stomach

Gone silent

In the backseat

In the courtroom

In a cage

In the desert

In the park

Gone swimming

On the shortest night

At the bottom of the lake

In pieces

In pictures

Without meaning

Without a face

Seeking refuge

In a new land

Gone still

In the heart

With your head bowed

In deference

In sickness

In surrender

With your hands up

On the sidewalk

In the daylight

In the dark

I have just lit the fire. I am nervously myself between this August chill and the fire, in my early dawn state of extreme anxiety gnawed by myself, by ideas, my mind taut, as if on guard; the rest still wrapped in loose-fitting wool and linen. Over there, the rumpled bed is growing cold. Cadaver of my night.

Lighting the fire is full of ideas. Building this little pyre. The part played by the brushwood, the catching delineated by the thinness of the twigs; it is a question of producing one step after another until the big log catches. The spirit of
war, or revolution. Propagation of a faith. Love.

– Paul Valery

What have we / abandoned to arrive with such violence at this hour.
– Joanna Klink

PROBITY

in the poem
or our hearts

will grow old
and break

– George Oppen

A witness is a witness to the truth of an event
– Dori Laub

The Wings of Daylight
by W. S. Merwin

Brightness appears showing us everything
it reveals the splendors it calls everything
but shows it to each of us alone
and only once and only to look at
not to touch or hold in our shadows
what we see is never what we touch
what we take turns out to be something else
what we see that one time departs untouched
while other shadows gather around us
the world’s shadows mingle with our own
we had forgotten them but they know us
they remember us as we always were
they were at home here before the first came
everything will leave us except the shadows
but the shadows carry the whole story
at first daybreak they open their long wings

I know you like to line dance
Everything so democratic and cool
But, baby, there’s no guidance when random rules
– David Berman

This is something I learned from myths. What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light? Or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle?
– Joseph Campbell

If a little kid ever asks you just why the sky is blue, you look at him/her right in the eye & say, “It’s because of Quantum effects involving Raleigh scattering combined with a lack of violet photon receptors in our retinae.”
– Philip Plait

When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are.
– Eckhart Tolle

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.
An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
– G.K. Chesterton

The Old English word for despair was ormōdnes: being ‘without heart’ or ‘spiritless’. Instead of falling into despair, you were said to ‘depart’ into it (ġewītan), as if you were going to another place.
– @wylfcen

It is awkward and difficult for the ear to hear something new; we are bad at listening to unfamiliar music. When we hear another language, we involuntarily try to form the sounds we hear into words that sound more comfortable and familiar to us.
– Nietzsche

“Politics” are a distraction from the true dividing line that runs down the center of the world—between those people who believe there are things in life too precious and sacred to be sold, degraded, or destroyed, and those who think that anything’s fair game for our domination.
– Paul J. Pastor

obstreperous spring
inviting birdsong to drown
our politics
– Andy Perrin

Any distinction between sacred and secular literature is finally a political judgment, and therefore irrelevant in the realms of the aesthetic.
– Harold Bloom

I’d like to live like a poor man – only with lots of money.
– Pablo Picasso

What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style
– Gustave Flaubert

In our dull myopic greed,
unable to envision what

the true potential of our
America was meant to be.

– Andy Perrin

Don’t spit blood. You’ll stain the rug. Don’t spit justice, coffee, passion, Wheaties, phlegm, anger, sarcasm, case law, spittle, fire, truth.
– Eric Sirota , The Rent Eats First

ARCHAEOLOGY

I tell you nothing new when I say

here we are again, unable to claim

many moments of relief

from the confirmable gloom, though

there was a time, before news became

ubiquitous, when it was possible

to close our eyes and hide in our rooms.

The excitement of bones found

in mass graves —not ours— the remains

of mastodons and dinosaurs, told us

something of our past. Now we see

face down in ditches our neighbors

with whom we once broke bread,

whose children played in our yards,

and everywhere colossal denials of blame.

I tell you nothing new, Andre. I dare

boring you, Miguel, with what

you already know, the enemy

suddenly the enemy, down on your knees,

motherfucker, for being down on

your knees to the wrong god.

I dare boring you because the shovels

are blades, the dirt is bloody, and I need

to remind myself of the creatures

we are and have been-remnants

everywhere, no need, really, to dig.

– Stephen Dunn

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
– James Baldwin

True solitude is a din of birdsong, seething leaves, whirling colors, or a clamor of tracks in the snow.
– Edward Hoagland

America has a big government because
America has big problems.
– Andy Perrin

My era was the freest time. I now realize it’s over.
– David Hockney

I don’t want to shovel poetry into people like it’s information. I want it to be perceptual, like a dot.
– Eileen Myles

Art is chaos taking shape.
– Pablo Picasso

Measure me, sky!
Tell me I reach by a song
Nearer the stars;
I have been little so long.

Weigh me, high wind!
What will your wild scales record?
Profit of pain,
Joy by the weight of a word.

Horizon, reach out!
Catch at my hands, stretch me taut,
Rim of the world:
Widen my eyes by a thought.

Sky, be my depth,
Wind, be my width and my height,
World, my heart’s span;
Loveliness, wings for my flight.

– Leonora Speyer

she never says gay, but she does say special and i missed you, and i want you to know i have always loved you.
– Ollie Schminkey

While much good came through invention, much invention came irrespective of the good.
– Lewis Mumford

do not miss
the Festival of the Otters
along the riverbank
– Basho

A good will, is not a blueprint; nor stirring words, a substitute for tools.
Many clutch, the fashion of virtue; away from the soot, of our volcane world.
Go naked, into the fires of vision; and forge yourself, a rightful act.
– American Sijo

Writers seldom make good leaders. They’re self-employed, for one thing, and they have very little contact with their customers. It’s very easy for a writer to be unrealistic.
– W. H. Auden

Praise their grit and gospel, their glistening

brains, their minds on fire.

– Ellen Bass

I don’t think I believed in my prayers until I encountered Buddhism.
– Nakuul Mehta

When I write,
I want the words
to be truer than I am.
I want them to
question me,
crack my facade,
cut through the fog,
pull me out of myself,
and tousle me with light.
– McCall Erickson

In Praise Of Solid People

Thank God that there are solid folk
Who water flowers and roll the lawn,
And sit and sew and talk and smoke,
And snore all through the summer dawn.

Who pass untroubled nights and days
Full-fed and sleepily content,
Rejoicing in each other’s praise,
Respectable and innocent.

Who feel the things that all men feel,
And think in well-worn grooves of thought,
Whose honest spirits never reel
Before man’s mystery, overwrought.

Yet not unfaithful nor unkind,
With work-day virtues surely staid,
Theirs is the sane and humble mind,
And dull affections undismayed.

O happy people! I have seen
No verse yet written in your praise,
And, truth to tell, the time has been
I would have scorned your easy ways.

But now thro’ weariness and strife
I learn your worthiness indeed,
The world is better for such life
As stout suburban people lead.

Too often have I sat alone
When the wet night falls heavily,
And fretting winds around me moan,
And homeless longing vexes me

For lore that I shall never know,
And visions none can hope to see,
Till brooding works upon me so
A childish fear steals over me.

I look around the empty room,
The clock still ticking in its place,
And all else silent as the tomb,
Till suddenly, I think, a face

Grows from the darkness just beside.
I turn, and lo! it fades away,
And soon another phantom tide
Of shifting dreams begins to play,

And dusky galleys past me sail,
Full freighted on a faerie sea;
I hear the silken merchants hail
Across the ringing waves to me

—Then suddenly, again, the room,
Familiar books about me piled,
And I alone amid the gloom,
By one more mocking dream beguiled.

And still no nearer to the Light,
And still no further from myself,
Alone and lost in clinging night
—(The clock’s still ticking on the shelf).

Then do I envy solid folk
Who sit of evenings by the fire,
After their work and doze and smoke,
And are not fretted by desire.

– C. S. Lewis

Have at the Orcs, with winged words, hildenǣddran (war-adders), biting darts – but make sure of the mark, before shooting.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

In a morning solitude there seems to lie about our fields of thought an aerial wealth too plenteous to be completely gathered into the granary of language.
– Robert Alfred Vaughan

True kindness is not necessarily giving something to someone who is down, but showing them that they still have something to give, to get back up.
– Charles F. Glassman

I speak
of telepathic assemblage
of integer as burning
scorched by epiphanies & rubies

take the sun with its fire
with its sphere of indefinite quantity
with its immemorial sub-rationals
at its imperial equator of ghosts
at its sign of transfunctional mounting

& because of transfunctional mounting
the sun
never negated or quelled

– Will Alexander

The morning door is open to the outer world;
the pleasure of edges, clear shapes and names.
Its air is the sharp pain of your separateness.
– William Bronk

Mnemosyne

A sign we are, without meaning
Without pain we are and have nearly
Lost our language in foreign lands,
For when the heavens quarrel
Over humans and moons proceed
In force, the sea
Speaks out and rivers must find
Their way. But there is One,
Without doubt, who
Can change this any day. He needs
No law. The rustle of leaf and then the sway of oaks
Beside glaciers. Not everything
Is in the power of the gods. Mortals would sooner
Reach toward the abyss. With them
The echo turns. Though the time
Be long, truth
Will come to pass.

– Hölderlin tr. by Richard Sieburth

I do think the music that one listens to has a deep impact on one’s rhythmic and bodily disposition.
– Nathaniel Mackey

Answering ‘What is Zen?’ is like answering ‘What is the ocean?’ To understand the ocean, you have to submerge yourself. You have to get wet.
– Les Kaye

The best stories come out of the air.
– Donald Hall

The more you probe into it, the more it runs away from you. Because it’s you looking at yourself. It’s like a snake chasing its own tail or a dog running after its tail. The more we explore into the atom, the more we explore into the exterior vastness. We’re really looking for ourselves. We want to know what it is. And it—obviously, it, the universe—is you. But that’s a thing that’s closed to Western knowledge.
– Alan Watts

I hear the sound of education ending.
– Wayne Koestenbaum

I believe that poems are a score for performance by the reader, and that you become the speaking voice. You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem, you are the voice in the poem. You stand behind the words and speak them as your own.
– Helen Vendler

Nothing save the airs that brood
Over the magic solitude.
– Edgar Allan Poe

People aren’t homes, they never will be. People are rivers, always changing, forever flowing. They will disappear with everything you put inside
them.
– Nikita Gill

Thoughts are an important part of your inner wisdom—and they are very powerful. A thought held long enough and repeated often enough becomes a belief. A belief then becomes your biology.
– Dr. Christiane Northrup

I have always loved cherries and tend to eat them with abandon at a certain point in summer. But too many will make me feel sick. A fine line. As is everything to do with suffering and pleasure.
– Danusha Laméris

Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.
– Steven Pressfield

Fate goeth ever as she must!
– Beowulf (J.R.R. Tolkien)

It’s you still. You who says, Look! You who points / to the sky.
– Hieu Minh Nguyen

there are a lot of little wars
you realized you’ve missed
– Dave Newman

There will be people who you can’t get in tune with no matter how long you know them. And others you were in tune with before you even met them.
– Nika Solé

VIEW

Not the city lights. We want

-the moon-

The Moon
none of our own doing!

– Rae Armantrout

So much of the political discourse has become slogans and hot takes.

But as Quincy Jones said, “We need more songs, man. Fucking songs, not hooks.”

– @tamaranopper

Fascism doesn’t start with soldiers in the streets. It starts with deciding who is expendable.

The sick. The disabled. The aging.

The refugees. The immigrants. The outsiders.

The people who think too much, speak too loudly, refuse to bow.

It starts small. With quiets erasures. The things we let slide because we think they don’t apply to us, until they do.

– William Murphy

Evil doesn’t die. It grows back through the cracks of our apathy.
– Garry Kasparov

alone again
on the Pacific shore …
winter moonlight
forming a narrow path
to the land I left behind
– Chen-ou Liu

When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
– C.S. Lewis

Life obliges me to do something, so I paint.
– Rene Magritte

I never find your perfume nor your voice anywhere
In this vast city, I never find anyone like you.
– Noshi Gilani

Reasoning proceeds by fits and starts, hesitates and bifurcates at each level.
– Deleuze

We are drawn to what is familiar, not always to what is healthy.
– Sigmund Freud

Besides what he has put into his work with manifest intention, the artist seems instinctively, as it were, to have depicted therein an infinity, which no finite understanding is capable of developing to the full.
– F.W.J. Schelling

The air is thick with information and news, but nothing much seems to be getting communicated, although when something does happen it affects the whole world at once.
– Northrop Frye

I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones.
– Franz Kafka

Let us go to another country,
Not yours or mine,
And start again…

‘Hope would be our passport;
the rest is understood’______

– William Plomer

The child I was is just one breath away from me.
– Sheniz Janmohamed

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful, a faery’s child…

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.

– John Keats

There’s only one thing to be done. We must explore the wood. Hermits and knights-errant and people like that always manage to live somehow if they’re in a forest. They find roots and berries and things.
– CS Lewis, Prince Caspian

How many times have I come to you out of my head
with joy, if ever a man was,
for to approach you I have given up the light
and all directions. I come to you
lost, wholly trusting as a man who goes
into the forest unarmed. It is as though I descend
slowly earthward out of the air. I rest in peace
in you, when I arrive at last.
– Wendell Berry

May your love be firm,
and may your dream of life together
be a river between two shores—
by day bathed in sunlight, and by night
illuminated from within . . .
– James Bertolino

To be human is to let go the hand of God,
and so you, the creator, have to let your work be human:
let the reader have your words,
let emotion examine its own name.
Let the hope of nothing, of an end,
be where you begin.
When letting go,
say goodbye with both hands.
– B. J. Ward

Entanglement

A librarian in Calcutta and an entomologist in Prague
sign their moon-faced illicit emails,
“ton entanglée.”

No one can explain it.
The strange charm between border collie and sheep,
leaf and wind, the two distant electrons.

There is, too, the matter of a horse race.
Each person shouts for his own horse louder,
confident in the rising din
past whip, past mud,
the horse will hear his own name in his own quickened ear.

Desire is different:
desire is the moment before the race is run.

Has an electron never refused
the invitation to change direction,
sent in no knowable envelope, with no knowable ring?

A story told often: after the lecture, the widow
insisting the universe rests on the back of a turtle.
And what, the physicist
asks, does the turtle rest on?

Very clever, young man, she replies, very clever,
but it’s turtles all the way down.

And so a woman in Beijing buys for her love,
who practices turtle geometry in Boston, a metal trinket
from a night-market street stall.

On the back of a turtle, at rest on its shell,
a turtle.
Inside that green-painted shell, another, still smaller.

This continues for many turtles,
until finally, too small to see
or to lift up by its curious, preacherly head
a single un-green electron
waits the width of a world for some weightless message
sent into the din of existence for it alone.

Murmur of all that is claspable, clabberable, clamberable,
against all that is not:

You are there. I am here. I remember

– Jane Hirshfield

The open mind and the receptive heart—which are at last and with fortune’s smile the informed mind and the experienced heart—are to be gained anywhere, any time, without necessarily moving an inch from any present address.
– Eudora Welty

According to Vedanta, there are only two symptoms of enlightenment, just two indications that a transformation is taking place within you toward a higher consciousness. The first symptom is that you stop worrying. Things don’t bother you anymore. You become light-hearted and full of joy. The second symptom is that you encounter more and more meaningful coincidences in your life, more and more synchronicities. And this accelerates to the point where you actually experience the miraculous.
– Deepak Chopra

It is almost impossible to have an idea of the circle except by being at the centre, because we are so used to relating ourselves to everything as if we were the centre of it. It is very interesting to try and be aware of the circle from the circumference, for then there is no privileged point, no place in which I can isolate myself – for being the centre is special, therefore separated or isolated from the whole. It is a totally different experience for us when we are not obsessed by being at the centre. Then the centre is everywhere and we see differently.
– J.G. Bennett

Forgiveness means giving up hope for a different past. It means knowing that the past is over, the dust has settled and the destruction left in its wake can never be reconstructed to resemble what it was. It’s accepting that there’s no magic solution to the damage that’s been caused. It’s the realization that as unfair as the hurricane was, you still have to live in its city of ruins. And no amount of anger is going to reconstruct that city. You have to do it yourself.
– Heidi Priebe

What exactly is the poetry’s witness? The language of poetry may or may not change us, but it shows the changes within us. Like a seismograph, it registers violent occurrences. Miłosz titled his seminal text The Witness of Poetry “not because we witness it, but because it witnesses us.” Living on the other side of the Iron Curtain, Zbigniew Herbert told us something similar: a poet is like a barometer for the psyche of a nation. It cannot change the weather. But it shows us what the weather is like.
– Ilya Kaminsky

We dwell in the house of the body, but its perfection and intricate life are the work of a wisdom which never relaxes dominion over a single cell.
– George William Russell

One of the most remarkable of man’s characteristics is his capacity for becoming used to conditions of almost any kind, whether good or bad, both in the self and in the environment, and once he has become used to such conditions they seem to him both right and natural. This capacity is a boon when it enables him to adapt himself to conditions which are desirable, but it may prove a great danger when the conditions are undesirable. When his sensory appreciation is untrustworthy, it is possible for him to become so familiar with seriously harmful conditions of misuse of himself that these malconditions will feel right and comfortable.
– F. Matthias Alexander

The more I dim my eyes over print and frazzle my brain over abstract ideas, the more I appreciate the delight of being basically an animal wrapped in a sensitive skin: sex, the resistance of rock, the taste and touch of snow, the feel of the sun, good wine and a rare beefsteak and the company of friends around a fire with a guitar and lousy old cowboy songs. Despair: I’ll never be a scholar, never be a decent good Christian. Just a hedonist, a pagan, a primitive romantic. But what’s an honest soul to do? I don’t know. I can say this: Be loyal to what you love, be true to the earth, fight your enemies with passion and laughter.
– Edward Abbey

My notion of democracy is that under it the weakest shall have the same opportunities as the strongest…no country in the world today shows any but patronizing regard for the weak… Western democracy, as it functions today, is diluted fascism…true democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the center. It has to be worked from below, by the people of every village.
– Ghandi

Never let yourself be persuaded that any one Great Man, any one leader, is necessary to the salvation of America. When America consists of one leader and 143,000,000 followers, it will no longer be America. Truly American leadership is not of any one man. It is of multitudes of men — and women.
– Dwight David Eisenhower

Every viewpoint is useful, and it takes a wide diversity of views for any group to navigate this universe, let alone to act as custodians for it.
– Tyson Yunkaporta

A good day to remember that the rules of the Earth system are determined by physics and biology and the rules of the economy are made up by a small group of self-interested people and could change.
– Dr. Elizabeth Sawin

War, at first, is the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn’t any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone’s being worse off.
– Karl Kraus

Between the choice to live in pain and the choice to take pills, there should be a world of alternatives: health care that we can find, or that can find us. This would mean easier access to doctors, but also to other, simpler means of health. A great deal of physical pain, for example, is best treated with physical therapy and physical exercise. These options require human contact, and do not generate the quick profits of pharmaceuticals and surgical implants. If we are concerned about American health, and American freedom, then everyone should be insured, and everyone’s insurance should cover what helps to relieve pain. We need a system of solidarity that no individual can create but from which every individual would gain.
– Timothy Snyder

During the Age of Glass, everyone believed some part of him or her to be extremely fragile. For some it was a hand, for others a femur, yet others believed it was their noses that were made of glass. The Age of Glass followed the Stone Age as an evolutionary corrective, introducing into human relations a new sense of fragility that fostered compassion. This period lasted a relatively short time in the history of love-about a century-until a doctor named Ignacio da Silva hit on the treatment of inviting people to recline on a couch and giving them a bracing smack on the body part in question, proving to them the truth. The anatomical illusion that had seemed so real slowly disappeared and-like so much we no longer need but can’t give up-became vestigial. But from time to time, for reasons that can’t always be understood, it surfaces again, suggesting that the Age of Glass, like the Age of Silence, never entirely ended.
– Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

We shall find peace. We shall hear the angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.
– Anton Chekhov

There is a girl in New York City
Who calls herself the human trampoline
And sometimes when I’m falling, flying
Or tumbling in turmoil I say
“Whoa, so this is what she means”
She means we’re bouncing into Graceland
And I see losing love
Is like a window in your heart
Well, everybody sees you’re blown apart
Everybody feels the wind blow
In Graceland, in Graceland
I’m going to Graceland
For reasons I cannot explain
There’s some part of me wants to see
Graceland
And I may be obliged to defend
Every love, every ending
Or maybe there’s no obligations now
Maybe I’ve a reason to believe
We all will be received
In Graceland
– Paul Simon

The beauty of a fragment is that it still supports the hope of brilliant completeness.
– Tobias Wolff

It takes generosity to discover the whole through others. If you realize you are only a violin, you can open yourself up to the world by playing your role in the concert.
– Jacques Yves Cousteau

Let the watchwords of all our people be the old familiar watchwords of honesty, decency, fair-dealing, and commonsense…. We must treat each man on his worth and merits as a man. We must see that each is given a square deal, because he is entitled to no more and should receive no less. The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us.
– Theodore Roosevelt

I use the word “extravagant” here because our tenderness needs to be generous. The word means to “wander outside.” It originally meant “unusual” and “outside the norm.” It meant this until the 1700s, when it started to mean “spend too much money.” When someone lavishes us with an extravagant gift, we say, “You shouldn’t have.” The extravagant gesture doesn’t hold back nor show restraint. It has “wandered outside,” beyond our expectations… outside of anything we know. It hobbles us a bit as we feel unworthy in the face of such largesse. Because tenderness begets tenderness, we insist on extravagance, which liberates our hearts. The view is wider and the container more spacious. Saint Francis writes, “No obstacles in my heart—everything a frail-boned kindness.” We find rest in this.
– Gregory Boyle

Let me fall if I must.
The one I will become
will catch me.
– Baal Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism

Your pretty empire took so long to build,
now, with a snap of history’s fingers,
down it goes.

– Alan Moore

At 50, everyone has the face
he deserves.

– George Orwell

If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things-praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts-not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
– C. S. Lewis

It would therefore be impossible to ‘glorify God by doing what we thought wrong’. Doing what we think right, on the other hand, is not the same as glorifying God.
– C.S. Lewis

Write what
should not be
forgotten.
– Isabel Allende

Can the mind, knowing its limitation, being aware of its conditioning, go beyond itself?
– Krishnamurti

If we are gripped by a strong attraction to a person or a thing, we must reflect on it. As Jung says: Unless we prefer to be made fools of by our illusions, we shall by carefully analyzing every fascination, extract from it a portion of our own personality, like a quintessence, and slowly come to recognize that we meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life. The same applies to our passionate antipathies. They also must be subjected to thorough analytic scrutiny. Whom do I hate? What groups or factions do I fight against? Whoever and whatever they are, they are a part of me; I’m bound to that which I hate as surely as I am to that which I love. The important thing psychologically, is where one’s libido is lodged, not whether one is for or against a particular thing.
– Edward Edinger

The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.
– Sigmund Freud

At present they seem determined to perpetuate the squalor and servitude of War in Peace, so that Peace shall become like War shorn even of the last tattered
rags of glory.
– J.R.R.. Tolkien

Even in this gloom hope gleams again. Our Enemy’s devices oft serve us in his despite.
– Éomer (Tolkien, The Return of the King)

Each epoch dreams the one to follow.
– Michelet

I view death mostly as a significant change of address….When I am sitting next to people who are in the process of transition, I always tell them: Stay as long as you want, and fly away whenever you’re ready.
– Anne Lamott

Your body is a reflection of your relationship with yourself.
– Dan Go

The imagination is like a lantern. It illuminates the inner landscapes of our life and helps us discover their secret archaeologies. When our eyes are graced with wonder, the world reveals its wonders to us. There are people who see only dullness in the world and that is because their eyes have already been dulled. So much depends on how we look at things. The quality of our looking determines what we come to see. Too often we squander the invitations extended to us because our looking has become repetitive and blind. The mystery and beauty is all around us but we never manage to see it. Similarly with the inner world: the imagination is the eye for the inner world. When the imagination awakens, the inner world illuminates. We begin to glimpse things that no-one speaks about, that the outer world seems to ignore. When the inner world brightens, we discover a new confidence and a surer grounding in the world.
– John O’Donohue

Always stick to what makes you weird, odd, strange, different. That’s your source of power.
– Robert Greene

Seeing more clearly into how the mind functions tends to shatter some of the meditator’s most cherished beliefs about cognition, consciousness, and the nature of self.
– Wes Nisker

If you want real control, drop the illusion of control; let life have you. It does anyway. You’re just telling yourself the story of how it doesn’t.
– Byron Katie

The lofty constructions of conscious thought become blurred in the rays not of a twilight but rather of a dawn, from which figures always foreboded, awaited, and loved rise into view.
– Henry Corbin

The truth is;
All is well, everything is unfolding as it should.
As you dwell in this, the external world changes for you.
– Robert Adams

Transference means that we bring past experiences into present relationships, mistaking them for reality.
– Sigmund Freud

If I have a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: be anything you like, be madmen, drunks and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing, success… If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live.
– Thomas Merton

It is no bad thing celebrating a simple life.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

I see failure and ‘making it’ as part of a story we have told—and sold—ourselves as a culture. As we know, it’s largely bullshit. So much is determined by factors outside of one’s control, and yet the myth persists.
– Sam Lipsyte

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.
– Marcus Aurelius

I want a readership that wants to read things because the work is difficult, not because it’s only fun. I want the fun to be in figuring it out.
– Percival Everett

We pick partners who help us recreate and resolve past emotional conflicts—often without realizing it.
– Stephen A. Mitchell

March 15.

In “life,” I don’t want to be reduced
to my work.

In “work,” I don’t want to be reduced
to my life.

My work is too austere
My life is a brutal anecdote

– Susan Sontag

But there is really only one liberal study, -that which gives a man liberty. It is the study of wisdom, and that is lofty, brave and great souled.
– Senaca

Love Song

How should I keep my soul
from touching yours? How should I
lift it beyond you toward other things?
Ah, I would gladly shelter it
in darkness with some lost thing,
on some remote unsounding place
that doesn’t tremble, when your depths stir.
Yet everything that touches you or me
takes us together like a bow’s stroke
that from two strings draws one voice.
Across what instrument are we stretched?
And what player holds us in his hand?
O sweet song

– Rilke

This Life is not here to serve this body, mind, or emotion. This body, mind, and emotion are here to serve Life.
– Sadhguru

There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don’t work.
– Anaïs Nin

No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.
– Socrates

If you subdue desire, your sorrows shall fall from you like drops of water from a lotus flower.
– The Dhammapada

Equivalence

Every thought a manifesto
Every manifesto an excuse
Every excuse a confession

Each confession an accusation
Each accusation a regret
Each regret a resurrection

All resurrections mourning
All mourning worship
All worship interruption
All interruptions sacraments

This sacrament a treaty
That treaty an attempt
This attempt an intuition
That intuition thought

– Alex Rettie

There is an art to finding your way in the lower regions by the memory of what you have seen when you were higher up. When you can no longer see, you can at least still know.
– René Daumal

Woman—The Poet
by Frances Dana Barker Gage.

“The greatest female poet,” said a gentleman
friend to me, “has fallen below our mediocre men.”

Tell me not, proud man! that woman
Never yet hath wrought her name,
With the golden threads of Genius,
Topmost, on the scrolls of fame!

That the strongest, loftiest effort,
Of the greatest woman’s soul,
Hath but half way climbed the mountain,
Hath but midway reached the goal;—

There, beside the weaker brothers,
In the shadows cold and high,
She has thrown her withering laurels,
And hath laid her down to die;

While above her, in the sunbeams,
Homer, Milton, Shakespeare bask,
And with mocking voices ever,
Tell her of her hopeless task.

Oh! there is a glorious poem,
In each earnest, woman-heart,
Struggling for a mighty utt’rance,
Struggling to become a part

Of the never-ending drama,
Acting on Life’s fitful stage,—
Hourly, daily, monthly, yearly,—
Love and hope on every page.

Think ye not, because she’s plodding,
Plodding duty’s daily round,
That no glowing lines of beauty
In her footsteps may be found.

When she giveth meat in season,
To her household, morn and night;
When she giveth ease to suff’ring,
Or to darkness bringeth light;—

While she plieth broom and duster,
Needle, scissors, here and there,
Leaves she not a glow, a gladness—
Do not all things grow more fair

Mark, proud man, the patient mother,
Bending o’er the cradle low;
List ye to her stirring heart-songs,
Improvised in love-tones low.

She is writing, ever writing,
Poems, earnest, true, and strong,
On that fair, unsullied life-page,
Nestled snowy downs among.

She is writing, ever writing,
Love all holy holds her pen.
Will her lofty aspirations
E’er be reached by mortal men?

Can the creature she is forming
Soar beyond her earnest thought,
Or produce one trace of beauty
Which her soul hath not inwrought?

She is writing, ever writing;—
Busy day or quiet night,
Finds her pen still poised and ready,
Some great poet-thought to write.

Here a line of love and beauty,
There a touch sublimely true,
Now a stanza breathing duty,—
Ever marking something new;

Till, at last, her work completed,
Like a regal flower unfurled,
Every petal fresh and glorious,
Bursts her Poem on the world.

Bursts to live and glow forever,—
Shedding fragrance o’er the soul,
Gathering power, and strength, and wisdom,
While the eternal years shall roll.

Bursts to live and glow forever,
Live above the earth-chained clod,
Drawing all things human onward,
Upward to the throne of God.

Oh! what living, breathing Poems,
Now are echoing through the land,
Written from the heart of woman,
While God held her trembling hand.

What were Homer, Milton, Shakespeare,
All who’ve ever near’d Fame’s goal,
But th’ inspired, the living Poems
Of a loving mother’s soul!

Man may form the grand Ideal,
And lay down the glorious plan;
But the woman’s work is real—
’Tis the mother makes the man.*

Men are what their mothers made them.

– R. W. Emerson

The bewitched person cannot distinguish between illusion and reality, image and body, word and deed.
– Alexander Lowen

winter rain
speckles attic windows
the ghostly past
knocking on the door
of my immigrant mind
– Chen-ou Liu

Pledge fealty first and foremost to your own inner signal, even if it’s wrong, because the more you trust your body, the more trustworthy your body becomes.
– @strangestloop

Writing Tip: Don’t stop writing halfway through the sentence, otherwise you’ll come back and forget what you were thinking at the moment. Stop at the end of an idea.
– Emma Sotomayor

Many are the strange chances of the world, and help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the Wise falter.
– J. R. R. Tolkien

There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life.
– R. L. Stevenson

In America, healthcare is a big business. In Canada it is a right.
– Mark Carney

How many of these gentle people have I helped to kill just by paying my taxes?
– June Jordan

How masterful and mad is hope.
– Ada Limón

Those faces you see every day on the streets were not created entirely without hope: be kind to them: like you they have not escaped.
– Charles Bukowski

I don’t believe in specific goals. Scott Adams famously said, Set up systems, not goals. Use your judgment to figure out what kinds of environments you can thrive in, and then create an environment around you so you’re statistically likely to succeed.
– @naval

These are wild times. And they are going to get wilder. This can be particularly difficult for anyone who has done a lot of inner work to soften their emotional edges. Because they threw away all of their armor, much too early. That’s the thing about the therapeutic process. Sometimes it opens our heart so beautifully that we can no longer function around the armored, survivalistic vibration that still permeates our world. But we have to. We are still a species at war, and those who long for power didn’t go to sleep while many of us were healing our ancestral trauma. If anything, they used our distracted inner focus as an opportunity to build a stronger foundation for their malevolence. To survive this, it’s essential to build a bridge between your grace and your grit. Heart on your sleeve, boots on the ground, never for one moment thinking that because you healed something that your enemy longs to do the same. It’s time to get real, now.
– Jeff Brown

I’m so full
that every part of me is now structurally
integral. Remove any brick
and the whole house will explode.

– Neil Hilborn

If we all faced only the facts, all we’d have would be war and supermarkets.
– Ruth Gordon

Once you accept the arrest of a person for no reason other than their speech, we are all in danger.
– Joyce Vance

Bliss is a thing which is always there and is not something which comes and goes. That which comes and goes is a creation of the mind.
– Sri Ramana Maharshi

I too am guilty. I too have dreamed of owning what was not meant for me.
– Sarah Kay

The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That – with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word ‘success’ – is our national disease.
– William James

There is no endpoint to self-awareness and self-discovery. It’s a lifelong process you hopefully keep getting better and better at.
– @naval

The whole journey of renunciation, or starting to say yes to life, is realizing first of all that you’ve come up against your edge, that everything in you is saying no, and then at that point, softening.
– Pema Chödrön

Spring will be here soon, proving every year as it does that life is stronger than death, than all the crap and chaos.
– Anne Lamott

We find our voice through
experimentation.
– Rick Rubin

The modern mind is overstimulated and the modern body is understimulated and overfed.

Meditation, exercise, and fasting restore an ancient balance.

– @naval

POLITICAL SCIENCE 101

Here is all the
politics we need:
My blue sky pervades
each atom
of your body.
Your blue sky pervades
each atom
of my body.
Where you are, I am.
Where I am, You are.
All our troubles
lie in the veil
of a single thought:
“I am not You.”
Love is letting
this thought
dissolve.

– Alfred K. LaMotte

And I tell you that you should open yourselves to hearing an authentic poet, of the kind whose bodily senses were shaped in a world that is not our own and that few people are able to perceive. A poet closer to death than to philosophy, closer to pain than to intelligence, closer to blood than to ink.
– Federico García Lorca

He made wild tries at phonetic spelling. But the language tricked him with its inconsistencies. He watched sentences deteriorate, powerless to make them right. The nature of things was to be elusive. Things slipped through his perceptions. He could not get a grip on the runaway world.
– Don DeLillo

We have subtle subconscious faculties we are not using. Beyond the limited analytic intellect is a vast realm of mind that includes psychic and extrasensory abilities; intuition; wisdom; a sense of unity; aesthetic, qualitative and creative faculties; and image-forming and symbolic capacities. Though these faculties are many, we give them a single name with some justification for they are working best when they are in concert. They comprise a mind, moreover, in spontaneous connection to the cosmic mind. This total mind we call ‘heart.‘
– Kabir Helminski

Virtuosos, prodigies, divas, crooners, vocal powerhouses, and maestros wow an audience with their prowess, their superior ability. They impress, bedazzle, do what regular people cannot do. It’s about execution, skill, triumph, and noteworthy achievement.

But artist songwriters are primarily in the business of human connection. The job is simple expression of complex thought. The mission is to close a gap in the world, an aching hole longing to be by filled with compassion and love. For the artist songwriter, message comes first, music is employed to amplify truth and message.

What is the message? The message is this: I am not better than you, and we are all in the same boat. We need each other, so, let me confide in you. I will expose my hopes, and dreams, wins and losses, strengths and weaknesses, so you might recognize yourself there. We then become us – you are not alone, and neither am I. The purpose of songwriting as an art is not to bedazzle, it to generate compassion, which leads to empathy, and empathy leads to action.

– Mary Gauthier

Your inside person does not have an age. It is all the ages you have ever been & the age you are at this very moment. As soon as you get used to being some extremely advanced age that you used to think of as ancient and hoary, you will get even older, God willing.
– Anne Lamott

We live in a time of no room, which is the time of the end. The time when everyone is obsessed with lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quantity, speed, number, price, power, and acceleration.
– Thomas Merton

The universe is a vast system of exchange. Every artery of it is in motion, throbbing with reciprocity, from the planet to the rotting leaf. The vapor climbs the sunbeam, and comes back in blessings upon the exhausted herb. The exhalation of the plant is wafted to the ocean. And so goes on the beautiful commerce of nature. And all because of dissimilarity — because no one thing is sufficient in itself, but calls for the assistance of something else, and repays by a contribution in turn.
– E.H. Chapin

The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
since the imperfect is so hot in us,
lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
– Wallace Stevens

Do I, then, belong to the heavens?
Why, if not so, should the heavens
Fix me thus with their ceaseless blue stare,
Luring me on, and my mind, higher
Ever higher, up into the sky,
Drawing me ceaselessly up
To heights far, far above the human?
-Yukio Mishima, Icarus

When you encounter those who are wicked, unrighteous, foolish, dim-witted, deformed, vicious, chronically ill, lonely, unfortunate, or disabled, you should think: “How can I save them?” And even if there is nothing you can do, at least you must not indulge in feelings of arrogance, superiority, derision, scorn, or abhorrence, but should immediately manifest sympathy and compassion. If you fail to do so, you should feel ashamed and deeply reproach yourself: “How far I have strayed from the Way! How can I betray the old sages?” I take these words as an admonition to myself.
– Ryokan

Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries. Sadness becomes a seizure. Empathy demands another kind of porousness in response … Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia—em (into) and pathos (feeling)—a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person’s pain as you’d enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there?
– Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

The monsters had been the foes of the gods, the captains of men, and within Time the monsters would win. In the heroic siege and last defeat, men and gods alike had been imagined in the same host. Now the heroic figure, the men of old, remained and still fought on until defeat. For the monsters do not depart, whether the gods go or come.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

The Celt, and his cromlechs, and his pillar-stones, these will not change much – indeed, it is doubtful if anybody at all changes at any time. In spite of hosts of deniers, and asserters, and wise-men, and professors, the majority still are adverse to sitting down to dine thirteen at a table, or being helped to salt, or walking under a ladder, of seeing a single magpie flirting his chequered tale. There are, of course, children of light who have set their faces against all this, although even a newspaperman, if you entice him into a cemetery at midnight, will believe in phantoms, for everyone is a visionary, if you scratch him deep enough. But the Celt, unlike any other, is a visionary without scratching.
– William Butler Yeats

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
– W.H. Auden

The Shell

The sea fills my ear
with sand and with fear.
“You may wash out the sand,
but never the sound
of the ghost of the sea
that is haunting me.”

– Ted Hughes

Three of my poetry teachers died over the past several years, two during the pandemic. While living, they were this connective tissue to a whole history of letters, a bridge between their students and their teachers before them, and their teachers before them, and so on and so on. One remarked to me, while living, that, after his teacher died, he felt abandoned at the edge of a page, slowly arranging letters, an empty space stretching out before him. When a teacher dies, a whole library is destroyed, and then, if we’re lucky, we inherit a piece of those libraries. I don’t know how to say it other than that.

Pedagogy

now she’s gone my teacher wants to know
where the speaker enters the poem
the wind blows open the screen door & it catches
on its chain. outback my neighbors are smoking
a pig to make it last. my teacher only became
my teacher after she passed. before that
she was a woman who had lived a long time.
as always i am an ungrateful child, a student
first of ingratitude. ungracious as a wasp. a knot
in a history of rope your hands don’t notice
as you hold on for dear life. dear life, the speaker
is the chain holding the door closed & the wind
is my teacher, the smoke curing meat,
my teacher had stories about all the dead poets
which made her, while living, prophetic. proximity
is next to godliness. for a woman who had no use
for music or pleasure her writing beats the page
until knuckles singe. my speaker wants to know
when the teacher enters the poem, if she ever leaves,
if she’s always there in the text shaking her heads
cutting the weeds.

– Sam Sax

The strangeness that made everything sparkle came from me. Worlds rose out of my bottomless perplexity.
– César Aira, The Literary Conference

The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence.

The fall of Troy. The fall of the petals from a fruit tree in blossom. To know that what is most precious is not rooted in existence— that is beautiful. Why? It projects the soul beyond time.

– Simone Weil

And if you missed a day, there was always the next,
and if you missed a year, it didn’t matter,
the hills weren’t going anywhere,
the thyme and rosemary kept coming back,
the sun kept rising, the bushes kept bearing fruit
– Louise Gluck, Sunrise

The future is bigger than our imaginations. It’s unimaginable, and then it comes anyway. To meet it we need to keep going, to walk past what we can imagine. We need to be unstoppable. And here’s what it takes: you don’t stop walking to congratulate yourself; you don’t stop walking to wallow in despair; you don’t stop because your own life got too comfortable or too rough; you don’t stop because you won; you don’t stop because you lost. There’s more to win, more to lose, others who need you.

You don’t stop walking because there is no way forward. Of course there is no way. You walk the path into being, you make the way, and if you do it well, others can follow the route. You look backward to grasp the long history you’re moving forward from, the paths others have made, the road you came in on. You look forward to possibility. That’s what we mean by hope, and you look past it into the impossible and that doesn’t stop you either. But mostly you just walk, right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot. That’s what makes you unstoppable.

– Rebecca Solnit

The porter runs to the heavy load and takes it from others,
knowing burdens are the foundation of ease
and bitter things the forerunners of pleasure.
See the porters struggle over the load!
It’s the way of those who see the truth of things.
Paradise is surrounded by what we dislike;
the fires of hell are surrounded by what we desire.
– Rumi

Lucifer falls, Alice falls, so does Icarus. Humpty Dumpty falls.
The giant in “Jack and the Beanstalk” falls. Jack and Jill fall. The Titans tumble earthward for nine days straight. Elpenor slips headlong from Circe’s.roof. Adam and Eve supposedly fall, though in fact the theological idea of a lapse into sin is Christian in origin, the necessary precondition for rapture. We must fall so that Christ can raise us.

Read Genesis, however, and you’ll see that the authors of the Hebrew scriptures, their imaginations defined perhaps by the long horizons of the Fertile Crescent, conceive of expulsion in lateral terms. The central metaphor is not descent but exile. Still, the experience of falling is so fundamental that is lends itself to moral and existential embellishment.

Witnessed or not, an accidental fall entails a loss of dignity. Our upright posture most distinguishes Homo erectus from that class of creatures that the Bible identifies as “creeping,” and no animal is creepier than that enigmatic serpent whose curse it is to crawl upon the ground, just as no animal topples more easily than we do. Quadrupeds wobble and trip when newborn, but rarely thereafter. Just think what a horrific sight it is to see a racehorse go down. Implicit in the biblical stories is a kind of hierarchy of being that seems to mirror the human body cosmologically. I suspect that Zeus and Baal and Yahweh Himself may be associated with mountaintops and clouds in part because our eyes are among our own most altitudinous organs. To be human is to defy gravity. To be a snake is to embrace it. The snake is thus our anatomical opposite, though when we fall – or sleep, or have sex, or die – we assume a serpentine posture, a fact implicit in the symbolism of Genesis.

Only with the Hellenic distinction between the body and the spirit could we imagine the dead ascending like helium balloons into the sky. The flight of Icarus is not merely an allegory about human ambition. It is an allegory about our ambition to slip our mortal bonds. Only the soul may ascend; the body must plummet. To be earthbound is to be deathbound. In the theater of battle to fall means to die. The same logic governs the collapse of architecture and empires, those collective attempts to defy gravity and time.

But there is also a pleasure in falling, in giving in, in assenting to gravity’s pull. Although we can fall into disgrace, we can also fall into a trance, or sleep, or love. What these experiences have in common is the surrendering of the will – to music, or to unconsciousness, or to another. These are all varieties of bewilderment. In the absence of pain, falling ill can accord some of the same pleasures as falling in love. There is a voluptuousness to illness, the eros of the infantile. Even seemingly disastrous falls can be accompanied by the joy of relief or the exhilaration of chaos.

“Contact! Contact!” Thoreau shouted at the heavens from atop Mount Ktaadn. “Where are we? Who are we?” And the heavens did not reply.

– Donovan Hohn, Falling; Confessions of a lapsed forest Christian

My heart found its home long ago in the beauty, mystery, order and disorder of the flowering earth…
– Lady Bird Johnson

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love…

– Walt Whitman

Adulthood feels like walking around in the desert with a bag over your head, being bumped into by people who rob you as they bore you.
– Dylan Moran

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.
– Franklin D. Roosevelt

Once more, let me remind you what fascism is. Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege.
– Tommy Douglas

In fascism, feeling is first. Fascists of the 1920s and 1930s wanted to undo the enlightenment and appeal to people as members of a tribe, race or species. What mattered was a story of us and them that could begin a politics of conflict and combat. Fascists proposed that the world was run by conspirators whose mysterious hold must be broken by violence. This could be achieved by a leader (führer, duce) who spoke directly to and for the people, without laws and institutions. Totalitarianism meant domination of the whole self, without respect for private and public.
– Timothy Snyder

Word, equal to (one with) the Highest,
Our only Hope,
Eternal day of the earth and heavens,
We break the silence of the peaceful night;
– Gabriel Fauré

For he had gone alone into the island / And brought back the whole thing.
– Seamus Heaney

Refuse to allow the format you’re working in or the trends of the culture to dictate the direction of your work.
– Rick Rubin

When there is inquiry without a motive, without the desire for a result, the mind goes beyond all traditional religions. Then, perhaps, one may find out what God is or what truth is.
– Krishnamurti

You’re an ocean.
Some don’t have the capacity.
Stop trying to fit in their teacup.
– Dr. Thema

Let us stop considering other people as bearers of lethal spiritual and moral germs, in order to see them as they are: people materially like us.
– Jacques Ellul

The great difference between a yogi and an ordinary man is that he has awakened a dormant faculty in man called awareness. He has unfolded this faculty, whereas the ordinary man has not. He is always aware… He is the witnesser of events.
– Swami Satyananda Saraswati

When the old monk
takes his rest
he takes his rest —
don’t bother him,
the poet said.
– The Old Monk

Melkor had gone often alone into the void places seeking the Imperishable Flame; for desire grew hot within him to bring into Being things of his own…Yet he found not the Fire, for it is with Ilúvatar.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

Remember, remember always, that most of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.
– Franklin D. Roosevelt

Retirement starts when you stop sacrificing today for some imaginary tomorrow.

You retire by saving up enough money, becoming a monk, or by finding work that feels like play to you.

– @naval

The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming
disillusioned.
– Antonio Gramsci

Fear is the destructive energy in man. It withers the mind, it distorts thought, it leads to all kinds of extraordinarily clever and subtle theories, absurd superstitions, dogmas, and beliefs.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti

Maturity: the
confidence to
have no opinion
on many things.
– Alain De Botton

You must renounce all superficiality, all convention, all vanity and delusion.
– Gustav Mahler

No vision. No values that aren’t money capitalism is the cult that grew from the corpse of an utterly-vacated Christianity that didn’t believe its own teachings.
– @aliner

Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid, be ye very desolate, saith the Lord. For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.
– Jeremiah 2:12-13

Intellectualization creates a gap or lack of rapport between you and your life. You may think about things so much that you get into the state where you are eating the menu instead of the dinner.
– Alan Watts

Friendship ended with “researching consciousness”, voyaging consciousness is your new best friend
– River Kenna

Never let oneself be guided by
the opinion of one’s contemporaries.
Continue steadfastly on one’s way.
– Gustav Mahler

Changing your interpretation of your past is often just as good as changing your past.
– @naval

But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care…For I also am a steward. Did you not know?

– Gandalf to Denethor (Tolkien, The Return of the King)

Lasting novels don’t come from literature departments.

Successful businesses don’t come from business schools.

Scientific revolutions don’t come from research universities.

Get your education, then get moving. Find the loners tinkering at the edge.

– @naval

Sometimes I go
to the other world
thinking I won’t
get back,
the old monk admitted.
– The Old Monk

At the moment when the soul discovers itself to be a stranger and alone in a world formerly familiar, a personal figure appears on its horizon, a figure that announces itself to the soul personally because it symbolizes with the soul’s most intimate depths. In other words, the soul discovers itself to be the earthly counterpart of another being with which it forms a totality that is dual in structure. The two elements of this dualitude may be called the ego and the Self, or the transcendent celestial Self and the earthly Self, or by still other names. It is from this transcendent Self that the soul originates in the past of metahistory; this Self had become strange to it while the soul slumbered in the world of ordinary consciousness; but it ceases to be strange to it at the moment when the soul in turn feels itself a stranger in this world.
– Henry Corbin

Their colonizers / tried, as with any joy, to snuff it out. They feared a love / so strong one might sell or kill their other / loves for leaves and sugar.
– Leila Chatti

God appears and God is light
To those poor souls who dwell in night,
But does a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.
– William Blake

[The decision of the future is not] imposed by things. The decision of the future falls to the soul, depends upon how the soul understands itself, upon its refusal or acceptance of a new birth.
– Henry Corbin

The heart decides, the head rationalizes.
– @naval

The ideal would be to make money with your mind, not with your time.
– @naval

A Walk in Early Spring

Only to wanderers is the beauty of a white
cloud tinted red at dawn while rising from the sea,
of spring in a wild-plum or river-willow tree,
always a revelation, always a delight.

I watch a yellow oriole dart through open sky
or water lettuce shimmer emerald in the sun,
and suddenly a tune, a dear, outdated one,
returns me to my hometown, and I start to cry.

– Tu Shen-yen

March 18.

Oh what a grind it is embodying all
these ideas, & having perpetually to
expose my mind, opened & intensified
as it is by the heat of creation to the
blasts of the outer world. If I didn’t
feel so much, how easy it would be
to go on —

– Virginia Woolf

The spine is the highway to the Infinite. Your own body is the temple of God. It is within your own self that God must be realized.
– Paramahansa Yogananda

the immediacy of war
the immediacy of lives
lost

forest of human greed

– Andy Perrin

To benefit from the dharma, we have to be there every step of the way, working with our own minds and emotions, starting from a basis of self-reflection and profound acceptance.
– Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

There is a hint of the sea in every suburb …

– Chris Green

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

A man who loses his money gains, at the least, experience, and sometimes, something better.
– George Bernard Shaw

Fear is the hardening of one heart into many. Love is the softening of two hearts into one.
– Berto Consalvi

There are only two kinds of people: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, ‘All right, then, have it your way.’
– C.S. Lewis

Humankind today is disappearing, like a face in the sand erased on the shore. But that which is taking its place no longer has a world; it is only a bare life, mute and without history, at the mercy of calculations of power and science.
– Agamben

Cheers for spring; for life; for a growing soul.
– Sylvia Plath

Culture isn’t what you write — it’s who you let in.
– Codie Sanchez

DEAR NEIGHBOR,

I grew up playing hockey on ponds,

which makes me 3/8 Canadian, at least.

And if I’m drunk, I’ve likely been pounding

maple syrup, with or without pancakes,

even while driving, or skydiving,

though I’d never do that, jump out of a plane

and ask the air to support my endeavors.

O Canada, speaking of crazy, I’m sorry

we’ve kept you awake at night.

I hear the floorboards of our common border creak

as you pace above me. Please understand,

no one here wants to attack you. Well,

no one here who doesn’t have orange skin

wants to attack you. What’s up with that?

Is there such a thing as sentient citrus? Signs

point to no. Americans want to attack you

about as much as they want to lick a light socket

while standing in a bathtub

with a shark who hasn’t eaten in a year.

Maybe less than that, if you can want to do anything

less than that, though I’d rather do that

than try to explain why a president of the United States

would pick a fight with Canada. It’s like picking a fight

with your right arm. Or cutting a hole in the ice

where you stand. Or performing open-heart surgery on yourself

with a wolverine, in the dark, on the high-wire,

while doing cocaine and riding a suicidal horse

doing smack. It’s exactly like that, only worse.

By the way, I’ve never written a poem to a country before.

Do you have a nickname? I’ll call you Mapleleaf,

since I love your flag, and your anthem

kicks our anthem’s ass, it’s not even close,

like kazoos versus cellos in a street fight.

I never told you, but I had my first cannoli in Windsor,

where I took my first trip with my wife

almost thirty-five years ago. I should have thanked you

for the sweetness but I didn’t, is this why

people think of us as rude Americans,

or is it because some of us think we own

the world? No one owns the world, not even the world.

The sky sort of owns the world

if you think about it, as the world

sits in the sky’s pocket, but that’s enough astronomy

for one poem. If you’d like to drop by, I’d love that.

And if I come over, please don’t forecheck me.

We’re the same people separated

by how we pronounce sorry, a word I can’t use enough

right now. I’m sorry we’ve sorry made you sorry

anxious sorry no good sorry or sorry bad sorry reason

at sorry all. America’s insane right now,

is the only way to explain this. We need therapy.

Maybe Thorazine. And shouldn’t be around others

until we can learn to be around ourselves.

I wish you could ignore us, but what is it that people say

about 800-pound gorillas, other than, that’s

a lot of gorilla? And there’s something

about an 800-pound gorilla with a combover

that’s more terrifying than comic, don’t you think?

That America has come between Canada and Wayne Gretzky

should make clear to all life forms

that exist or will ever exist

that something has gone terribly wrong.

You say sorry almost like soiree, I say sorry

to every single one of you, every single million of you,

and ask that you accept the mumble of this poem

as a bullhorn, a treaty, a kiss.

– Bob Hicok

They comprehend neither beauty nor sorrow; understand neither empathy nor compassion, reject complexity and nuance, and deny empirical reality when it confronts them.

To create in any medium, to test hypotheses in the lab, to report the empirical reality, to challenge one’s own assumptions, to teach others…is to rebel against them.

– Clifton Lee

Admit

Admit,
your distant love affair
is with yourself,
and that

no one
can play
harder to get

– David Whyte

You do not become a poet by learning in a college.
– Werner Herzog

Bats by Louise Glück

There are two kinds of vision: the seeing of things, which belongs to the science of optics, versus the seeing beyond things, which results from deprivation. Man mocking the dark, rejecting worlds you do not know: though the dark is full of obstacles, it is possible to have intense awareness when the field is narrow and the signals few. Night has bred in us thought more focused than yours, if rudimentary: man the ego, man imprisoned in the eye, there is a path you cannot see, beyond the eye’s reach, what the philosophers have called the via negativa: to make a place for light the mystic shuts his eyes — illumination of the kind he seeks destroys creatures who depend on things.

JOURNEY

Nobody can discover the world for anybody else. It is only after we have discovered it for ourselves that it becomes a common ground and a common bond, and we cease to be alone.

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home.

– Wendell Berry

Space opens and from the heart of the matter sheds a descending grace that makes for a moment, that naked thing, Being, a thing to understand.
– Norman MacCaig

Everyone, in some small sacred sanctuary of the self, is nuts.
– Leo Rosten

Once Miles Davis asked me, “How do you play from nothing?” And I said, “You know, you just do it.” And that actually is the answer. I wish there were a way to make “I don’t know” a positive thing, which it isn’t in our society. We feel that we need to “know” certain things, and we substitute that quest for the actual experience of things in all its complexity. When I play pure improvisation, any kind of intellectual handles are inappropriate because they get in the way of letting the river move where it’s supposed to move.
– Keith Jarrett

Sunday-morning chatter announced in horror: “People may think the rich can buy their way out of the justice system.” No shit. Been going to Texas prisons for a long time. Seen nobody rich on Death Row yet. You mean MONEY has something to do with justice in this country?… Wake me when impending egalitarianism is a problem. In the meantime, oligarchy is eating our ass, our
dreams, our country, our heritage, our democracy, our justice, and our tax code.
– Molly Ivins

If we were all alike; if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, one poet would be enough and Hesiod himself would do very well. Everything he said would be in no need of expounding or would have been expounded long ago. But we are not all alike and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things. The fact is that the saying of new things in new ways is grateful to us.
– Wallace Stevens

We have reason. It is the entire meaning and purpose of Shangri-La. It came to me in a vision long, long ago. I foresaw a time when man exalting in the technique of murder, would rage so hotly over the world, that every book, every treasure would be doomed to destruction. This vision was so vivid and so moving that I determined to gather together all things of beauty and culture that I could and preserve them here against the doom toward which the world is rushing. Look at the world today. Is there anything more pitiful? What madness there is! What blindness! A scurrying mass of bewildered humanity crashing headlong against each other. The time must come, my friend, when brutality and the lust for power must perish by its own sword. For when that day comes, the world must begin to look for a new life. And it is our hope that they may find it here.
– James Hilton, Lost Horizon

Spring at Stone Mountain Park

Our life is shorter than flowers
Then shall we mourn?

No, we shall dance
Plant gardens
Dress in colors
And teach our children
To make the world more beautiful.

Because our life is
shorter than flowers.

– Toltec culture

Life is a garden, not a road. We enter and exit through the same gate. Wandering, where we go matters less than what we notice.
– Kurt Vonnegut

We build a fire in a powder magazine, then double the fire department to put it out. We inflame wild beasts with the smell of blood, and then innocently wonder at the wave of brutal appetite that sweeps the land as a consequence.
– Mark Twain

It is requisite for the relaxation of the mind that we make use, from time to time, of playful deeds and jokes.
– St. Thomas Aquinas

Nocturne
by Li-Young Lee

That scraping of iron on iron when the wind
rises, what is it? Something the wind won’t
quit with, but drags back and forth.
Sometimes faint, far, then suddenly, close, just
beyond the screened door, as if someone there
squats in the dark honing his wares against
my threshold. Half steel wire, half metal wing,
nothing and anything might make this noise
of saws and rasps, a creaking and groaning
of bone-growth, or body-death, marriages of rust,
or ore abraded. Tonight, something bows
that should not bend. Something stiffens that should
slide. Something, loose and not right,
rakes or forges itself all night.

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end,
Each changing place with that which goes before
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith, being crowned,
Crooked eclipses ‘gainst his glory fight
And Time that gave, doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,
And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,
Feeds on the rarities of natures truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow;
And yet, to times, in hope, my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.
– William Shakespeare

Sit in your body. Understand what it means to be made of every ancestor that has ever existed five hundred, five hundred thousand, five hundred million years back. You can almost start to disappear in it.
– E. Noélle Campbell

My soul pours out without end, like melancholy water
– Éphraïm Mikhaël

In the Green Morning, Now, Once More

In the green morning, before
Love was destiny,
The sun was king,
And God was famous.

The merry, the musical,
The jolly, the magical,
The feast, the feast of feasts, the festival
Suddenly ended

As the sky descended
But there was only the feeling,
In all the dark falling,
Of fragrance and of freshness,
of birth and beginning.

– Delmore Schwartz

For me, the challenge is to play music that makes the audience imagine they are playing it too. Maybe they think or have been told that they are not artists and can’t perform. Then, when they hear music, they get the feeling that they can do what they had thought they couldn’t.
– Wayne Shorter

If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.
– Edmund Burke

There is a curious, extremely interesting term in Japanese that refers to a very special manner of polite, aristocratic speech known as “play language,” asobase kotoba, whereby, instead of saying to a person, for example, “I see that you have come to Tokyo,” one would express the observation by saying, “I see that you are playing at being in Tokyo” – the idea being that the person addressed is in such control of his life and his powers that for him everything is a play, a game. He is able to enter into life as one would enter into a game, freely and with ease. And this idea is carried even so far that instead of saying to a person, “I hear that your father has died,” you would say, rather, “I hear that your father has played at dying.” And now, I submit that this is truly a noble, really glorious way to approach life. What has to be done is attacked with such a will that in the performance one is literally “in play.” That is the attitude designated by Nietzsche as Amor fati, love of one’s fate.
– Joseph Campbell

I am a stranger / learning to worship the strangers / around me / whoever you are / whoever I may become.
– June Jordan

…the presence (even if only on the borders) of the terrible is, I believe, what gives this imagined world its verisimilitude. A safe fairy-land is untrue to all worlds.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

Vernal Equinox

I promised no poems
about you. I’m sorry:
I managed to leave
you off the page
but couldn’t stop writing
about love. Soon the snow
will melt & we’ll climb
mountains with nothing
but shoes on our feet.
I’ll take myself
places I haven’t been
in years. The future feels
wide open, I feel wide
open. If you listened
to my chest it would sound
like a river ice breakup,
like I just learned
how to breathe.

– Kyla Jamieson

All mystics are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well! Though everything is a mess, all is well. Strange paradox, to be sure. But, tragically, most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep. They are having a nightmare.
– Anthony de Mello

The three big decisions – what you do, where you live, and who you’re with.
– @naval

I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a storyteller.
– G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

I think if you wanna know what your destiny is, you gotta look at the places where you’ve been put through the wringer over and over and over,

areas of life where other people seem able to just skate by without trouble, but where you’ve had to be broken down again and again

– River Kenna

Self-compassion is so important to our wellbeing. It helps us shift from self-criticism and judgment to one of self-care, warmth, and love.
– Lama Aria Drolma

Instead of, at the very least, achieving a competent assessment of the impotence and implicatedness of one’s own existence whereby one might possibly detach it from the background of universal delusion, a blind determination to save the prestige of one’s personal existence is triumphing everywhere.
– Walter Benjamin

It’s very freeing to meet some people who understand there’s no shame in applying a level of dedication to even the smallest things. That’s not geeky or nerdy or stupid. That’s beautiful.
– Malcolm Gladwell

When all is said and done, spring is the main reason for Wow. Spring is crazy, being all hope and beauty and glory. She is the resurrection.
– Anne Lamott

If you think having uncomfortable conversations is hard, wait until you see the results of not having them.
– Ignacio Carcavallo

I wonder sometimes if the purpose of the artistic community isn’t to provide a concerned social matrix which simultaneously assures that no member, regardless of honors or approbation, has the slightest idea of the worth of his own work.
– Samuel R. Delany

One can no longer even say that the end justifies the means, for within realism there is no longer an end; there is only the fact that the means succeed and that is all.
– Jacques Ellul, Political Realism

The streets are crawling…with the mad and the unemployed and the disabled. Meanwhile, we celebrate the greatness of America. Nobody can ever celebrate the greatness of their nation when your eyes don’t look at those who are mad and sick…No, America’s not very much.
– Charles Bukowski

the pine tree is perfect

Walking in the snowhills the trail goes just right
Eat snow off pine needles
the city’s not so big, the
hills surround it.

– Gary Snyder

Ovid’s metamorphoses, where personal beings turn into natural objects, as Daphne becomes a laurel tree or Philomela a nightingale, are in a sense stories about the breakdown of metaphor, Classical analogies of alienation myths like the fall of Adam and Eve.
– Northrop Frye

Ilúvatar said again: Behold your Music! This is your minstrelsy; and each of you shall find contained herein, amid the design that I set before you, all those things which it may seem that he himself devised or added.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

You’re spending time to save money when you should be spending money to save time.
– @naval

But the music of your talk
Never shall the chemistry
Of the secret earth restore.
All your lovely words are spoken.
Once the ivory box is broken,
Beats the golden bird no more.
– Edna St. Vincent Millay

This is the darkness of forgetting, of deep space with no stars, of the rocky core of a dusty dead planet.
– Dick Westheimer

Beware of the wolves. They’ve been raised by wolves.
– Dobby Gibson

You can have poetry in a novel. You can have many stories in a novel. You can tell tales.
– Charles Johnson

I am aware, sure I am
aware.

Catastrophically aware.

– Sylvia Plath

Personality disorders are not static or fixed; they are patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that can be understood and changed through a deep, self-reflective process.
– Jonathan Shedler

Some say the loving and the devouring are all the same thing.
– C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

The land is numb.
It stands beneath the feet, and one may come
Walking securely, till the sea extends
Its limber margin, and precision ends.
By night a chaos of commingling power,
The whole Pacific hovers hour by hour.

– Yvor Winters

People are beginning to wake up to the fact that the unlimited exploitation of nature will not work and is very dangerous, and after we’ve used up everything there won’t be very much to go on with, and Morris certainly told them that one hundred years ago.
– Northrop Frye

So anyone who claims that I am a dreamer who expects to transform hell into heaven is wrong. I have few illusions. But I feel a responsibility to work towards the things I consider good and right. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to change certain things for the better, or not at all. Both outcomes are possible. There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.
– Václav Havel

…you can have talent, but if you cannot endure, if you cannot learn to work, and to work against your own worst tendencies and prejudices, and you cannot take the criticism of strangers, or the uncertainty, then you will not become a writer.
– Alexander Chee

The world is a den of thieves, and night is falling. Evil breaks its chains and runs through the world like a mad dog. The poison affects us all. No one escapes. Therefore let us be happy while we are happy. Let us be kind, generous, affectionate and good. It is necessary and not at all shameful to take pleasure in the little world.
– Ingmar Bergman

in her private heart
like so many dark rivers
wild geese returning
– Suzanne Beaumont

We should measure the prosperity of a nation not by the number of millionaires, but by the absence of poverty, the prevalence of health, the efficiency of the public schools, and the number of people who can and do read worthwhile books.
– W. E. B. Du Bois

One Day
by Marie Howe

One day the patterned carpet, the folding chairs,
the woman in the blue suit by the door examining her split ends,

all of it will go on without me. I’ll have disappeared,
as easily as a coin under lake water, and few to notice the difference

—a coin dropping into the darkening—
and West 4th Street, the sesame noodles that taste like too much peanut butter

lowered into the small white paper carton—all of it will go on and on—
and the I that caused me so much trouble? Nowhere

or grit thrown into the garden
or into the sticky bodies of several worms,

or just gone, stopped—like the Middle Ages,
like the coin Whitman carried in his pocket all the way to that basement

bar on Broadway that isn’t there anymore.
Oh to be in Whitman’s pocket, on a cold winter day,

to feel his large warm hand slide in and out, and in again.
To be taken hold of by Walt Whitman! To be exchanged!

To be spent for something somebody wanted and drank and found delicious.

Thus we read in the teachings that the Buddha, in his great compassion and grandmotherly kindness, “enters into every atom contained in the provisionally established seas in all the Dharma realms… and in each and every atom…, utilizing the Dharma teaching that all is a dream…, enlightens as many sentient beings as there are atoms in the world-seas. … and causes those abiding in mistaken samadhis to enter the class of beings assured of attaining awakening.”!” These words were spoken to make deluded sentient beings aware that “dream” and “not- dream” are both illusory by revealing that the world of reality before them is a provisionally established sea, and thus that dreams as a whole are reality and reality as a whole is dreams, and that you cannot accept one and reject the other. The true meaning of “the perfected person has no dreams” is simply this.

Who are we, if not measured by our impact on others? That’s who we are! We’re not who we say we are, we’re not who we want to be ~ we are the sum of the influence and impact that we have, in our lives, on others.
– Carl Sagan

Koan
by sophie strand

The reason the bumblebee stays aloft
despite its size, is the same reason I
am still here, still alive. Can you
give such things a number? You should
not give such things a number.

Give us both a long pink repose.
A field. A flower to drink from.

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. But I am a part of this universe, and the most courageous thing to do is to accept it and the tragedy at the same time.
– Albert Camus

Those who have suffered understand suffering and therefore extend their hand.
– Patti Smith

The work of the eyes is done.
Go now and do the heart–
work on the images imprisoned
within you.
– Rainer Maria Rilke

Howl Pt. 2

I saw the worst minds – spanning generations – destroy
(in their madness) millions

swallowing children on bomb-shattered foreign streets
and alleys like hungry ghosts

in search of the quick buck, the side fuck, and the final
lethal fix for their own child-shattered soul

Zombie-like orange-headed salesmen and green-washed
wannabe philosopher-kings

selling magic mirrors to the self-same wounded
In ketamine-cocaine-fueled mass delusion shadowed by a crucifix

singing hymns to themselves on gilded shitters
(there is power in the blood)

in the midnight abyss
with a chorus rasping out a hoarse call-and-response
from wireless living rooms built of boredom…

– via Clifton Lee

For he that does good, having the unlimited power to do evil, deserves praise not only for the good which he performs, but for the evil which he forbears.
– Walter Scott

BLACK FOLK DON’T HAVE BIRTHDAYS

We have birthday weekends,
birthday weeks,
birthday months,

A milestone year like 30 or 50
can result in a yearlong jubilee
of saying yes to all pleasures.

As the descendants of the once enslaved,
who had no record of when they were born
and no means by which to celebrate,
we are blessed with the inheritance of extra days.

They whisper,

celebrate child.
Take all the time
you need

– Steven Willis

It is a hard thing to leave any deeply routined life, even if you hate it.
– John Steinbeck

Sadness is caused by intelligence. The more you understand certain things, the
more you wish you didn’t understand them.
– Charles Bukowski

I cannot prove that my view of the good life is right; I can only state my view, and hope that as many as possible will agree. My view is this:

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

– Bertrand Russell

Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.
– William James

One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.
– Aldo Leopold

You can’t stay the same. If you’re a musician and a singer, you have to change, that’s the way it works.
– Van Morrison

People still get married when the world falls apart.
People still have babies,
People still make art.
A heart breaks, but it still yearns,
A mind aches, but it still learns,
It doesn’t feel quite right
to not know how to fight
except to stay alive,
to love and thrive.
It is quite right to be afraid
as evil makes its bold parade,
The damage is dire, frightening, real,
a horrible, darkness grimly revealed,
Between your pangs of sorrow,
remember, please, to see,
the sky, each tree,
And find some energy
to find the moments where you can
actually
do something
to help,
and whatever it is,
do it because you can,
do it because you must,
and in this – trust,
your light is never wasted.
Each gesture counts,
no matter how small as the dangers mount,
Do not let them darken your heart.
Do not let them darken your heart.
Do not let them darken your heart.

I’m going on tour, I’m going to sing, I’m going to gather with people and love them, and in the exchange, find pockets of solace, and perhaps inspiration, and certainly a reminder, that they have not won yet, and they won’t. You may not hear the stories of heroism for many years to come, but I assure you, they will be there, and you might be one of the heroes.

– Orit Shimoni

The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.
– Virginia Woolf

After all, isn’t it true that the realities of the inner life seem like marvels only because we live so far away from them?

Memories and emotions are fragile things. You should never bear down on them, or draw on them by main force. You should barely touch them with the tips of your fingers, the tips of your dreams.

– Jacques Lusseyran

Education means leading out the individual nature in each man and woman to its true fullness. You can’t do that by stimulating the mind. To pump education into the mind is fatal…

The fact is, our process of universal education is to-day so uncouth, so psychologically barbaric, that it is the most terrible menace to the existence of our race. We seize hold of our children, and by parrot-compulsion we force into them a set of mental tricks.

By unnatural and unhealthy compulsion we force them into a certain amount of cerebral activity. And then, after a few years, with a certain number of windmills in their heads, we turn them loose, like so many inferior Don Quixotes, to make a mess of life. All that they have learnt in their heads has no reference at all to their dynamic souls.

– DH Lawrence

We have no right to tell our children how to build their future, since we have proved unfit to build our own…We cannot hope to build independent human characters if education is in the hands of politicians.
– Wilhelm Reich

The best way, perhaps the only way, to change others is to become an example.
– @naval

I only name what I love. I only name what’s worth naming.
– Roland Barthes

unaware of the bell’s
deep meaning
cool evening

– Issa

Humor doesn’t cut it, or romance, or lyricism—no, no, no. Only terror works.
– Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

…negativeness submerges you like a flood. If you have not made an ark within you, you can be spiritually drowned…
– Gurdjieff

Words are the clothes
thoughts wear.
– Samuel Beckett

The aim of therapy is not to ‘fix’ the person, but to help the person find their own voice, their own answers.
– Yalom

Spring gets you every time. Every year it sucks me in, but then, I’m easy—a few cool blue skies, new grass, wildflowers, and I’m in love.
– Anne Lamott

If you have been struggling to develop mindfulness, this may come as a surprise. The secret to stabilizing your practice has not only been right under your nose but it is your nose—and the rest of your body, too, for that matter.
– Willa Blythe Baker

Why are all reflections lovelier than what we call the reality? – not so grand or so strong, it may be, but always lovelier? Fair as is the gliding sloop on the shining sea, the wavering, trembling, unresting sail below is fairer still.
– George MacDonald, Phantastes

Writing is a form of mastery, is it not?
– Margo Jefferson

Deep feeling and nuanced thinking requires keen discerning. Otherwise, I’m a ship lost at sea.

May I know anchors within my explorations, ease within my deep dives, and gentle winds that catch my wings, turning the fall to fly.

– McCall Erickson

People will try to tear you down because you stand solid on being committed to your own evolution. Like, I’m sorry you choose not to evolve, but I am absolutely not sorry that elevating is what I do.
– Nika Solé

The taste of freedom can make you unemployable.
– @naval

The enlightenment that seems desirable isn’t enlightenment, and that aspect of us which is able to desire enlightenment is unable to achieve it and won’t survive it’s onset..
– Jed McKenna

A ruby crocus near the porch sends up

hope—winter of sorrow is waning

– Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

sometimes I feel like I slipped and fell into a beautiful life
– Simon Sarris

bumper to bumper
on the highway
snow geese honking
– Chen-ou Liu

I begin with the principle that all
men are bores. Surely no one will
prove himself so great a bore as
to contradict me in this.
– Soren Kierkegaard

Stay together, friends.
Don’t scatter and sleep.
Our friendship is made of being awake.
– Jalaluddin Rumi

It isn’t that I am against or unsympathetic toward the metaphysical: I’ve studied a lot of it. But in my experience, which I would call very much humanist, the great beauty of people and relationships and the operation of the world derives from our humanity–the flaws; the reaching for improvement; the recognition of our need for one another; the astounding effect of kindness, empathy, understanding, support when it is delivered. I pray sometimes, but mostly to be strong, because I know, and I hope, that people will need me and call upon me. Something Tennessee [Williams] said to you has stayed with me: ‘Don’t pray for someone when a problem is witnessed or referenced. Fix the problem as best you can. We are the answered prayer.’ All of us can be and should be the answered prayers, and I wake up thinking of how I can be of help to whatever crosses my path.
– Marian Seldes

Contemplating a loving God strengthens portions of our brain — particularly the frontal lobes and the anterior cingulate — where empathy and reason reside. Contemplating a wrathful God empowers the limbic system, which is ‘filled with aggression and fear.’ It is a sobering concept: The God we choose to love changes us into his image, whether he exists or not.
– Michael Gerson

…start with values, not policies and facts and numbers. Say what you believe, but haven’t been saying. For example, progressive thought is built on empathy, on citizens caring about other citizens and working through our government to provide public resources for all, both businesses and individuals. Use history. That’s how America started. The public resources used by businesses were not only roads and bridges, but public education, a national bank, a patent office, courts for business cases, interstate commerce support, and of course the criminal justice system. From the beginning, the Private Depended on Public Resources, both private lives and private enterprise.
– George Lakoff

I have abandoned all particular forms of devotion, all prayer techniques. My only prayer practice is paying attention. I carry on a habitual, silent, and secret conversation with God that fills me with overwhelming joy.
– Brother Lawrence

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

Still Thrives This Love Song
by k.d. lang

I often wonder
Is it so
All I am holding
Wants let go
How could I manage
I don’t know
I often question
Is it so
Life’s contradictions
Tend to grow
Spawning the choices
And the woe
But, still somehow thrives this love
Which I pray I’m worthy of
Still somehow thrives this love

I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

Dear camerado! I confess I have urged
you onward with me, and still urge you,
without the least idea what is our destination,
Or whether we shall be victorious, or
utterly quell’d and defeated.

– Walt Whitman

We were the first generation to have, in our own homes, the means to re- and forward-wind reality: even very small children could press their fingers against those clunky buttons and see what-has-been become what-is or what-will-be.
– Zadie Smith

These creatures are among us, although morphologically they do not differ from us; we must not posit a difference of essence, but a difference of behavior. In my science fiction I write about about them constantly. Sometimes they themselves do not know they are androids. Like Rachel Rosen, they can be pretty but somehow lack something; or, like Pris in We Can Build You, they can be absolutely born of a human womb and even design androids — the Abraham Lincoln one in that book — and themselves be without warmth; they then fall within the clinical entity “schizoid,” which means lacking proper feeling. I am sure we mean the same thing here, with the emphasis on the word “thing.” A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne’s theorem that “No man is an island,” but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man.

– Philip K Dick, Man, Androids and Machine

A man without mythology is merely a product of statistics.
– C.G. Jung

Silence is my first language, and lonely is an accent that I still can’t get rid of.
– Rudy Francisco

I stored up the purest words
for making new silences.

– Alejandra Pizarnik

No tenderness for
ourselves translates into
no kindness for others
– Pema Chodron

The world does not need more Christians or Buddhists, it needs more Christs and more Buddhas.
– Willigis Jäeger

I heard that Poetry was dead.

And so I went to grieve for her in the last place I saw her.

I sat on our bench, looking out to the sea, and I cried; I called out to her. I clawed at the thoughts in my mind – trying to make sense of them – and I clung to the memories I’d shared with her right here; in front of the ocean. 

I searched for the words I needed to put a voice to my grief, but I couldn’t find them.

Because Poetry was dead it seemed.

Tears streamed down my face as I watched the waves rolling in to and out from the sand, and I realized how similar we were, the ocean and I.

I realized that the ocean never abandons the beach; that it cannot keep away. It returns relentlessly to reach out to the shore – hour after hour, day after day, year after year – and no matter how often the moon turns its tides, the waves will always come crashing back to rest on the land: they will always come home. 
Just like I would to this spot. To my memories. To Poetry.

“Thank you,” said a voice from beside me,
and I realized it was her. 

“For what?” I asked.

“For keeping me alive,” she said. “I will never die, as long as there are always people to seek me out, to share me, and to find celebration or solace in what I have to say.

People tend to look for me when they are lost for words. They don’t really know how to define me; but they know me when they find me.”

“So how did I do it? How did I find you?” I asked.

“You stopped,” she told me. “You noticed things. You watched the world around you and found poetry in the spaces and the silence. You brought meaning to the ocean, and you gave a voice to your grief. There is poetry in all of us, because there are feelings in all of us, and you took the time to listen to yours.”

And that’s the moment I figured it out: the answer to the question I’d heard – and asked – so many times before: What is poetry?

Because poetry, as it turns out,

is simply our feelings,
all bundled up into words;
that we can wrap around us
like a comfort blanket.

To bring us solace.
To hold our space.

Or to help us find our way home.

It’s World Poetry Day today, and I wanted to write something to play on the idea that ‘Poetry is dead’. Because I really don’t think it will ever truly die. 

– Becky Hemsley, 2025

Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder, wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping, confusing, itching, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, numbling, rambling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, horse-shitting, hair-splitting, nit-picking, piss-trickling, nose sticking, ass-gouging, eyeball-poking, finger-pointing, alleyway-sneaking, long waiting, small stepping, evil-eyeing, back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding, grinding, grinding away at yourself. Stop it and just … DO!
– Sol Lewitt

We danced too wild, and we sang too long, and we hugged too hard, and we kissed too sweet, and howled just as long as we wanted to howl, because by now we were all old enough to know that what looks like crazy on an ordinary day looks a lot like love if you catch it in the moonlight.
– Pearl Cleage

O Proserpina!

For the flowers now that frighted thou let’st fall
From Dis’s waggon! daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes
Or Cytherea’s breath; pale prime-roses,
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phœbus in his strength, a malady
Most incident to maids; bold oxlips and
The crown imperial; lilies of all kinds,
The flower-de-luce being one.
O! these I lack
To make you garlands of, and my sweet friend,
To strew him o’er and o’er!

– Shakespeare

I’d drive my car out toward Malibu, park it on the side of the road, and go down to the beach to practice. I invited Ornette to come with me and we’d play, just the two of us standing in the sand, putting our sound out over the ocean.
– Sonny Rollins, The World of Jazz

Reverence is the process of awakening to being alive. It’s the realization that life is amazing, and every living being is our sibling.
– Paul Hawken

Playing is just about feeling, It isn’t necessarily about misery, it isn’t about happiness. It’s just about letting yourself feel all those things you already have inside of you but are trying to push aside because they don’t make for polite conversation or something. But if you just get up there — that’s the only reason I can sing. Because I get up there and just let all those things come out.
– Janis Joplin

We’re in the world, not against it. It doesn’t work to try to stand outside things and run them that way. It just doesn’t work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

Wherever you are, you are one with the clouds and one with the sun and the stars you see. You are one with everything. That is more true than I can say, and more true than you can hear.
– Shunryū Suzuki-rōshi

The strange superstition has arisen in the Western world that we can start all over again, remaking human nature, human society, and the possibilities of happiness; as though the knowledge and experience of our ancestors were now entirely irrelevant.
– Roger Scruton

I’ve tried meditation, I’ve tried chanting.
I strongly recommend staring at trees
– Suchi Govindarajan

When you are practicing Zen Meditation do not try and stop your thinking. Let it stop by itself. If something comes into your mind, let it come in, and let it go out. It will not stay long. When you try and stop your thinking, it means you are bothered by it…
– Shunryu Suzuki

how exciting
this spring
to go on another journey
– Basho

My nervous system has a delicacy and fastidiousness that are not up to the demands of a life not sanctioned by art. I am afraid this school year may kill me.

– Bruno Schulz to Romana Halpern

I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.
– Rebecca Solnit

Poetry is the last refuge of honest speech and the outspoken heart.
– Charles Simic

I’m only pronouns, & I am all of them, & I didn’t ask for this
You did
I came into your life to change it & it did so & now nothing
will ever change
That, and that’s that.
Alone & crowded, unhappy fate, nevertheless
I slip softly into the air
The world’s furious song flows through my costume.
– Ted Berrigan

The Poet at 80

Here fall the years in furious disorder;
thin pages in her own determined hand
blow like leafmeal along the smoky border
of that dark continent, that motherland
called memory. Daily, parts of her crumble
before her eyes and just beyond her reach;
odd how the recent days are first to tumble,
hard-bound, whole signatures, into the breach.

She learns, by virtue of her new unknowing,
indifference to failure or acclaim;
by increments her swift untimely slowing
sharpens her focus as it dulls her shame,
and, resolute, she works to write a defter
line, a more promising stanza, every day,
grateful for language that has not yet left her,
not yet failed or refused her or blown away.

– Jane Greer

Will the pursuit of non-violence free the mind from violence?
– Krishnamurti

Yet some things there are that they cannot see, neither alone nor taking counsel together; for to none but himself has Ilúvatar revealed all that he has in store, and in every age there come forth things that are new and have no foretelling
– J.R.R. Tolkien

The first rule of handling conflict is don’t hang around with people who are constantly engaging in conflict.
– @naval

Something unquenched, something unquenchable, is in me.
– Nietzsche

If I had been able to *make* something of the fears I had, if I had been able to fashion things out of them, things of true repose…but the fears that beset me every day roused up a hundred other fears….
– Rilke

Acceptance is peace; attachment is tension
– Yung Pueblo

How easy it is to make anything ridiculous!
– J.R.R. Tolkien

silver-blue skies . . .
spring first comes
in name only
– @ruralitalics

Interesting subtlety – the Buddha taught not-self, not no-self.
– Kaccānagotta Sutta

To those inclined toward kindness, I say
Come out of your houses drumming.
– Rita Dove

When success begins to slip from your fingers—for whatever reason—the response isn’t to grip and claw so hard that you shatter it to pieces. It’s to understand that you must work yourself back to the aspirational phase. You must get back to first principles and best practices.
– Ryan Holiday

The near enemy of love as the Sutras call it is greed, which can then masquerade as love. And the far enemy of loving-kindness is ill will.
– Vanessa Zuisei Goddard

One can perfectly modify economic life and its regime from top to bottom without changing in the slightest the fundamental structures of society.
– Jacques Ellul

Witnessing is a keyword for all meditators. Witness that you are not the body…Witness that you are not the mind…Witness that you are only a witness.
– Osho

Greatness relies heavily on your willingness to be misunderstood.
– Nika Solé

Christ knew that it would be a more stunning thunderbolt to fulfill the law than to destroy it.
– G.K. Chesterton

The inside vision of rational thinking must be truer than the outside vision which sees only movements of the grey matter; for if the outside vision were the correct one all thought (including this thought itself) would be valueless, and this is self-contradictory.
– C.S. Lewis

Be careful to be gentle, lest in removing the rust, you break the whole instrument.
– St. Benedict

behold our city in blackness
the radiant rash
the wildfire of halogen gemshine
– Septimus Brown

When fascism comes, it will look good. It will have big hair, pressed suits, lapel pins. It will control all the channels. …It will sit on the Supreme Court. It will court us with fear. It will woo us with hope.
– Terry Ehret

It’s no one else’s responsibility to make the truth comfortable for you. It’s your own work to be able to receive it without being offended by it.
– Nika Solé

You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity – a piece of a business – to gain your financial freedom.
– @naval

seasonal beings
flitting through lifetime’s of growth
rotations of mind
harvesting fruitage of thought
concepts in wisdom’s deep barns
– @plantingtheoar

I don’t know who sold the country,
but I saw who paid the price.
– Mahmoud Darwish

Never apologize for making money.

The world is not kind to the poor.

– @Codie_Sanchez

grateful beyond war
this hot
cup of tea

– Kathy Watts

MIND

Mind in its purest play is like some bat
That beats about in caverns all alone,
Contriving by a kind of senseless wit
Not to conclude against a wall of stone.

It has no need to falter or explore;
Darkly it knows what obstacles are there,
And so may weave and flitter, dip and soar
In perfect courses through the blackest air.

And has this simile a like perfection?
The mind is like a bat. Precisely. Save
That in the very happiest intellection
A graceful error may correct the cave.

– Richard Wilbur

We are Love’s creation. When you see someone else as something other than love, you are seeing the egos past programming instead of the present that is being shown to you.
– James Blanchard Cisneros

In English, we say:
“Back yourself.”

But in poetry, we say:
“You are the hand that catches,
the voice that steadies,
the heart that knows:
keep going.”

– @KoibitoNoKaze

In the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.
– Stacy Schiff

What’s really occurring is an attack on the American mind.
– Robert Reich

Endure and be strong; this pain will be useful to you one day.
– Ovid

Don’t go without water, without a map. Alternate advice: Don’t go without a destination.
– Evan Harris, Badlands Detour

I wish I still knew how to find joy in the pure thrill of the ten minutes before your favorite cartoon comes on, the rush against time, the body so suddenly delayed, cumbersome yet present, the embodiment of coiled anticipation.
– Ocean Vuong

Deconstruction is not the destruction of meaning, but the unveiling of its multiplicity.
– Jacques Derrida

What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it, you become its prey.
– William Gaddis, The Recognitions

In the age of simulacra, reality becomes endlessly reproducible, and truth loses its uniqueness.
– Jean Baudrillard

I suppose the human race is doing the best it can but hells bells that’s only an explanation its not an excuse.
– Don Marquis

The first people a dictator puts in jail after a coup are the writers, the teachers, the librarians — because these people are dangerous. They have enough vocabulary to recognize injustice and to speak out loudly about it. Let us have the courage to go on being dangerous people.
– Madeleine L’Engle

The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.
– Elizabeth Gilbert

In an absurd world, every conscious act is an act of rebellion against madness.
– Albert Camus

He was going somewhere, he knew that. And if it was the wrong direction, sooner or later he’d find it out.
– Raymond Carver

Let this time be held in trust
Everything will swirl to dust
But the feelings that we make
In the moments as they break

Let this day be given chance
To perform its piece of the dance
It could be that the humblest hour
Bears the most enchanted flower

Let this place be duly blessed
For having offered us a nest
Even if we must go today
Ours the love we give away

Let these little fires of thought
Fertilize the seeds we brought
From the caves of birth and death
Where we give each other breath

Let this evening of our dreams
Flush to morning bursting green
Now let us hurry out to find
Drops of dew on every vine

Dreams, like seeds, must die to grow
Eyes, like skies, may cry to show
Joys, like birds, are here and gone
Only trust keeps growing on

– George Gorman

Everybody sees the world through the ideas they have of themselves. As you think yourself to be, so you think the world to be. If you imagine yourself as separate from the world, the world will appear as separate from you. And you will experience desire and fear…

The primary purpose of meditation is to become more conscious and familiar with our inner life. The ultimate purpose is to reach the Source of Life.

There is no “my self” and “your self.” There is the Self. The only Self of All. Misled by the diversity of names and shapes, minds and bodies, you imagine multiple selves. There is no second or higher “self” to search for. You are the higher Self.

Only give up the false ideas you have about your self. Get hold of the main thing – that the world and the Self are One, and perfect. Only your attitude is faulty and needs readjustment.

Just as every drop of the ocean carries the taste of the ocean, so does every moment carry the taste of eternity.

– Nisargadatta

I think of the warmth spun by the word
Around its center the dream called ourselves
– Tristan Tzara

Be naïve enough to start, and stubborn enough to finish
– Ross Edgley

You see, Satan is not a monster. We don’t see him when he comes because he has disguised himself in beauty.
– Luis Alberto Urrea

If you don’t know your neighbor, it’s easier to turn on them. That’s why they want to keep us separated, alone, apart, scrolling on our phones, thinking that the person next to us is some kind of enemy.

We might all come from different places, but we share the same kind of experiences. I want to tell you that you belong. No matter who you voted for, the right words to say. If you are willing to fight for someone you don’t know you are welcome here.

– AOC

Courtesy is the best part of culture, a kind of enchantment, and it wins the goodwill of all, just as rudeness wins only scorn and universal annoyance.
– Baltasar Gracián

Words can sting like anything, but silence breaks the heart.
– Phyllis McGinley

To have ruined one’s self over poetry is an honour.
– Lord Henry Wotton

If you find me in my work, I haven’t done my job. If you find yourself, then I’m an artist.
– Brandi Carlile

One insight that injury affords is that there are others out there on whom my life depends, people I do not know and may never know. This fundamental dependency on anonymous others is not a condition that I can will away. No security measure will foreclose this dependency; no violent act of sovereignty will rid the world of this fact.
– Judith Butler

Knowing What You Know Now,
Would You Choose To Be Born?
by Anya Krugovoy Silver

Don’t say no out loud. Don’t admit
that gold-sponged April isn’t enough,
that the first milky sip of coffee or fuchsia
bougainvillea on a Greek patio don’t provide
moments that make life worth its worry.

Such reflection belies the plaques in each
cheap beachside shop that remind us
to be merry, or what fun we should feel,
even about the small, sappy ways we go wrong.

The world demands our sloppy awe.
I’ve been struck down too many times.
Stuck, poisoned, drained, radiated fourteen years.
Truly, if not for love, I would choose oblivion.
Sweet love, a stone jammed in my jaw.

I think everybody’s looking for something they’ve never seen before. You work on your songs, but your songs also work on you. So you absorb and you excrete and in some way you retain, and slowly you start to become some place that songs are passing through. I’d like to think that they enjoy blowing through you. There’s something electric about you, maybe, some kind of a force left behind by music that passes through you. Like everybody likes to be around someone who does something well and loves doing it, so songs would be no different, right? Like ‘Let’s blow down there and see that guy’.

Most songs have meager beginnings. You wake up in the morning, you throw on your suspenders, and you subvocalize and just think. They seem to form like calcium. I can’t think of a story right off the bat that was that interesting. I write things on the back of my hand, usually, and sing into a tape recorder. I don’t know.

“You kind of go into the world of a song,” says Waits. “They’re not necessarily autobiographical, sometimes you inhabit the lives of others. Or it’s just a daydream. Songs kind of write themselves sometimes. It’s like you’re kind of walking out on the diving board and you keep walking until you fall in the water and every line keeps you in the air and if you come up with a bad line you fall into the water. I don’t know how it works. If I did I’d probably stop doing it.”

– Tom Waits, Mojo magazine

When the truth doesn’t fill our body and mind, we think we have had enough. When the truth fills our body and mind, we realize that something is missing. For example, when we look at the ocean from a boat, with no land in sight, it seems circular and nothing else. But the ocean is neither round nor square, and its features are infinite in variety. It is like a palace. It is like a jewel. Only to our eyes, only for a moment, does it seem circular.

All things are like this. Although there are numberless aspects to all things, we see only as far as our vision can reach. And in our vision of all things, we must appreciate that although they may look round or square, the other aspect of oceans or mountains are infinite in variety, and that universes lie all around us. It is like this everywhere, right here, in the tiniest drop of water.

– Dogen

Thoreau always had two notebooks—one for facts, and the other for poetry. But he had a hard time keeping them apart, as he often found facts more poetic than his poems. They are, he said, translated from the language of the earth into that of the sky. Thoreau knew that the imagination uses facts to fabricate images and even delicate architectures. One summer night, looking up into the sky at a particularly beautiful, scintillating star, he thought perhaps another traveler somewhere else along the coast was, like him, looking up at that same star and said, ‘Of what unsuspected triangles are stars the apex?’
– Jean Frémon

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

At the end, all that’s left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that’s why I’ve never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that’s why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.
– Nicole Krauss

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.
– Carl G. Jung

The skin is no more separated from the brain than the surface of a lake is separated from its depths; the two are different locations in a continuous medium. ‘Peripheral’ and ‘central’ are merely spatial distinctions, distinctions which do more harm than good if they lure us into forgetting that the brain is a single functional unit, from cortex to fingertips and toes. To touch the surface is to stir the depths.
– Deane Juhan

…the dream of all poetry, to cut a hole in time.
– Mary Ruefle

Tied to one another by the bonds of the earth, by intelligence, heart and flesh, nothing, I know, can surprise or separate us.
– Albert Camus to Maria Casarès

We met, we recognized each other, we abandoned ourselves one to the other. We have lived a love of burning, pure crystal. Do you realize what happiness we have, and what has been given to us?
– Maria Casarès to Albert Camus

“And if Mozart is for Sundays, who do you listen to the rest of the week?” “Louis Armstrong on Mondays, Frank Sinatra on Wednesdays. And Glenn Miller on Fridays, unless it’s raining. If it’s raining, it’s always Billie Holiday.” “What about Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday?” I asked. “Those days are quiet. Unless it’s raining.”
– Clare Vanderpool

One of the reasons people stay in classes for so long–become so devoted to certain teachers for far too long–is because the classroom and the studio are the last two places in which someone can believe they might be an artist. It is a positive infantilism that exists in the classroom: You can still believe and be pure of heart. That is killed very quickly in the professional arts, because there is little that is pure there. People are cast by how they look and sound, and a career is built by repeating what was liked or what was successful the first time. Artistry is imperiled, or it dies. But in the classroom, particularly among those who have yet to make a living or an impact in the professional theatre, the dream can continue, so there will always be a room somewhere, a school, full of people who are rightly determined to have the theatre of which they dreamed, and which propelled them to come and work in it in the first place.
– Elia Kazan

When I use the word “body,” I mean more than the physical machine. Not only do you physically live the circumstances around you but also those you only think of in your mind. Your physically felt body is in fact part of a gigantic system of here and other places, now and other times, you and other people–in fact, the whole universe. This sense of being bodily alive in a vast system is the body as it is felt from inside.
– Eugene Gendlin, Focusing

Every human being is a koan, that is to say, an impossibility. There is no formula for getting along with a human being. No technique will achieve relatedness. I am impossible to get along with; so is each one of you; all our friends are impossible; the members of our families are impossible.

How then shall we get along with them? If you are seeking a real encounter, then you must confront the koan represented by the other person. The koan is an invitation to enter into reality.

– Bernard Phillips

The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.
– Flannery O’Connor

And it’s like some tiny nothing that sets off a natural disaster halfway across the world, only this was the opposite of disaster, how by accident she saved me with that thoughtless act of grace, and she never knew, and how that, too, is the part of the history of love.
– Nicole Krauss

And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don’t want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body.
– Charles Bukowski

In a troubled time, the willingness to proceed like you’re needed is a radical act.
– Stephen Jenkinson

all I know is that I believe in the sound of music
and the running of a horse. all else is squabble.
– Charles Bukowski

It is the suffering, crippled side of the personality which is both the dark shadow that won’t change and also the redeemer that transforms one’s life and alters one’s values. The redeemer can get the hidden treasure or win the princess or slay the dragon because he’s marked in some way-he’s abnormal. The shadow is both the awful thing that needs redemption, and the suffering redeemer who can provide it.
– Liz Greene

Some of the greatest models of mindfulness are people who do work that is otherwise conceived of as invisible.
– Deborah David

Happiness to me is mainly not suffering, not desiring, not thinking too much about the future or the past, really embracing the present moment and the reality of what is, and the way it is.
– @naval

“The idea of being paralyzed in the face of overwhelming forces we do not understand is the mark of our time,” noted Arthur Miller, many decades ago. The best thing about getting old is seeing how little is ever new.
– Pico Iyer

I love immersing myself in the universe of a novel for years. There is never a time when I am more alive.
– Arundhati Roy

zero gods is too few.
one god is too lonely.
two gods are too many.
so sometimes we know there is no god.
and that’s when we write our best prayers.

sometimes we know there is a god.
and we know there are no words for a prayer.
but tonight there is a full moon in my window.
and a beloved.
and no prayer is more beautiful.

– hune margulies

Love is the only bow on Life’s dark cloud. It is the morning and the evening star. It shines upon the babe, and sheds its radiance on the quiet tomb. It is the mother of art, inspirer of poet, patriot and philosopher. It is the air and light of every heart — builder of every home, kindler of every fire on every hearth. It was the first to dream of immortality. It fills the world with melody — for music is the voice of love. Love is the magician, the enchanter, that changes worthless things to Joy, and makes royal kings and queens of common clay. It is the perfume of that wondrous flower, the heart, and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon, we are less than beasts; but with it, earth is heaven, and we are gods.
– Robert G. Ingersoll

In a circle of true Friends each man is simply what he is: stands for nothing but himself. No one cares two-pence about anyone else’s family, profession, class, income, race, or previous history…That is the kingliness of Friendship. We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts. This love (essentially) ignores not only our physical bodies but that whole embodiment which consists of our family, job, past and connections. At home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also bear a general character; husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague, or subordinate. Not among our Friends. It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds. Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

Hence (if you will not misunderstand me) the exquisite arbitrariness and irresponsibility of this love. I have no duty to be anyone’s Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which gave value to survival.

– C.S. Lewis

“So lasting they are, the rivers!” Only think. Sources somewhere in the mountains pulsate and springs seep from a rock, join in a stream, in the current of a river, and the river flows through centuries, millennia. Tribes, nations pass, and the river is still there, and yet it is not, for water does not stay the same, only the place and the name persist, as a metaphor for a permanent form and changing matter. The same rivers flowed in Europe when none of today’s countries existed and no languages known to us were spoken. It is in the names of rivers that traces of lost tribes survive. They lived, though, so long ago that nothing is certain and scholars make guesses which to other scholars seem unfounded. It is not even known how many of these names come from before the Indo-European invasion, which is estimated to have taken place two thousand to three thousand years B. C. Our civilization poisoned river waters, and their contamination acquires a powerful emotional meaning. As the course of a river is a symbol of time, we are inclined to think of a poisoned time. And yet the sources continue to gush and we believe time will be purified one day. I am a worshipper of flowing and would like to entrust my sins to the waters, let them be carried to the sea.
– Czeslaw Milosz, Rivers

Pride is a stubborn insistence of being what we are not and never were intended to be. Pride is a deep, insatiable need for unreality, an exorbitant demand that others believe the lie we have made ourselves believe about ourselves.
– Thomas Merton

The ethic of Jesus, as I understand it, issues from the ever so slight edge He grants to life, in the ‘life v. death’ conflict of the Easter hymn. He grants the edge (better, He wins the edge) from the edge. From his chosen place in the world.
– Daniel Berrigan, An Ethic of Resurrection

To be human we need to experience the end of the world. We need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world and that the world isn’t what we think it is.
– Hélène Cixous

I think Dostoevsky was right, that every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell.
– Rollo May

The Clear Bead at the Centre
changes everything
There are no edges to my loving now.
I’ve heard it said, there’s a window
that opens from one mind to another.
But if there is no wall
there is no window,
And if there is no window,
there is no need for a latch
There are no edges to my loving now.
The clear bead at the center
changes everything.
– Rumi (translation by Bly & Coleman)

Into this wild Abyss/ The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave–/ Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,/ But all these in their pregnant causes mixed/ Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,/ Unless the Almighty Maker them ordain/ His dark materials to create more worlds,–/ Into this wild Abyss the wary Fiend/ Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while,/ Pondering his voyage; for no narrow frith/ He had to cross.
– John Milton, Paradise Lost

Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist, there are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges and absorbs the impact.
– Nicole Krauss

A human lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.
– Thomas Mann

When we sit down and connect directly with body, heart, and mind, we can feel our emotional life and heal, integrate, and free the heart.
– Rebecca Bradshaw

Some people have one great dream in life which they fail to fulfill. Others have no dream at all and fail to fulfill even that.
– Pessoa

The sea is the favorite symbol for the unconscious, the mother of all that lives.
– CG Jung

If you make wise choices that include caring for and sharing with others, you’ll create a world filled with peace and compassion.
– Khangser Rinpoche

How good to be safe in tombs,
Where nature’s temper cannot reach,
Nor vengeance ever comes!
– Emily Dickinson

Turn within. See the truth. Become the truth. Do not look to others for advice, what to do, how to live.

Be a lamp unto yourself as the Buddha said. All the answers are within you

– Robert Adams

Eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude.
– JS Mill

Only a life lived in a certain spirit is worth living. It is a remarkable fact that a life lived entirely from the ego is dull not only for the person himself but for all concerned. The fullness of life requires more than just an ego; it needs spirit.
– Carl G. Jung

Ulmo answered: ‘Truly, Water is become now fairer than my heart imagined, neither had my secret thought conceived the snowflake, nor in all my music was contained the falling of the rain. I will seek Manwë, that he and I may make melodies for ever to thy delight!’
– J.R.R. Tolkien

The path back to power for the Democratic Party is to show that we can get sh*t done again. This really has to be our focus. We need to be able to build housing quickly and cost-effectively. We need to build more hospitals and schools. We need to make it clear that we’re the party of getting things done. They’re clearly the party of tearing things down.
– Adam Schiff

Eternally rolls the wheel of Being. Everything dies, everything blooms again; eternally runs the year of Being.
– Nietzsche

Jung stresses that consciousness must have a say too; there must be a dialogue between the unconscious and consciousness. We cannot simply swallow uncritically what the unconscious says; we must also think about the level on which it wants to be realized.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

Listening to books instead of reading them is like drinking your vegetables instead of eating them.
– @naval

I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock.
– Edgar Allan Poe

The man and the woman are one flesh – yes, even when they are not one spirit. Man is a quadruped.
– G.K. Chesterton

Our ideas about the psyche affect the psyche
– Hillman

Think how much you must change. Even more than you dare.
– Sandra Lim

The best poets
are the ones
who speak to us
in their poems
as if we were
their brothers
and sisters.
– john zbigniew guzlowski

AI can’t invent, it can only regurgitate what’s been made already. Its widespread adoption would usher in an era of cultural stagnation. One day we’ll wake up to find that thrilling, groundbreaking art is no longer being made. Only humans could make Sgt. Peppers’.
– @SketchesbyBoze

Abandonment is the most devastating form of emotional trauma.
– Gabor Mate

There are no “good” billionaires. Not one. Not a single one. Every billionaire is a disaster for the world, their families, their communities, and their ecosystems.
– Alina Stefanescu

Clear thinkers take feedback from reality, not society.
– @naval

With a mercy that outrides
The all of water, an ark
For the listener; for the lingerer with a love glides
Lower than death and the dark;
A vein for the visiting of the past-prayer, pent in prison,
The-last-breath penitent spirits—the uttermost mark
– Gerard Manley Hopkins

The blue pearl is a point of consciousness. Ramana Maharshi uses the right side of the heart, in the right side of the chest, where the heart which is consciousness resides. So the blue pearl is the same thing.
– Robert Adams

[Louise Imogen Guiney] would not tolerate bad rhymes, rhymes for rhyme’s sake, cacophonies, bad grammar, forced constructions, the colloquial or the stereotyped.
– George O’Neill

The secret of the enjoyment of pleasure is to know when to stop. Man doesn’t learn this secret easily, but to shun pleasure altogether is cowardly avoidance of a difficult job. For we have to learn the art of enjoying things because they are impermanent.
– Alan Watts

No matter what kind of karma you gathered in the past, this moment’s karma is always in your hands.
– Sadhguru

Free people make free choices. Free choices mean you get unequal outcomes.

You can have freedom, or you can have equal outcomes. You can’t have both.

– @naval

not too much
of a chance.
I was from a generation
of lambs
whose fate was determined
by the whims
of a wolf.
but it was when
the bars closed
that you would hear
him howl.
my mother
didn’t carry her ignominy
in the form
of a scarlet letter;
she walked tall
in high heels
and wore the bruises
of an
impassioned woman
who refused
to back down
from fist or wagging tongue.
like the searing flesh
of Salem’s sisters,
she emerged from the fire
and walked with it.

– Ryan Fiennes

“One wants some attention for one’s writing,” he said. “And, eh, on the other hand, you kind of like to be left alone.”
– Louis Jenkins

Discontent, blaming, complaining, self-pity cannot serve as a foundation for a good future, no matter how much effort you make.
– Eckhart Tolle

Thank God for Black studies. Entering this whole other critical world of the nonwhite canon left its mark.
– Margo Jefferson

But this life is always and at all points ‘frustrating’ – it is a matter of degree in the pressure and the interior counter-pressure. Bless you.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

In a world full of cowards, I’m begging all of us to be fearless. To dig deep. To find someone or something to stand up for. To make things with our whole heart. To care about the most vulnerable. To write as if our lives depend on it. To do the right thing despite the cost.
– Maureen Langloss

The older you get the more dialed in your nutrition, exercise and sleep has to be.
– Dan Go

tomorrow
like daisies I’ll try
surfacing
– Beez Laine

A fit body, a calm mind, a house full of love. These things cannot be bought – they must be earned.
– @naval

If it is not right, do not do it, if it is not true, do not say it.
– Marcus Aurelius

the silent egg thinks
and the toaster’s electrical
ear waits

– Frank O’Hara

You do not always know what I am feeling.
– Frank O’Hara

The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you
cannot do.
– Walter Bagehot

All ways of speaking of archetypes are translations from one metaphor to another.
– James Hillman

If you drank more water you’d realize you don’t need to eat as much.
– Dan Go

Again the bloom, the northward flight,
The fount freed at its silver height,
And down the deep woods to the lowest,
The fragrant shadows scarred with light.
– Louise Imogen Guiney

It is so hot that it is hard to walk but even more difficult to stand still. The sun is at full strength and the ground is holding so much heat that it feels as if he’s inside a sandwich press.
– A. M. Homes, Walter, Like Water

One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Repression causes stupidity
– Dollard & Miller

If you feel a little weary, take a prayer break. Allow yourself to take a meditative pause. Take a deep breath and tune up your faith.
– Iyanla Vanzant

For spaces and seasons, but thou.
Thy greatest ministry is always now.
O sacramental sea, terrible sea,
Thine are the words of the mystery —
– A. E. Waite

Come off the tightrope.

Refuse to entertain clowns.

Your heart deserves better than a circus.

– Dr. Thema

Acid Reflux

Did it make a home inside
your chest? What is the softest thing
you’ve ever held hostage? At what age
did you first hide your truest
feeling? What feeling then
eclipsed the truer one?
Who did you blame?

– Patrycja Humienik

Developing spiritual eyesight & mystical perception requires humility — because entitlement, arrogance & egocentricity veils one’s intuition. You cannot be a sensitive observer of All That Is if your ego is in the way, obscuring your ability to intuitively tap in & truly see.
– Gina Näuman

William James wrote in his diary in 1870: “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.” This is the problem with determinists: they are psyoping themselves into a lower agency state. Your soul has as much wriggle room as you *believe* it does.
– @oldbooksguy

I’m an intelligent person. I’m well aware that heads roll when the winds change. But it’s impossible to predict anything in Russia.
– Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.
– C.S. Lewis

You see, Aslan didn’t tell Pole what would happen. He only told her what to do.
– Puddleglum (C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair)

To come to know that nothing is good, nothing is bad, begins a great transformation. You start looking in, the outside reality loses meaning. The social reality is a fiction, a beautiful drama. You can participate in it, but then you don’t take it seriously. It is just a role to be played. Play it as beautifully, as efficiently, as possible. But don’t take it seriously. It has nothing of the ultimate in it.
– Osho

Think of it this way: There are two kinds of failure. The first comes from never trying out your ideas because you are afraid, or because you are waiting for the perfect time. This kind of failure you can never learn from, and such timidity will destroy you. The second kind comes from a bold and venturesome spirit. If you fail in this way, the hit that you take to your reputation is greatly outweighed by what you learn. Repeated failure will toughen your spirit and show you with absolute clarity how things must be done.
– Robert Greene

Heavy

When the gods die
the myths
are lifted off our backs.

Peace be with them.
They were heavy.

– Tom Clark

Nothing I used to care about is important anymore. Prizes, publications, jobs? They’re all what Fanon called “the spoils.” All I want to do is help my people and work for liberation. Nothing else matters anymore.
– Randa Jarrar

‘My son, my son,’ said Aslan. ‘I know. Grief is great. Only you and I in this land know that yet. Let us be good to one another.’
– C.S. Lewis

“Now, Bree,” [Aslan] said, “you poor, proud, frightened Horse, draw near. Nearer still, my son. Do not dare not to dare.”
– C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy

Suffering is a call for inquiry, all pain needs investigation.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj

Somehow,
we ride our lost loves out to sea.
– Diane Seuss

I’ve seen it before
in the birth canal
red autumn sunset

– Tsubasa Kitaoji

happy hour
i water down
my life story
– @Andddrrrew

Either solve the problems of a few rich people or a lot of poor people. But don’t get stuck in between trying to sell average products at average prices to average people. That’s where businesses bleed and ambition goes to die.
– Alex Hormozi

He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.
– C.S. Lewis

You are one of those rare people with genius, and, unlike some publishers, it is a word I have not used half a dozen times in thirty years of publishing.
– Stanley Unwin to J.R.R. Tolkien

Our culture has lost the ability to recognize what sanity actually looks like. We’ve confused a particular kind of intelligence—the ability to manipulate symbols and derive logical conclusions within closed systems—with wisdom. We’ve confused rationality with reality-alignment.

This misrecognition has led to a bizarre situation: we’ve handed billions of dollars to people who are fundamentally disordered in their relationship with reality and said, “Build the most powerful technologies the world has ever known.” We’ve trusted the design of our future to minds that are structurally disconnected from the living complexity of the world.

– Daniel Thorson

Duality is always secretly unity.
– Alan Watts

When I’m writing the first draft, I’m constantly reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.
– Jordan Peele

I’d heard that if you chewed rice long enough it would get sweet and turn into sake, and the same’s true for languages. And I never got a bellyache from trying to digest too much at once.
– Yōko Tawada

Anyone who undergoes a development of consciousness is immediately assailed by a sense of abandonment and excommunication from most of the values that formerly sustained one. The old kingdom dissolves beneath and one is left to feel exiled and without any container for life.
– Robert A. Johnson

Despair always begins as a snack that you nibble on when bored and then becomes a meal that you have thrice a day.
– Shehan Karunatilaka

One night I dreamed of an angel: I walked into a huge, empty bar and saw him sitting in a corner with his elbows on the table and a cup of milky coffee in front of him. She’s the love of your life, he said, looking up at me, and the force of his gaze, the fire in his eyes, threw me right across the room. I started shouting, Waiter, waiter, then opened my eyes and escaped from that miserable dream. Other nights I didn’t dream of anyone, but I woke up in tears.
– Roberto Bolaño

I can’t point to any one event that resulted in my decision to go into hibernation. Initially, I just wanted some downers to drown out my thoughts and judgments, since the constant barrage made it hard not to hate everyone and everything. I thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me.
– Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

In March, I’ll be rested, caught up and human.
– Sylvia Plath

you want to defund libraries, i want them to have outdoor seating and be open late on weekends we are not the same.
– @oyveyitskay

The human mind, in taking us down the path of technocracy, has become the adversary of life itself and collaterally the adversary of the human soul.
– Konrad Lorenz

If you’re mad about a trans woman in the House of Representatives and not a Nazi in the White House, you’re the problem.
– Lauren Howard

Em dashes are not only a sign of AI — they’re also a sign that someone got their MFA in Creative Writing.
– @minicwolfie

I told you once I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapability to feel with their own fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.
– GM Gilbert

Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell.
– Joan Crawford

They both looked to the right and to the left into most of the shops they passed, had a wary eye for all gregarious assemblages of people, and turned out of their road to avoid any very excited group of talkers.
– Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

It’s a little early for all this.
Everything’s still very bare—
nevertheless, something’s different today from yesterday.
– Louise Glück

Let’s not beat around the bush; I love life – that’s
my real weakness. I love it so much that I am
incapable of imagining what is not life.
– Albert Camus

To will is to stir up paradoxes.
– Albert Camus

It’s like meeting someone
you’ve known in a past life,
and the soul just says,
Ah, there you are.
– Haruki Murakami

Opportunities may come along for you to convert something—something that exists into something that didn’t yet. That might be the beginning of it. Sometimes you just want to do things your way, want to see for yourself what lies behind the misty curtain.
– Bob Dylan

Feeling that morality has nothing to do with the way you use the resources of this world is an idea that can’t persist any longer. If it does, then we won’t.
– Barbara Kingsolver

Manners is what holds a society together. At bottom, propriety is concern for other people. When that goes out the window, the gates of hell are shortly opened and ignorance is King.
– Jane Austen

Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.
– Paulo Coelho

We need never shout across the spaces to an absent God. He is nearer than our own soul, closer than our most secret thought.
– A. W. Tozer

Understanding arises in the dialogue between the past and the present.
– Hans-Georg Gadamer

History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.
– Former West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer

If Carl Jung were still around he might say:

The modern marketplace has become our new unconscious—a vast repository of symbols and projections.

Each purchase is an attempt to individuate, yet ironically leads many further from their authentic Self.

The collective shadow now manifests not in myths or dreams, but in endless consumption that leaves the soul perpetually hungry.

– @inspirited_in_sight

I’ll read my books and I’ll drink coffee and I’ll listen to music, and I’ll bolt the door.
– J. D. Salinger

Some days are typing days, and some days are thinking days, but both days are writing days.
– V.E. Schwab

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
– Mark Twain

No one has ever been insulted into changing their mind. Lead with genuine curiosity instead of accusations and watch how fast barriers come down.
– Christopher Voss

Suddenly I can see all of England from above, almost like a map. I can see all the old pilgrim roads lit up like capillaries, and emanating a bright gold glow. The night shape of Albion is braided with these warming criss-crosses of light. Mossy crosses are repaired again, saint named, candle-bright to encourage all apostles of the road. The little beasties of the hedgerows dig deeper into their dens, the winged ones up in the majestic beeches settle into their nests. All is a hymnal, at least for a moonlit moment.

I need to walk more lanes barefoot. Kiss more icons. I need to take refuge in more old churches. A theology of the body. I’m tired of the sensible. I want to say yes to the universe, and the one that made it. I need to know my Bible better, I need to know my compassion better, I need to know my joy better.
I need to feel more like a Christian.

– Martin Shaw

I didn’t write it for the sake of revenge. I wrote it for the sake of release.
– alanis morissette

Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it.
– Horace

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet.
– James Oppenheim

The assumption has always been that creativity, like good taste, can be acquired by guided exposure. But, as with language learning, the exposure is far more important than the guidance.
– Samuel R. Delany

In some sense, the act of mindfulness meditation itself could be understood as a practice of dying—to each moment…
– Wes Nisker

Tomorrow is nothing, today is too late; the good lived yesterday.
– Marcus Aurelius

Sometimes you go to people to hear their thoughts on your ideas, not realizing you’re actually giving it to them.
– Jacob York

WAKE UP!

Do you have a body? Don’t sit on the porch.
Go out and walk in the rain!

If you are in love,
then why are you asleep?

Wake up, wake up!
You have slept millions and millions of years.

Why not wake up this morning?

– Kabir

Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.
– Max Planck

In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting, and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.
– Marilynne Robinson

PART ONE, SONNET IV

You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins behind you.
Blessed ones, whole ones,
you where the heart begins:
You are the bow that shoots the arrows
and you are the target.
Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.
The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

– Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

The Universe is a map
Subjectivity is a map of a map
Science is a map of a map of a map
– Inner Naturalist

If you’re living in a big body, consider that you might be making your life small to accommodate it.
– @shastorra

In unreasonable times, art cannot be expected to appear in reasonable forms in reasonable speech acts in league with the official language when there is nothing official about language and there are no boundaries to what can be uttered officially official language itself a way of kidnapping meaning.
– D. A. Powell

It is no wonder Dada flourished in the wreckage of what was known then as The Great War. How could the head not explode at the monumental attack on meaning. Apollinaire died with a fragment in his head. Typography itself, the fixed form of industrial publication, had to be shaken, dismantled.
– D. A. Powell

Any sufficiently advanced field, when faced with too much popularizing pressure, will gain an antimemetic field: a false and oversimplified version of the field created by edutainers to cater to people who do not have the requisite knowledge and skill to meaningfully engage in it
– Arbutus Tree

The present is all we have to live in. Or to lose.
– Marcus Aurelius

I yell ‘Shit’ down a cliff at the ocean. Even in my lifetime the immediacy of that word will fade…But if I put the real cliff and the real ocean into the poem, the word Shit will ride along with them, travel the time-machine until cliffs and oceans disappear.

– Jack Spicer

Train yourself to ignore the front that people display, the myth that surrounds them, and instead plumb their depths for signs of their character.
– Robert Greene

It is an empty house
In which there is nothing
But a little machine

– Jack Spicer

Yes but the garbage of the real still reaches out into the current world making its objects, in turn, visible- lemon calls to lemon, newspaper to newspaper, boy to boy. As things decay they bring their equivalent into being.

– Jack Spicer, After Lorca

The greatest discovery in life is to discover that our essential nature does not share the limits nor the destiny of the body and mind.
– Rupert Spira

Antiquary

Some people try, before cashing in, to make
their lives into shrines. Mine seems to be turning out,
as predicted, a small provincial museum, the kind
that might have in some corner or other one work
you could be interested in, if you knew it was there.
Memorials and keepsakes hang around, half catalogued. Some
curiosa, here and there a whopper-who else
could maintain a scarlet nose drinking
Dr. Pepper? I have my precedents. Lots of men
shuffle off, leaving a ball of tinfoil too large to get
out of the attic or half a century of the New York Times
or some other mess. I keep everything. Old
gods and old ads fade together; both
show better on a neutral wall. Philosophies, old hat,
catch dust on a rack. The trouble is
I’m a glutton. The floor is cluttered,
the shelves go across the windows. I trip
sometimes over ancient arguments or
a lid I can’t place, or claim two different heads
to be Saint Thomas’s. Nothing, nothing will I
surrender. There is little enough as it is.
I may, of course, croak tomorrow, stumbling
from the larder, but I will not set
my house in order.

– Keith Waldrop

Yet twice blessed is help unlooked for, and never was a meeting of friends more joyful.
– Éomer to Aragorn (Tolkien, The Return of the King)

[Freud] concluded his life-work with the pessimistic realization that he had not been dealing with neurotic individuals but with a morbid civilization.
– Otto Rank

I am speaking as a member of a certain democracy and a very complex country that insists on being very narrow-minded. Simplicity is taken to be a great American virtue along with sincerity. One of the results of this is that immaturity is taken to be a great virtue, too.
– James Baldwin

The happiness you are seeking is not to be found in the flow of life, but in your attitude toward whatever life brings.
– Ramesh S Balsekar

When we lack real problems, we create imaginary ones; when we lack meaningful work, we perfect the unimportant.
– Shane Parrish

Karma is just you, repeating your patterns, virtues, and flaws until you finally get what you deserve.
– @naval

Coping with the challenges of aging becomes much easier when we practice the dharma.
– Bhikkhuni Dhammananda

In the mirror of your mind, all kinds of pictures appear and disappear. Knowing that they are entirely your own creations, watch them silently come and go. Be alert, but not perturbed. …. You see the picture, but you are not the picture.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Photography can’t stop time from flowing, but it can take a piece of three-dimensional time and flatten it, like a pressed flower.
– Susan Moon

many different thoughts
coming to my mind
cherry blossoms
– Basho

Teaching is more a way for the teacher to learn than for the student to learn.
– @naval

I hate the idea that you ought to read the whole of anybody.
– Robert Frost

Unless customers would miss a company if it went away, it eventually will.
– Joel Tillinghast

What can stun the mind into quietness? What can briefly flummox the mind in its quest to reduce everything to a concept?
– George Saunders on Inka Essenhigh

Everything comes right in the end. Steady determination is what is required.
– Ramana Maharshi

He who works all day has no time to make money.
– John D. Rockefeller

The Changing Light

The changing light at San Francisco
is none of your East Coast light
none of your
pearly light of Paris
The light of San Francisco
is a sea light
an island light
And the light of fog
blanketing the hills
drifting in at night
through the Golden Gate
to lie on the city at dawn
And then the halcyon late mornings
after the fog burns off
and the sun paints white houses
with the sea light of Greece
with sharp clean shadows
making the town look like
it had just been painted
But the wind comes up at four o’clock
sweeping the hills
And then the veil of light of early evening
And then another scrim
when the new night fog
floats in
And in that vale of light
the city drifts
anchorless upon the ocean

– Lawrence Ferlinghetti

For Freud, as you know, all defense is defense against desire, which is fundamentally right. But according to Lacan, desire it is itself defense, a defense against the desire of the Other.
– Moustafa Safouan

I wrote this poem because, despite all attempts otherwise, I just keep getting older.
– Josh Bell

No matter how attractive a person’s potential may be, you have to date their reality.
– Mandy Hale

When someone gets to the point where, in their writing, they see themselves objectively and recognize the transformation that has reshaped who they are, a memoir might be in the offing.
– Trish Lockard

You cannot know God solely with your mind. You need full access knowing, which many call the contemplative mind.
– Richard Rohr

Visionary feminism is a wise and loving politics. It is rooted in the love of male and female being, refusing to privilege one over the other. The soul of feminist politics is the commitment to ending patriarchal domination of women and men, girls and boys. Love cannot exist in any relationship that is based on domination and coercion. Males cannot love themselves in patriarchal culture if their very self-definition relies on submission to patriarchal rules. When men embrace feminist thinking and practice, which emphasizes the value of mutual growth and self-actualization in all relationships, their emotional well-being will be enhanced. A genuine feminist politics always brings us from bondage to freedom, from lovelessness to loving.
– bell hooks

Someday, I’m sure, dreams will come true. But when? Why not now? Why not?
– George Saunders

In New Mexico he always awoke a young man… Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up to him for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests… That air would disappear from the whole earth in time, perhaps; but long after his day. He did not know just when it had become so necessary to him, but he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it. Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!
– Willa Cather

Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.
– Virginia Woolf

But my heart, which feared nothing and hoped infinitely, was full of peace.
– George MacDonald, Lilith

I want to see things differently…I want to find something
that nobody has ever found.
– Rei Kawakubo

Most of us, without knowing it, live every day in a game designed by those whose only wish is to keep us playing it, because no matter what we do, we lose.

And what we lose is the soul.

Make no mistake: the entire system of consumerism, exploitation of the worker, and appropriation of spiritual language by nihilistic power structures—all of it is designed to deaden the human soul, numbing it to the point of compliance while convincing it that it is free, simply because it can purchase any artificial fulfillment in a relentless pattern of pleasure and pain.

The task of a contemporary human life is to liberate itself from this pattern; to truly live again; to participate less and less in a society that slays the soul, that makes us embarrassed to say “soul,” that sells us a vision of happiness that is simply designed to keep us compliant, myopic, in constant battle with one another while real evil happens behind our backs, in our names and with our tax dollars.

If we can turn off the noise that’s designed to zombify us, we might begin again to find those rare spaces of silence, attention, and depth; we just might hear, softly at first, the ancient voice of the soul, telling us what to let go of, what to love, what to do for each other and ourselves. We just might learn the real, sacred reason we are here.

– Joseph Fasano

It’s becoming clearer and clearer that we are being ruled by extremely evil idiots. It would be funny if it weren’t so fucking scary.
– Maureen Langloss

I was not interested in creating that rhythm of tension and release in order to arouse. That’s what pornography does.
– Robert Glück

You must watch this in practical politics: every in-group (or group of nice people) needs an out-group of nasty people, otherwise they wouldn’t know who they were.

And you must recognize, then, that this out-group is your necessary enemy, whom you need. He keeps you on your toes. But you mustn’t obliterate him. If you do, you are in a very dangerous state of affairs. So you have to love your enemies in this sense, regard them as highly necessary, and to be respected chivalrously. We need the communists and they need us. The thing is to cool it and play what I call a contained conflict. When conflicts get out of hand, all sides blow up.

– Alan Watts

Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now, and we will never be here again.
– Homer

Critics who use ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown-up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish: these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence.
– C.S. Lewis

Last night in the warm spring air while I was
blazing my tirade against someone who doesn’t
interest
me, it was love for you that set me
afire,
– Frank O’Hara

He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.
– Proverbs 16:32

holding hands
we watch an old movie
imagine living
in a simple
black and white world
– Joanne Morcom

Too much of what is
called “education” is
little more than an
expensive isolation
from reality.

– Thomas Sowell

Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum.
– Erich Maria Remarque

The anxiety that accompanies those previously felt needs will recede and, eventually, with the long maturation, disappear completely.
– Mitra Bishop Roshi

It’s not so much that nothing means
anything but more that it keeps meaning
nothing.
there’s no release, just gurus and self-
appointed gods and hucksters.
the more people say, the less there is to say.
even the best books are dry sawdust.

– Charles Bukowski

A True Conversation With The Sun
by Buck Downs

[for Mayakovsky]

many are the poets
who claim to have had
a true conversation
with the sun – the sun
has disavowed
any knowledge
of their actions —

anyone who has looked
directly into the sun
can tell you the truth
is not the whole story —

Often, I felt I had
grown so little,
though you tried
your best.
Some are gardeners
and yield bountiful harvests.
I felt your failure
hung thick in the air
between us.
I couldn’t breathe.
Maybe the lack
of oxygen
hindered my growth.
My fear of being
your fruitless labor.
If only I had gotten
to know myself
through you.

– Ryan Fiennes

The word guardian derives from the Middle English word garden. I find this fitting; my instinctive need for protection leads me to nature—to plant life—and almost always to trees. When I’m in their presence, I can sense their watchfulness. I feel their embrace.
– Lauren Krauze

Had a ghost passed over me? No, it was the poetry. I wanted to cry; I felt very odd. I had fallen into a new way of being happy.
– Sylvia Plath

A walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.
– Robert Macfarlane

My Hate
by Marvin Bell

My hate is like ripe fruit
from an orchard, which is mine.

I sink my teeth into it.
I nurse on its odd shapes.

I have grafted every new variety,
walked in my bare feet,

rotting and detached,
on the fallen ones.

Vicious circle. Unfriendly act.
I am eating the whole world.

In the caves of my ill will
I must be stopped.

I have repeatedly heard from my teachers of Madhyamaka philosophy that emptiness does not mean nothing matters. Since everything is empty, everything matters.
– Michael Lobsang Tenpa

may the money of the world glitteringly cover you
as you rest after a long day under the kleig lights with your faces
in packs for our edification, the way the clouds come often at night
but the heavens operate on the star system.
– Frank O’Hara

I always return to myself,
always more faithfully.

– Marguerite Duras

It is nearly seven hundred years since Meister Eckhart exclaimed: “It is all inside, not outside, for everything is inside.” But how few people have realized as yet what he meant.

– Barbara Hannah

The Shift is coming. The Shift has to be coming. Because if you keep living like this you’ll die.
– Ned Vizzini, It’s Kind of a Funny Story

The Lord of the Rings resonates with depth psychology because it is about a special kind of quest. Frodo leaves home not to slay a dragon or win laurels, but to let go of something that will lead to his growth.
– June Singer

I tried to hold on to this compassion, sensing its preciousness, but even as I reached to grasp it, it dissipated into wisps. No revelation can endure unless it is bolstered by a calm pure mind — and I’m afraid I didn’t possess that.
– Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions

One can not start by saying that our earthly destiny has or has not importance, for it depends upon us to give it importance. It is up to man to make it important to be a man, and he alone can feel his success or failure.
– Simone de Beauvoir

People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to.
– Malcolm Muggeridge

There is no better teacher than history in determining the future. There are answers worth billions of dollars in a $30 history book.
– Charlie Munger

The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.
– Woodrow Wilson

I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.
– William Morris

I know Americans who lost their lives because of intelligence failures.
– Pete Buttigieg

Liberation begins with the renunciation of accepted values.
– Herbert Marcuse

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.
– Oscar Wilde

Deep is the well of truth and long does it take to know what has fallen into its depths.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

Creativity is the constant discovery of the new within oneself.
– Alfred North Whitehead

The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.
– Peter Drucker

May you have the fortitude to continue thinking critically in a thoughtless and reactive world.
– Natasha Marin

A lot of writing is walking around the house muttering.
– Abigail Thomas

“You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it’ is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?
– Jeanette Winterson

Damage, growth, and time are all the same thing to a body.
– Sarah Manguso

I’m yours. For tonight. Your big joke. And my heart still leaps up between the declaration and the punchline.
– Leonard Cohen

We ourselves are large-scale complex instances of something, both objectively physical from the outside and subjectively mental on the inside. Perhaps the basis of this identity pervades the world.
– Thomas Nagel

…late in this century and on a Wednesday morning,
bearing the mark of one who’s experienced
neither heaven nor hell,

my birthplace vanished, my citizenship earned,
in league with stones of the earth, I
enter, without retreat or help from history,
the days of no day, my earth
of no earth, I re-enter

the city in which I love you.
And I never believed that the multitude
of dreams and many words were vain.

– Li-Young Lee

All this was prepared for me. All this was set in motion long ago. I live in someone else’s future. I stayed as long as I could, he said. Now look at the moon.
– Richard Siken

Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men. Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth, now the living timber bursts with the new buds and spring comes round again. And so with men: as one generation comes to life, another dies away.
– Homer

Quiet people always know more than they seem. Although very normal, their inner world is by default fronted mysterious and therefore assumed weird. Never underestimate the social awareness and sense of reality in a quiet person; they are some of the most observant, absorbent persons of all.
– Criss Jami, Healology

To Paula in Late Spring
by W.S. Merwin

Let me imagine that we will come again
when we want to and it will be spring
we will be no older than we ever were
the worn griefs will have eased like the early cloud
through which the morning slowly comes to itself
and the ancient defenses against the dead
will be done with and left to the dead at last
the light will be as it is now in the garden
that we have made here these years together
of our long evenings and astonishment

I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.
– Sylvia Plath

Do not be afraid; our fate
Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.
– Dante Alighieri, Inferno

Grim war-gods from remote ages have stalked upon the scene. International good faith; the public law of Europe; the greatest good of the greatest number; the ideal of a fertile, tolerant, progressive, demilitarized, infinitely varied society, is shattered. Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers from which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.

– Winston Churchill, Armistice – or Peace?

I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.
– Madonna

…their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.
– Tolkien, The Return of the King

I Thought This Would Be My Life
by Yang Qingxiang

I used to take a walk after rain
on other people’s foorsteps.

Twin shells rest in the sand,
kissed by rolling waves.

I was going to build a home there, to listen to
the wind in different seasons.

To read books written by someone afar, and wake
in the bell chime from across the water.

I cry and dry my tears.
I love, from the deepest of my tender heart.

I was going to write you a long letter in the moonlight,
occupying my mind with the ten thousand things at dusk.

Have children, and tell stories under a tree,
tend to the rice field, and leave the mountains green when I
die.

I was prepared to do that, I thought:
— This would be my life.

Transformation is a balance between human effort and grace. What is needed to evoke the positive, guiding unconscious dynamism? We have to face the opposites; we have to let ourselves be dissolved; we have to endure shattering and often reprehensible emotions; we have to live through the despair to be in the place where the new thing can come in. That comes as grace, but without our effort, grace would not have occurred.
– J. Gary Sparks

Scraps of moon

Scraps of moon
bobbing discarded on broken water but sky-moon

complete, transcending

all violation.

– Denise Levertov

The day you feel unhappy and horrible, get out of your room and ask people, “What can I do for you?” The service you do that day will bring a revolution inside you.
– Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Wear forgiving pants! The world is too hard as it is without letting tight pants have an opinion on how you are doing, and make it clear that they are disappointed in you.
– Anne Lamott

To evoke the Fool is to risk losing everything
—job, acceptance, even sanity—but gain a
wild, untamed grace.

The mature Fool doesn’t just drift-he
channels intuition into work, love, and a life
that matters.

The Fool’s freedom comes at a cost-excess
can lead to wisdom, but only if you survive
the cliff.

– The Parallax View

Neurotypical is a tiny box that only a small percentage of people fit into.

There are actually more neurodivergent people in the world (globally) than neurotypical people.

The normative standard for neurology was determined by wealthy men in western culture. Autistic social theorists have called that normative standard neurotypical.


The majority of people who exist outside of western culture would be considered neurodivergent because their neurology doesn’t match that of the men who decided what was and wasn’t normal.

Very very few humans actually have the normative neurotype, and those humans are not guaranteed to stay that neurotype. Acquired neurodivergence from cumulative stress, trauma, injury, and aging happens all the time, and in modern life, it happens to MOST people.

Neurotypical is the dominant or normative neurotype, not because of numbers but because of who has the power in our society.

To codify various mental conditions as disorders, professionals sat around tables and voted on traits, classifying things as normal or abnormal, not by any actual scientific evidence, but based on whether or not they personally possessed those traits.


Neurodivergent and neurotypical are not medical or biological terms. They are social justice terms. The purpose of these terms (according to the people who coined them) is to be able to discuss systemic power dynamics. These words are partly about how our brains work but even more than that they are about how the world treats us for the way that our brain works.

Neuronormativity is not the most common neurology. It’s a cultural standard that is enforced on people. When we challenge neuronormative expectations, it helps everyone, not just those of us who are already divergent.

– Janae Elisabeth, Trauma Geek