Journal XIX

In these stones horizons sing creating truth like glass from inspiration’s furnace.
– Gwyneth Lewis

Poems don’t just happen. They are luckily or stealthily related to a readiness within ourselves.
– William Stafford

Be a Warrior of Love, Not Hate

And by warrior, I mean—carrier.
And by carrier, I mean sacred guardian.
And by sacred guardian, I mean vessel.
And by vessel,
I mean, be an instrument of love.
And by instrument,
I mean—strum, sing, play, dance, move
to the melody of souls,
which we all know how to sing.
We just seem to have forgotten the words—
too focused on that warrior with the shield,
held up in fear of The Other.
When we take the shield away,
when we take the fear away,
when we carry within our hearts,
minds, bodies, and souls
the sacred gift that was give to us
so many moons ago,
we are left with what we came here with—
what we are all made of
in our deepest core selves—
love.

– Cristina M. R. Norcross

Silence is just as likely to indicate the most profound ideas forming, the deepest energies being summoned.
– Kazuo Ishiguro

poetry must be made by all. not by one.
– lautréamont

Swerving to Miss Caterpillars

In the Autumn,
when thirteen-segments,
fat and bristled,
dare the frenetic roads to find
tall, dry grasses in which to sleep
themselves into something
utterly different,
caterpillars can be your prayer.
What kind of person do you
choose to be?
Every moment of every day
you have this question put before
you by everything around you.
Everything.
And, everyone.
In that instant in which you wake up,
how will
you emerge?
Driving down Route 33,
at this very moment,
I make my choice:
I choose to be the kind of person
who swerves to miss caterpillars.

– Jamie K. Reaser

I write with experiences in mind, but I don’t write about them, I write out of them.
– John Ashbery

Of all the colors, BLUE has the best songs written for it. No contest. RED and GREEN fighting for a distant second.
– Mario Chard

Some days I feel like an expert in a field only a few people actually care about. Other days I feel like a novice.
– Timothy Green

I find the entrepreneur-in-search-of-a-business-idea viscerally repulsive.

If you don’t know what your purpose in life is, maybe start there?

– @VinceFHorn

One of my favorite anthropology books is the late Keith H. Basso’s, Wisdom Sits in Places. It’s a beautiful text that describes how Western Apache people consider space and place. For them, every place has a story attached to it, and that story gives that place its philosophical significance. Embedded in the story is the wisdom that that place embodies. The story is a kind of a covenant you make with the place. That place, the memory of which is preserved in stories, represents a whole set of historical events and experiences that are meaningful to that particular culture.

The same is true for Songhay people: There are certain spots in the Niger River basin that are sacred spaces. But labeling them sacred spaces is reductive; it robs them of their full significance. I make this point in much of my writing, and certainly in my new book. In many respects we have lost our ability to take the time to tell stories. In our times, we tend to reduce complexity to a series of formulae. We think we can understand something that’s partially true. But there’s an awful lot of non-Western phenomena that cannot be reduced to a formula. These are phenomena that do not lend themselves to theoretical extraction.

I also think people have lost their capacity—and this is part of the ideology of explication—for experiencing the wonder of not being able to understand something, of not being able to explain things that are mysterious. For me, the experience of wonder leads us to change. It enables us to expand our imagination. It leads us to a space of creativity where we can devise things that can make life sweeter for us now and in the future. For me, the experience of the inexplicable wonders of Adam Jenitongo’s world fired my imagination, expanded my consciousness, and prompted me to try different forms (memoir and fiction) of anthropological expression.

One thing is certain: The wonders embodied in the ethnographic record make anthropologists the custodians of important insights about the human condition, insights that could help us confront the life-threatening issues that define our troubled times.

– The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and interview with Paul Stoller

Northern Lights. Something in the cold, wet atmosphere brought them out. I grabbed Lipsha’s arm. We floated into the field and sank down, crushing green wheat. We chewed the sweet grass tips and stared up and were lost. Everything seemed to be one piece. the air, our faces, all cool, moist, and dark, and the ghostly sky. Pale green likcs of light pulsed and faded across it. Living lights. their fires lobbed over, higher, higher, then died out in blackness. At times the whole sky was ringed in shooting points and puckers of light gathering and falling, pulsing, fading, rhythmical as breathing. All of a piece. As if the sky were a pattern of nerves and our thought and memories traveled across it. As if the sky were one gigantic memory for us all. Or a dance hall. And all the world’s wandering souls were dancing there. I thought of June. She would be dancing if there was a dance hall in space. she would be dancing a two-step for wandering souls. Her long legs lifting and falling. Her laugh an ace. Her sweet perfume the way all grown-up women were supposed to smell. Her amusement at both the bad and the good. Her defeat. Her reckless victory. Her sons.

– Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

There is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
– Werner Herzog

evening star—
fold upon fold
the quiet blue hills
– Mary Lee McClure

Lawns and fields and hills and wide old velvet
sleeves, green things. They stretch, fold, roll away,
unfurl and calm the eye.
– Anne Carson

The tranquility that comes when you stop caring what they say. Or think, or do. Only what you do.
– Marcus Aurelius

each time
the poem was different
and the same
– Laura Kerr

May my mind come alive today To the invisible geography That invites me to new frontiers, To break the dead shell of yesterdays, To risk being disturbed and changed. May I have the courage today To live the life that I would love, To postpone my dream no longer But do at last what I came here for And waste my heart on fear no more.
– John O’Donohue

For example: a man arrives at the conclusion that his misery is the result of his manifestations of anger, conceit, sensuality, etc., and he will think that the cure should consist in applying himself to produce manifestations of gentleness, humility, asceticism, etc. Or perhaps another man, more intelligent this one, will come to the conclusion that his misery is a result of his mental agitation, and he will think that the cure should consist in applying himself, by such and such exercises, to the task of tranquillising his mind. One such doctrine will say to us, ‘Your misery is due to the fact that you are always desiring something, to your attachment to what you possess’, and this will result, according to the degree of intelligence of the master, in the advice to give away all your possessions, or to learn to detach yourself inwardly from the belongings that you continue to own outwardly. Another such doctrine will see the key to the man’s misery in his lack of self-mastery, and will prescribe ‘Yoga’, methods aimed at progressive training of the body, or of feelings, or of the attitude towards others, or of knowledge, or of attention. All that is, from the Zen point of view, just animal-training and leads to one kind of servitude or another (with the illusory and exalting impression of attaining freedom). At the back of all that there is the following simpleminded reasoning: ‘Things are going badly with me in such and such a way; very well, from now on I am going to do exactly the opposite.’ This way of regarding the problem, starting from a form that is judged to be bad, encloses the searcher within the limits of a domain that is formal, and, as a result deprives him of all possibility of re-establishing his consciousness beyond all form; when I am enclosed within the limits of the plane of dualism no reversal of method will deliver me from the dualistic illusion and restore me to Unity. It is perfectly analogous to the problem of ‘Achilles and the Tortoise’; the manner of posing the problem encloses it within the very limits that it is necessary to overstep, and as a result, renders it insoluble.
– Hubert Benoit, The Supreme Doctrine

MAGNIFIES AN OBJECT TEN TIMES

is what it clearly said
on the handle of the magnifying glass
my father received on his fifth birthday.
He took it as a warning; the birthday gift
would only work its magic ten times
and no more, becoming, after that,
just a small round window with no miracle,
toy giant’s monocle, a circle of simple glass.

And so he went about his days with curious thrift,
weighing how much he needed to see any part
of the world up close, observing as best he could
with his own eyes first, thinking, Do I need to see
that dead bug big? That dandelion, that blade
of grass, that wriggling moth in the spider’s web?
I can imagine most of nature’s gifts and crimes.
Best not to waste one of my ten precious times.


He lost count of how many miracles he’d left,
and for weeks after half-expected the magic of the glass
to simply stop. And I have asked him to tell me
of the thrilling moment he realized, or was told,
“ten times” in this context simply meant tenfold
and not ten instances, but he cannot remember.
Likewise the joy that must have come with such
a limitless epiphany. But what he does recall
and says most he misses still is the way the magic
made him see the world the rest of the time,
not through the glass, but all the time
he thought that magic would not last.

– Taylor Mali

I never find words right away. Poems for me always begin with images and rhythms, shapes, feelings, forms, dances in the back of my mind.
– Gary Snyder

The desire to prevent other people from becoming conscious because one does not want to wake up oneself is real destructiveness.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

There are two kinds of people in this world: those for whom BOC stands for Blue Öyster Cult and those for whom BOC stands for Boards Of Canada.
– Dave Segal

One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

I can only gaze with wonder and awe at the depths and heights of our psychic nature. It’s non-spatial universe conceals an untold abundance of images which have accumulated over millions of years of living development and become fixed in the organism.
– Carl Jung

The tension of the future is unbearable in us. It must break through narrow cracks, it must force new ways. You want to cast off the burden, you want to escape the inescapable.
– @RedBookJung

I embrace my solitude as a beautiful gift; I will become beautiful through it.
– Susan Sontag

The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists in the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli.
– Georg Simmel

About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. It seems to me, however, that this can well be described as the general neurosis of our time.
– CG Jung

I’ve been remembering the way my parents used to pepper their speech with radio catchphrases like ‘It’s agony, Ivy’ and ‘After you, Cecil’ and It’s that man again’ and I thought they were lines they’d made up.
– @IMcMillan

I do love you, you silly one.
– Franz Kafka, 1920.

The function of the artist in a disturbed society is to give awareness of the universe, to ask the right questions, and to elevate the mind.
– Marina Abramovic

The ‘real’ reader has always known that he or she must read between the lines. That is where the truth hides itself.
– Lawrence Durrell

A Potential For Misunderstanding
by Charles Hensler

Every day you fall
from the same bridge. Each night
you swim farther upstream.

Houses and gardens in silhouette, the scent
of wood smoke rising, the water heavy
between the trees.

Was that a heron or a flag pole; a shimmering
willow or someone waving from shore?

Is it only the senescent light of stars
arriving weary, or a fragment of frozen moon?

How were you able to weather the guests
who came early, and stayed? There were too many to know—
their urgencies and trembling hands, their clarinets
that wouldn’t play.

So far upstream in the feathered dark
past the shore, the fences, the cottonwood—

is the house you find the house you knew,
the light your light in the window?

– Charles Hensler

I think, to a poet, the human community is like the community of birds to a bird, singing to each other. Love is one of the reasons we are singing to one another, love of language itself, love of sound, love of singing itself, and love of the other birds.
– Sharon Olds

Apology

after Edna St. Vincent Millay

And there will always be new cold
on the windowsill, new gentle
splintered fingernail, the little frost.
So razor fresh. So crocus fresh.

I am sorry for the iris heat of yesterday
and nothing more. I mistake
a riverbed knuckled with fish
for something simple. I, too, will be

good. Good
as the jugular’s perfect hyacinth.
Small budding. Smalling disappointments.
I know. And I am not resigned.

– Ahana Banerji

The Sand
We watched this kid write his name in the sand
on the last day we spent there together,
the way he took a stick in his hand
that some dog had been chasing forever
to carefully carve out letters like quavers
and semibreves in some musical score,
not thinking of water’s slow erasures
as he quietly worked away at the shore.
To think we knew better in our rapport
of the long year to come and what it held
as if time wouldn’t give us what for
with what we imagined unparalleled.
All told, this poem’s no better than scribbling
on the beach, though each of us keeps singing.
– Ben Wilkinson

(Im)permanence

I.

He said ‘you must be the only girl in the world
who gets upset whenever she’s given flowers’

& I explained it’s not the bouquets that upset me,
it’s what the flowers mean: they scream temporary

fleeting beauty, something so flagrantly not everlasting
& yet apparently symbolising your perpetual love for me.

They’re an idea of happiness that I watch die slowly, painfully,
over seventy-two hours or five days or another tragic week.

II.

They’re busy dying in the corner while we’re fucking,
trying to create new life of our own & failing.

Those sagging lilies simply mirror my lack
of fecundity. See how the soft pollen drops

so easily from stamen, only to be wiped off
the tabletop, ochre dust hot on my fingertips

that I rub together cruelly, forcing hopeful spores
into a state of obliteration till there’s no hope of more

life left. The filament in every bloom: my fallopian
tubes that don’t function as they’re supposed to.

Stigma protruding from womb, ever-present
even when hidden behind the droop of exhausted petals.

III.

Every shock of colour wrapped in cellophane seems to be
you confidently saying, ‘Here is our love: dying already.’

Every artfully arranged display says, ‘The clock is ticking,’
so mockingly. I smashed every vase in the house

& still you offered me a gathering of already-fading pink
roses in a stolen Stella Artois pint glass. I monitored them

& said, ‘Why are you so intent on reminding me that
everyone and everything I love always leaves me?’

IV.

The symbolism I obsessed over manifested as true:
soon after another negative test, you bagged up our love

& threw it out with the same ease you used to dump
those bunches of supermarket daffodils last spring:

old beauty crumpled in on itself, drowned in stale water,
destined for the compost heap. At least they might

regenerate one day, turn from decay to beauty again.
Unlike us: dead-ended from the moment we were picked.

V.

You bought me a cactus instead one day, unveiled it to me as if
it were a new pet or the longed-for baby, but I still managed

to murder it eventually—absent-mindedly, yes, but I killed it
all the same, through a combination of subconscious spite

& inevitable neglect in the bleak depressive episode
that supressed me when you left. Did I just forget

to water it, or did the succulent kill itself, suicided
in the knowledge that I’m not fit to be a mother?

In those days, nature served solely to remind me
of everything unnatural & ugly about my body.

VI.

How to pick oneself up again after so many deaths? I grieve
daily for the baby I’ll never get to meet & all of the flowers

in my house now are unkillable: faux stems, plastic leaves, silk petals, forever in bloom—permanent reminders that I survived the impermanence of you.

– HLR

People aren’t going hungry because we cannot feed the poor. People are going hungry because we cannot satisfy the rich.
– Mohamad Safa

The heart’s destination is that way and the path to home is this way.

There’s one face in that direction;
there’s another face in this direction.

– Noshi Gilani

Where Thou art—that—is Home—
– Emily Dickinson

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

Naturally, every age thinks that all ages before it were prejudiced, and today we think this more than ever and are just as wrong as all previous ages that thought so. It is sad but unfortunately true that man learns nothing from history.
– CG Jung

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
– Zadie Smith

Ryokou

Pebbled streets
Of the medieval town
Lost their clamour

Transcend dejection
History rises from beyond
Tinged purple past

Your own ancestors
Sent you on a voyage
Orchids your cradle

Root oars
Under canvas
Saffron winged

– Andre aC Connolly

When I awake thinking of dreams I slept on, I often wonder, if the dreams ever wake up thinking of me?
– Anthony Liccione

In the beginning, practice seems to be a matter of personal will, but along the way, it clearly becomes the will of the Dharma.
– Tangen Harada

Trauma is so arresting that traumatized people will focus on it compulsively. Unfortunately, the situation that defeated them once will defeat them again and again.
– Peter A. Levine

This desire for the end of desire, which is finally the motor force behind all metaphysics, does more than attest to an incapacity to tolerate any pleasure than that of satiety. . .
– Kaja Silverman

Loneliness stands on the corner
waiting for a handout.
The book of love
has all the pages torn.
The weatherman says rain today
but what does he know?
We’ll be born again like flowers,
mindless as flowers,
entranced by our own beauty
while in the sepulchres of alleys
the beggar kneels
before an altar of broken windows.
His prayers rise up
like smoke from ancient fires as
along the back streets of the heart,
the blind man taps a cosmic semaphore
and all the lights in the city
go out at once.
– Albert Huffstickler

Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.
– William Penn

To analyze creative people is a great problem because often such people think they are in a neurotic crisis but when you look at their dream material it shows that they are neurotic because they are haunted by a creative idea & should do something creative.
– Marie Louise Von Franz

If you feel safe and loved, your brain becomes specialized in exploration, play, and cooperation; if you are frightened and unwanted, it specializes in managing feelings of fear and abandonment.
– Bessel van der Kolk

If the masculine mind tries to live without its “other half” the feminine soul, then the masculine becomes unbalanced, sick, and finally monstrous. Power without love becomes brutality. Feeling without masculine strength becomes woolly sentimentality.
– Robert A. Johnson

We are involved in a serious social revolution. By and large, American politics is dominated by politicians who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic, and social exploitation.
– John Lewis, March on Washington

Wars are as unfortunate for the earth as they are for people.
– Giacomo Sartori

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 and read for five years.
– Joseph Campbell

When we get really angry, resentful, fearful, or selfish—we start to go a little unconscious. We lose our awareness of what we’re doing with our body, speech, and mind. In this state, it’s all too easy to let ourselves spiral downward.
– Pema Chödrön

A writing career is a journey, not a thing with an end line. You take small steps and big steps, but there’s no “making it.” Small steps are necessary and big steps merely mark the first day of your new job/stage/chapter/whatever. That’s why the hustle never stops.
– Gabino Iglesias

A thoroughly good relationship with ourselves results in being still, which doesn’t mean we don’t run and jump and dance about. It means there’s no compulsiveness. We don’t overwork, overeat, oversmoke, overseduce. In short, we begin to stop causing harm.
– Pema Chodron

The forest is the root of all life; it is the womb that revives our biological instincts, that deepens our intelligence and increases our sensitivity as human beings.
– Akira Miyawaki

One of the great strengths of the inner feminine is the ability to let go, to give up ego control, to stop trying to control the people and the situation, to turn the situation over to fate and wait on the natural flow of the universe.
– Robert A. Johnson, We

Answers tell us where we’ve been. Questions get us on our journey, and I’ve often said to people in psychoanalysis, “This is not about curing you because you’re not a disease, you’re a process. This is about making your life more interesting to you—a life full of adventure, a life full of daily choices that create and express your values.
– James Hollis

I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.
– Françoise Sagan

So that’s another thing poetry allows me. It allows me to deal with being an artist of many backgrounds and to hold great complexity in my very being.
– Jericho Brown

Genuinely experiencing a sense of hopelessness does not lead to despair; it gives rise directly to trust in oneself.
– Chögyam Trungpa

I didn’t put so much energy into healing to be happy all of the time, I know that’s not realistic.
I do it so that I can face the down moments with more ease and so that I can remember that no heavy mood is going to last forever.
– yung pueblo

Buddhism, being nontheistic, does not hold out any promises of divine grace or supernatural interventions.
– Chögyam Trungpa

An old idea suggests that each person comes to life at a time when they have something to give to the world. That sense of soulful giving may be more needed now than ever before, as the world needs genuine vision as well as great imagination to initiate meaningful changes in all areas of culture and nature. Strangely, it tends to be the orphaned and neglected parts of our souls that are the least known but can become most able to see what is needed on all levels of life.
– Michael Meade

Whoever ‘you’ are, you are placed at the beginning and end of the poem…
– Economy of the Unlost, Anne Carson

I write poetry to remember I am alive, that we are alive, and to feel the air around us.
– Maureen N. McLane

In the end a person must lose that which is most precious, that to which one’s whole life has been devoted. The treasure is consciousness; it is the ego’s final sacrifice to the Self.
– June Singer

Saṃsāra in itself is just deluded thought.
And when the nature of the mind is seen,
It is nirvāṇa—there from the beginning.
It is primal wisdom, free of all fixation,
That, in self-knowing, knows its object.
– Longchenpa

This is where the poem holds its breath, where the usable truth sways, sorrowing,
and the people sway with the truth of it, and this is where the poem enters the dark.
– Maureen Seaton

Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

When art becomes intense, loneliness emerges, clarity emerges, strangeness emerges. If it doesn’t go that far, it’s a lie. My past writing has been like wine, and not even the best wine. But from now on it will be like water – clear, bright, and rippling without overflowing – or so I hope.
– Santoka

Begin to weave and the
Divine will provide
the Thread.
– Old Proverb

It’s all in the ear.
– William Carlos Williams

If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.
– H. G. Wells

As the years go by, I’m less and less convinced that technology will present answers to the climate crisis. To me, it’s not fast enough and not more significant than community building or education. Yet, tech continues to receive billions of dollars in funding. Why?
– Isaias Hernandez

People who are given the resources, time, & space to take care of themselves —who aren’t just told “take care of yourself” & given more to do with less —tend to be more productive for longer.

Also, reciprocity is probably the most important part of the social contract.

– @agnesbookbinder

We who choose to surround ourselves with lives even more temporary than our own live within a fragile circle, easily and often breached.
Unable to accept its awful gaps, we still would live no other way.
– Irving Townshend

Nature isn’t classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly it’s a wonderful problem, because it doesn’t look so easy.
– Richard Feynman

The world spectator is emphatically a desiring subject. He has done more than accede to lack; he has learned to take pleasure in his own insatiability.
– Kaja Silverman

Singing Everything – Joy Harjo

Once there were songs for everything,
Songs for planting, for growing, for harvesting,
For eating, getting drunk, falling asleep,
For sunrise, birth, mind-break, and war.
For death (those are the heaviest songs and they
Have to be pried from the earth with shovels of grief)
Now all we hear are falling-in-love songs and
Falling apart after falling in love songs.
The earth is leaning sideways
And a song is emerging from the floods
And fires. Urgent tendrils lift toward the sun.
You must be friends with silence to hear.
The songs of the guardians of silence are the most powerful—
They are the most rare.

The Battles of the Pen and the Scissors (Excerpt)

Writer, you hold a flame in your hand,
or is it the blade of a sword or a spear– 
the tree of knowledge of good and evil,
or a staff to make wondrous signs appear?

Are there words enough in all of song
to praise the pen? Who else could bear
the burden of bringing back the past
and preserving it then as though with myrrh?

It has no ear with which it might hear,
or mouth with which to offer answers,
and yet the pen, in a single stroke,
at once does both—observes and remembers.

At night he says “Tomorrow I’ll write,”
but there nothing at all to back up his words;
the heaven’s frost caught in his face,
and the cackling of mocking ice is heard.

Don’t pride yourself on tomorrow’s prize,
when you have no notion of what it hides.

– Shem Tov Ardutiel (pen name Santob De Carrion)

Zarathustra says to go back to the body, go into the body, and then everything will be right, for there the greatest intelligence is hidden.
– CG Jung

Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art.
– Maya Angelou

I feel full of poetry, strong poetry, simple, fantastic, religious, bad, deep, wicked, mystical.
Everything, everything, I want to be all things.
– Federico García Lorca

Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry. When someone intrudes into the poet’s life, the poet loses his or her balance for a moment. The person who writes the poetry emerges, tentatively, like a hermit crab from a conch shell.
– Jack Spicer

Don’t be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.
– Arthur Miller

Be yourself. The world worships the original.
– Ingrid Bergman

Be honest, frank and fearless… Read some good, heavy, serious books just for discipline: Take yourself in hand and master yourself.
– W.E.B. Du Bois

The way in which I am being destroyed—
Those who see—rub their hands in envy.
– Jaun Eliya

In the Old Testament, religious intolerance manifested itself primarily in an abhorrence of images. The word idol comes from the Latin idolum, which in turn derives from the Greek word for image, eidolon.
– Leonard Shlain

and the universe splits open for one poem—
the way a life lived calls on us to praise it.
– Maureen Seaton

I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition like mine, and books, where I found it quite often.
– Julio Cortazar

In the course of analysis the ego changes its standpoint. It finds a broader context. The personal, the contemporary, relates to a the larger perspective if large enough, the perspective of eternity.
– Edward Edinger

a bonfire
on a summer night
at the edge of the ocean
– Buson

And a verse every night
Unfolding from the wisdom of your absence.
– Hilda Hilst

The development of Western philosophy during the last two centuries has succeeded in isolating the mind in its own sphere and in severing it from its primordial oneness with the universe.
– CG Jung

Since universities are collapsing, should we bring back monasteries as centres of knowledge?
– @DuncanAStuart

In Buddhist terms, our worth is a product of our ability to choose between right and wrong, between truth and delusion—and these are consequential choices. We know the difference between wholesome and unwholesome acts, and we know that our actions have consequences.
– Sallie Jiko Tisdale

I still love books where nothing happens, / good or bad. The page is one landscape I move through.
– Derrick Austin

It is perfectly possible — indeed, it is far from uncommon — to go to bed one night, or wake up one morning, or simply walk through a door one has known all one’s life, and discover, between inhaling and exhaling, that the self one has sewn together with such effort is all dirty rags, is unusable, is gone: and out of what raw material will one build a self again? The lives of men — and, therefore, of nations — to an extent literally unimaginable, depend on how vividly this question lives in the mind. It is a question which can paralyze the mind, of course; but if the question does not live in the mind, then one is simply condemned to eternal youth, which is a synonym for corruption.
– James Baldwin

People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that man grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings.
– Nietzsche

The End of August

I am overtired Of the great harvest I myself desired. – Robert Frost

It’s the end of August and I’m tired. The garden is tired. The grass is tired. Everything is tired. We’ve all had too much summer. Bring on the cold. Bring on the frost. Bring on all that death and destruction. Let’s have some quiet and some peace. Let us rest. Give us emptiness.

– David Budbill

When some of the people who speak publicly on existential risks tell us it’s not too late” we should always ask: It’s not too late for what and for whom.
– Jem Bendell

We have to do it all at once. End racial injustice. End planetary extraction. Help each other, turn to one another. Learn to practice peace. Repair and regenerate. The wall and barricades are false solutions.
– Dr. Elizabeth Sawin

Clarification of terms, with appreciation:

Boycott is when you remove your consumption.
Strike is when you remove your labor.
Vote is when you remove your GOP.

– Ethan Nichtern

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, more discouragement, or more anger to what’s already here. It’s becoming essential that we learn how to relate sanely with difficult times. The earth seems to be beseeching us to connect with joy and discover our innermost essence. This is the best way that we can benefit others.
– Pema Chodron

…in Dagara life, the first few years of a child’s life is spent with the grandparents, not the parents. What the grandparents and grandchildren share together … that the parents do not … is their close proximity to the cosmos. Grandparents will soon return to where the grandchildren came from, so therefore the grandchild is the bearer of news the grandparents need. The grandparents must get this information before the child forgets.
– Malidoma Some

We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.
– John Ruskin

It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.
– Anne Carson, Plainwater

City

I looked at the city
and smiled
and walked in
who would ever want to live here
I wondered
and never went back.

– Mangalesh Dabral

The way a tree grows around its past contributes to its exquisite individuality, character & beauty. I certainly don’t advocate traumatization to build character, but since trauma is almost a given at some point in our lives, the image of the tree can be a valuable mirror.
– Peter A. Levine

But memory has no memory. Or metaphor.
It moves as it wants to move,
and never measures the distance.
– Charles Wright

Deep in the wintry parts of our minds, we are hardy stock and know there is no such thing as a work-free transformation. We know that we will have to burn to the ground in one way or another, and then sit right in the ashes of who we once thought we were and go on from there.
– Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés

He’ll never be frightened. He knows too damn much.
– Ernest Hemingway

Half-hearted,
insincere
and disassociated
but longing to be
wholly present.

This is faith, too.
– Justin McRoberts

We now know that human transformation does not happen through didacticism or through excessive certitude, but through the playful entertainment of another scripting of reality that may subvert the old given text and its interpretation and lead to the embrace of an alternative text and its redescription of reality.
– Walter Brueggemann

Honour this place of not-knowing.
Bow before this bubbling mess of creativity.
Sink into wonderment.
Befriend the very place where you sit or stand.
Do not label this place ‘indecision’ or ‘inaction’.
It is more alive than that, more active.
It is the place where possibilities grow.
It is the place where uncertainty is sacred,
and the place where answers will emerge.
There is courage in staying close.
There is strength in not knowing…
– Jeff Foster

It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance—for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light. That is what I said in the Pentecost sermon. I have reflected on that sermon, and there is some truth in it. But the Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than it seems to imply. Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?
– Marilynne Robinson

We are living in the time of the parenthesis, the time between eras. It is as though we have bracketed off the present from both the past and the future, for we are neither here nor there … but we have not embraced the future either. We have done the human thing: We are clinging to the known past in fear of the unknown future.
– John Naisbitt

There’s always been a struggle between art and commerce, but now I’m telling you art is getting its ass kicked, and it’s making us mean, and it’s making us bitchy, and it’s making us cheap punks and that’s not who we are.
– Aaron Sorkin

Earthing
by Billy Collins

You have probably come across
those scales in planetariums
that tell you how much you
would weigh on other planets.

You have noticed the fat ones
lingering on the Mars scale
and the emaciated slowing up
the line for Neptune.

As a creature of average weight.
I fail to see the attraction.

Imagine squatting in the wasteland
Of Pluto, all five tons of you,
or wandering around Mercury
wondering what to do next with your ounce.

How much better to step onto
the simple bathroom scale,
a happy earthing feeling
the familiar ropes of gravity,

157 pounds standing soaking wet
a respectful distance from the scale

The Widening Sky
by Edward Hirsch

I am so small walking on the beach
at night under the widening sky.
The wet sand quickens beneath my feet
and the waves thunder against the shore.

I am moving away from the boardwalk
with its colorful streamers of people
and the hotels with their blinking lights.
The wind sighs for hundreds of miles.

I am disappearing so far into the dark
I have vanished from sight.
I am a tiny seashell
that has secretly drifted ashore

and carries the sound of the ocean
surging through its body.
I am so small now no one can see me.
How can I be filled with such a vast love?

After I Came Back From Iceland
by Sheenagh Pugh

After I came back from Iceland,
I couldn’t stop talking. It was the light,
you see, the light and the air. I tried to put it
into poems, even, but you couldn’t write

the waterfall on White River, blinding
and glacial, nor the clean toy town
with the resplendent harbour for its glass.
You couldn’t write how the black lava shone,

nor how the outlines of the bright red roofs
cut the sky sharp as a knife: how breathing
was like drinking cold water. When I got back
to Heathrow and walked out into Reading,

I damn near choked on this warm gritty stuff
I called air; also on the conjecture
that we’d all settle for second best
once we’d forgotten there was something more.

A sense of de-familiarization is a recurring feature of spiritual life, and it can come to us in many ways—in art, in travel, in practice. However it comes, it offers an opportunity for openness and intimacy, both, if one can allow oneself to fall into them.
– Henry Shukman, Far from Home

I Watch People In The World

I watch people in the world
Throw away their lives lusting after things,
Never able to satisfy their desires,
Falling into deeper despair
And torturing themselves.
Even if they get what they want
How long will they be able to enjoy it?
For one heavenly pleasure
They suffer ten torments of hell,
Binding themselves more firmly to the grindstone.
Such people are like monkeys
Frantically grasping for the moon in the water
And then falling into a whirlpool.
How endlessly those caught up in the floating world suffer.
Despite myself, I fret over them all night
And cannot staunch my flow of tears.

– Taigu Ryokan, trans. John Stephens

We all are born whole but somehow the culture demands that we live out only part of our nature and refuse other parts of our inheritance.
– Robert A. Johnson

with nowhere to perch
in the middle of a field
a bird sings
– Basho

We could say that only an overwhelmingly strong emotional experience can interrupt our relation to the comfort of the times to the point where we are forced to look inside ourselves.
– J. Gary Sparks

When they dig our poems up out of the rubble, we want them to know who we were, what consciousness was, but also how astounding and unimaginably infinite and mysterious life was.
– Jorie Graham

Whatever the shape of the distinct, multifarious display,
Its reality is self-sprung emanation, magical projection,
And it never strays from the nonaction of the All-Good.
– Longchenpa

Individuals must become both more united and increasingly different
– Guattari

parley in Milton Keynes

an agreement
has been brokered

between The Teens
and The Old Folks:

both parties affirmed
the need for soft shoes

28.VIII.23

– Alec Finlay (dailies)

Poems do begin with my life, my body, my mess of unfiltered emotional ongoingness & that material are the bones of the poems. The poems themselves, however, always feel larger than me. They flesh out into real other beings and walk around in the world without me.
– Ada Limón

I have attained three supreme mystical powers. I am going to teach them to you, if you are ready. These siddhis overcome all obstacles, stun all enemies, and open all the portals to the Infinite. Normally I would keep them a secret, only for the initiated, but because we are nearing the collapse of the empire, I must share them with you in hopes that you will use them as talismans for your journey. These three mystical powers have been hidden for thousands of years in the monasteries of the Himalayas, but they must now be revealed. Of course, you received these secret initiations when you were a baby in the crib, goo-gooing, burbing and farting, muttering “Ga!” “Hu!” “Mama!” “Bha!” and other bija mantras of supreme wisdom. But you exchanged your radiance for an education. Now you must be re-initiated.

1. First, whenever you are sad or angry or confused, take it as a sign to abandon your mind. Sink down into your body. Feel your heart-beat. Just stop whining, fall down, and enter your heart-beat.

2. Don’t take your next breath, receive it.

3. When you’ve fallen into your heart-beat and realized that every breath is a gift to be received, not taken, then offer the gift back to the Giver, slowly breathe out, and listen.

Listen to what? Between breathing out and breathing in, listen to the quietest most distant sound. Just for a moment. This moment is an eternal door. This door is in the center of your chest, between going and coming, between beats, where there is no journey, no thought, no “I.” Listen to what? Listen to the space beyond the faintest sound. Listen to the vibrating aliveness of listening itself. Listen to the symphony of your flesh, the chorus of electrons, the song of distant stars falling into the neurons of your solar plexus. Drown in the hum of silence. Now you must pay me. Here is your initiation fee. Because if you don’t pay me, the mystical power of these secret techniques will not be activated. OK? So please send me tidal waves of compassion. Forgive me for ever having imagined there was anything to learn but listening, pulsation, and friendship with your own heart.

– Fred LaMotte

You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.
– Anaïs Nin

colonialism is primarily an economic domination…For this very reason…the first objective of our resistance…is to liberate our land economically, although beforehand we have to pass through political liberation.
– Amilcar Cabral

It is devastating, all this blinding ideology. Politics and religion and fear make people do crazy things….as well as turn a blind eye to others who are behaving in disturbing ways. It is disturbing.
– Kent Burgess

Dear Child of God, you are loved with a love that nothing can shake, a love that loved you long before you were created, a love that will be there long after everything has disappeared. You are precious, with a preciousness that is totally quite immeasurable. And God wants you to be like God. Filled with life and goodness and laughter – and joy.

God, who is forever pouring out God’s whole being from all eternity, wants you to flourish. God wants you to be filled with joy and excitement and ever longing to be able to find what is so beautiful in God’s creation: the compassion of so many, the caring, the sharing.

And God says, Please, my child, help me. Help me to spread love and laughter and joy and compassion. And you know what, my child? As you do this – hey, presto – you discover joy. Joy, which you had not sought, comes as the gift, as almost the reward for this non-self-regarding caring for others.

– Archbishop Desmond Tutu

The witch-burnings did not take place during the ‘Dark Ages,’ as we commonly suppose. They occurred between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries– precisely during and following the Renaissance, that glorious period when, as we are taught, ‘men’s’ minds were being freed from bleakness and superstition. While Michelangelo was sculpting and Shakespeare writing, the witches were burning. The whole secular ‘Enlightenment,’ in fact, the male professions of doctor, lawyer, judge, artist, all rose from the ashes of the destroyed women’s culture. Renaissance men were celebrating naked female beauty in their art, while women’s bodies were being tortured and burned by the hundreds of thousands all around them.
– Monica Sjöö & Barbara Mor

When someone goes to the theater, to a concert or to a party of any kind, if the party is to his liking, he immediately remembers and regrets that the people he wants are not there.” ‘What my sister, my father, would like this,’ he thinks, and no longer enjoys the show but through a mild melancholy. This is the melancholy that I feel, not for the people of my house, which would be small and bad, but for all creatures that for lack of means and for their misfortune do not enjoy the supreme good of beauty which is life and is goodness and is serenity and it is passion. That’s why I never own a book, because I gift how many I buy, which are infinite, and that’s why I’m here honored and pleased to inaugurate this people’s library, the first surely in the whole province of Granada.

Man doesn’t only live on bread. I, if I was hungry and disabled on the street, I would not ask for a bread; but I would ask for half a loaf and a book. And I attack from here violently those who only talk about economic claims without ever naming the cultural claims which is what the peoples ask for screamingly. It’s good for all men to eat, but for all men to know. Let them enjoy all the fruits of the human spirit because otherwise is to make them Civil service machines, is to make them slaves to a terrible social organization.

I have much more shame for a man who wants to know and can’t, than for a hungry man. For a hungry man can easily quench his hunger with a loaf of bread or some fruit, but a man who is eager to know and has no means, suffers terrible agony because it is books, books, many books that he needs and where are those books?

Books ! Books ! Make here a magic word equivalent to saying: ‘love, love’, and that peoples should ask as they ask for bread or as they long for rain for their seedlings. When insignificant Russian writer Fedor Dostoyevsky, father of the Russian Revolution much more than Lenin, he was imprisoned in Siberia, far from the world, between four walls and surrounded by desolate infinite snow plains; and he called for help in a letter to his distant family, he only said: ‘Send me books, books, many.’ books so my soul does not die! ’. I was cold and did not ask for fire, I was terribly thirsty and did not ask water: I asked for books, that is, horizons, that is, stairs to climb the summit of the spirit and heart. Because the physical, biological, natural agony of a body by hunger, thirst or cold, lasts little, very little, but the agony of the unsatisfied soul lasts a lifetime.

The great Menéndez Pidal, one of Europe’s most true wise men, has already said that the motto of the Republic should be: ‘Culture’. Culture because only through it can be solved the problems in which the people are debated today full of faith, but lacking light.
– Federico Garcia

A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved.
– Ocean Vuong

Even if one is the most sinful of all sinners, one shall yet cross over the ocean of sin by the raft of self-knowledge alone. As the blazing fire reduces wood to ashes, similarly, the fire of Self-knowledge reduces all bonds of karma to ashes…
– Krishna, Bhagavad Gita

Let us start a better life.
– Franz Kafka, 1912.

There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.
– T. S. Eliot

I don’t envision a single thing that, when undeveloped, leads to such great harm as the mind. The mind, when undeveloped, leads to great harm.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu

If the emergent God that wants to be born in man is not humanized and transformed by a sufficient number of conscious individuals, its dark aspect can destroy us.
– Edward Edinger

I hear, my dear boy, that you, too, are busying yourself with art. There is nothing more divine. And nothing simpler. Yet, why is it so difficult? Every first move, everything unwilled, is beautiful, but once self-conscious, it all becomes crooked and perverse.
– Kleist to Ruhle

The Holy Ghost, the autonomous transpersonal spirit that connects man with God, has been lost by modem man. Like the Gnostic Sophia, it has fallen into the darkness of matter.
– Edward Edinger

Stuart Hall said, “The task of socialism is to meet people where they are, where they are touched, bitten, moved, frustrated, nauseated—to develop discontent,” and that a socialist movement “must be developed in cultural and social terms, as well as in economic and political.”

If I make another mistake, it will be the last– for then I will despise either my soul or the earth, and I will separate them.
– Kleist in Paris

We are citizens of two realms, we all must sustain a dual allegiance: we sense the ineffable in one realm, we name and exploit reality in another.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel

The modern notion of a philosopher is that of an academic, dry-as-dust rationalist. The early tradition of philosophy was anything but that. Philosophers were visionaries, quite similar to the great Hebrew prophets.
– Edward Edinger

Any writer is always trying to get better, trying to push out of their own comfort zones. Of course I want to focus on the musicality of the line, the work of the metaphor, the thematic resonance, but above all, I am interested in writing something that matters.
– Ada Limón

In this field cows made
Their own path; here they come now,
This summer evening
– @hoshigenari

Do not laugh at a blind man,
nor tease a dwarf,
nor cause hardship for the lame.
Don’t tease a man
who is in the hand of the god (i.e. insane)

– fragment from ancient Egyptian papyrus, dated to around the time of Amenhotep III

Shakyamuni did not dedicate his life simply to helping us to become completely enlightened & to escape the world of karma & rebirth. He taught us, rather, to teach others to teach others, until such time as the world is full of beings whose sole aim in life is to be of service.
– Francis Dojun Cook

Nothing is more disgusting than the majority: because it consists of a few powerful predecessors, of rogues who adapt themselves, of weak who assimilate themselves, and the masses who imitate without knowing at all what they want.
– Goethe

What is error, and its sequel, lie, if not a kind of Caput Mortum, an inert matter without which truth would be too volatile, and could not be mixed and ground in human mortars?
– Marguerite Yourcenar

along a moonlit river
our thoughts flowing
with the water
– Etsujin

I want the kind of resume / that takes home all the prizes and a salary / commensurate with thunderstorms.
– Sasha Fletcher

Investigate what is, and not what pleases.
– J. W. von Goethe

I was one of the lucky ones. Moonlight was always flowing within my sea-like heart.
– Julia de Burgos

And the words, which hold true for us, are for seizing with our hands — one sentence long, which never ends.
– Karl Krolow

Only art penetrates what pride, passion, intelligence and habit erect on all sides — the seeming realities of this world.
– Saul Bellow

Imagine language
after opaque years
become transparent …

since the hour needs witnesses
who can construct a sentence.

Which was my country?
A schism in the nation,
slogans on banners

– Marilyn Hacker

Conscious attention is a designed function of the brain to scan the environment, like a radar does, and note for any troublemaking changes. But if you identify yourself with your troubleshooter, then naturally you define yourself as being in a perpetual state of anxiety.
– Alan Watts

Fear is a female faint in which freedom loses consciousness; speaking psychologically, the Fall of Man always takes place in a faint.
– Søren Kierkegaard

Incantation
Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master.
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.
– Czeslaw Milosz

Dream Song

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.

After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
People bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me: wag.

– John Berryman

FOR EARTH’S GRANDSONS
by Joy Harjo

Stand tall, no matter height, how dark your skin

Your spirit is all colors within

You are made of the finest woven light

From the iridescent love that formed your mothers, fathers

Your grandparents all the way back on the spiral road–

There is no end to this love

It has formed your bodies

Feeds your bright spirits

And no matter what happens in these times of breaking–

No matter dictators, the heartless, and liars

No matter– you are born of those

Who kept ceremonial embers burning in their hands

All through the miles of relentless exile

Those who sang the path through massacre

All the way to sunrise

You will make it through—

Italy to Lord
It’s dark in here and forest green: Britannica,
sixteen oak trees in a London living room,
the little girl, my mother, in the bookcase glass.
Italy, Ithaca, Izmail, Japan, each page a mainsail,
turning, HMS Discovery – none of the rivers
of southern Italy is of any great importance.
Like birds on a long-haul flight, let not seas
or deserts, cliffs or icy mountain-tops
impede you. Jews, Kabȋr, Kabul, Kaffir,
from up here all seems clear (all evil in the world’s
ascribed to Maya or illusion), then home at last
returned from all those navigable miles
to Lichen, Linnet, Logic, London, to find
a century has passed, the forest’s cleared,
the animals all bared and scorched, the gold
all brought to light. I look into the glass,
discover there myself in dense shade, deep

and shadowy as on any wooded island.
– Jane Draycott

Labyrinth by Jorge Luis Borges
Translated from the Spanish by Stephen Kessler

There’ll never be a door. You are inside
and the fortress contains the universe
and has no other side nor any back
nor any outer wall nor secret core.
Do not expect the rigor of your path,
which stubbornly splits into another one,
which stubbornly splits into another one,
to have an end. Your fate is ironclad
like your judge. Do not expect the charge
of the bull that is a man and whose strange
plural form fills the thicket of endless
interwoven stone with your own horror.
It does not exist. Expect nothing. Not

even the beast obscured by the black dusk.

The Laboratory by Wislawa Szymborska
Translated from the Polish by Walter Whipple

Did it all
happen in the laboratory?
Beneath one lamp by day
and billions by night?

Are we a trial generation?
Poured from one beaker to another,
shaken in retorts,
observed by something more than an eye,
each one individually
taken by forceps?

Or maybe otherwise:
no interventions.
The transformations occur on their own
in accordance with a plan.
The needle draws
the expected zigzags.

Maybe until now there was nothing interesting in us.
The control monitors are seldom switched on,
except when there’s a war, and a rather big one at that,
several flights over the lump of clay called Earth,
or significant movements from point A to point B.

Or perhaps thus:
they only have a taste for episodes.
Look! a little girl on a big screen
is sewing a button to her sleeve.

The monitors begin to shriek,
personnel come running in.
Oh, what sort of tiny creature
with a little heart beating on the inside!
What graceful dignity
in the way she draws the thread!
Someone calls out in rapture:
Tell the Boss,
and let him come see for himself!

Edward Lear by W. H. Auden

Left by his friend to breakfast alone on the white
Italian shore, his Terrible Demon arose
Over his shoulder; he wept to himself in the night,
A dirty landscape-painter who hated his nose.

The legions of cruel inquisitive They
Were so many and big like dogs: he was upset
By Germans and boats; affection was miles away:
But guided by tears he successfully reached his Regret.

How prodigious the welcome was. Flowers took his hat
And bore him off to introduce him to the tongs;
The demon’s false nose made the table laugh; a cat
Soon had him waltzing madly, let him squeeze her hand;
Words pushed him to the piano to sing comic songs;

And children swarmed to him like settlers. He became a land.

The Birds
by Linda Pastan

The Birds
are heading south, pulled
by a compass in the genes.
They are not fooled
by this odd November summer,
though we stand in our doorways
wearing cotton dresses.
We are watching them

as they swoop and gather–
the shadow of wings
falls over the heart.
When they rustle among
the empty branches, the trees
must think their lost leaves
have come back.

The birds are heading south,
instinct is the oldest story.
They fly over their doubles,
the mute weathervanes,
teaching all of us
with their tailfeathers
the true north.

At Once I Was Irish, At Least
by Thomas Whitehead

There was no one with me, so
I took my hot baked potato
and while I ate the other
portions of my uncomplicated dinner,

held the potato inside my jacket
and right over my heart,
and you should know, before
we part, how I was better for it.

Insomnia by Linda Pastan

I remember when by body
was a friend.

when sleep like a good dog
came when summoned.

The door to the future
had not started to shut,

and lying on my back
between cold sheets

did not feel
like a rehearsal.

Now what light is left
comes up—a stain in the east,

and sleep, reluctant
as a busy doctor,

gives me a little
of its time.

The Makers
Who can remember back to the first poets, The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus? No one has remembered that far back Or now considers, among the artifacts And bones and cantilevered inference The past is made of, those first and greatest poets, So lofty and disdainful of renown They left us not a name to know them by. They were the ones that in whatever tongue Worded the world, that were the first to say Star, water, stone, that said the visible And made it bring invisibles to view In wind and time and change, and in the mind Itself that minded the hitherto idiot world And spoke the speechless world and sang the towers Of the city into the astonished sky. They were the first great listeners, attuned To interval, relationship, and scale, The first to say above, beneath, beyond, Conjurors with love, death, sleep, with bread and wine, Who having uttered vanished from the world Leaving no memory but the marvelous Magical elements, the breathing shapes And stops of breath we build our Babels of.
– Howard Nemerov

When word gets around that you can listen
when others tend to talk,
people will treat you as a sage.
– Ed Koch

Most readers are looking for books similar to ones they’ve already read and loved, so it’s smart to familiarize yourself with other titles out there that could be comparative to yours.
– Brooke Warner

In solitude we find ourselves; we prepare ourselves to come to conversation with something to say that is authentic, ours. If we can’t gather ourselves, we can’t recognize other people for who they are. If we are not content to be alone, we turn others into the people we need them to be. If we don’t know how to be alone, we’ll only know how to be lonely.
– Sherry Turkle

Being habitually angry . . . undermines your trust. First of all, it’s hard to trust yourself. At some level you’re aware that your aggression could bring you down at any moment. And since you can’t trust yourself, it’s hard to trust anyone else. Because your own mind is unreliable, everyone else seems unreliable as well. You are highly susceptible to paranoia. You don’t know who will stick by you, who will be there in your time of need, and who will let you down or betray you.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, Peaceful Heart

I never found a genuine way
to heal until I was genuinely
rooting for everybody’s healing,
including the people whose poor
decisions I was healing from.
– Andrea Gibson

To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up. Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (they don’t mean me) or by despair (there’s nothing we can do). Each of us must find our work and do it.
– Audre Lorde

Most of the living aren’t plodding through zombie routines but are enthusiastically engaged in adventurous interplay, as well as the learning and satisfaction that ensues. Even a simple game can become so absorbing that one is fully present in the here and now, which helps us concentrate on pursuing a goal for a long time. As Albert Einstein says, “Play is the highest form of research.”
– George Gorman

Awareness practice is not just sitting meditation or meditation-in-action alone. It is a unique training practice in how to behave as an inspired human being. That is what is meant by being an artist.
– Chögyam Trungpa

I don’t want to be a poet, I want to be poetry.
– C.A. Conrad

What are we now but voices / who promise each other a life
– Eliza Griswold

…writing honestly is very difficult. The more I try to be honest, the farther my words sink into darkness.
– Murakami

The crossroads represents a place where consciousness is crossed by the unconscious in other words, a place where you have to surrender your ego will to a higher will.
– Marion Woodman

This naturally present pristine cognition, the ultimate truth of the naturally pure expanse, is the original abiding nature of all things, and it is the pristine cognition to be experienced by individual intuitive awareness.
– Dudjom Rinpoche

i went into a bookstore. i began to count the books there to read and the years i’m left to live. i won’t last for half of it! surely there must be other ways to save a person, otherwise i’m lost.
– almada negreiros

You were a town with one pay phone and someone else was using it.
– Kim Addonizio

The unpardonable sin, in Campbell’s book, was the sin of inadvertence, of not being alert, not quite awake.
– Bill Moyers

People have gotten used to living a botched-up life – to be anxious, insecure, hateful, jealous, and in various states of unpleasantness through the day – slowly humanity has begun to see it as normal. None of these things are normal. These are abnormalities. Once you accept them as part of life they become normal because the majority has joined the gang of unpleasantness. They are all saying, “Unpleasantness is normal. Being nasty to each other is normal. Being nasty to myself is normal.” Someone trusted that you would be doing good things at least to yourself and said, “Do unto others what you do unto yourself.” I am telling you, never do unto others what you are doing to yourself! By being with people, I know what they are doing to themselves is the worst thing. Fortunately, they are not doing such horrible things to others. Only once in a while they are giving a dose to others, but to themselves they are giving it throughout the day.
– Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev

THE GIFT

Be still, my soul, and steadfast.
Earth and heaven both are still watching
though time is draining from the clock
and your walk, that was confident and quick,
has become slow.

So, be slow if you must, but let
the heart still play its true part.
Love still as once you loved, deeply
and without patience. Let God and the world
know you are grateful.
That the gift has been given.

– Mary Oliver

The world is no longer magical. You’ve been left out.
You shall no longer share the bright moon
nor the slow gardens. There is no one anymore
moon not a mirror of the past,
glass of solitude, sun of agonies.
Goodbye the mutual hands and the sighs
that brought love closer. Today you only have
the faithful memory and the deserted days.
Nobody Loses (repeat emptiness)
but which have not and have not had
Never, but not enough to be brave
to learn the art of forgetting.
A symbol, a rose, it tears you apart
and he can kill you a guitar.
I won’t be happy anymore. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
There are so many other things in the world;
any instant is deeper
and different than the sea. Life is short
and though the hours are so long, a
dark wonder is haunting us,
death, that other sea, that other arrow
that delivers us from the sun and the moon
and of love. The bliss you gave me
and you removed me must be erased;
what was everything must be nothing.
I only have the joy of being sad,
that vanity habit that bends me
to the south, at a certain door, at a certain corner.
– Jorge Luis Borge

Modern mind has become more and more calculating. .. Only money economy has filled the days of so many people with weighing, calculating, with numerical determinations, with a reduction of qualitative values to quantitative ones.
– Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life

All of us are in some sort of theatre that we create for ourselves
– Werner Herzog

The only writers who have any peace are the ones who don’t write. And there are some like that. They wallow in a sea of possibilities. To express a thought, you first have to limit it, and that means kill it. Every word I speak robs me of a thousand others, and every line I write means giving up another.
– Stanisław Lem

I like Simone Weil’s idea that writing is actually the translation of a text we already carry within us. That notion makes a heavy task lighter. In fact, though, writing is the backbreaking work of hacking a footpath, as in a coal mine; in total darkness, beneath the earth. In poetry there are moments of illumination. A streak of light falls in the dark corridor, then the darkness slams shut overhead once more. In prose the darknesses are even thicker, the black clods even harder.
– Anna Kamienska

If we think about what it means to “concentrate” or “pay attention” at an individual level, it implies alignment: different parts of the mind and even the body acting in concert and oriented toward the same thing. To pay attention to one thing is to resist paying attention to other things; it meant constantly denying and thwarting provocations outside the sphere of one’s attention. We contrast this with distraction, in which the mind is disassembled, pointing in many different directions at once and preventing meaningful action. It seems the same is true on a collective level. Just as it takes alignment for someone to concentrate and act with intention, it requires alignment for a “movement” to move. Importantly, this is not a top-down formation, but rather a mutual agreement among individuals who pay intense attention to the same things and to each other. I draw the connection between individual and collective concentration because it makes the stakes of attention clear. It’s not just that living in a constant state of distraction is unpleasant, or that a life without wilful thought and action is an impoverished one. If it’s true that collective agency both mirrors and relies on the individual capacity to “pay attention”, then in a time that demands action, distraction appears to be (at the level of the collective) a life-and-death matter. A social body that can’t concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can’t think and act.
– Jenny Odell

Poetry is not a fancy way of giving you information; it’s an incantation. It is actually a magic spell. It changes things; it changes you.
– Philip Pullman

Life hasn’t just begun. Art never had a beginning. Always, until the moment of its stopping, it was constantly there. It is infinite. It is here, at this moment, behind me and inside me, and, as if the doors of an Assembly Hall were suddenly flung open, I am immersed in its fresh, headlong omnilocality and omnitemporality, as if an oath of allegiance were to be sworn without delay. No genuine book has a first page. Like the rustling of a forest, it is begotten God knows where, and it grows and it rolls, arousing the dense wilds of the forest until suddenly, in the very darkest, most stunned and panicked moment, it rolls to its end and begins to speak with all the treetops at once.
– Boris Pasternak

Be careful of words, even the miraculous ones. For the miraculous we do our best, sometimes they swarm like insects and leave not a sting but a kiss. They can be as good as fingers. They can be as trusty as the rock you stick your bottom on. But they can be both daisies and bruises. Yet I am in love with words. They are doves falling out of the ceiling. They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap. They are the trees, the legs of summer, and the sun, its passionate face…
– Anne Sexton

With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism.
– Marshall McLuhan

Parsifal, Turning Difficulties into Healing,
by Jack Kornfield.

In the Arthurian legends, the young knight Parsifal joins the Knights of the Round Table to seek the Holy Grail. His mentor, Gournamond, tells him that to remain honorable, he must follow two rules: First, he should neither seduce nor be seduced. And second, if he reaches the Castle of the Holy Grail, he must ask, “Whom does the Grail serve?” As he travels, he sees all around him signs of suffering and disarray. But when Parsifal finally makes his way to the Grail Castle, he is utterly intoxicated by the court. He meets the wounded Fisher King and is offered a magical banquet that includes everything he could desire. He forgets his purpose and does not ask the essential question. The next morning the whole castle and kingdom disappear and Parsifal must wander and suffer for many years until by hard-won maturity he returns a second time. This time he remembers, “Whom does the Grail serve?” he asks. The Fisher King answers, “The Holy Grail serves the Grail King.” (The Grail King is God.) As soon as the Fisher King is reminded of this holy truth, he is healed, and in being healed, all that has rotted in the fields, all disharmony in his nation, all the sufferings of the kingdom are restored to peace and well-being.

The resolution of the journey to enlightenment comes when we recognize that both our suffering and our awakening are in the service of a higher good. Unless we serve the Divine, our unfulfilled needs can become entangled with out quest, and our spiritual experiences can work only to create a more expanded form of ego. A teacher who is overidentified with spiritual energy may subtly believe that, as the one who carries the teachings, it is he or she who must be served. We should be wary when there is a court around a teacher that focuses more on the person than on the wisdom of the lineage. When the Fisher King forgets whom he serves, the bounty of the kingdom fails, and all suffer from the king’s spiritual sickness.

We’re unprepared
for our little disappointments.
Normally I might not pay attention
to sunlight pouring into the courtyard
but this afternoon, I do –
probably because it’s already nearly gone.
None of us mentions the night,
but I, for one, would like to
be expecting it, when
it comes.
– Nathan McClain

My vessel is launched on the boundless main and my sails are spread to the wind ! In the whole of the world there is nothing that stays unchanged. All is in flux. Any shape that is formed is constantly shifting. Time itself flows steadily by in perpetual motion.
Think of a river: no river can ever arrest its current, nor can the fleeting hour. But as water is forced downstream by the water behind it and presses no less on the water ahead, so time is in constant flight and pursuit, continually new. The present turns into the past and the future replaces the present; every moment that passes is new and eternally changing.
– Ovid, Metamorphoses

When I love
I feel that I am the king of time
I possess the earth and everything on it
and ride into the sun upon my horse.
When I love
I become liquid light
invisible to the eye
and the poems in my notebooks
become fields of mimosa and poppy.
When I love
the water gushes from my fingers
grass grows on my tongue
when I love
I become time outside all time.
When I love a woman
all the trees run barefoot toward me?
– Nizar Qabbani

IN PRAISE OF MY SISTER by Wislawa Szymborska
Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczcak and Clare Cavanagh

My sister doesn’t write poems.
and it’s unlikely that she’ll suddenly start writing poems.
She takes after her mother, who didn’t write poems,
and also her father, who likewise didn’t write poems.
I feel safe beneath my sister’s roof:
my sister’s husband would rather die than write poems.
And, even though this is starting to sound as repetitive as
Peter Piper,
the truth is, none of my relatives write poems.

My sister’s desk drawers don’t hold old poems,
and her handbag doesn’t hold new ones,
When my sister asks me over for lunch,
I know she doesn’t want to read me her poems.
Her soups are delicious without ulterior motives.
Her coffee doesn’t spill on manuscripts.

There are many families in which nobody writes poems,
but once it starts up it’s hard to quarantine.
Sometimes poetry cascades down through the generations,
creating fatal whirlpools where family love may founder.

My sister has tackled oral prose with some success.
but her entire written opus consists of postcards from
vacations
whose text is only the same promise every year:
when she gets back, she’ll have
so much
much
much to tell.

We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.
– Albert Einstein

Upon being the first Black man to earn a PhD from Harvard, WEB DuBois said: The honor, I assure you, was Harvard’s.

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
– Psalm 137

A monk asks: Is there anything more miraculous than the wonders of Nature?


The master answers: Yes, your awareness of the wonders of Nature.
– Angelus Silesius

But write what you love with eyes wide open.
– James Scott Bell

In order to establish an enlightened society for others, we need to discover what inherently we have to offer the world.
– Chögyam Trungpa

…I had been sleepwalking: poems had guided me, instead of the moon, and the world had been absent.
– Lydia Chukovskaya, The Akhmatova Journals, Volume 1

Perhaps the greatest irony of healing is that it occurs when we accept our felt experience, rather than rely on willpower or focused effort to get rid of the unwanted.
– Josh Korda

The fact that writing remains so difficult is what puzzles.
– Elizabeth Hardwick

Everything I deny is granted a greater degree of autonomy. Everything I project onto the other ultimately comes back to haunt me. Everything I refuse to face remains a part of my presence in this world. Looking at that, working at it as best we can, lifting that off of our partners and others is the single best thing we can do for the world.
– James Hollis

The bright hero is a little too bright, a little too invulnerable, and a little too far away from ordinary human suffering and ordinary human longing to perform his appointed task of redemption. He can be injured only from behind, implying that the bright heroic stance can deflect anything in life but the shadow, the unconscious.
– Liz Greene

With glorious naïveté a statesman comes out with the proud declaration that he has no “imagination for evil.” Quite right: we have no imagination for evil, but evil has us in its grip. Some do not want to know this, and others are identified with evil. That is the psychological situation in the world today.
– CG Jung

What I want very much to see are two mass migrations — one out of the shallows of rationalistic humanism to an appreciation of the mystery of things, the other out of religious faith to a true appreciation of our ignorance.
– Bryan Magee

I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are.
– Ray Bradbury

If the person you like has an overloaded ego and has difficulty seeing other perspectives beyond their own, they will struggle to love you well.
– yung pueblo

I am sorry I can say nothing more to console you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. [People] will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on stage. But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Everything you’ve built and collected has to be carried higher. Every day higher still. You get the feeling that your paradise is sinking into the sea and you have a strange desire to go with it.
– Tove Jansson

Sssnnnwhuffffll?Hnwhuffl hhnnwfl hnfl hfl?Gdroblboblhobngbl gbl gl g g g g glbgl…
– Edwin Morgan, The Loch Ness Monster’s Song

…He roved among the vales and streams, In the green wood and hollow dell; They were his dwellings night and day, But nature ne’er could find the way Into the heart of Peter Bell. In vain, through every changeful year, Did Nature lead him as before; A primrose by a river’s brim A yellow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more…
– William Wordsworth, Peter Bell

To the poet, the primrose can be something more. I suggest that this something more is, in fact, a self-reflexive recognition. The primrose resembles a poem and both poem and primrose resemble the poet. He learns about himself as a creator when he looks at the primrose. His pride is enhanced to see himself as a contributor to the vast processes which the primrose exemplifies. And his humility is exercised and made valid by recognizing himself as a tiny product of those processes.
– Gregory Bateson

It’s quite a thing to do a little better than the ones who came before. It may not seem like such a big thing—perhaps because we know that one day, humanity will rise far beyond its ancestral patterns—but it really is quite something. Because those grooves run deep in our patterning. Because they course right through our veins. Even a little bit more growthful, a little bit more loving, a little bit more conscious, is a remarkable step forward for humanity. Perhaps we can take some time this week to acknowledge that. To give ourselves (and others) credit for all that we have done to break the chains of generational habit. To celebrate the courage that it took to do a little better than the ones who came before. It really is quite something. Every little step, huge.
– Jeff Brown

I only knew The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.
– Thom Gunn

on the death of a poet, i ask: can a poet be missed? consider this: a poem, once written, is like a child who leaves home and will never call again. not even during days of fiesta. in reality, a poem, once born, never dies. but interestingly, without a poet, a poem will never be born. a poet grants the poem what he cannot possess: life eternal. but does a poem want to live forever? i have known poems and i don’t believe they know what they want. does a poet want to live forever? i have known poets and i believe they pretend they know what they want. but those poets who truly live the poetry of their lives surely die. that’s why i was not surprised to hear that leonard cohen has died. it’s ok. let us all say hallelujah! and may his memory be a blessing.
– hune margulies, 2016

Never appropriate dharmas, but always give them up. To do this is to accept the burden, taking on responsibility for the sake of all living beings.
– Nagarjuna

I envy those who will eventually know more; but I know also that, exactly like me […] they will have to make allowance for the part which is true in any falsehood, and likewise reckon the eternal admixture of falsity in truth.
– Yourcenar, The Abyss (trans. Grace Frick)

You’re shifting, shedding, evolving, becoming, blooming. Give thanks for the lessons learned. There’s more to your story than your scars.
– Dr. Thema

The philosopher Plotinus suggested that while the body favors a straight line, the soul hankers for the circle. This mythic, circular time, (which is really no kind of time at all) laughs at the straight line and the alarm clock.
– Dr. Martin Shaw

One way of measuring ego-strength and maturity of personality is to assess a person’s capacity to tolerate ambivalence. This capacity is closely related to the ability to feel empathy. It is all about tolerating otherness.
– Heidi M. Kolb

The good life is not any fixed state. It is not a state of contentment, or Nirvana. It is not a condition in which the individual is adjusted, fulfilled, or actualized. The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination.
– Carl Rogers

We can’t have clean energy because it will destroy the oil industry. We can’t have healthcare because it will destroy the health insurance industry. We can’t have peace because it will destroy the weapon industry. Capitalism built a system we can’t afford to do the right thing.
– Mohamad Safa

Mason bees belly flop onto the flower, which gets pollen all over their body. Whereas, a honey bee collects pollen on their back legs. This enables mason bees to pollinate 95% of the flowers they land on vs. 5% for the honey bees.
– Google

Let go of all that you no longer need. This is how you heal, using your body to sing.
– James Crews

I was not born to this wariness. I came of age as my kind do—armed with ache and swathed in rectitude, a rough carving sluiced under a torrent of disregard.
– Rita Dove

in the breeze the trees’ shadows watery, mine mixed among them, the heart young & old at once.
– Susan Browne

“GOD” The word “God” is a symbol not a definition. Religious symbols should attempt to share our most profound experiences of reverence in poetic imagery. Symbols should attempt to deepen and broaden our shared sense of reverence, not to capture the sacred in an iron cage of systematic theology “God” is not an object that can be defined. “God” is a symbol of everything too deep, too big or too mysterious to be understand. If “God” were an actual being in the world, we would not need symbols of transcendence. Any definition of the infinite is a contradiction in terms. Symbols require a shift from our ordinary ways of thinking and speaking. Far from discursive thought, they call us to a kind of agnostic reverence. It is always a mistake to reason from religious symbols. When we think we know what “God” thinks, when we use “God” as a scientific explanation, when we use “God” as a political justification- we are taking the divine name in vain. The deadliest idols of our day are not the mockery of heretics, but the concrete mental images of faithful believers. To worship any concrete image of the transcendent is idolatry, not reverence. Systematic theology is often idolatry buttressed by biblical quotes with Greek and Latin footnotes. Once we think of “God” as an actual being, our religious symbols no longer point to the transcendent, but refer only to themselves. Symbols that hardened into concrete beliefs become cataracts of the soul.
– Jim Rigby

In the land of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, one brave and honest man is bound to create a scandal.
– Edward Abbey

i cannot believe how long september feels before september even starts
– Glennon Doyle

All a poet can do today is warn.
– Wilfred Owen

I am a poet, I think, because I’m always a little lost. Always hunting around in the dark, always never quite sure. What is it that I’m feeling? What is it that I want? What is it that makes me so uncomfortable but I cannot put my finger on it? Why does this happen when I open myself up, why does this happen when I retreat? I am continually shifting about in a dark room, trying to UNDERSTAND what it is. In the dark, I bump into a thing… I can’t name it. But I begin to describe it. The corners and edges, the space it takes. Texture. And soon enough, even though I’m still fumbling, it’s as if the lights are on. I see it. And you see it with me. How did that happen? I don’t know how it happens… except it has been my truest guide. Language, poetry, particulars of the indescribable.
– Layli LongSoldier

The deepness can’t be held or assuaged except in the time love grows in. “In” is where the deepness dwells. When deeps hold other deeps, something sleeps. Something else awakens. What is between the deeps of you and those in me? Why is love so hot it bares us to the bone? Anole lizards change the color of their skin. There is world enough to feel what deepness means.
– George Gorman

Seek patience
and passion
in equal amounts.

Patience alone
will not build the temple.

Passion alone
will destroy its walls.

– Maya Angelou

Emotions are paramount in safe passageway,
you said so long ago.
How we could come down this road
was nurtured by how it felt.
Through the feeling-speech of teamwork-love
islands grow into archipelagos,
clouds, reefs and towns convene
with all cells in dialogue.
The spirit of life is a feeling-being
Emotions have always been paramount.
A rousing cheer for feeling what’s here!
Celebrating the whole team of earth.
– George Gorman

There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it’s not really there.
– Bill McKibben

Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is who within you makes everything his own and says, “My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body.” Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate. Learn how it happens that one watches without willing, rests without willing, becomes angry without willing, loves without willing. If you carefully investigate these matters you will find him in yourself.
– Monomius

Direct the world in which you act towards that which is good, and the measured and peaceful course of time will bring about the results. You have given it this direction if by your teaching you raise its thoughts towards the necessary and the eternal; if, by your acts or your creations, you make the necessary and the eternal the object of your leanings. The structure of error and of all that is arbitrary must fall, and it has already fallen, as soon as you are sure that it is tottering. But it is important that it should not only totter in the external but also in the internal man.

Cherish triumphant truth in the modest sanctuary of your heart; give it an incarnate form through beauty, that it may not only be the understanding that does homage to it, but that loving feeling mayly grasp its appearance. And that you may not by any chance take from external reality the model which you yourself ought to furnish, do not venture into its dangerous society before you are assured in your own heart that you have a good escort furnished by ideal nature.

Live with your age, but be not its creature; Labor for your contemporaries, but give them what they need, and not what they praise. Without having shared their faults, share their punishment with a noble resignation, and bend under the yoke that they find is as painful to dispense with as to bear. By the constancy with which you will despise their good fortune, you will prove to them that it is not through cowardice that you submit to their sufferings. See them in thought such as they ought to be when you must act upon them; but see them as they are when you are tempted to act for them. Seek to owe their suffrage to their dignity; but to make them happy keeping an account of their unworthiness; thus, on the one hand, the nobleness of your heart will kindle theirs, and, on the other, your end will not be reduced to nothingness by their unworthiness.

The gravity of your principles will keep them off from you, but in play they will still endure them. Their taste is purer than their heart, and it is by their taste you must lay hold of this suspicious fugitive. In vain will ye combat their maxims, in vain will ye condemn their actions; but you can try your molding hand on their leisure. Drive away caprice, frivolity, and coarseness, from their pleasures, and you will banish them imperceptibly from their acts, and length from their feelings. Everywhere that you meet them, surround them with great, noble, and ingenious forms; multiply around them the symbols of perfection, till appearance triumphs over reality, and art over nature.

– Friedrich Schiller

Dr. Suzanne Simard explains how mycorrhizal networks connect the roots of trees:

[Graduate student Kevin Beiler] has found that all trees in dry interior Douglas-fir forests are interconnected, with the largest, oldest trees serving as hubs, much like the hub of a spoked wheel, where younger trees establish within the mycorrhizal network of the old trees. Through careful experimentation, recent graduate Francois Teste determined that survival of these establishing trees was greatly enhanced when they were linked into the network of the old trees. Through the use of stable isotope tracers, he and Amanda Schoonmaker

[…] found that increased survival was associated with belowground transfer of carbon, nitrogen and water from the old trees.

the seats are
empty.
the theatre is dark.
Why do you keep
acting?
– Charles Bukowski

Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself.
– Erasmus

Trust yourself. At the root, at the core, there is pure sanity, pure openness. Don’t trust what you have been taught, what you think, what you believe, what you hope. Deeper than that, trust the silence of your being.
– Gangaji

The best way to get along with people is not to expect them to be like you.
– Joyce Meyer

Two guiding principles for acquiring wisdom:

1. Go to bed smarter than when you woke up

2. Don’t try to figure everything out on your own. Learn from others.

– Farnam Street

We need to know what virtue is and then take it up and put it into practice. Likewise, if we want to be free of suffering, we need to know its cause—various misdeeds and non virtue—and give it up. We need to identify what’s good and what is wrongdoing. What does virtue mean? What is non-virtue? These do not mean that there is a god who has commanded that you should not do this or that. Neither the Buddha nor anyone else has said that you are not allowed to do something, and if you do it, it is wrong. Instead, it comes down to your own mind. When you look at your mind, you can tell whether your acts are virtuous or non-virtuous. We can look at and see this for ourselves. When we act with a kind heart and good motivation, without any greed or lust, without any aggression and any delusion, that is virtuous. If, on the other hand, we act with a negative motivation, that is non-virtuous. For example, we could act out of the greed that wants only to benefit ourselves, or out of the aversion that wants to harm someone else, or out of delusion that does not know what to take up and what to give up.
– Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche

Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them.
– William Faulkner

We are meaning-seeking creatures and, unlike other animals, fall very easily into despair if we cannot find significance and value in our lives.
– Karen Armstrong

I have to tell you
by Dorothea Grossman

I have to tell you,
there are times when
the sun strikes me
like a gong,
and I remember everything,
even your ears.

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
– George Orwell

The psyche is not unconscious. We are . . . The psyche is constantly making intelligible statements. It’s making dreams and symptoms, it’s making fantasies and moods. It’s extraordinarily intentional, purposive.
– James Hillman, A Blue Fire

As a poet, what I’m trying to do is play with the world that I’ve inherited—the political worlds, the personal worlds. [I] try to shape them into poems that show me the truth of those moments, as well as show me the possibilities that exist and the world that we can create.
– José Olivarez

We’re all witches in the making. Claiming space. Defining borders. Conjuring futures yet written. Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.
– Mary Shelley

Witches don’t look like anything. Witches are. Witches do.
– Franny Billingsley

I like to be surrounded by splendid things.
– Freddie Mercury

It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.
– Mary Wollstonecraft

Desire narrows our awareness till we see only what we crave; mindfulness helps us see other possibilities.
– Sandra Weinberg

The living relation between the poem and the world: difficult knowledge, operating theater where the poet, committed, goes on working.
– Adrienne Rich

Why would you let someone who cannot hear the great poem of the world judge your life?
– Joseph Fasano

Little do we realize, until perhaps the consequences pile high, that we are still captive to early formative experiences and are not exercising the powers of the emergent adulthood we in fact possess.
– James Hollis

Ableism is telling yourself that you’ll never become disabled; that you’re invincible and it couldn’t ever happen to you. ANYONE can become disabled and it’s actually inevitable that you will be once you age. Caring about disabled people is caring about your future self.
– Briana Mills, LMFT

Oh, you woke up?

Then what happened?

There’s just one “health” and it’s physical, mental, individual, & collective.

– @VinceFHorn

let us not teach
what we have learned badly

and not profited by

– H.D.

Inner work, as a practical experience, shows us that we can embrace the conflict, embrace the duality, bravely place ourselves in the very midst of the warring voices, and find our way through them to the unity that they ultimately express.
– Robert A. Johnson

A book, a story, should be smarter than its author. It is the critic or the teacher in you or me who cleverly outwits the characters with the power of prior knowledge of meetings and ends. Stay open and ignorant.
– Grace Paley

All I can come up with are stray sentences, he said, maybe because reality seems to me like a swarm of stray sentences.
– Bolaño, Antwerp (tr. Wimmer)

blue moon
every poet
sees a different hue
– @hegelincanada

Myths derive from the visions of people who have searched their own most inward world.
– Joseph Campbell

If we lack inner freedom, intense sensory experiences can generate strong attachments that entangle us. If we know how to maintain our inner freedom, we can experience sensations within the simplicity of the present moment, in a state of well-being that is free from grasping.
– Matthieu Ricard

rules are very hard
just ignore them as a bard
poetic license
– @ehinsen

I call it therapy of ideas. When people ask me if I practice, I say no, I no longer practice. I practice what I call the therapy of ideas. I think we’re sick from ideas.
– James Hillman

Starting to think “we are engaged in a psychic time war” is actually a pretty useful myth.
– @the_wilderless

The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die.

As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.

– Friedrich Nietzsche

It’s not ‘natural’ to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting, articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little…have few verbal means. Eloquence…thinking in words…is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality. In groups, it’s more natural to sing, to dance, to pray: given, rather than invented (individual) speech.
– Susan Sontag

The literary career is sometimes a hideous notion. It brings out the worst in critics and reviewers. It develops cliques and antagonistic loyalties when what a poet most needs is to learn from that which most opposes him or her, most disturbs, most confronts. Instead of support, the poet gets knee-jerk hostility from other ‘camps,’ and equally reflexive self-imaging praise from friends.
– Marvin Bell

The coming of consciousness was probably the most tremendous experience of primeval times, for with it a world came into being whose existence no one had suspected before.
– CG Jung

It’s hard to stay in a relationship with someone who does not see the way they project the tension in their mind into their daily interactions.
– @YungPueblo

Words do not suffice
Songs rarely transform
Love revises life
Doubt can be taken by storm

Something that no one knows
Kismet every day
Is awakened by
The love on every page

– George Gorman

Let’s contemplate the sky. Forget the crazy hammering heartbeat, don’t listen to it, don’t start counting, remember that there is a clever way of breathing that conserves oxygen as if you’re lying below the surface of a body of water breathing through a very thin straw but you can breathe through it if you’re careful, if you don’t panic; one breath and then another and then another, isn’t that the story of all lives? careers? Just a matter of breathing. Of course it is. But contemplate the sky, it’s there to be contemplated. A mild shock to see it so blank, blue, a thin airy ghostly blue, no clouds to disguise its emptiness. You are beginning to feel not only weightless but near-bodiless, lying on the earth like a scrap of paper about to be blown off. Two dimensions and you’d imagined you were three! And there’s the sky rolling away forever, into infinity — if ‘infinity’ can be ‘rolled into’ —and the forlorn truth is, that’s where you’re going too. And the lovely blue isn’t even blue, is it? isn’t even there, is it? a mere optical illusion, isn’t it? no matter what art has urged you to believe.
– Joyce Carol Oates

In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.
– Michel Foucault

It seems to me that the great pleasure of human life is not in having an opinion, but rather in learning all the ways you are wrong, and all the nuances you failed to account for, and all the truths that turned out to be not as simple as you once believed. And it seems to me that one of the central pleasures of attending school is that you get to read with really well-informed people who can help welcome you into a complex world stuffed with rich and maddening ambiguity.
– John Green

The happiest person in this country cannot help breathing in smokers’ cigarette fumes, auto exhaust, and airborne chemical dust. The idea that happiness can insulate us against the results of our environmental madness is a rumor circulated by our enemies.
– Audre Lorde

The two worlds are joyous because of you. Don’t stay in this world without me. Don’t go to the next world without me. Don’t let your eyes look without me. Don’t let your tongue speak without me. Don’t let your hands hold without me. Don’t let your soul stir without me.
– Rumi

It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.
– Isadora Duncan

Denial is probably a lower-level energy form of dissociation. The disconnection is between the person and the memory of or feelings about a particular event (or series of events). We may deny that an event occurred, or we may act as though it were unimportant.
– Peter A. Levine

I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.
– Nietzsche

According to Jung, we are here on earth to gain conscience. The more we gain, the more is stored in the collective unconscious of humanity. This gain does not accrue only to your descendants, but to humanity in general.
– Roberto Lima Netto

All the months are crude experiments,
out of which the perfect September is made.
– Virginia Wolf

We ought to toughen and fortify our ears against being seduced by the sound of polite words. I like the kind of friendship which rejoices in sharp, vigorous exchanges just as love rejoices in bites & scratches… I do truly seek to frequent those who manhandle me.
– Montaigne

there are too many christians who go their entire lives without having one doubt about their faith
– Mason Mennenga

you are not alone,
the poem said,
in the dark tunnel.
– Louise Glück

Modern technology teaches man to take for granted the world he is looking at; he takes no time to retreat and reflect.

Technology lures him on, dropping him into its wheels and movements. No rest, no meditation, no reflection, no conversation – the senses are continually overloaded with stimuli.

[Man] doesn’t learn to question his world anymore; the screen offers him answers-ready-made.

– Joost Meerloo

At the end of history, human existence would enter animal night. […] But wouldn’t the night demand a primary condition: ignorance as to the fact that it is night? Night that knows it is night would not be night, it would only be the fall of the day . . .
– Georges Bataille

a caterpillar
not yet a butterfly
as autumn approaches
– Basho

to the moon
all the hatred and desire
of your heart
– Ogawa

Psychologically, the ocean is the counterpart of the unconscious into which the sun of consciousness sets and out of which it comes.
– Joseph Campbell

a lone cricket
defies the distant thunder
to call to his kind
– @HaikuHedgehog

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
we see the shores blurring past as we hold
each other in the rushing current
the daylight rushes 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

A man who is unconscious of himself acts in a blind, instinctive way and is in addition, fooled by all the illusions that arise when he sees everything that he is not conscious of in himself coming to meet him from outside as projections upon his neighbour.
– CG Jung

I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.
– Zadie Smith

This is the nineteenth line of the poem. I am waiting for you to look at me. Sun bleaches the paper. Time slides through the flesh. Someone on the corner is imprinting the building with a kind of humanity just by touching it.
– Alex Dimitrov

I am not a has-been. I am a will be.
– Lauren Bacall

Whether others are hostile or friendly, the warrior of meek extends a sense of kindness to himself and mercy to others.
– Chögyam Trungpa

The scene might appear timeless, but it is the opposite. It bursts with time, the landscape fractures under the pressure of time.
– Tristan McConnell

When the mind is at the bursting level, you don’t do anything. Just let it be. For the time being, watch a movie, see a nice view, be on the beach or the bank of a river.
– Gelek Rinpoche

Sometimes in Buddhist practice one is advised to be wary of engaging in overly intellectual practice. This is not to say that the Buddhist tradition is anti-intellectual, but rather that it’s easy to substitute descriptions from books for experiences gained in meditation.
– Justin von Bujdoss

Find the thread of your being and follow it as far as you can follow it. You will be led into places you would not choose to go that wind up being revelations that you didn’t know were possible.
– Michael Meade

city lights –
concealing stars
like sorrow.
– @HaikuPure

How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.

A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

– Annie Dillard

Tears, sorrow, and disappointment are bitter, but wisdom is the comforter in all psychic suffering. Indeed, bitterness and wisdom form a pair of alternatives: where there is bitterness wisdom is lacking, and where wisdom is there can be no bitterness.
– Carl Jung

Nothing is more foreign to me than a personal mode of thought. … When I advance a word, I play with the thought of others, which I have gleaned by chance from the human substance around me.
– Bataille

This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
– Alan W. Watts

I had a divine calling on my life, a charge, a challenge to serve not just Black people, but all oppressed humankind. That calling will be with me to the end.
– Coretta Scott King

In our lives, we experience alternations of creation & destruction, growth/decay, birth/death, light/dark, conscious/unconscious. Unfortunately, we have been taught to fear & resist the decreasing energies represented by the dark, by decay, death & the unconscious.
– Demetra George

But just as conscious contents can vanish into the unconscious, new contents, which have never yet been conscious, can arise from it.
– CG Jung

Late August is all about checking in. Writing to check in. Reaching out. Reaching out to check in.
– Jane Huffman

September breathes her #sombre mists
She is an epilogue of summer
Crumpling the skeletons of umbellifers
Kissing the tired wildflowers goodnight
– @adoughtyimages

I Don’t Know Why

I don’t know why they say
the horse is a noble animal
and the dove is beautiful
But no one keeps a vulture.
Why is the clover inferior to the red tulip?
We need to wash our eyes
and view things differently.
We should wash our words…

– Sohrab Sepehri

Might your faith in the power of acknowledgement (whether viewed as a cognitive or a discursive function) reproduce the fetishization it proposes to displace?
– Edelman to Berlant

Hope opens the door to possibility and allows us to envision change, particularly change that we desire. But hope alone will not affect change—that requires movement.
– Andrew Mellen

A politician divides mankind into two classes: tools and enemies.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

The effort of explaining, even of expressing himself, had become, with the years, more and more terrifying to him. Whether from laziness or from inability to find the right words, he had developed almost a passion for silence.
– Francois Mauriac

September. The awakening painful and yet joyful.
– Amrita Pritam

EPITAPH
Now I’m not the brightest
knife in the drawer, but
I know a couple things
about this life: poverty
silence, impermanence
discipline and mystery

The world is not illusory, we are

From crimson thread to toe tag

If you are not disturbed
there is something seriously wrong with you, I’m sorry

And I know who I am
I’ll be a voice
coming from nowhere,

inside –

be glad for me.
– Franz Wright

The circular economy’s tenets of ‘make, remake, reuse’ were encoded in the very lifestyle and economic reality of subsistence farming in the region. The linear model of ‘take, make, use, discard’, which so successfully replaced it, should not only be seen as an environmental disaster, but also as a colonial act of what Mignolo (2007) terms ‘epistemicide’: the erasure of ways of thinking and being in the world. (23) Clachworks seeks to make critical connections between past and present, local and global, providing tools for making and remaking the world we live in.
– The Carrying Stream: Towards a plurality of possibilities

Who should accomplish your deeds? Who should carry your virtues and your vices?
– @RedBookJung

Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.
– Etty Hillesum

The sun was descending. The sky was very wonderful and blue and so on. It was, it still is now, one of my best memories.
– Michel Foucault

If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower

Life is a breeze blowing over a sweating face and neck.
– Nicholas Pierotti

Looking out the window at the trees and counting the leaves, listening to a voice within that tells me nothing is perfect so why bother to try, I am thief of my own time. When I die I want it to be said that I wasted hours in feeling absolutely useless and enjoyed it, sensing my life more strongly than when I worked at it. Now I know myself from a stone or a sledgehammer.
– David Ignatow, For Yaedi

since leaving academia, I work fewer hours, I make more money, the work I do is easier, and I have more free time. that heavy dread is gone. that need to seek approval is gone. that constantly busy mindset is gone. life is calm, and I can focus on what really matters.
– @LifeAfterMyPhD

Every day of our lives we are on the verge of making those slight changes that would make all the difference.
– Mignon McLaughlin

STORM The green horse of the tree bucks in the wind as lightning hits beyond. We will ride it out together, or together fall.
– Lucien Stryk

What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all it’s equipment will avail it nothing.
– Marcel Proust

here they come
the -ber months

with snow jobs
in the offing.

– Alec Finlay

Only poets attend poetry readings. Poetry as a public interest is dead. So why am I speaking to the dead?
– John Zbigniew Guzlowski

Poetry unsettles our scrawled defense; unapprehensible but dear nevertheless.
– Susan Howe

We often say night falls. I think the night rises. I think the bright falls.
– Victoria Chang

Hope is not about proving anything. It’s choosing to believe this one thing, that love is bigger than any grim bleak shit anyone can throw at us.
– Anne Lamott

Everything in life can be taken away from you and generally will be at some point.

Your wealth vanishes, the latest gadgetry suddenly becomes passé, your allies desert you.

But if your mind is armed with the art of war, there is no power that can take that away.

In the middle of a crisis, your mind will find its way to the right solution.

Having superior strategies at your fingertips will give your maneuvers irresistible force.

Being unconquerable lies with yourself.

– Sun Tzu

The faith of queer Christians is one of the few things that keeps me coming back to my own faith.
– Stephen Bryce

Once the individual has passed his initial test and can enter the mature phase of life, the hero myth loses its relevance. The hero’s symbolic death becomes, as it were, the achievement of that maturity.
– CG Jung

Beethoven tells you what it’s like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it’s like to be human. Bach tells you what it’s like to be the universe.
– Douglas Adams

You are a writer. The ‘normal’ ship sailed without you long ago.
– Terri Lynn Main

Alma Mater

Don’t be a teacher for ever,
Warned the teacher deep in dreams.
Remember the lessons are over,
And the kids are leaving in streams.

One sleepy term you will wake
At the wrong end of the hall,
Just when it should be break.
Get up and get out, that’s all.

– George Szirtes

My daughter finds a blue marble,
examines its weather eye.
Asks me about heaven,
my father just died.

My head is empty.
The sun dulls my tongue.
I tell her of our ancestors
and the day she was born.

She nods, soundless. Watches me
from deep inside the marble.

– @LotusTongue

I was a blueprint, blue on blue, mapless / but for those warm bones and my red heart barking.
– Ama Codjoe

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can’t be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.
– Sylvia Plath

To write poetry is like performing heart surgery on yourself without anesthesia… in public. You are peeling back layers. You are dissecting yourself.
– Amir Sulaiman

When plunging completely and genuinely into the teachings, one is not allowed to bring along one’s deceptions…
– Chögyam Trungpa

Things I know about healing: Speaking kindly to yourself helps a lot.
– Rebecca Ray

And that’s how you go on. You lay laughter over the dark parts. The more dark parts, the more you have to laugh. With defiance, with abandon, with hysteria, any way you can.
– Laini Taylor

People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.
– Chuck Palahniuk

Poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels.
– Allen Ginsberg

Wrinkles will only go where the smiles have been.
– Jimmy Buffet

A truth can walk naked, But a lie always needs to be dressed.
– Khalil Gibran

The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him.
– Victor Hugo

The job has its ups and downs. There’s the swinging through the sky, the whale-watching, and the wielding of badass tools reminiscent of alien torture implements. Less nice, there’s a weird kind of marine vertigo and regular exposure to suicides. But Chad Allan sounds like he’d prefer nothing else.
– The Fascinating, Neverending Job of Painting the Golden Gate Bridge

You can watch a clock tick. You can witness a sunrise or a sunset, but that is not time. That is simply movement.
– Zen Proverb

Many-Roofed Building in Moonlight
by Jane Hirshfield

I found myself
suddenly voluminous,
three-dimensioned,
a many-roofed building in moonlight.

Thought traversed
me as simply as moths might.
Feelings traversed me as fish.

I heard myself thinking,
It isn’t the piano, it isn’t the ears.

Then heard, too soon, the ordinary furnace,
the usual footsteps above me.

Washed my face again with hot water,
as I did when I was a child.

I have come to the conclusion that religion and spirituality in its various forms is just the password that you require to access the various religious feelings of selflessness, love and peace that you need to survive and feel fully human. We put too much emphasis on the password and not enough on the feelings, which are independent of any creed or method.

And we jealously guard and protect the password from all detractors and attacks. And sometimes go on the offensive and launch first strikes against other passwords. Religion and spirituality is just a way in to your deeper experience; it is not the experience itself.

– Bodhidharma

This year will take from me
the hardened person
who I longed to be.
I am healing by mistake.
Rome is also built on ruins.
– Eliza Griswold

The light of glory shines in the middle of the night. Who can see it? A heart that has eyes and watches.
– Angelus Silesius

Jesus came to be a champion for the disenfranchised. Not the santa clause of the oppressor.
– Carlos A. Rodríguez

Leave me alone with God as much as may be. As the tide draws the waters close in upon the shore, make me an island, set apart, alone with you, God, holy to you.
– Saint Aidan of Lindisfarne

My life is as simple as I can make it. Work all day, cook, eat, wash up, telephone, hack writing, drink, television in the evenings. I almost never go out.
– Philip Larkin

To die… to fall like a drop of sea in the immense sea? Or to be what I have never been: one, without shadow and without sleep, a loner who advances without path and without mirror?
– Antonio Machado

Wonder is where it starts, and though wonder is also where it ends, this is no futile path. Whether admiring a patch of moss, a crystal, flower, or golden beetle, a sky full of clouds, a sea with the serene, vast sigh of its swells, or a butterfly wing with its arrangement of crystalline ribs, contours, and the vibrant bezel of its edges, the diverse scripts and ornamentations of its markings, and the infinite, sweet, delightfully inspired transitions and shadings of its colors — whenever I experience part of nature, whether with my eyes or another of the five senses, whenever I feel drawn in, enchanted, opening myself momentarily to its existence and epiphanies, that very moment allows me to forget the avaricious, blind world of human need, and rather than thinking or issuing orders, rather than acquiring or exploiting, fighting or organizing, all I do in that moment is “wonder,” like Goethe, and not only does this wonderment establish my brotherhood with him, other poets, and sages, it also makes me a brother to those wondrous things I behold and experience as the living world: butterflies and moths, beetles, clouds, rivers and mountains, because while wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.
– Hermann Hesse

And I intensely felt the passage of time within me, the time that is not seen and that kneads us. The one that rolls and rolls inside the heart and makes it roll with it and changes us inside and out and little by little it is making us what we will be on the last day.
– Mercè Rodoreda

and the moon
once it stopped
was sleeping
in the cold blue light
– Erika Meitner

Again it is September! It seems so strange that I who made no vows Should sit here desolate this golden weather.
– Jessie Redmon Fauset

A problem with living in the twenty-first century is that we are made to feel poorly travelled if we have only been to ten other countries. To feel old if we have a wrinkle. To feel ugly if we aren’t photo shopped and filtered.
– Matt Haig

frigates that take us lands away
After Emily Dickinson’s “There is no Frigate like a Book”
the small begin of i
in to look
up
all the way
up
the wall of
books that break
the heart of a
child open to love
who does not yet
know desire except
when she desires
cathedrals of words that gather
dust
await the eye
—to see was to love—
hungered on hunger
sweeping across a paginated world
perfected
in misery in
love in words spent with
books and time
algorithms of the
ever in spirit
the extended minute
stretched to
goodbye to
leaved portals
to
the worlds
of other to

forever.

– M NourbesSe Philip

Poetry is my deepest health
– Sylvia Plath

Wild are seas, that want a shore.
– Robert Herrick

Never make your value as a human being conditioned on the results of what you’re trying to achieve.
– Marshall Goldsmith

Some of the last written words of Gregory Bateson with the help of his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson [in brackets] from Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred:

Always at the interface…some degree of mutual understanding must be achieved. In the case of two strongly contrasting systems, sharing a minimum of premises, the establishment of a common ground of communication is not easy and will be the more difficult inasmuch as people, in all cultures, are prone to believe their values and preconceptions are ‘true’ and ‘natural.'[The alternative would be a shift of our ways of seeing that would affirm the complexities and mutual integration of both sides of any interface. We reduce ourselves to such caricatures as ‘economic man,’ and we have reduced other societies and the woods and lakes that we encounter to potential assets. What will it take to react to interfaces in more complex ways? At the very least, it requires ways of seeing that affirm our own complexity and the systemic complexity of the other and that propose the possibility that they might together constitute an inclusive system, with a common network of mind and elements of the necessarily mysterious. Such a perception of both self and other is the affirmation of the sacred.] Notice that the ideal I offer you comes close to being a religious hope or ideal. We are not going to get far unless we acknowledge that the whole of science and technology, like medicine from Hippocrates downward, springs out of and impinges on religion. In two ways all health practitioners are religious – necessarily accepting some system of ethics and necessarily subscribing to some theory of body-mind relations, a mythology, for better or worse. [This perhaps also is true of all those who act on living systems.]

The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on — because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions.
– Noam Chomsky

Moonlight drowns out all but the brightest stars.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

All my students surpass me.

This is my gift.

– Kenneth Folk

The one common note of all this country is the haunting presence of the ocean. A great faint sound of breakers follows you high up into the inland cañons; the roar of water dwells in the clean, empty rooms of Monterey as in a shell upon the chimney; go where you will, you have but to pause and listen to hear the voice of the Pacific.
– Robert Louis Stevenson

It was an able, intelligent, mildly perceptive tour de force & it would never mean anything to anyone. In the place in Vivaldo’s mind where books lived, whether they were great, mangled, mutilated, or mad, Richard’s book did not exist.
– James Baldwin, Another Country

I call for passion and wisdom / joined at the waist / like a centaur.
– Zuzanna Ginczanka, trans. Alissa Valles

The whole world is beautiful, the art is in the seeing.
– Camille Pissarro

I know that a person is still alive, if you remember to say their name.
– Rudy Francisco

The search for fusion regularly gives rise to various symptoms. Our own psyche knows what is right for us, knows what is developmentally demanded. When we use the Other to avoid our own task, we may be able to fool ourselves for awhile, but the soul will not be mocked. It will express its protest in physical ailments, activated complexes and disturbing dreams. The soul wishes its fullest expression; it is here, as Rumi expressed it, ‘for its own joy.
– James Hollis, The Eden Project

Delusion,’ ‘enlightenment’ – just fox words fooling Zen monks everywhere.
– Daitō

It’s amazing what lies people can sustain behind the mask of their real faces.
– Philip Roth

It’s just a song about being spiritually beside somebody.
– Van Morrison

My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.
– George Bernard Shaw

I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death. “I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure. As we all face the losses and the gifts.
– Oliver Sacks

Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.
– Henry David Thoreau

As the ego does not represent the whole psyche, so the Western mind cannot speak for the whole world.
– James Hillman, Philosophical Intimations

The most important thing for students to learn in school is who they are. I do not teach history. I open views to the past for students to see themselves in, so they may better understand who they are today and who they can be tomorrow.
– Andy Perrin

Imagine if all the tumult of the body were to quiet down, along with our busy thoughts.
Imagine if all things that are perishable grew still.
And imagine if that moment were to go on and on,
leaving behind all other sights and sounds but this one vision
which ravishes and absorbs and fixes the beholder in joy,
so that the rest of eternal life were like that moment of illumination
which leaves us breathless.
– Saint Augustine

[The whale already]

a golden shovel

The whale already taken got away: the moon alone
– Yosa Buson, translated by Hiroaki Sato

What is endangered, the
rest of us ignore. The whale,
loved by children and cartoonists, already
dwindles. Bycatch has taken
them. The tiny creatures they consume haven’t got
a chance to outlast the warming. A way
to safeguard whales is to deny ourselves the
discs and car exhaust. The moon
sees us at all cost alone.

– Kimiko Hahn

Like a vase,
a heart breaks
once.
– Sarah Manguso

Fascination arises when the unconscious has been moved.
– CG Jung

As we cannot revivify myths that once moved generations, so we cannot afford the potential disasters of projecting those energies unconsciously. Through the projection of the shadow onto a Fuerher, a whole world may burn.
– James Hollis

Hatred always says the same thing
but love is all the songs of the world.
– @stars_poem

The writing does help me get closer to my own story and step back from my own story, so there was this kind of double consciousness that allowed me to see things in a fresh way, it was so deeply cathartic. The first draft especially was deeply cathartic and then the revision was when I was able to gain the detachment. I started seeing my story as art and not just catharsis. So it became both catharsis and art.
– Gayle Brandeis

In my experience, it’s often the books that resemble yours the least that end up unlocking something in your writing. And when this happens, it’s a wonderful reminder of how mysterious and magical this whole process is—and how lucky we are to be writers.
– Kirstin Chen

For many of us, the body is more repressed and denied than even the mind or the heart. It makes both presence and healing quite difficult, because the body, not just our mind, holds our memories.
– Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water

Burning Man is the perfect example of how many rich white people recreationally manufacture hardship because they are immune from it systematically.
– @sheologian

Delirious narrativity . . . constitutes the paradigm for the construction and reconstruction of mythical, mystical, aesthetic, even scientific, worlds.
– Guattari

The more one studies attempted solutions to problems in politics & economics, in art, philosophy, and religion, the more one has the impression of extremely gifted people wearing out their ingenuity at futile task of trying to get the water of life into neat and permanent packages.
– Alan Watts

Music taught me how to write–how to pace a poem, and where to apply the most heat. It showed me how to create energy and tension. It shaped my sense of aesthetics. And most importantly it solidified in me the conviction that art belongs to people, not institutions.
– Andrea Jurjević

When I tell anyone from Gen Z my age they go very quiet like we’re suddenly in a library and they’re returning a book that’s way over due. Which is weird because they don’t know what a library is.
– Seán Ono Lennon

There was no comfort in what she saw, now that she could see it.
– Alice Munro

I feel like I’ve heard tons of examples of people losing their faith in religious communities, or living as isolated ‘undercover atheists’. I almost never hear the reverse, though – who lives as closeted religious people when their entire social community is atheist?
– @Aella_Girl

Everything was quiet, as if
the silence was listening.
– Anna Kavan

The power of the way is so great that it carries away others and ignites them. You do not know how this happens: hence it is best you call this effect magical.
– @RedBookJung

We ask the unforeseeable to deceive the expected.
– René Char (translated by Paul Mann)

The order we presume with our beliefs is a fragile order, built upon many a mental sleight-of-hand. We’ve been juggling for a long time.
– Kathleen Dowling Singh

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core…
– John Keats

Of course we imagined the gods in our faces. They were our aims writ large. When they let us down, then we asked friends and lovers to chalice the hope of our hearts. When friends tired, stumbled, or cursed us, we saw our ideals in the dust. We fashioned a world out of that bitter ground with some comfort, much grief, and much rust. “You must disassemble before you combine,” an alchemist sang like the sea. “For this is the art of enlivening spirits ungrown and unfree.” We divided our truths from our dreams, found some feeling-room in the breach, then divorced love from memory’s rules. Was that a fucking relief! Then we began the long process of teasing apart man and woman, until, meeting by chance in a long wave of pleasing forgiveness could roll down the hill. But implacable was the cynic within, though we tracked him at last to his lair, where he now with his wiliest lies tries to win us away from the kiss and the dare. But now we’re alchemically mixing the twos with threes and fours, and with more! Freedom and love replace cyclones of doom, as hope leavens ashes of war.
– George Gorman

Who can explain the fire? The waters of dream are gray. Yet souls have bent their desire around this distant day. Though we are covered with ashes, and even the children mourn, the heavens are lifting their sashes, soon to be taken by storm. What is this aching promise? Balm to the fierce and true. Flame to an old gray premise. Sprout in the ash of doom? Nothing but shoots and flowers. Only the signs of spring. Among the crumbling towers, we lift our hearts and sing.
– George Gorman

Circular movement
measures a triangular
world at once at rest.
– Jay Wright

lotus flowers
pure in heart
unstained by the mind
– Ogawa

You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.
– Jodi Picoult

I’m mostly interested in shackle-bursting poetry.
– Uche Nduka

The body remembers, the bones remember, the joints remember, even the little finger remembers. Memory is lodged in pictures and feelings in the cells themselves. Like a sponge filled with water, anywhere the flesh is pressed, wrung, even touched lightly, a memory may flow out in a stream.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Men, it has been well said,
think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they
recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
– Charles MacKay

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, The Poems of Our Climate

The way I teach my students to work is to bring them in to conditions where they can learn to think. They have to learn to think without words, with images, patterns and connections. That sort of thinking always leads to a new way of action. …if you think for one second in this way, which eliminates the connection with words, you cannot think but in patterns, in disciplines connected to one another… You are thinking with the elements of thinking. Maybe whatever you do has already been invented by somebody, but you have (now) invented it yourself. You have created it. So you can see, …you actually begin to think for the first time in your life, originally, creatively. You will be surprised what you can do. I was surprised.
– Moshe Feldenkrais

The human animal is a learning animal; we like to learn; we are good at it; we don’t need to be shown how or made to do it. What kills the processes are the people interfering with it or trying to regulate it or control it.
– John Holt

A question I’m often asked is, How have you balanced these various pursuits?” And the word “balance” always implies that I have balanced them, and of course I haven’t. It’s been difficult and sometimes a struggle to keep it all going… to find time for it all. I’ve known writers — I think it’s true also of other artists — who thought that you had to put your art before everything. But if you have a marriage and a family and a farm, you’re just going to find that you can’t always put your art first, and moreover that you shouldn’t. There are a number of things more important than your art. It’s wrong to favor it over your family, or over your place, or over your animals.
– Wendell Berry

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

Evolution is no linear family tree, but change in the single multidimensional being that has grown to cover the entire surface of Earth.
– Lynn Margulis

Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.
– Chuck Palahniuk

The books. Are you seeing the books? Everything you would want to read is right here.
– Rory Gilmore

I carried my book everywhere, like an eager student clinging […] so that I might silence in myself the last accusations: Who are you and what is your purpose?
– Louise Glück

My life is my capital, the capital of my imagination
– Susan Sontag

We’re beginning to want our bodies back. And yet we’re simultaneously afraid to have them back and ignorant of how to get them back.
– Stanley Keleman

One thing that comes out in myths, for example, is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.
– Joseph Campbell

true, this isn’t paradise
but we come at last to love it

for the sweet hay and the flowers rising,
for the corn lining up row on row,

…

and for how, each day,
something that loves us

tries to save us.

– Lucille Clifton

The root of suffering is resisting the certainty that no matter what the circumstances, uncertainty is all we truly have.
– Pema Chodron

Sacrifice is not destruction, sacrifice is the foundation stone of what is to come.
– Carl G. Jung

Awakening the enlightened mind may not be a question of self-improvement, which is never-ending; it may be a question of faith, which is always available right now.
– Hannah Tennant-Moore

A sane and normal society is one in which people habitually disagree, because general agreement is relatively rare outside the sphere of instinctive human qualities.
– CG Jung

With silence everything comes up at once, everything that has long remained unsaid, and what has never been said, stays hanging in the air.
– Herta Muller

Polytheism gave the multiplicity of complexes in the psyche a background for finding values and relating to many aspects of life, which we now more narrowly condemn as perverse, irreligious, obscene and inhuman.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

if there is no savior, I’ll do it myself, I’ll forgive myself
– Danez Smith

Take God out of the dictionary, and you would have Him in the street.
– Melville to Hawthorne

If you ever find yourself stressed, overwhelmed, sinking into stasis despite wanting to change, or frustrated when you can’t respond to new opportunities, you need more slack in your life.

Slack allows you to think ahead.

– @farnamstreet

Instead of: no one wants to work anymore. Try: no one wants to be exploited anymore.
– Robert Reich

Philosophy is indeed for me the art of rejecting submission. It’s not an authoritative exercise, but an adventurous one; an attempt to open doors to what we have been told to give up in the name of reason.
– Isabelle Stengers

It is not as important to find the cause of our traumatized feelings as it is to learn how to relate to them.
– Mark Epstein

No hero will emerge from the clouds to save us from the climate crisis.

It isn’t going to be me, you, or any of the accounts on this app with hundreds of thousands of followers.

We need everyone to work together to stop overtaxing the Earth.

We need a movement, not an idol.

– @edgarrmcgregor

I know that without these great writers’ holy words seared into my brain, I would most likely have ended up chained to a wall in Camarillo State Hospital, zapped beyond recognition, or dead by misadventure.
– Johnny Depp

And all at once, summer collapsed into fall.
– Oscar Wilde

The greater the doubt, the greater the awakening; the smaller the doubt, the smaller the awakening. No doubt, no awakening.
– Bessel van der Kolk

The movement of coming to consciousness of feminine values accompanies a new attitude of acceptance and respect for the body.
– Deldon Anne McNeely

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
– Samuel Butler

It can be harmful to hear insights from a developmental balance you haven’t gone through,

Cuz you’ll likely either a) convince yourself you see the insight, and develop an illusion of familiarity with it

Or b) resent it and build up defenses against it

Either move risks stunting

– @the_wilderless

For once I need to choose myself, or else I’m going to lose myself.
– Veronika Jensen

Music is truthful…
Music attracts the
angels in the
universe.
– Bob Dylan

One takes refuge not from a position of strength but from a position that acknowledges weakness.
– Dharmavidya David Brazier

Meditative Wisdom is that which makes you try what you know and understand as true, so you can apply a wisdom to change, and react or not react, differently. To not go down that same old brain path, but to create a new brain path.
– Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

I early arrived at the insight that when no answer comes from within to the problems and complexities of life, they ultimately mean very little.
– CG Jung

… in all my poems I undress
the heart.
– Julia de Burgos

in the library
the sound of a fallen pencil
stops time

– IW. Crow, Tokyo, Japan

Autumn came, with wind and gold.
– Henry David Thoreau

In the end, the whole of life becomes an act of letting go.
– Yann Martel

It’s my belief that if you listen to good music, your writing will improve.
– Haruki Murakami

Is there a limit to how many things you can bookmark and never read?
– Tara Skurtu

I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.
– Willa Cather

when i hear you speak and see you smile, full, satisfied, absorbed; my centred mind deems all the world’s vain hopes and joys the while, as empty as the unsubstantial wind. i feel your charms, but dare not raise to that theme; a power for that to language was not given.
– Camões

I am learning how to sleep
again, to love
the descent, or is it,

lying here, a rising up
to summit
where sleep wanders

till waking. And when
I cannot, when the water
leaches into everything

– Kevin Young, Hum

The bodhisattva is not concerned with conversion; he respects others’ lifestyles, speaks their language, and allows them to evolve according to their nature rather than making them into a replica of himself.
– Chögyam Trungpa

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
– Sylvia Plath

Tell the image makers and magazine sellers and the plastic surgeons that you are not afraid. That what you fear the most is the death of imagination and originality and metaphor and passion.
– Marion Woodman

Genius begins great works. Labor alone finishes them.
– Joseph Joubert

Jung’s conviction is that the most effective way to redeem or transform the world is first of all to transform the little piece of it that is oneself.
– Edward Edinger

About 50 percent of politics is definitely obnoxious inasmuch as it poisons the utterly incompetent mind of the masses. We are on guard against contagious diseases of the body, but we are exasperatingly careless when it comes to the even more dangerous collective diseases of the mind.
– CG Jung

I’d rather help people have nuanced, deep convos about power dynamics than make universal rules for what is ethical when there’s a power imbalance.
– Mia Schachter

Don’t go looking at me like that because you’ll wear your eyes out.
– Emile Zola, La Bête Humaine

My love is not a beleaguered ransom note that threatens and begs of another something I refuse in myself while keeping my heart hostage—

No. My heart is a torch of living, breathing love that blazes with God and fully contains all it has sought.

– Chelan Harkin

true, this isn’t paradise but we come at last to love it for the sweet hay and the flowers rising, for the corn lining up row on row, … and for how, each day, something that loves us tries to save us.
– Lucille Clifton

I traded these sonnets For a wrought-iron candelabra.
– Bernadette Mayer

Sometimes it’s not enough to know what things mean, sometimes you have to know what things don’t mean.
– Bob Dylan

Work Like You Can
Nothing’ll get lost if we work like we can
Til the smell of the earth is worn into our hands
And I promise you something you’ll never get nowhere
If you only ask questions of love
Long ago people came to this town
To build their lives out of what they found
And now the town’s a ruin and the dirt on the ground
Is mixed in with the ashes of love
Gather with others and work like you can
To live like you can
You can keep your mouth shut better than I can
Accept and obey every law in this land
And when the wind blows your wages right out of your hands
You’ll accept that wind doesn’t blow around love
Gather with others and work like you can
To live like you can
In spite of, in spite of
Money, position and power
All the important things
I’m told we should be dreaming of
The seasons are fixed with sun
Just like an old stone that’ll never be thrown
Soon the spring will come
Like a distant object of love
And the spring tide and neap tide
Bring a rhythm to the land
With the oil on the saw we can work like we can
What you lack in ability you can gain pretty simply
Ignore the riches
The riches of love
Gather with others and work like you can
To live like you can
– Roddy Woomble

But the radiance is not ended,
And the joy, whate’er the cost,
Which those fleeting days attended
Never can be wholly lost.
– Leslie Pinckney Hill

Why is it that all those old English songs are full of “Fal-de-riddle-eye-do” and “Hey nonny-nonny” and all those babbling choruses? Why is it that when we get hep with jazz we just go “Boody-boody-boop-de-boo” and so on, and enjoy ourselves swinging it? It is this participation in the essential glorious nonsense that is at the heart of the world—that isn’t going anywhere, that is a dance. But it seems that only in moments of unusual insight and illumination that we get the point of this, and find that thus the true meaning of life is no meaning, that its purpose is no purpose, and that its sense is non-sense.
– Alan Watts

I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.
– Kurt Vonnegut

We inherited the destruction and its consequences. In modern life the world belongs to the stupid, the insensitive and the disturbed. The right to live and triumph is today earned with the same qualifications one requires to be interned in a madhouse: amorality, hypomania and an incapacity for thought.
– Fernando Pessoa

I long for the day
when all that is dark in me
becomes light
– Mutsuo

Every story has its chapter in the desert, the long slide from kingdom to kingdom through the wilderness, where you learn things, where you’re left to your own devices.
– Richard Siken

Psalm Fragments
by Denise Levertov

Lord, I curl in Thy grey
gossamer hammock
that swings by one
elastic thread to thin
twigs that could, that should
break but don’t.

I do nothing, I give You
nothing. Yet You hold me

minute by minute
from falling.

Lord, you provide.

To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told — that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.
– Beryl Markham

I had spent four years propped on the front porch […] bemused and dreaming, watching the sun shine through the Spanish moss, lost in the mystery of finding myself alive at such a time and place.
– Walker Percy, from The Moviegoer

We who choose to surround ourselves with lives even more temporary than our own, live within a fragile circle, easily and often breached. Unable to accept its awful gaps, we still would live no other way. We cherish memory as the only certain immortality, never fully understanding the necessary plan.
– Irving Townsend

Elegy for Smoking

It’s not the drug I miss
but all those minutes
we used to steal
outside the library,
under restaurant awnings,
out on porches, by the quiet fields.

And how kind
it used to make us
when we’d laugh
and throw our heads back
and watch the dragon’s breath
float from our mouths,
all ravenous and doomed.

Which is why I quit, of course,
like almost everyone,
and stay inside these days
staring at my phone,
chewing toothpicks
and figuring the bill,

while out the window
the smokers gather
in their same old constellations,
like memories of ourselves.

Or like the remnants
of some decimated tribe,
come down out of the hills
to tell their stories
in the lightly falling rain —

to be, for a moment, simply there
and nowhere else,
faces glowing
each time they lift to their lips
the little flame.

– Patrick Phillips

In my small way, I preserved and cataloged, and dipped into the vast ocean of learning that awaited, knowing all the time that the life of one man was insufficient for even the smallest part of the wonders that lay within. It is cruel that we are granted the desire to know, but denied the time to do so properly. We all die frustrated; it is the greatest lesson we have to learn.
– Iain Pears

I want to tell her the history of my family-gods. They are rainforest-hot,
cropland-warm, dark with every-colored skin. They have mouths
that sound like all kinds of countries. I want to tell her these gods
live wild and holy in me, in white and blue cities where my skin
is remembered or forgotten, in cities where I am always one thing, or
from anywhere.
– Jennifer Maritza McCauley

The Moor
by R. S. Thomas

It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God was there made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In movement of the wind over grass.

There were no prayers said. But stillness
Of the heart’s passions — that was praise
Enough; and the mind’s cession
Of its kingdom. I walked on,
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.

Too many are willing to sit at God’s table, but not work on His field.
– Vance Havner

The Volume Of Friendship
by Alex House

Lord, make a factory of peace,
Make more hope,
Hate, the least.
Make war as small as a speck of sand
And terrorism a wick on a candle that burns to ashes.
And make love and peace as big as a skyscraper.
And hope like a mountain that’s 1,000 feet tall.
And make the volume of friendship be so loud
It shakes the ground.

Look closely. The beautiful may be small.
– Immanuel Kant

…that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain…
– Ray Bradbury, The October Country

There are prophets, there are guides, and there are argumentative people with theories, and one must be careful to discriminate between them.
– Peter Brook

To make a stone stonier, that is the purpose of art.
– Viktor Slovski

Do you think it’s possible for an entire nation to be insane?
– Terry Pratchett

Every game ever invented by mankind, is a way of making things hard for the fun of it!
– John Ciardi

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they’re very different.
– Yogi Berra

I wasn’t worried about freedom. I was worried about people being turned into morons by TV.
– Ray Bradbury

Your mind is the knife that cuts the continuum of space and time into neat slices of linear experience.
– Deepak Chopra

A poem,
like trying
to remember,
is a movement
of the whole body.
– Rosmarie Waldrop

Set your sights high, the higher the better. Expect the most wonderful things to happen, not in the future but right now. Realize that nothing is too good. Allow absolutely nothing to hamper you or hold you up in any way.
– Eileen Caddy

Heaven and earth are ruthless and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs.
– Lao Tzu

How well I have learned that there is no fence to sit on between heaven and hell. There is a deep, wide gulf, a chasm, and in that chasm is no place for any man.
– Johnny Cash

But paradise is locked and bolted…. We must make a journey around the world to see if a back door has perhaps been left open.
– Heinrich von Kleist

I am ashamed of my century, but I have to smile.
– Frank O’Hara

They’re telling you to blend in, like you’ve never seen how a blender works, like you’ve never seen the mess from the blade.
– Andrea Gibson

Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, and I’ll kiss you for it.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

Listen carefully: God is not a jerk. God does not want you to be a jerk. If you ever feel like God’s will commands you to be a jerk, then that’s not God.
– Fred Clark

Introspect daily, detect diligently, negate ruthlessly.
– Swami Chinmayananda

Unity is diversity embraced, protected, and maintained by an infinitely generous love. It takes grace and love and the Spirit to achieve unity. Uniformity can be achieved by coercion, shame, and fear. Unfortunately, most churches have confused uniformity with true spiritual unity for centuries.
– Richard Rohr

I don’t care if this poem gets off the ground or not
And neither should you.
All I have ever cared about
And all you should ever care about
Is what happens when you lift your eyes from this page.

Do not think for one minute it is the Poem that matters.
It is not the Poem that matters.
You can shove the Poem.
What matters is what is out there in the large dark
and in the long light,
Breathing.

– Gwendolyn MacEwen

There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses . . . Our senses define the edge of consciousness, and because we are born explorers and questors after the unknown, we spend a lot of our lives pacing that windswept perimeter: We take drugs; we go to circuses; we tramp through jungles; we listen to loud music; we purchase exotic fragrances; we pay hugely for culinary novelties, and are even willing to risk our lives to sample a new taste. In Japan, chefs offer the flesh of the puffer fish, or fugu, which is highly poisonous unless prepared with exquisite care. The most distinguished chefs leave just enough of the poison in the flesh to make the diners’ lips tingle, so that they know how close they are coming to their mortality.

Deep down, we know our devotion to reality is just a marriage of convenience, and we leave it to the seers, the shamans, the ascetics, the religious teachers, the artists among us to reach a higher state of awareness, from which they transcend our rigorous but routinely analyzing senses and become closer to the raw experience of nature that pours into the unconscious, the world of dreams, the source of myth.

Our several senses, which feel so personal and impromptu, and seem at times to divorce us from other people, reach far beyond us. They’re an extension of the genetic chain that connects us to everyone who has ever lived; they bind us to other people and to animals, across time and country and happenstance. They bridge the personal and the impersonal, the one private soul with its many relatives, the individual with the universe, all of life on Earth. In REM sleep, our brain waves range between eight and thirteen hertz, a frequency at which flickering light can trigger epileptic seizures. The tremulous earth quivers gently at around ten hertz. So, in our deepest sleep, we enter synchrony with the trembling of the earth. Dreaming, we become the Earth’s dream.

– Diane Ackerman

From nothing you become sad,
From nothing you become happy,
You are burning in the flame,
But I will not let you out
Until you are fully baked
Fully wise, and fully yourself.
– Rumi

Wisdom is so kind and wise
that wherever you may look
you can learn something about God.
Why would not the omnipresent teach that way?
– St. Catherine of Siena

Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.
– David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

O dawn! O dreaded dawn! O let me rest
Weary my veins, my brain, my life! Have pity!
No! Once again the harsh, the ugly city.
– Claude McKay

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.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

If you’re lucky
after a number of
revolutions, you’ll
feel something catch.
– Matthea Harvey

What is truth? For the multitude,
that which it continually
reads and hears.
– Oswald Spengler

Release what you thought it was supposed to be.

Release who you thought you were supposed to be.

This life is the remix and it can be better than you imagined.

– Dr. Thema

The deep critical thinker has become the misfit of the world, this is not a coincidence. To maintain order and control you must isolate the intellectual, the sage, the philosopher, the savant before their ideas awaken people.
– Carl Jung

What I love about university libraries is that they always seem slightly off-limits, therefore forbidden. I feel I’ve been allowed in with my little identity card and now I’m going to be bad.
– Susan Howe

early autumn
the ocean and the fields
all green
– Basho

The imagination is chaos. New forms are fetched out of it. The creative act is to let down the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and then to attempt to bring out of it ideas.
– Rupert Sheldrake

Some conversations are not about what they’re about.
– Anne Carson

Violence is not necessary to destroy a civilization. Each civilization dies from indifference toward the unique values which created it.
– Nicolás Gómez Dávila

I’m actually still unsettled by those ever-extending moments where I stop being me
– @the_wilderless

… at flood tide they saw the river as a powerful god, bearded with the white foam of detergents, calling home the twenty-seven lost rivers of London, sighing as the night declined.
– Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore

A reading is a kind of communion. The poet articulates the semi-known for the tribe.
– Gary Snyder

The sky was the place of the past.
– Roberto Calasso

None of your knowledge, your reading, your connections will be of any use here: two legs suffice, and big eyes to see with. Walk alone, across mountains or through forests. You are nobody to the hills or the thick boughs heavy with greenery. You are no longer a role, or a status, not even an individual, but a body, a body that feels sharp stones on the paths, the caress of long grass and the freshness of the wind. When you walk, the world has neither present nor future: nothing but the cycle of mornings and evenings. Always the same thing to do all day: walk. But the walker who marvels while walking (the blue of the rocks in a July evening light, the silvery green of olive leaves at noon, the violet morning hills) has no past, no plans, no experience. He/she has within him the eternal child. While walking I am but a simple gaze.
– Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

and – again like September – Be lonely enough to keep hearing The air drip-dripping towards noon
– Ana Blandiana

Spirituality without spiritual materialism is an attitude of compassion. Finally you have to return to the world
– Chögyam Trungpa

We suffer very much from the fact that we consist of mind and have lost the body.
– Carl G. Jung

Some of the physical torments that the old saints put on themselves were child’s play compared to some of the automatic and habitual mental tortures and chronic self-naughting we inflict upon ourselves. In this, we pathologize rather than mythologize.
– Jean Houston

Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.
– Mark Twain

Unbearable restlessness of the sort that makes me throw away manuscripts, change profile photos, rearrange shelves, draft maps of despair, and acknowledge, once again, that this is the turbulent ride inherent in my writing life.
– Alina Stefanescu

It’s a mercy that time runs in one direction only, that we see the past but darkly and the future not at all.
– Olivia Laing

It’s typical of those with narrow minds, to ramble against everything that doesn’t fit in their heads.
– Antonio Machado

The work to which psychotherapists dedicate themselves is about awakening life. It is about bringing life back to deadened psyches through the body, and to deadened parts of the body through the psyche.
– Deldon Anne McNeely

Now it reveals
its hidden side and
now the other ―
thus it falls,
an autumn leaf.
– Ryokan Taigu

Ars Poetica
For a while I climbed the ladder,
not realizing I’d placed it
against the wrong house. The window
I tried to look into was a mirror.
I fell backward into the world.
– Stephen Dunn

Meditation is not what you think. You sit in absolute silence and your mind starts going over all your movies. During that process, you become so familiar with the scripts you keep in your life that you end up getting sick of them. Then you realize that the person you think you are is nothing but a complicated script you spend most of your energy on. After a more thorough examination, you discover your personality disgusts you. And that’s because it’s not really you. If you feel terrified enough about that personality, you spontaneously allow it to fade away. And then, if you’re lucky, you can experience yourself without the distortion of that personality.
– Leonard Cohen

My new definition of an adult is someone who’s actually facing the reality of presently unfolding ecological, agricultural, socioeconomic system collapse instead of compulsively evading it and clinging to the fantasy that everything will continue on as we’re used to.
– Edward Smith

Of all humankind’s betrayals of its liberators, its betrayal of Christ is the hardest to bear. To create a clutch of hierarchical, mysogynistic, homophobic, dogmatic churches in the name of ‘the lover of lovers,’ the one who Teresa of Avila called ‘the wild and broken-hearted prince of love,’ is an almost demonic enterprise and one that has blinded us for centuries.
– Andrew Harvey

I see whole bevies of shooting stars—like gold arrows before my darkening eyes—but before the black—and burning—I have a small light space to say—oh what? I cannot let you burn me up. I cannot.
– A. S. Byatt

We will love like dogwood.
Kiss like cranes.
Die like moths.
I promise.
– Larissa Shmailo, Spring Vow

On the journey of the warrior-bodhisattva, the path goes down, not up, as if the mountain pointed toward the earth instead of the sky. Instead of transcending the suffering of all creatures, we move toward turbulence and doubt however we can. We explore the reality and unpredictability of insecurity and pain, and we try not to push it away. If it takes years, if it takes lifetimes, we let it be as it is. At our own pace, without speed or aggression, we move down and down and down. With us move millions of others, companions in awakening from fear.
– Pema Chodron

God did not retire to the seventh heaven. God is some kind of lost continent in the human mind.
– Terence McKenna

I’d go out into a great big field all alone or in the deep, deep woods and I’d look up into the sky—up—up—up—into that lovely blue sky that looks as if there was no end to its blueness. And then I’d just feel a prayer.
– L. M. Montgomery

The illusion that you could get someone else to do it for you. To think for you. Even though the great emotions, the great truths, were universal; even though the mind of humanity was ultimately one mind, still, each and every single individual had to establish his or her own special, personal, particular, unique, direct, one-to-one, hands-on relationship with reality, with the universe, with the Divine. It might be a pain in the ass, it might be, most of all, lonely – but it was the bottom line. It was as different for everybody as it was the same, so everybody had to take control of their own life, define their own death, and construct their own salvation. And when you finished, you didn’t call the Messiah.

He’d call you.

– Tom Robbins

In the antigarden represented by the desert, the question accompanying the poet like her shadow under the sun is: Who am I to be so alone? Who am I if I am not with another? The demand for another is always mute but piercing. All these texts ask for another and all the poets ask for another language, even for a foreign language perhaps, because the essence of poetry is to find strangeness in language.
– Hélène Cixous

Neurologically, contemplative moments are pauses in the automatic activity of conditioned brain-cell patterns. Psychologically, they are transient suspensions of compulsion. Philosophically they are “naked intuition,” the momentary direct perception that happens before we begin to think or react. Spiritually, they are tastes of freedom for love …, the spaciousness of salvation.
– Gerald G. May M.D.

The house of your beliefs, of your properties, of your attachments and comforting ways of thinking is constantly being broken into.
– Krishnamurti

You cannot be grateful without possessing a past. That is why children are incapable of gratitude and why night prayers and dinner graces are lost on them. ‘Gobbles Mommy, Gobbles Grandpa…’ George races through it. She has no reference points. As I get older the past widens and accumulates, all sloppy landlessness like a river, and as a result I have more clearly demarcated areas of gratitude. Things like ice cream or scenery or one good kiss become objects of a huge soulful thanks. Nothing is gobbled. This is a sign of getting old.
– Lorrie Moore

Don’t save your enormous creativity for “something better.” Give it to this.
– Rob Brezsny

To come alive again, one needs a special grace, self-forgetfulness, or a homeland.
– Albert Camus

Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black. We can’t tell if it will survive us. But we can be sure that it’s the last thing to go.
– Martin Amis, The Second Plane

Everybody ought to have a Lower East Side in their life.
– Irving Berlin

Everything is changing, including you.
That is an actual fact you can see.
This is not something you will know after reading many books.
So if you have a lot of suffering in your everyday life,
you will actually feel the most important teaching of Buddhism:
that everything changes, and there is nothing to stick to.
– Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

The soul never thinks without a picture.
– Aristotle

Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.
– Jhumpa Lahiri

Unlike a subject like, say, carpentry, where we learn from the experience of those who have gone before us, meditation is defined by spontaneity, by not knowing.
– Barry Evans

When your self-image dissolves in silence, what arises spontaneously is no longer an image but the living substance of what you really are.
– Dennis Lewis

The idea of liberation through the suppression of desire is the greatest foolishness ever conceived by the human mind.
– Emil Cioran

It’s not just a pretty metaphor to say that there are seasons in the affairs of men. The last six thousand years of human history feel like a long, cold, unrelenting winter. The hardship, privation, unceasing longing, and the constant demand for cunning perseverance are the hallmarks of a long winter. Our species has been in this epochal winter for so long that we’ve largely forgotten that life can be another way. Our fascination with the end of the world could be our animal longing for the end of this age of relentless cunning. Change is the law of nature. Every season ends.
– George Gorman

It depends on what you want and how much you want it and how you place yourself in relation to the generally accepted system of morality. You know that old argument that some people have the right to set aside conventional morality because of their superiority or whatever? Clearly, there are people who do terrible things and are able to justify their misconduct by need or superiority or by saying they weren’t responsible. But if these things continue and if you’re unable to avoid self-deception, then you reach a point where you have to say, No, I am not a good person. I have behaved badly. That is the first admission. The second admission is that I will continue to behave badly.
– Stephen Dobyns

You know, there are limits to thinking. It’s like boiling an egg or cooking a soufflé. If you boil an egg too long, it becomes much too hard. If you cook a soufflé too long in the oven, it’s absolutely ruined. And there’s a moment to stop.
– Alan Watts

Summer sings its long song, and all the notes are green.
But there’s a click, somewhere in the middle
of the month, as we reach the turning point, the apex,
a Ferris wheel, cars tipping and tilting over the top,
and we see September up ahead, school and schedules
returning. And there’s the first night you step outside
and hear the katydids arguing, six more weeks
to frost, and you know you can make it through to fall.
Dark now at eight, nights finally cooling off for sleep,
no more twisting in damp sheets, hearing mosquitoes’
thirsty whines. Lakes of chicory and Queen Anne’s lace
mirror the sky’s high cirrus. Evenings grow chilly,
time for old sweaters and sweatpants, lying in the hammock
squinting to read in the quick-coming dusk.
A few fireflies punctuate the night’s black text,
and the moonlight is so thick, you could swim in it
until you reach the other side.
– Barbara Crooker

Openheartedness helps us gain a wider perspective and realize that we’re all vulnerable and fragile.
– Kimberly Brown

Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed. A little distorted. A little foolish.
– Hermann Hesse

Metaphors activate a wide array of different brain circuits, so when we are cut off from metaphorical thinking we compromise the process of psychological integration. When we concretize something that needs to be understood metaphorically, we seal it into a dead and isolated world.
– Marion Woodman

Most men resemble great deserted palaces : the owner occupies only a few rooms and has closed off wings where he never ventures.
– François Mauriac

Most beliefs we build on secrets.
– Junious ‘Jay’ Ward

Let us pretend, we are surrounded by vacation not work, that all this wheat is beach, that the above blue is ocean.
– Huascar Medina

What dreadful Hot weather we have! – It keeps one in a continual state of Inelegance.
– Jane Austen, September 1796

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well. .. Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.
– H.D. Thoreau

It is in your own power to maintain the beauty of your soul, or to be a decent human being.
– Marcus Aurelius

Sufi teachers, good ones, energetically unveil and open their hearts, exposing all their wounds, at some point during a talk or retreat, giving other folks permission to radically open.
Many Native American teachers, during a sacred talk or retreat, will bring themselves to tears for the same reason.
– Leila

The aim of the corporate state is not to feed, clothe or house the masses, but to shift all economic, social and political power and wealth into the hands of the tiny corporate elite. It is to create a world where the heads of corporations make $900,000 an hour and four-job families struggle to survive. The corporate elite achieves its aims of greater and greater profit by weakening and dismantling government agencies and taking over or destroying public institutions. Charter schools, mercenary armies, a for-profit health insurance industry and outsourcing every facet of government work, from clerical tasks to intelligence, feed the corporate beast at our expense. The decimation of labor unions, the twisting of education into mindless vocational training and the slashing of social services leave us ever more enslaved to the whims of corporations. The intrusion of corporations into the public sphere destroys the concept of the common good. It erases the lines between public and private interests. It creates a world that is defined exclusively by naked self-interest.
– Chris Hedges

I see a lot of PhD students trying to find a dissertation topic by trying to first find a gap in the literature. I get why you’re doing this, but my best academic writing advice for you is to write about something you deeply deeply care about.
– Dr. Lisa Munro

To be lost in spiritlessness is the most terrible thing of all.
– Søren Kierkegaard

Could divine presence, as glimpsed by the mind, be thought at the heart of the unthought infinite?—But all thinking rids us of God.

One writes before or after God.
God is the blank present.
– Edmond Jabès (trans. Waldrop)

I followed my own curiosity until it made a book.
– Jennifer Egan

Partake in reality as an actor in a theatrical play: with attention, dedication and an open heart. But never believe yourself to be your character, for characters spend their lives chasing their own shadows, whereas actors embody the meaning of existence.
– Bernardo Kastrup

We’re a race of elsewhere people. That’s what makes us the best saints and the best poets and the best musicians and the world’s worst bankers. That’s why wherever you go you’ll see some of us – and it makes no difference if the place is soft and warm and lovely and there’s not a thing anyone could find wrong with it, there’ll always be what Jimmy the Yank calls A Hankering. It’s in the eyes. The idea of the better home. Some of us have it worse than others.
– Niall Williams

Read carefully, then don’t read; work hard, then forget about it; know your tradition, then liberate yourself from it; learn language, then free yourself from it.
Finally, know at least one form of magic.
– Gary Snyder

One thing I’ve noticed is my writing ebbs and flows with my reading. I’ve just finished a wonderful book, and immediately I’m filled with lyrics and images and I’m inspired to write something again. I think my first tip for beating writer’s block is to defeat reader’s block.
– Katherine Priddy

Imagination travels faster than sight. Deceit comes in through the ears, but usually leaves through the eyes.
– Baltasar Gracián

I can see that there are moments when I am more alive than others. To what extent does that touch me? How to receive this impression: I Am Alive? Can you say that this taste exists? That implies that the rest of the time you are as if dead, that’s a given. When you are as if dead and you engage in so-called inner work, what quality do you think the work will have? What is the value of the sensation, the collectedness that you call “trying?” This is not at all to make you sad but to invite you to recognize that there is only one taste that would illuminate your inner movement: “I Am Alive.”
– Michel Conge

Body like a Mountain.
Heart like the Ocean.
Mind like the Sky.
– Dogen

Religion isn’t invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are. You know something and then the Quality stimulus hits and then you try to define the Quality stimulus, but to define it all you’ve got to work with is what you know. So your definition is made up of what you know. It’s an analogue to what you already know. It has to be. It can’t be anything else. And the mythos grows this way. By analogies to what is known before. The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. The Quality is the track that directs the train. What is outside the train, to either side—that is the terra incognita of the insane. He knew that to understand Quality he would have to leave the mythos. That’s why he felt that slippage. He knew something was about to happen.
– Ken Pirsig

You cannot take it all. Offer. Sacrifice does not kill, but preserve, make it holy. Until wings turn into a cross. However noble, if we do things on our own, we are the enemies of grace. Odysseus was noble. Nevertheless Dante put him in hell, precisely for that reason. Hell is based on justice. Heaven is grace. Nobody deserves it.
– Ewa Chrusciel

those who read own the world,
and those who watch
television lose it.
– Werner Herzog

It’s one void after another is what it is…It aint just the one. Like it says in the good book. You think the void is just the void but it aint. It goes on.
– Cormac McCarthy

In the economy of the body, the limbic highway takes precedence over the neural pathways. We were designed and built to feel, and there is no thought, no state of mind, that is not also a feeling state. Nobody can feel too much, though many of us work very hard at feeling too little. Feeling is frightening. Well, I find it so.
– Jeanette Winterson

The modern masses do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience… What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.
– Hannah Arendt

God forbid this is my last day on this beautiful earth, it won’t be spent listening to some news person telling me how rotten we are, how rotten life is, heck no, I’m going out and seeing how beautiful life is.
– Frank Zappa

REFUGE

I lay myself down
on the welcoming
ground, the earth’s
spine becoming mine.
Peace seeps into
heavy limbs and
slows my heartbeat
to the pace of
nature. I take refuge
in the quiet, and let
my burdens go,
one by one, until
the earth and I
both float in the
same vast and
holy silence.

– Danna Faulds

If you wish to be more than a typist of words, you have no choice, you must extend awareness further than society wants it to go. You must travel in the mythic and living landscapes that lie outside of and beyond the statistical mentality. You must enter dark waters. At minimum that means understanding that the primary thing a writer works with is not words but meanings; the most important thing with which a writer works are invisible to the eye. The cannot be seen, they can only be felt. And so you must feel. Keenly.
– Stephen Buhner

In therapy the problem is always the whole person, never the symptom alone. We must ask questions which challenge the whole personality.
– CG Jung

Wealthy people eat tasty meat and strong, ambitious men eat roots. I am just poor.

snowy morning
all alone I chew
dried salmon

– Matsuo Basho

Changing the subject is one of the most difficult arts to master, the key to almost all the others.
– César Aira

Can all us of agree that in 2023, we’re wearing comfy pants only?

– athleta@threads.net

Ungoverernable, the sun, the sun, the sun
– Nicholas Gulig

It might have been a celebration, so strong the presence
of the poem. The sky sinks slowly inside the past.
– Barbara Guest

The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.
– Robert M. Pirsig

When I first realized I was queer, I thought I had to leave god. And I had
a permeating sense of loneliness for a
long time wishing I was connected to something greater. Now I understand god differently. It’s no longer a belief
for me. It’s an experience. I look at a tree and it overtakes my being. And I can feel that the tree had to have been loved
to have been made. My whole yard
is blooming with flowers right now.
When I look at a flower I can feel the divinity that created it. And, I can feel
in my heart of hearts that I was made from the exact same love that made
the flower. My trust in life comes
from looking at beauty of our world
and feeling a part of it. Feeling my
heart pumping. Feeling my feet take steps. And when I speak of god I am
not speaking of something outside
of us. I mean the divine within us all.
I could replace the word god with
any of my friends’ names.
– Andrea Gibson

You must understand, if you want to be a poet, there is no stopping place. We poets go on and on. Stations. Small steps. Sometimes an oasis. That’s it, on and on and on.
– Meena Alexander

Pursue the authentic―decide first what is authentic, then go after it with all your heart.
– Louise Erdrich

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
– Henry David Thoreau

Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure.
– William James

If one is caught in a projection that disturbs one’s adaptation, whether it be an attraction full of fascination or hatred or obstinacy in clinging to a theory or an idea, at first one is carried along by a current of powerful affect as well as of desire or inner demand (to “devour” the beloved object, to “annihilate” the enemy, to force the idea onto other people). This leads to behavior that is constantly at odds w/ the outer world, and conflicts & disappointments result.
– Marie Louise von Franz

Spinning and weaving activities are connected with the idea of nature. The Goddess of nature is the loom into which God throws the shuttle so as to weave the world.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

This, I believe, is the great Western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else’s.
– Joseph Campbell

Before we even ask ourselves how to heal our estrangement, we must first sink down into the wound itself and apprentice ourselves to it.
– Toko-pa Turner, Belonging

lunch with a friend
how so few words
hold me up
– Randy Brooks

Respect to the Business Man who appears to be conducting a full work day from a picnic table at the dog park.
– Jane Huffman

How many losses does it take to stop a heart,
to lay waste to the vocabularies of desire?
– Dorianne Laux

We’re finding out in real time, every day, that a lot of people just don’t have any survival instincts.
– @JessicaLexicus

It is good to be born in a depraved time; for, compared to others, you gain a reputation for virtue at a small cost.
– Montaigne

Saw a student taking notes — notes! — in class this morning.

Nature is healing.

– @seeshespeak

A public university is neither the buildings on a campus nor the endowment nor its figureheads. The public university is quite simply its people: students, past, present, and future; staff who support the mission; workers who provide services; and us, the faculty.
– Rose Casey

The symbol the world itself is speaking. The more archaic and “deeper,” that is the more physiological, the symbol is, the more collective and universal, the more “material” it is.
– CG Jung

Like the cell, the line is the basic structural, functional, and biological unit of all known living poems.
– Dorianne Laux

If you’re in community, you’re already in resistance.
– Moe Bowstern

Nothing could be so delightful as the style of living in Scotland; the people were so frank & gay, & the manners so easy & engaging…
– Susan Ferrier

As for my personal hopes, I’d like to repay my debt to oxygen, mountains, and fish; to forest, plants, animals, and insects; to my fellow humans, past, present, and future. I’d like to honor both ferocity and love. To be of service and to stay permeable to shared existence. And to be granted the luck to write some next poem, which could, of course, take any shape, color, and circumstance of this shifting kaleidoscope and water wheel we call a human life- at once tiny, not mattering at all, and an immense and immeasurable gift the size of existence.
– Jane Hirshfield

You can waste a perfectly good life trying to meet the standards of someone who thinks you’re not good enough because they can’t understand who you are.
– Barbara Sher

For the thinker, as for the artist, what counts in life is not the number of rare and exciting adventures he encounters, but the inner depth in that life, by which something great may be made out of even the paltriest and most banal of occurrences.
– William Barrett

Give us Courage
Give us courage, gaiety and the quiet mind.
Spare us to our friends, soften to us our enemies.
Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavors.
If it may not, give us the strength to encounter
that which is to come, that we be brave in peril,
constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath,
and in all changes of fortune and down to the gates
of death, loyal and loving to one another.
– Robert Louis Stevenson

The Inner Fire

Van Gogh and Chekhov and all great people have known inwardly that they were something. They have had a passionate conviction of their importance, of the life, the fire, the god in them. But they were never sure that others would necessarily see it in them, or that recognition would ever come.

But this is the point: everybody in the world has the same conviction of inner importance, fire, of the god within. The tragedy is that either they stifle their fire by not believing in it and using it; or they try to prove to the world and themselves that they have it, not inwardly and greatly, but externally and egotistically, by some second-rate thing like money or power or more publicity. Therefore all should work.

First because it is impossible that you have no creative gift. Second: the only way to make it live and increase is to use it. Third: you cannot be sure that it is not a great gift.

– Brenda Ueland

The process of education has naturally enough been the basis of hope for the perdurance of our democracy on the part of all our great leaders, from Thomas Jefferson onwards. To regard teachers—in our entire educational system, from the primary grades to the university—as the priests of our democracy is therefore not to indulge in hyperbole. It is the special task of teachers to foster those habits of open-mindedness and critical inquiry which alone make for responsible citizens, who, in turn, make possible an enlightened and effective public opinion. Teachers must fulfill their function by precept and practice, by the very atmosphere which they generate; they must be exemplars of open-mindedness and free inquiry. They cannot carry out their noble task if the conditions for the practice of a responsible and critical mind are denied to them.
– Felix Frankfurter

Every film is political. Most political of all are those that pretend not to be: ‘entertainment’ movies. They are the most political films there are because they dismiss the possibility of change. In every frame they tell you everything’s fine the way it is. They are a continual advertisement for things as they are.
– Wim Wenders

In 1983, Foucault told Le Monde that all books should be published anonymously for a year, so the critics would have to discuss them without reference to an author who already had a place within the intellectual firmament.
– @aliner

The birds fly quietly through us. Oh, I who wish to grow, I look out, and inside me the tree grows… . I take refuge, and refuge is inside me.
– Rainer Maria Rilke

But everything is changing all the time—the waves, the clouds, and us. If we are quiet and still in the moment, we can witness change and accept it as inevitable.
– Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush

There are many proofs of a tyrant’s innocence
His nails or teeth aren’t long
His eyes don’t turn red
Rather, he keeps smiling
Often, he invites you to his house
And stretches his soft hand towards you…

– Manglesh Dabral
(trans. Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee)

Love is a gentle junkyard
Where pretty weeds grow tall,
And thorns strangle anything truly beautiful
It is littered with shreds of
hope, trust, and fallen rose petals.
– Taylor Mali (the poet)

Anyone who would hold fast through long dark until gloaming, Put out your hand. We will not fray. Light isn’t the only one Who can come a long way.
– George Gorman

It took me a long time to understand that sometimes, when I thought I was writing about ibises, I was really writing about homesickness. I learned to always pay attention to what the words in front of you are really saying.
– Helen MacDonald

I dreamt of you last night—as if I was playing the piano and you were turning the pages for me.
– Vladimir Nabokov

The very moment you change your perception, you re-write the biochemistry of your body. Our emotions directly influence the amount of active coding sites in the double helix of your DNA, thus changing the gene’s expression and altering our physiology. One of the greatest scientific discoveries of our time is that Biology and Belief are direct reflections of one another.

What you think, what you feel, and what manifests in your body and the experiences you attract are always a match, 100% of the time, no exceptions. There is nothing random about evolution and DNA alterations, animals evolve and adapt to their environments based on their perceptions relative to their habitat.
– Dr. Bruce H. Lipton

But poets write to be read, yes? I write to amuse me, to discover and uncover, to open, to crack and to creak, to fumble, to see how far in and down I can go. If I go deep enough into that place, honestly enough, my hope is that you’ll find you there.
– Michael Bazzett

Start now. Start where you are. Start with fear. Start with pain. Start with doubt. Start with hands shaking. Start with voice trembling but start. Start and don’t stop. Start where you are, with what you have. Just… start.
– Ijeoma Umebinyuo

Buddhism is saying: you don’t need any gizmos to be in the know. You don’t need a religion. You don’t need any, even, Buddha statues. You don’t need any temples. You don’t need any Buddhist bondieuserie: rosaries and all that jazz. But when you get to the point that you know you don’t need any of those things, that you don’t need a religion at all, then it’s fun to have one. Then, as it were, you can be trusted to use rosaries and ring bells and clappers and chant sutras, you see? But those things won’t help you a bit. They’ll just tie you up in knots if you use them as methods of catching hold of something.
– Alan Watts

Style is 90 percent punctuation.
– Parul Sehgal

i count the morning stars the air so sweet i turn riverdark with sound.
– Sonia Sanchez

If a mystic is one who is sensibly—or even sensuously—aware of his inseparability, as an individual, from the total existing universe, he’s simply a person who has become sensible—aware through his senses—of the way ecologists see the world. So when I’m in academic circles I don’t talk about mystical experience, I talk about ecological awareness. Same thing.
– Alan Watts

with the gods absent
it all goes to ruin
fallen leaves
– Basho

Again, the devil… showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to Him, ‘All these things I will give You…’ Then Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan”
– Matt. 4:8-10

The human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.
– Alexander Solzhenitsyn

All this appearance is consciousness alone, devoid of inherent self-nature: naturally present, pristine awareness, manifesting with no fixed abode.
– Guhyagarbha Tantra

Passed from hand to hand, place to place, time to time, I could remain my own true self (as a book), despite being thrown out of a car and lost in a back drawer.
– Edward Said

Why is man, who is so highly sophisticated in one direction, so utterly unintelligent in other directions?
– Krishnamurti

We must start to forgive and not stop
for a single minute, maybe not even to love.
– Denis Johnson

idle heat
a farmer slumbers
in an olive grove
– James Welsh

Young writers, I’m rooting for you, but if you approach me to ask, ‘How do I build a career like yours w/ no education, no sacrifice, and no willingness to build community,’ I have nothing for you. I can’t even relate.
– Jonathan Escoffery

One could just as easily contend that a similar heat is generated when two genres are rubbed against each other to form something entirely new. In Proust’s case, the fertile encounter took place between the essay and the novel.
– Edmund White on Proust

What I love about the ancient Greeks is they didn’t need a god to put all their shit on. The gods were basically personifications of whatever nonsensical shit dwelled within them.
– Nick Tosches

Come here words, last things,
before night dissolves you in ink
and moon juice. Gather

your wits just once more
and prepare one more sentence
for chaos to chew.

You came from chaos,
were birthed by it, out of it,
like the noise bins make

when kicked. Speak now. Sing.

– George Szirtes

How bitter were
the Prozac pills
of the last
few hundred mornings.
– Leonard Cohen

ripening jewels
an invisible signpost
destiny as a form of intervention
– Ulrica Hume

While you’re reading, be aware of your breathing. Once you’ve made that adjustment— being aware of breathing and aware of reading—see if you’re more grounded.
– Gary Gach

A woman who writes those trances and portents! […] She thinks she can warn the stars. A writer is essentially a spy. Dear love, I am that girl.
– Anne Sexton

You’ve got to follow that dream, wherever that dream may lead.
– Elvis Presley

When someone says, “I’m socially liberal but fiscally conservative,” what I hear is, “Everyone should have the right to live in dignified poverty.”
– Simeon Berry

She’d sit down / with her cigarettes and red wine / and read these big novels / that took her away from thinking / all day about money and into / whatever Emma Bovary or / Elinor Dashwood was dealing with.
– George Bilgere, Anna Karenina

They have an instinctive shorthand that may be indiscernible to the naked eye, but which they can each see coming almost without having to look up or over.
– Elvis Costello, Irish Times

It’s hopeless to believe that this weather / Will clear. You’re either a victim or survivor. / It’s no longer ‘turbulence’ but ‘rough air.’
– Cindy King

The most dangerous person, as the daily news illustrates, is the person in denial of the erotic energy which courses through the soul.
– James Hollis

The spirit of evil is fear, negation, the adversary who opposes life in its struggle for eternal duration and thwarts every great deed . . . For the hero, fear is a challenge and a task, because only boldness can deliver from fear. And if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is somehow violated.
– CG Jung

One of the ways you know you are in the underworld is that you do not ride your passions, your passions ride you.
– Martin Shaw

A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals.
– John Steinbeck

A poem that doesn’t get out of hand isn’t a poem.
– John Hollander

My images were surreal simply in the sense that my vision brought out the fantastic dimension of reality. My only aim was to express reality, for there is nothing more surreal than reality itself.”
– Brassaï

I cling to everything that obstructs my way to myself.
– @RedBookJung

The heart shuts,
The sea slides back,
The mirrors are sheeted.
– Sylvia Plath

Return you ancient mirrors
you hidden water’s edges
– Giuseppe Ungaretti (translated by Patrick Creagh)

The contentment of innumerable people can be destroyed in a generation by the withering touch of our civilisation…
– Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

All my life I have been giving myself away in poems – to all. To poets, too. But always I gave too much, drowned out the possible response.
– Tsvetaeva to Rilke, 1926

Prophecy is another word for smoke, and lost.

Go ask the living. Ask the dead.

We eat this landscape in a different way, at a distance
so it will forgive nothing.

– Berryman, Alver, Salamun, Hikmet

A tremor in the leaves
and the ground shakes—
mountains moving
– Voima Oy

I’ll make it easy for you, when discussing my work, avoid the words “folklore”, “folktales”, or “myths/mythology”. You start with tht exercise and you’ll begin to see what I’m saying.
– Nnedi Okorafor, PhD

As academia became more competitive, high-achiever types flocked to it & outperformed the weirdos who used to populate it; the result is widespread unhappiness, because academia is more suited to people who obsess over Aristotle’s theory of sleep than people who want to change the world.
– Agnes Callard

It’s a shame when we find out esteemed members of our community might have made up data.That’s bad,& they shouldn’t do it.But catching the cheaters won’t bring our field back to life.Only new ideas can do that.
– Adam Mastroianni

I tell my wife if every person in America knew every single word of information we knew, this country would not be divided as it is right now.
– Special Grand Juror

This lonely hill was always dear to me,
and this hedgerow, which cuts off the view
of so much of the last horizon.
But sitting here and gazing, I can see
beyond, in my mind’s eye, unending spaces,
and superhuman silences, and depthless calm,
till what I feel
is almost fear. And when I hear
the wind stir in these branches, I begin
comparing that endless stillness with this noise:
and the eternal comes to mind,
and the dead seasons, and the present
living one, and how it sounds.
So my mind sinks in this immensity:
and foundering is sweet in such a sea.
– Giacomo Leopardi, The Infinite

I’ve got lots of sensibility and no common sense;
isn’t it better to lie low while the universe bombards

to ride out the pendulation of the seasons
straining not so often to embrace the moon. but more

to render it embraceable; isn’t it enough
that one branch, rocking before a storm, can gather

the lines of twilight like threads in cool fresh sheets;
and isn’t it enough that all creeks flow seaward;

isn’t it enough that riverbanks come in pairs?

– Diane Ackerman, Wife of Light

…we are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily mobilized by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and such like. To call this a society of free peoples is blasphemous. What have we to offer the world beside the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment?
– Henry Miller

How little belongs to happiness! The sound of a bagpipe. – Without music, life would be a mistake. The German thinks of himself as a god when singing songs.

Wie wenig gehört zum Glücke! Der Ton eines Dudelsacks. – Ohne Musik wäre das Leben ein Irrthum. Der Deutsche denkt sich selbst Gott liedersingend.

– Friedrich Nietzsche

Autumn evening~
there’s joy also
in loneliness.
– Yosa Buson

The country does
what the city cannot.
It quietens the mind and
brings simplicity into one’s life
– Donna Goddard

I have hope in people, in individuals. Because you don’t know what’s going to rise from the ruins.
– Joan Baez

We could cheer for the dusk. It is coming. It is here.
– David Kelly-Hedrick

The rose of all the world is not for me.
I want for my part
Only the little white rose of Scotland
That smells sharp and sweet—and breaks the heart.
– Hugh MacDiarmid

If you examine your life well, you will find many instances when God showed His unmistakable mercy to you. Trouble was brewing, but it passed you by for some reason. God delivered you. Acknowledge these and thank God, Who loves you.
– St. Theophan the Recluse

Imagine what our world would be like if creative and engineering talent wasn’t all commandeered by capital but mobilized to focus on urgent, democratically ratified, social and ecological objectives?
– Jason Hickel

let me be yo wil
derness let me be yo wind
blowing you all day.
– Sonia Sanchez

The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.
– Emil Cioran

There was a skyness to the sky and a nowness to the world that he had never seen or felt or realized before.
– Neil Gaiman, Stardust

Half of your beauty comes from the way you speak.
– Ali

Galleries are frightening places, places of evaluation, of judgement.
– Margaret Atwood

go escape while you can go escape buy tickets for the last water train which as it subsides reveals curbs pavements the riverside.
– Iryna Shuvalova

In the middle of the way
under the wet of late September..
Rain-logged berries and stones
Are rained upon, acorns
shine from grassy verges..
– Seamus Heaney

THESE POEMS, SHE SAID

For years I carried this poem by the Canadian poet Robert Bringhurst in my mind like a totem.

These poems, these poems, these poems, she said, are poems with no love in them.
These are the poems of a man who would leave his wife and child because they made noise in his study.
These are the poems of a man who would murder his mother to claim the inheritance.
These are the poems of a man like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not comprehend
but which nevertheless offended me.
These are the poems of a man who would rather sleep with himself than with women, she said.
These are the poems of a man with eyes like a drawknife,
with hands like a pickpocket’s hands, woven of water and logic and hunger,
with no strand of love in them.
These poems are as heartless as birdsong,
as unmeant as elm leaves,
which if they love love only the wide blue sky and the air and the idea of elm leaves.
Self-love is an ending, she said, and not a beginning.
Love means love of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.
These poems, she said.…
You are, he said, beautiful.

That is not love, she said rightly. —

– quoted by Christian Wiman

‘The sea is never pregnant,’ a Wolof proverb goes: You can never predict when it will deliver. You can never predict what it will take, either. The immensity of the ocean has room for every variable – God, genie, climate change, tides – but it bestows and withholds its wealth, shelters and destroys at whim unfathomable to man. To live off the sea is to submit to its vagaries, to endure constantly the tension between desire and defeat.
– Anna Badkhen

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life.
– Carl Sagan

Wherever the spirit would go, they would go, and the wheels would rise along with them, because the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels. When the creatures moved, they also moved; when the creatures stood still, they also stood still; and when the creatures rose from the ground, the wheels rose along with them, because the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels.
– Ezekiel 1:20-21

Solange Claustres, speaking of Gurdjieff.
Always watching him, I saw him ‘listening’ to what was behind the words, what was not actually said.
I saw in his facial expressions how he was trying to feel and understand the unformulated question, the lack of understanding or the denial.
I also felt his suffering for others, his sadness before their inability
to understand, or wish to understand, but also his joy for a person who was truly searching.
I often heard him use the phrase: to become the adult for oneself, and its reference to our line of descendants; he made us feel the link with our close ones, our responsibility in relationship to our parents, our grandparents, our whole lineage – which has affected us all……through this work we help our parents and the people around us.
He attached great importance to this, and said that we had to become the parents of our parents by becoming the adult for ourselves.
– Ian Sanders

The landscape’s silent immensity—and the God to whom it points—is able to absorb all the grief one can give it.
– Belden C. Lane

Language is a pleasure, after all. Bilingualism strikes me as a kind of synesthesia. Instead of seeing colors associated with letters and words, instead of hearing melodies, what I hear with language is the play and echo of the other language. The option to say it differently, and thus to live it differently. Language is not only a means of communication or description. It’s a framework in which we process existence.
– Yoojin Grace Wuertz, Mother Tongue

leaning to your warmth the Rowan tree enamored with the sun
– Ash Evan

Maybe poems are made of breath, the way water, / cajoled to boil, says, This is my soul, freed.
– Dean Young

No one is remembered for being normal.
– Albert Einstein

Inside the heart, a murmur of poems.
– Sam Roxas-Chua, Dearest Federico

we called it rain
but really
all we knew
was dread
– lessethereal@threads.net

A blanket of verbs crosses the threshold. Poetry, you are mine, and I will go anywhere with you. A gap in the mind, a spangled street, my spine, perfectly erect now, chooses these words, yet it is as if I have no choice.
– Noelle Kocot

When composing a verse let there not be a hair’s breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy.
– Zen Master Matsuo Bashō

GOD SEARCHES FOR GOD
Of my unclear and unimaginable self
I want none of it. There is nothing
higher than I. Only monks at my feet kissing lice.
I have nothing to give but tears, of which one
is too much and a whole sea
not enough. Do not fathom me here.
Do not touch this. Having laid the cosmic egg
who will take my immortal life in their hands?
Of my thirst, endless floods. Relativism.
And anarchy is all I seem to incur.
It is said this planet came to be
when I was pulled apart.
– Bianca Stone

WHEN GOD IS DRUNK DURING CREATION
IT IS NOT A GOOD LOOK
You rise naked from all things chaos
to tear the sea from the sky
and rub your hands together:
mountains, rivers,
metal, the cays and craws
wandering for a name;
your sloppy hands forge
luxurious breasts and balls
tight in a Babylonian fervor
no memory whatsoever
of the invention
of the platypus, mammal
with duck bill and venom
purely to compete for a mate—
sadist even then, knowing
the structure of pleasure and panic.
In those moments you hardly knew
what to call yourself.
In those blackouts
joy sat upon your face
like a loose mask
and you feasted on the last
of the unicorns
and licked the wings off Man.
– Bianca Stone

Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence.
– George Washington

Uniting intellectual understanding with the felt experience is a powerful tool in the discovery of meaning.
– Jeffrey Raff

How fragile we are under the sheltering sky.
– PaulBowles

CROSSROADS
by Louise Glück

My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer
I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar,
like what I remember of love when I was young —

love that was so often foolish in its objective
but never in its choices, its intensities
Too much demanded in advance, too much that could not be promised

My soul has been so fearful, so violent;
forgive its brutality.
As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you cautiously,

not wishing to give offense
but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance:

it is not the earth I will miss,
it is you I will miss.

Peace is defined as harmony among those who are divided. When, therefore, we end that civil war within our nature and cultivate peace within ourselves, we become peace […] flesh will then no longer be opposed to spirit, nor the spirit to the flesh. Once we subject the wisdom of the flesh to God’s law, we shall be re-created as one single man at peace.
– Gregory of Nyssa

Forget about what’s happened;
don’t keep going over old history.
Be alert, be present. I’m about to do something brand-new.
It’s bursting out! Don’t you see it?
There it is! I’m making a road through the desert,
rivers in the badlands.
Wild animals will say ‘Thank you!’”
– Isaiah 43:19

Painters have a knowledge which goes beyond words. They are where musicians are. When someone blows the saxophone the sky is made of copper. When you make a watercolor you know how it feels to be the sea lying early in the day in the proximity of light.
– Etel Adnan

For the Sleepwalkers

Tonight I want to say something wonderful
for the sleepwalkers who have so much faith
in their legs, so much faith in the invisible

arrow carved into the carpet, the worn path
that leads to the stairs instead of the window,
the gaping doorway instead of the seamless mirror.

I love the way that sleepwalkers are willing
to step out of their bodies into the night,
to raise their arms and welcome the darkness,

palming the blank spaces, touching everything.
Always they return home safely, like blind men
who know it is morning by feeling shadows.

And always they wake up as themselves again.
That’s why I want to say something astonishing
like: Our hearts are leaving our bodies.

Our hearts are thirsty black handkerchiefs
flying through the trees at night, soaking up
the darkest beams of moonlight, the music

of owls, the motion of wind-torn branches.
And now our hearts are thick black fists
flying back to the glove of our chests.

We have to learn to trust our hearts like that.
We have to learn the desperate faith of sleep-
walkers who rise out of their calm beds

and walk through the skin of another life.
We have to drink the stupefying cup of darkness
and wake up to ourselves, nourished and surprised.

– Edward Hirsch

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
– Jack Gilbert

Forms within the universe, whether galaxies, human beings or trees, are generated as an expression of vast forces at work within a holistic framework. Separateness, fragmentation, and disconnection are all illusions … Wholeness is never lost, and the Health within the human system, which is a manifestation of this unity, is also never lost.“
– John Upledger

And Paradise, boundless light, undeserved felicity.
– Eliot Weinberger

The Tryst

In the early evening rain
I leave the vault
and walk into the city

of lamentations, and stand.
I think it is September, September.

Where are you Josephine?
It is one minute until you must appear,
draped in a grass-green serape,

shorter than most people,
more beautiful, baleful . . .

pressing a hand to my forehead,
slipping into my famished pocket
the elixir, the silver needle.
– James Tate

Something we were withholding made us weak,
Until we found it was ourselves.
– Robert Frost

The next time you hear conservatives use any of the following terms, ask for a definition. They won’t have any.

“Woke.”
“Critical race theory.”
“Cancel culture.”
“Socialism.”

They just want to stoke culture wars to divert attention from economic looting and oligarchy.

– Robert Reich

He convinced me that an artist who does not work following his inner impulse, but calculating on effect, who does violence to his talent in order to please the public and forces himself to pander to the latter, is not really an artist.
– Tchaikovsky about Tolstoy

As I’m saying in many different ways, we get peddled the feral when we long for the wild.

Is it right to call Christ wild? It depends what you mean by wild. I chewed on the word through a six-year PhD, countless hundreds of storytellings, spent a thousand nights under canvas and still it flips out of my hand like a salmon and is back in the stream.

If we think it means anti-all-authority, anti-discipline, anti-structure then I don’t think we’ve got anywhere near Yeshua. If we think he’s all groovy and ‘whatever’ then we’ve had a Facebook perspective on what he actually had to say. He’s hard to draw with one line. He seems austere one moment, generous and relaxed the next. That, in itself, is rather wild.

I think anti-all-authority and discipline is something that leads us to the feral, not to the wild.

The feral is the wild that’s lost its way. It’s a facsimile. It’s not the thing, it’s the absence of the thing, the pain of it not being there. At its heart feral is lonesome. With at-risk youth I worked for years to help feral kids transmute into wild kids, not tame kids. This issue was literally all I thought about, all I did, for eight years. I dumped everything else for this one privileged labour.

In contrast to much of what’s often presented to us these days, I believe wild is the state that God planned for us. Feral is what we end up with when we’re not quite synched with him yet. Wild as un-hypnotised, curious, loving, diligent, fierce when needed. And yes, also obedient. Feral is a domesticated energy that will often turn savage when it finally leaps the fence. And again, the wild and the savage are not quite the same thing. As I’m saying in many different ways, we get peddled the feral when we long for the wild.

I think we can get befuddled over the word wildrather like we can over myth: wild as a bar room brawl, myth as a fiction, a lie. I’m petitioning these aren’t the case in my approach.

The wild in the small way I’ve come to understand it over the last thirty years is filled with hierarchies, filled with repetition, as much connected to sober listening as to ecstatic states. Probably more so. When I headed out into the hills years ago I was to be educated in ways I did not expect. Far less glamorous, much more exacting.

My four years in a tent had me aspiring (and likely failing) to some of the longings of an early Christian in the West Country of England. It wasn’t quite what I expected. I learnt to keep my wicks trimmed and my lanterns clean from grime, to never, ever leave food out when I went to sleep, to pay attention to my dreams and discern the difference between solitude and isolation. There were no screens and no electrics anywhere near my canvas circle over those years. I didn’t have the biblical language but I was absolutely searching for a deep encounter and surely I found one.

A note: most modern people should not go seriously long periods on your own in the woods. I’m talking months not four days. You are as likely to go mad as you are to become holy, and there’ll be no one to tell you the difference. Be careful. I’m cautious about that particular romanticism. There are a few folk really wired for it, but most would benefit from something a little more moderate. Not bland, not compromised, but careful steps.

My emphasis about Wild Christ and its connection to nature is not to imply that Christ constantly taught against civilisation, it’s more a mercy-mission for the over- domesticated, rather breathless conditions that many of us Christians find ourselves in these days. That as technology contorts and free-ranges its myriad ambitions over our attempts to stay connected to a ‘still small voice’ we are facing levels of distraction we never have before. We need that ‘wild’ word now, because of the legacy we see writ all round us. We also need kindness, wisdom, and flat-out courage. We need the disturbing acuity of Christ’s gesturing beyond the things of this world.

Wild, the real wild, is, for me, listening to Yeshua and trying to foolishly and wonderfully follow the treasury he is demonstrating. And yes, I get it. He’s not John the Baptist, he’s somehow an ascetic and also not an ascetic. He upsets everyone, from one angle or another, even his own family at times. I appreciate he’s not banging on day and night about wilderness vigils, but he certainly did one. And I very much doubt that two thousand years ago by the sea of Galilee, there was quite such an urgent need as today to get in touch with Moriarty’s ‘bush soul’. But even so, it’s where our druid is often found praying. The quiet, shadowy places, before the intensity of his days begin.

This fugitive-born God-Man, our Outlaw-King, is not pointing towards the wildness of a Harley Davidson, or unbridled eros, he’s hardly endorsing a plundering of the passions. His words are leaner than that, stranger than that.

There are other words in other times you could affix to him: Gentle-Christ, Funny-Christ, Scary-Christ, Obedient-Christ. At different moments of our lives we will need to seek out and learn from all those different aspects.

But right now, with the chloroform of the secular settling on us hourly, with pleasure unseating goodness regularly, I come to the conclusion that yes, the message of Christ in the face of the world is properly counter-cultural, properly, sophisticatedly, wild.

On the matter of location. I could probably make a fortune if I said seek the desert inside you and you don’t have to move a muscle. That’s a yes and no kind of issue.

If we immediately interiorise the desert, or the forest or mountain top as internal motifs, we’ve lost the incredible way in which God can communicate with us out there in those places. Often in a fairly literal, sensual, startling manner. It’s usually not the same as sitting in your cell/bungalow – wiser people than me will tell you it is – but I can’t condone our usual living conditions as having the same kind of spiritual vivacity as a wood or sacred hill. No doubt I can be chapter and versed on this, but for modern people we often can’t get profoundly ‘inside’ until we’ve been profoundly ‘outside’.

Surprise your retinas, take a walk, sit out at dusk especially. If you live in a city try and find a park. Show fidelity, keep visiting. Make a prayer and expect a response. Submit to a discipline: carve a holy icon. Make a small fire at the bottom of your garden and read the gospel of John with a few friends, I’m sure many of you do already. It doesn’t all have to be high-drama renunciation, a regular practice would be far more impactful.

– Martin Shaw

I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now…Come further up, come further in!
– C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle

When the last artist gives into commercial pressure, the world will disappear into a wisp of smoke.
– Peter Himmelman

We’re told that capitalism is all about innovation. But capital does not invest in innovations that are not profitable, even if they would dramatically improve well-being and ecology. The quality of innovation could be dramatically improved in a post-capitalist economy.
– Jason Hickel

poetry / isn’t revolution but a way of knowing / why it must come
– Adrienne Riche

Chaos is not pure indifferentiation; it possesses a specific ontological texture. It is inhabited by virtual entities and modalities of alterity which have nothing universal about them.
– Guattari

the hummingbird
migrates one thousand miles
a journey
to search for gentler
seasons I’ve left behind
– @lafcadiopoetry

a short sleep
a million dreams
full of pleasure and pain
– Kukai

my ardent soul is a burning pyre, an enormous scorching brazier! the agony of searching for, and not finding, the fire that consumes self-doubt! (…) my mouth has crushed roses, and my poor hands are as emaciated as the vague longings of patients.
– florbela espanca

entering
the temple gate
fragrance of orchids
– Basho

watching frayed clouds
with a stray cat
– saharakoame

Will the analytical mind, analyzing very clearly, rationally, sanely into the cause of conflict, end conflict?
– Krishnamurti

Night is not less wonderful than day; it is equally the work of God; it is lit by the splendor of the stars and it reveals to us things that the day does not know. Night is closer than day to the mystery of all beginning.
– Nicolas Berdyaev

He who goes to himself, climbs down.
– @RedBookJung

Once you have tasted the taste of sky, you will forever look up.
– Leonardo Da Vinci

I’d Rather Die While I’m Alive
Past a certain age most of us come to understand
You can’t outrun the hands of time the way you’d always planned
Some folks just quit on living life in order to survive
But when I have to go I’d rather die while I’m alive
You lose a step or two and several friends before you’re sure
That ladder you’ve been climbing is in fact a diving board
But rather than bow out with a traditional swan dive
I’ll try a cannon ball instead and die while I’m alive
I know it may sound funny and it’s something I cant prove
But sometimes I can find a deeper stillness when I move
If I dont like the parking space I’ll put my rig in drive
When I run out of road at least I’ll die where I’m alive
I’m not saying it ain’t risky but everything is
Even worker bees brave dragonflies and mantises
I can’t just quit the meadow and stay buzzed back at the hive
I’ll search for that sweet nectar and I’ll die while I’m alive
Savor every moment squeeze out each and every drop
Though no one knows for sure just when the big balloon will pop
Some folks start rehearsing at a very early age
As for me they’re gonna have to drag me off the stage
They say death separates the what you is from what you was
And I’m not sure some folks can tell the difference when it does
We dont have a say about much in this life but I’ve
Made my mind up that I’d rather die while I’m alive
Savor every moment squeeze out each and every drop
Though no one knows for sure just when the big balloon will pop
Let’s go down together when the poet says to rage
As they dim the lights and try to drag us off the stage
Past a certain age most of us come to understand
You can’t outrun the hands of time the way you’d always planned
I ain’t filing my book away in some dusty archive
I’ll keep on writing chapters ‘til I die while I’m alive
– John Flynn

Jung’s biggest challenge to humans was to become as conscious as possible. Not to do so contributes to environmental problems and the enormous human shadow that results in terrorism, wars, racism, etc. Jung said we desperately need more understanding of the human psyche, more psychology, because “We are the origin of all coming evil”
– George Nash

Poet: Do you write to find out what the poem will be?
– G. E. Schwartz

Being at the edge of ruin and discovery can be the same place.
– Jo Harjo

Deeper than sleep, but in a room as narrow
The mind turns off its longings one by one
– Jack Spicer, Hibernation

Homesickness extremely dangerous because the values of the things for which one is homesick become hopelessly exaggerated — if you lived in Newcastle I do not say you would read sentimental books, but you certainly would read all books sentimentally.

Ovid, admirable as a writer when he felt no emotion (metamorphoses)
— unpresentable [sic] when inspired to self-pity by exile.

Only the Irish are impressed by exile – it knocks the Celtic twilight out of them — Joyce, Moore, (Yeats a spiritual exile whining after Colonus and Byzantium).

Typical literature of homesickness, the only universal emotion unconnected with love or gain.
The Jacobite’s epitaph
The miner’s dream of home
Tristia, More Tristia, Ovid

– Cyril Connolly

Balance
by Adam Zagajewski

I watched the arctic landscape from above
and thought of nothing, lovely nothing.
I observed white canopies of clouds, vast
expanses where no wolf tracks could be found.

I thought about you and about the emptiness
that can promise one thing only: plenitude—
and that a certain sort of snowy wasteland
bursts from a surfeit of happiness.

As we drew closer to our landing,
the vulnerable earth emerged among the clouds,
comic gardens forgotten by their owners,
pale grass plagued by winter and the wind.

I put my book down and for an instant felt
a perfect balance between waking and dreams.
But when the plane touched concrete, then
assiduously circled the airport’s labryinth,

I once again knew nothing. The darkness
of daily wanderings resumed, the day’s sweet darkness,
the darkness of the voice that counts and measures,
remembers and forgets.

Wind
by Adam Zagajewski

We always forget what poetry is
(or maybe it happens only to me).
Poetry is a wind blowing from the gods, says
Cioran, citing the Aztecs.

But there are so many quiet, windless days.
The gods are napping then
or they’re preparing tax forms
for even loftier gods.

Oh may that wind return.
The wind blowing from the gods
let it come back, let that wind
awaken.

the world is so vast —
why do we spend so much time
staring at a screen?
– Jason Gould

Sometimes a poet just
wants to say something and
you make it impossible,
the old monk told his teachers.
– The Old Monk

There is an eternal love between the water drop and the leaf. When you look at them, you can see that they both shine out of happiness.
– Mehmet Murat Ildan

music two centuries old–
the color flows
out of the tea bag
– Gary Hotham

Language discovers what one might know, which in turn is always less than what language might say.
– Lynn Hejinian

you can’t think yourself out of the story you are caught in with the rules and elements of the very story in which you are caught. You need an intervention from the outside (even if this outside turns out to be a deep inside).
– Jeffrey Kripal

O flight,
Bring her swiftly to our song.
She is great,
We measure her by the pine-trees.
– H.D.

I think there is no light in the world but the world. And I think there is light. My happiness is the knowledge of all we do not know.
– George Oppen

I hope your heaven is a library. I hope it is void of almosts.
– Bianca Phipps

In our time, speed is everywhere except in the mind. In Wolfgang’s time, it was the opposite. … The humanoid of the present is an electronic montage with a flabby head. The pinnacle of the eighteenth century, in contrast, is a witty bird animated by silk and steel.
– P. Sollers

It’s so ironic, because you leave home and then home just…shows up in everything you do, in all of your relationships. Home is always showing up, and there’s another opportunity to do things differently, to forgive the old versions of yourself that didn’t and couldn’t.
– Sophia Fey

Women of the 1980s
They came from the municipalities the cantones the in between children of campesinos day laborers drudges. They crossed water and deserts and left children elders husbands. They were children lovers spouses mothers elders vagabond escapists. They prayed in the back of trucks so hard the virgin mother revealed herself at checkpoint to offer the miracle crossing of another boundary. Something was happening to them. So much had happened where they left. They changed the swelling cities but the cities changed them. They gathered burn marks bruises on their arms in kitchens in hotels in other homes. They hid their names behind other names. They learned and did not learn new language. They crossed themselves waiting for buses car rides late night early in the morning. They entered apartments at twilight where they laid beside sisters friends lovers. What were they dreaming as they slipped into their kitten heels hair cut short madonna-like lips painted red dancing in the discotecas downtown uptown outside the loop. They guarded pictures in their purses. They guarded themselves. They married for love married without it and they did not marry. And they loved they learned and they did not love. Learned to find and tuck themselves into their secret seams. The many things they would not tell their children. With illicit seeds they grow what they left behind among the brush little stems memorials now adornments at their windows.
– Maryam Ivette Parhizkar

We Two

We two are left:
I with small grace reveal
distaste and bitterness;
you with small patience
take my hands;
though effortless,
you scald their weight
as a bowl, lined with embers,
wherein droop
great petals of white rose,
forced by the heat
too soon to break.

We two are left:
as a blank wall, the world,
earth and the men who talk,
saying their space of life
is good and gracious,
with eyes blank
as that blank surface
their ignorance mistakes
for final shelter
and a resting-place.

We two remain:
yet by what miracle,
searching within the tangles of my brain,
I ask again,
have we two met within
this maze of dædal paths
in-wound mid grievous stone,
where once I stood alone?

– H.D.

The spirit of the tea beverage is one of peace, comfort, and refinement.
– Arthur Gray

If one wants to be active, one mustn’t be afraid to do something wrong sometimes, not afraid to lapse into some mistakes.
– Vincent Van Gogh

How was I supposed to feel then? About / moving in the world? How could I touch anything / or anyone without the weight of all of time shifting / through us?
– Ada Limón

Endlessness runs in you like leaves on the tree of night.
– Anne Carson

Are you here; recollected? See, most people aren’t. They’re bothering about yesterday and wondering what they’re going to do tomorrow, and aren’t all here. That’s a definition of sanity: to be all there. So to be recollected is to be completely alert, available for the present. Because that’s the only place that you are ever going to be in. Yesterday doesn’t exist, tomorrow never comes. There is only today.
– Alan Watts

Falling from a Height, Holding Hands

What was that?
storms of flying glass
& billowing flames

a clear day to the far sky
– better than burning,

hold hands.
We will be

two peregrines diving

all the way down

– Gary Snyder

Coffee, the drink of (sub)urban busybodies, bestows industrious reasoning that comes with its manic energy. A favorite of Kant, Voltaire, and Kierkegard.

Beer, the liquid bread of the masses, is versatile enough to act as a stimulant or narcotic in any given situation, filling the stomach and the mind with emotion. A favorite of Luther, Marx, and many others—Nietzsche (and many others) hated it.
Wine, nectar of the gods, sweet bounty of the Earth embuned by the heavenly muses with the very essence of art and philosophy. Favorited by Heidegger, Avicenna, Socrates, kings, emperors, and gods.

– Andrew Sweeny

You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.
– Jorge Luis Borges

Keeping suffering a secret we are in danger of deep darkness. Though it is ours to work through individually, it is more bearable when we are in relationship with others giving and receiving support. Shared suffering is the house of compassion. Aren’t we meant to enter and to live there?
– Gunilla Norris

I kept thinking, each human baby, born complete with its skin, is a phenomenon beyond comprehension, more amazing than The Milky Way. Each created anything—cricket, weed, sequoia, dinosaur—is beyond explanation, but here we are, by the millions, acting as if miracles were events that happened in Olden Times.
– Elroy Bode

From without, no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves, unless some interior, responding wonder meets it. […] Wonder interlocks with wonder; and then the confounding feeling comes.
– Hermann Melville

being a poet is great because there are like five job openings a year and you are competing with your twenty beloved friends for each of them!
– Aria Aber

[I WON’T BE ABLE TO WRITE FROM THE GRAVE]
I won’t be able to write from the grave
so let me tell you what I love:
oil, vinegar, salt, lettuce, brown bread, butter,
cheese and wine, a windy day, a fireplace,
the children nearby, poems and songs,
a friend sleeping in my bed—
and the short northern nights.
– FANNY HOWE

Which Greek god was the autistic one?
– @the_wilderless

what have those lonely mountains worth revealing?
more glory and more grief than i can tell:
the earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
can centre both the worlds of heaven and hell.
– emily brontë

You have to learn to write from the very center, and to have the courage to look at that center.
– Vivian Gornick

The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie – a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days – but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
– Hannah Arendt

MORNING AFTER
Again the chance to praise
the same room, the same floor,
the same view, the same tea,
the same image in the same mirror,
which today is startlingly not the same.
Again the chance to find the miracle
in the leaves that fall, the miracle
in the morning sun, the miracle
in the willows beside the pond.
Again, the chance to fall in love
with the same sky, the same field,
the same dirt, the same broken world.
Again, the chance to show up
with these same tired arms
and put them to work,
the same work as yesterday,
which is to learn to lift up,
to heal, to carry, to build,
to be in the world, to praise
the same room, the same floor,
the same view, the same tea.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Normally I’m against big things. I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things.
– Pete Seeger

Dawn is gathering. The noon of night has gone. The first gleams of daylight disclose its temperature. Stone takes on color. Treetops are roots of the day yet to grow. The moon, silver necklace from which Venus dangles like a pearl, still sheds its brightness. The abyss is only perspective, location. There will be nests on some branches.
– Homero Aridjis

As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul…
– Hermes Trismegistus

If then you do not make yourself equal to God, you cannot apprehend God; for like is known by like.
Leap clear of all that is corporeal, and make yourself grown to a like expanse with that greatness which is beyond all measure; rise above all time and become eternal; then you will apprehend God. Think that for you too nothing is impossible; deem that you too are immortal, and that you are able to grasp all things in your thought, to know every craft and science; find your home in the haunts of every living creature; make yourself higher than all heights and lower than all depths; bring together in yourself all opposites of quality, heat and cold, dryness and fluidity; think that you are everywhere at once, on land, at sea, in heaven; think that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world beyond the grave; grasp in your thought all of this at once, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together; then you can apprehend God.
But if you shut up your soul in your body, and abase yourself, and say “I know nothing, I can do nothing; I am afraid of earth and sea, I cannot mount to heaven; I know not what I was, nor what I shall be,” then what have you to do with God?”
– Hermes Trismegistus

Close your eyes and let the mind expand. Let no fear of death or darkness arrest its course. Allow the mind to merge with Mind. Let it flow out upon the great curve of consciousness. Let it soar on the wings of the great bird of duration, up to the very Circle of Eternity.
– Hermes Trismegistus

Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering becomes love. That is the mystery.
– Katherine Mansfield

But in order to see a thing always, one must first of all see it even if only for a second. All new powers and capacities of realisation come always in one and the same way. At first they appear in the form of flashes at rare and short moments; afterwards they appear more often and last longer until, finally, after very long work they become permanent. The same thing applies to awakening. It is impossible to awaken completely all at once. One must first begin to awaken for short moments. But one must die all at once and forever after having made a certain effort, having surmounted a certain obstacle, having taken a certain decision from which there is no going back. This would be difficult, even impossible, for a man, were it not for the slow and gradual awakening which precedes it.
– Gurdjieff

I like the irrelevant, the tangential, the sidebar excursion to nowhere that suddenly becomes revelatory.
– Jean-Luc Godard

… in all disorder, a secret order.
– Carl Jung

GOOD CONNECTIONS (Palindrome)

If I were Wi-Fi,
I’d impute some data;
radar, at a demo;
set up MIDI.
*If* I were Wi-Fi….

– Anthony Etherin

Poetry is the great storehouse of moments of silence
– D. A. Powell

But I speak softer, every year a little softer.
– Samuel Beckett

Flicker

What a small flicker is given To each of us to know.
– Naomi Shihab Nye

You go around all day guarding the flicker you found again that morning. Cupping a hand to protect it from wind, holding it close to the chest, so no wayward breath blows it out. This flame, shaky and uncertain, is how you light the rooms behind your eyes that no one has ever seen. The wick may be frayed, and the wax will last for just an hour or two at best, but it is enough. It will always be enough to look into the eyes of another and pass the flicker on to them.

– James Crews

THE WILD GEESE

Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer’s end. In time’s maze
over fall fields, we name names
that went west from here, names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed’s marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.

– Wendell Berry

If the past has nothing to say to the present, history may go on sleeping undisturbed in the closet where the system keeps its old disguises.
– Eduardo Galeano

The wind rustles the oak leaves: it is the voice of a god which speaks, and the trembling prophet listens, his face bent towards earth. What is the trembling that the mystic priest feels as on a storm night he draws close to the sacred oak? […]
One of the strangest and deepest sensations that prehistory has left with us is the sensation of foretelling. It will always exist. It is like an eternal proof of the senselessness of the universe. The first man must have seen auguries everywhere, he must have trembled at each step he took.
– Giorgio de Chirico

BONHOGA

PLACE OF ONE’S CHILDHOOD; SPIRITUAL HOME

BY JEN HADFIELD

‘The shuddering beauty of this biosphere is bristling with thorns,’
– David Abrams

Buzz Aldrin suffered from depression after he came back from the Moon. Mike Collins, by his own account, felt fine. On his mantelpiece, he set a framed photograph of the crescent Earth taken from Apollo 11, and was tickled when visitors cried out, “oh, the Moon!” Every so often his new perspective on home helped him to see some minor irritation in a different way. He recommended rocketting world leaders into space, so that they could see international conflicts in their global, even galactic, context. He had little desire to go back, though, turning down an opportunity to moon-walk, himself, on NASA’s next Moon-mission. With every hour that passed in Space, voyaging to the Moon, orbiting the Moon, getting everything ready for Aldrin and Armstrong’s return, he spoke less about where he was, and more about Home. He became disparaging about the Moon, calling it ‘the smallpox below’, a ‘withered, sun-seared peach-pit’ of a place. After their successful take-off and reunion, they fired up the ignition sequence that would break them clear of the Moon’s atmosphere. They ‘burnt for Home.’ Collins had plenty more he wanted to do here on Earth below, and ‘I am also planning to leave a lot of things undone,’ he said. But, by and large, he felt unchanged, except that he’d lost the habit of saying “the sun comes up” or “the sun goes down”. The Earth turns before the Sun, he reminds us. We move into the Sun’s light and we move into our own shadow.

On his first space mission, he and Frank Young orbited the Earth at eighteen thousand miles an hour. But because they were travelling at the same speed as the Earth, they felt no sensation of speed whatsoever. Collins went outside. He stuck his head and shoulders out of Agena’s hatch, and gazed at Space, as if looking at a garden from a porch. ‘My God,’ he exclaimed ‘the stars are everywhere [..] this is the best view of the Universe that a human has ever had.’ Has anyone ever been more ootadaeks?

Today, I am experiencing the best view of the Universe that I have ever had. It is the Sabbath, for some, and I am propped at zero velocity relative to the Earth, in the porch of an old Shetland crofthouse on the isle of Papa Stour, waiting, while the Earth rolls me towards the sun.
Despite the wind, and gloom, a wren is singing its heart out on the tarry roof of the byre in the garden. Jon Dunn – the writer and naturalist – says the wren is his favourite Shetland bird. It sings, he says, in the heart of winter. In the traditional style, the byre is roofed with an old upside-down sixareen, caulked and tarred. It looks like an ark, and it is full of peats and pallets to cut up and burn.

While I wait, the wren sings. I drink tea from an Alcatraz mug, and munch digestives down into waning crescents until they are narrow enough to dunk, and I play with a trick of perspective. I look out and say to myself, what if this, this old, Shetland garden, dim in the pre-dawn, this whirling epicentre, of Hilde’s colourful mosaics of broken pottery, of wind-bleached, wind-tousled grass, with this wren, flitting from boat-byre, to broken bowl of rainwater, to gate-post, is actually Heaven?

The Celts believed that Heaven and Earth were only three feet apart and, in the frequently referenced ‘thin places’, even closer. I too believe in a proximate Heaven, as subjective to each of us as our ideas of ‘remote’ or ‘centre’ or ‘edge’. What if Heaven has been right under our noses, all along? What if this is it? Heaven on our doorstep, Heaven under the kitchen sink. When we imagine some kind of membrane between us and Heaven, I think we might be it – sometimes a barrier, sometimes a portal. It might be ourselves that stand between us and Heaven.

I know I’m not proposing anything new, here. I am just, like Collins, trying to see things from a different perspective. I am just trying to wake up. It is late November. At 8.38am, on the porch of North Banks, I spin into the light.

For the last couple of days, we’ve been weathering a Northerly gale. I have had trouble keeping warm. The unfamiliar Raeburn chugged like a steam engine, filling the house with savoury, eye-stinging smoke. In that wild wind, I shut and open dampers, experimenting with the gas and electric heaters, opening all the doors and windows to let out the smoke. It is still heavenly.

I think Hilde and Pete know that, because they do something very uncommon with their house. They open its doors to people they know even just a little, which is how I come to be working on my book, here, this week. Everywhere are little love letters of welcome and thoughtfulness, urging guests to keep warm, to use as much coal and peat and wood as they like, and not to worry about broken dishes.
Visiting bairns are encouraged to draw on the wall in the narrow passage that leads from the kitchen to the sitting room. “Dear Boys and Girls, when you visit, you are welcome to write your name here or draw a small picture … NO pictures of poo, or monsters or scribbles or crossing out of other people’s names allowed. By order of Granny and Grandad.’

These, then, are the bylaws in Heaven. They seem reasonable and attainable, but by my reckoning there were plenty of monsters and poo in Heaven.

And there – I’ve drifted into the past tense. I think I’m imagining looking back from the not-too-distant future. What if we recognise too late the location and sensations of Heaven, once the wild places have been so fragmented and suppressed and polluted as to exist only in reserves, preserves and reservations? And what will we say, when the bairns ask us, what was it like, in Heaven?

First of all, Heaven, like Foula or Fair Isle, was a place went in to, not out to. It was not ‘remote’. What it was was red and rotten, like a cheese left to ripen in a cave. This made it stunning. It was riddled with the caves and tunnels that kayakkers love: you could paddle right into its core, through caves and tunnels. From the top, burns drained into inland sink-holes, hissing into the choppy, turquoise sea below. A dead neesik lay on a beach on the North coast and itself provided Heaven for several other species, which pecked and munched at its ruined crang. What I’m saying is, it wasn’t ‘perfect’. We had been around too long for that, and anyway, perfection wasn’t the point. On Heaven’s beaches, sheltered from that biting Northerly, were silvery pups so fat on seal-milk that they lay almost immobile, wringing their hind-flippers in agonies of comfort. In its flooded sedges, horse-goks were in their own soggy Heaven. An otter slipped onto a rock and masticated some struggling, pink catch – perhaps an octopus – noisily, and its kit played with a mat of floating bu-wrack. It swam up underwater and broke the surface, to wear it like a hat. Heaven was perhaps more visible around animals in the sea: each surfaced, silk-silently, or with a snoring gasp, at the hub of their own swirling, bubbling Heaven.

It was unrecognisable as the Heaven I skinny-dipped with my sister, just a couple months before, when we went into Papa for the day. We made neat piles of our clothes on a greyish beach between cliffs, and we went in. Oh, it’s a sort of transgression to be naked in the North. Our skin crimping, we stood side by side at the sea’s edge, which was frosty-blue-clear, like the taste of toothpaste. Side-by-side, eyes strictly and primly front, we walked into the sea. All summer, we’d been swimming in new wetsuits, and, thus insulated, had forgotten how the cold wrings your bones and punches the air out of your lungs: how you mouth like a goldfish, too stunned to even swear. Then, there was a kind of admittance: some bouncer in my brain stepped aside, and we slipped back into the present tense, which is our only home –
the pale selkie of my body looks unfamiliar as I shape-shift into my sea-skin; as I peer down at my breast, belly, legs through the clear and smoky turquoise water. The water is something I dote on now, all the different ways it is at once. Close in to the cliff, bubbles laced with froth cover its surface, and the swell is lovely, it comes on in gentle contractions, it sweeps us towards the shore. We are very brave. We tell each other so – not just skinny-dipping in this freezing sea, on the Isle of Papa where anybody could see us, but also letting the swell carry us towards a half-submerged tunnel in the cliff that is thick with kelp to the surface, so that its rubbery stalks stretch up on the swell, and submerge on the fall. We can’t see the reassuring sand through the water, but we can see the golden tangles. We let it carry us towards that frightening tunnel – we love this swell – we let it sweep us closer. Cilia sweep eggs down the Fallopian tubes like this – eye-to-eye with the limpets where the water laps the cliff now – the so-called Edge is busy with cleeks and anemones. Don’t let the water brush you up against them; the sea wants to usher us into the arch and its channel, it wants to sweep us in. Now our naked fronts are grazing the taffy ropes of kelp stalks, our bellies palmed by their stroking fingers, it gets shallower and shallower; the kelp sweeps backwards and tickles, and my knee knocks against a rock, we get tangled in kelp like sea otters, we anchor ourselves there, by wrapping kelp around our arms. We’ll be too cold soon, we are already too cold, but we always stay in too long, because – well, Heaven.
Those smooth contractions sweep us out and towards the beach. Then, beyond the chop and bulge of the next wave, a raingös; its burgundy throat patch dapper. It is very intimate to swim with this wild beauty, its feathers perfect as painted. What does it make of us? We try and creep up to it, paddling quietly behind the smooth humps of the waves; it appears, disappears on the swell that rises and falls between us. And then it is gone, although we don’t see it dive. White hands and feet, hard as bone; we have to get out. We stumble to dry our hard, cold bodies on my shirt. It’s hard to get those numb, sticky feet that seem to belong to someone else into leggings; I wipe my sandy feet on the grass, we can hardly move, but Tasha says we need to keep moving so we press the feet we can’t feel up the hill into the wind, and climb up onto the cliff, and for a long time it feels like we can’t breathe properly; my fingers are pink and yellow and the blue of bruises. In half an hour, Tash comments that her feet have thawed out enough to feel the sand inside her socks.

We follow the spectacular coast. We peer down into one red gyö, whose shadowed beach of offal-coloured cobbles can be reached by descending a luge of red scree. We slide down the scree, setting off little rockslides, bigger rocks rumbling by our feet. It is an echoing place, with cathedral acoustics. The sea is amplified, and the sea is a noisy eater, dragging its pebbles with the backsuck, making loud belly-gurgles and echoing slaps when it slops into caves at the cliff’s foot. Then the incoming wave fizzes up through the pebbles. Heaven is littered with bruck: resin fishing buoys, battered sheets of marine ply and old-style floats of the kind that are still used on some herring nets. Tar and plastic and rough balls of pumice from submarine volcanoes roll up on the beach, tangled in the wrack. I zigzag the beach, filling my pockets with souvenirs from Heaven.

Tasha perches on a rock in front of a cliff. One end has been eroded into a towering arch. Her binoculars are trained on a niche with a low ceiling. The rock below it is meteor-streaked with white birdlime. She’s watching two fat scarf chicks, fat-bellied and woolly in grey feather onesies, which are tucked up together at the back of the little cave. The vigilant parents perch nearby, glossy and greenish-black. One fixes us with its gaze and hisses, rhythmically, and it weaves and bobs its narrow, crested head from side to side. It is the scarfs’ echoing, private, musty-smelling Heaven. The sea rushes in. A buoy rattles up onto the rocks. In a rock hollow, the sea makes a noise like a finger pop. I sit, a disciple on a weed-glazed stone, gazing up at the scarfs. Heaven has the wild, stuffy reek of a teenager’s bedroom.

The Papa Stour ferry is called Snolda. She puts into Papa Stour a few times a week. I watch her appear, dock, depart. She puts a thought in the forefront of my mind: the life of islands depends on connection, and the thriving of folk everywhere depends on connection. Papa used to be a prosperous, busy place, which produced some weel-kent and much-loved storytellers and writers and was famous, Magnie says, for the quality of their kye. The men were sought after by the Merchant Navy, and the women, back at home, did everything until the men came home. These days, the nine or ten folk who still stay in Papa full-time, once a busy, prosperous place, fight to keep the ferry sailing.
On Friday, the ferry is cancelled due to that fierce Northerly, and suddenly, in my present, raddled, laddered Heaven, littered with arches that tumble into the sea, I am dependent on several things: the folk on this island, on Hilde and Pete’s generosity, and on the running of that boat. As long as it lies tied up at West Burrafirth, I am marooned here in Heaven. There is no shop. When the milk runs out, there will be no more cups of milky tea in the porch. If I ran out of food, I would have to beg from one of my six neighbours. But I feel ok about that, because Pete and Hilde are prepared for these unpredictabilities and because I know that what’s at fault here, if anything, are my expectations, and not Heaven itself.

My engineer hopes that I’m warm enough and he asks if the wind is noisy. He’s on a boat moored in Uig, Skye and it’s windy there, too. He’s not anxious but he is vigilant, wondering if they might break a line; ‘but’, he says ‘we have loads of ropes’. He proposes another date: when he gets home, he plans to kayak here, across St Magnus Bay. I look out at that wild body of water, that is now bright, and now dark, and I don’t even know if it’s possible.

He’s washed his sweater and sends me a video of it drip-drying, swaying with the movement of the boat. I tell him that here, it’s an admirable, stout and solid wind, but that the old house is equally admirable and solid. I go out into the wind to greet it. It’s a frogmarching wind. As the path turns, it either chivvies me ahead or knocks me off balance, or forces me down into the ditch, making snipe explode from shelter in their scores. When I get back and strip off my soaked cords, my thighs are a slapped pink. It’s nice to get to know each wind that visits us. Besides, it brings snow and hail, which I now watch advancing from the porch, in towering golden drifts from thunderheads over the North Sea, which is now too bright to look at, like the sun. The wind comes on steady, and without fatigue, from the North, over the waves and over the black, still-shadowed isles. In a week’s time, though we don’t know it yet, it will bring an Arctic visitor. The vagrant walrus, Freya – a ‘horse of the sea’, according to the Norse, a ‘tusk-walker’ according to the Inuit – will haul up on the walkway of a salmon farm in the Westside.
My friend Jenny will describe her as a beautiful sweet potato. She will be gorgeously russet, in a fine, plush coat that creases opulently between her spare tyres of belly-flab. One flipper shall be scarred with concentric rings of pink and white. Her tusks will be short, thin, yellowed and blunt. Her fat snout, a pincushion of short bristles. Her flippers, almost unbearably expressive. Sometimes, she will lift a wide paw over her head and wag it as if she’s waving. She will fold it over her eye, whose lids form a fat, closed purse. She will crimp up and kipper in the cool air, and wring her velvet hind-flippers, which are a little more chocolate than cinnamon-coloured, against each other. She. She. Aphrodite, come over the sea. She will be a pin-up; for a few days, everybody’s darling. And she is not here yet, but on her way, but I praise her now, because in 2022, she’ll be euthanised, in Bergen, by order of the Norwegian authorities, because they can’t persuade her hundreds of human visitors to keep a safe and respectful distance.

If you took a meid, perhaps between a walrus and a sea-arch, between a dear neighbour and Fish and Chips night in the local hall, where you might find yourself centred, was Heaven. Its primary natural law, stronger than gravity, was cohabitation. Transactions of attention and care, between people, creatures and place, was how we knew where we were. The moment you left your house, something ticklish and unexpected always happened. Magnie, in his Paisley dressing gown, might bring over a plate of fried herring, disparaging it, as always; he might show me the scar from his knee op, and I might offer to collect his messages from the store.

We were in relation to home, we were as related to otters and sea-monsters and birds as we were to each other. The bigger the flocks of wintering widgeon and plover, that wheeled up from the beach as you platched down through the burns, the closer we knew we were to Heaven. And sometimes they even outnumbered us.
On the towering banks of Noss, at least before bird flu, thirty thousand gannets nested, like saints in a cathedral’s niches. The cliff was loud and echoing with their football chants. We watched them from a seabird tour boat. Black painted wingtips, old-pub-nicotine-stained hoods. With their thick necks and flat feet they had a Booby waddle on the low, flat rocks at the bottom of Da Noup. Gannet poo, in white showers, was constantly raining loudly into the black water; lost feathers slowly sashaying down a hundred metres. A scorie delicately picked at a dead gannet chick floating in the water.

As we motored away they began to follow us. When Phil started to feed herring down a pipe into the water, they thrummed into the sea at steep angles, like throwing knives. You could look right down over the stern into the water and see the pale streaks of their bodies lancing into the depths. We looked down on them and their green vapour trails, but they were firing into the sea all around us, splashing us, in their hundreds. We looked down into the waves at emerald birds flying underwater. We gazed up, perilously, into a deafening kaleidoscope of wheeling, chattering gannets. When they popped up, they floated around for a moment, dipping their heads under and peering down their long beaks with a sort of secretarial air. Great frogspawny bubbles boiled up around them: the air that was trapped in their flight feathers. They dove at sixty miles an hour and to a depth of twenty-five metres. They actually fly, Phil told us, underwater. They had a special protective lens over their eyes, and something like bubble-wrap in their skulls and chests, that cushioned their brains and internal organs from the impact; and when they folded their long wings just before impact, it locked their spines into place.

They were sharpened at both ends, like pencils. When they were about to dive, their perfect soar faltered: they splayed their white tail-feathers, stuck out their flippers, wobbling from side to side in the slipstream like a plane landing at Sumburgh in a gale. The best thing about a gannet-dive was the heart-stopping moment at the crest of the rollercoaster – after they’d climbed steadily up through the air –and they tilted, in what seems like slow motion. A moment of weightlessness – of entropy, as Robin said in the Outpost the other day – then they tipped, clenched into darts, and fired into the waves all around us.

“I do like a gannet,” Robin mused, his eyes alight: “And, fuck me, when those fuckers hit da fuckin watter …”

When Pete hears on his radio that a minke whale was nearby, feeding on mackerel; we all stand, as if an important person has walked into the room. Phil has been fishing here recently: it was mackerel, he says, ‘from top to bottom – great balls of it.’ He leaves the wheel and lets the boat drift, bringing his big camera to the stern.

The sea is smooth and grey, the muscles around our eyes tighten. We wait and watch, scanning the slight swell. Suddenly the long head, and the small fin, like a neat claw, bursts silently into the air, and Natasha’s eyes are big with tears.

Then it dives. We stand on the back deck, feet apart; rolling with the boat. There’s no wind – the diesel exhaust wreathes around us – the whale is gone for what seems like forever. The sea is all smooth and glossy textures.

When the whale surfaces again, it makes us cry, like singing does when you haven’t sung for a long time.

I love the nothings we say in a state of rapture. I love the way words fail us, the naked things we say, our uncoolness. ‘Oh my goodness’ – as dolphins sound and make towards the boat. Then they surface to breathe; a queue of quiet exhalations, close, courtly sneezes of great dignity. Pete says, quietly, wowsers, his professional patter fallen by the wayside. He gives an odd little giggle to himself, a gentle dolphin-like snort of wonder.

I like the becalmed silence now, just the puttering of the idling engine as we stand in our shared church, hushed as we wait, watching, sweeping our gaze over the sea, watching.

There is the release of some shared hunger, or the lapsing of individual pain. In old Shetland, there used to be a practice of divination called ‘castin o da hert’. You poured molten lead through the open jaws of a pair of scissors into water, and when the metal hit the water, hissing, you studied the shapes it hardened into. Heartache cannot float on salt-water: it sinks, in shattered globules of dull silver, down to the seabed.
We motor back. It’s mid-afternoon, and a short hop to the Victoria Pier, but almost all the passengers are sleeping, as if a spell has been cast: this sometimes happens when we reach beyond ourselves, when we go ootadaeks. The exception is the mum who sits by the boat’s step and eats up the green headlands of the North end of Bressay with her eyes; you can tell she is hardly ever alone, and after a few moments she comes back from herself to her family, as if she had been a long way away for a long time, as if she feels guilty, taking the seat next to her daughter and gathering her into her side.

Now I am seeing things from this particular perspective, I can hardly sit still. At night, in North Banks, under all the blankets I can find, I can hardly sleep. I cannot leave Heaven alone. In the morning, I bolt out at the passing of a blizzard. The next is in the offing: a towering machine of shadow and ice and light. I meet two islanders as I drive to the airstrip. We pull up alongside each other and wind down our windows and talk about the weather. I don’t yet know their names, but they invite me for tea. One of them is bleeding lightly from his nose. Have a good Sunday, they say, God bless – and I will take any blessing I can get, regardless of denomination.

I run to the top of the hill above the airstrip, its windsock a couple tatters streaming from a tattered, swinging hoop. I am getting fitter, hike further, despite the weather. The stiffness in my lower back, from weeks of Zoom teaching, is beginning to ease. I’m becoming a better animal, if not a better person. The crown of Ronas Hill, in the distance, is a gleaming white.

‘Prayer, in its most ancient and elemental sense, consists simply in speaking to things’, says David Abrams.

Ronas, I blurt, you’re looking fucking stunning. I am my own swearing jar.

And what I’m doing, by Abrams account, is praying.

Swept away with the idea, he said it felt like an awakening to him. More like a remembering, I think. The animacy of the world is something we already know, but the language of animacy teeters on extinction—not just for Native peoples, but for everyone. Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion—until we teach them not to. We quickly retrain them and make them forget. When we tell them that the tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. Saying it makes a living land into “natural resources.”
– Robin Wall Kimmerer

Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.
– Thomas Paine, Common Sense

Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
– T.S. Eliot

The heavy-handedness of the Spiritual Friend is both appreciated and highly irritating.
– Chögyam Trungpa

Unavoidably, in our eyes, the animal is in the world like water in water.
– Georges Bataille

The self-confidence of the warrior is not the self-confidence of the average man. The average man seeks certainty in the eyes of the onlooker and calls that self-confidence. The warrior seeks impeccability in his own eyes and calls that humbleness. The average man is hooked to his fellow men, while the warrior is hooked only to infinity.
– Carlos Castaneda

Some folks seem to radiate a very high “vibe” on a regular basis, and some a rather low one habitually. Most of us fluctuate while maintaining at some middle ground for the most part. Life has it’s highs and lows, and we tend to ride them. But your personal vibration need not be completely at the mercy of the circumstances and exigencies fluctuating around you. How to raise one’s vibe regardless? We do have some choice in the matter actually. It helps to take stock of how you are feeling at the moment. If you are depressed, it might be reaching a bit to shoot for 7th heaven immediately. There are a few steps to the heights. Raising your vibration out of depression might amount to permitting yourself to feel sad or angry, and let that movement stir you from the deep rut and quietude of depression. Not that you’ll stay there forever either. Anger is a kind of movement that, if not squashed but allowed to run it’s biological course like a wave running through you, can release you into relief, and forgiveness, sometimes laughter and even hope. And the hopeful can take action to bring dreams into reality, and enjoy them. Raising vibration is about movement, frequencies bumping up octave by octave. Often physical movement can be a great help here. To willingly expand out of a contracted place, the humility to aspire to the company of the uplifted ones helps too. Misery loves company, but so do the saints. If you can identify that around which you are contracting, it is possible to image more space in relationship to the fear, the situation, the person. Ask for help from the highest vibrations to get moving in that growing space. Give yourself some room to breathe, to dance, to lighten up. Before your body moves an inch on the outside, you can begin to open up to the infinite space within you. This ain’t magic. It is one of your most basic powers, and readily accessible.
– Gil Hedley

… is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place. It is not to bring men and women over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines. It is not to lead our neighbor into a corner where there are no alternatives left, but to open wide a spectrum of options for choice and commitment. It is not an educated intimidation with good books, good stories and good works, but liberation of fearful hearts so that words can find roots and bear ample fruit … The paradox of hospitality is that it wants to create emptiness where strangers can enter and discover themselves created free; free to sing their own songs, speak their own languages, dance their own dances; free also to leave and follow their own vocations. Hospitality is not a subtle invitation to adopt the lifestyle of the host, but the gift of a chance for the guest to find his own … To convert hostility to hospitality requires the creation of the friendly empty space where we can reach out to our fellow human beings and invite them to a new relationship. This conversion is an inner event that cannot be manipulated but must develop from within. Just as we cannot force a plant to grow but can take away the weeds and stones which prevent its development, so we cannot force anyone to such a personal and intimate change of heart, but can offer a space where such a change can take place.
– Henri Nouwen

Do you ever wonder if putting every esoteric tradition’s most advanced secrets in listicles and free pdfs has led to some misunderstandings?
– @the_wilderless

the slow spin
on a wind turbine…
autumn morning
– Marilyn Ward

Through blind acceptance of collective opinions, we cripple ourselves and our own potential for meaningful growth and change, and we rarely understand how closely such debilitation is linked with depression, physical illness, neurosis, and death.
– Liz Greene, Relating

fresh leaves rustling in my notebook something half-written
– Kon Kei

Out in the open
sometimes you can
think the wind is
standing still and
you’re the one
who’s flying,
the old monk warned
all the young monks.
– The Old Monk

rural backroads
every direction
a sea of stars
– Rob Cairns

How you are is mostly
how
you’ve trained yourself to be,
the old monk said
– The Old Monk

The magic is still in the music and it’s never sounded better.
– Stephen Stills

I don’t understand why
distance must be measured in nonnegative
numbers.
– Stephen Page

In loss we meet the God of the unknown. We approach it like a possible threat unsure if it is friend or foe.
– Chelan Harkin

Owning something is a ball on a chain.
– Stephen Page

One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.
– Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

THEN: I was swept away by the perfection of things, by the glorious shape of each trout, by the angelic miniature perfection of mayflies, and by the pure wild silk of the Big Hole River. It is for such things that we were placed on this careening mudball.
– Thomas McGuane

NOW: The brown trout are blind, and still alive,” he added, joining others in calling them ZOMBIE trout.
– Wade Fellin

– Read by Jim Robbins

The ego is a psychological structure that we build as an interface between inner and outer reality. Without a strong ego, the outer world can become a highly threatening environment.
– Connie Zweig

When you work for your own liberation, you will find that you have also started helping others to come out of their misery.
– Virginia Hamilton

Turn the Music Off
by J.P. Huber

​The world unfolds itself about
three hundred feet at a time

depending on the lumens. One
headlight is gone and dead, and

the other drips just enough life
to carry on. The hulking black above

the horizon where stars vanish. It’s funny
how mountains cloak themselves as night.

Or maybe that’s just where heaven ends,
sudden and incomplete. The embrace cut short.

What are the odds the single-antlered elk
flopped over on the side of the road

is just sleeping. What are the odds
the silence between us is just that.

You have a smooth brain
Not ridges or lumps
Or valleys or bumps
All ideas slide right off
Like a waterslide
Smoooooth brain
– Jean Arp, Classic Sculpture

green and red maples
too soon for
holiday cheer
– Anne Morrigan

The true narcissist will remind us of the size of his crowds, or name buildings after himself, or use others and throw them away. But his or her journey is desolate, and ends always in emptiness.
– James Hollis

I wanted to be a writer, for as long as I can remember. But as a kid I usually expressed my aspirations in compound form– “writer and.”
– Mónica Gomery

It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.
– Zadie Smith

No progress or growth is possible until the shadow is adequately confronted and confronting means more than merely knowing about it. It is not until we have truly been shocked into seeing ourselves as we really are, instead of as we wish or hopefully assume we are, that we can take the first step toward individual reality.
– Connie Zweig

The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
– Kurt Vonnegut

The darkness contains many
truths that can bring the
light to its knees.
– Andrea Gibson

Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.
– Mark Twain

Poem with Human Intelligence
by J. Estanislao Lopez

This century is younger than me.
It dresses itself
in an overlong coat of Enlightenment thinking
despite the disappearing winter.
It twirls the light-up fidget spinner
won from the carnival of oil economies.
In this century, chatbots write poems
where starlings wander from their murmuration
into the denim-thick clouds of a storm.
When the chatbots inevitably learn
to kill their darlings,
we’ll ask if we are their darlings,
we’ll dive further inward if not or if so.
In films, the intelligent computer always arrives
at a misunderstanding of the human soul
because it lacks our ability
to lie to ourselves.
To feign hope and love through disillusion.

107 Water Street

“small town” is
Largely a state of mind…
– James Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover

All the sailboats in the harbor
face North. I can see twenty-four
from your study window.
Overhead, large white birds fly around
in the September glow.

The sky is baby blue without a single cloud.
The house at 25 Main Street finally sold.
Isn’t that where Venture Smith lived?
He was the son of a prince, who purchased
his freedom. History cannot be unlived.

Chez Perenyi, I visited David’s ashes
under a chestnut where edible mushrooms,
Phallus ravenelii, now grow, and Libby,
a rescue dog from Tennessee,
nuzzled me and licked my lashes.

At the Farmers’ Market, the cheesemonger
couldn’t stop talking. A young man at Nana’s bakery
gave me a brioche and smiled kindly.
And Mrs. Purity, of Purity Farm (I love her peaches),
stepped right out of a small Dutch painting.

All night I hear the clinking halyard lines.
Before dawn, I buy a coffee at Tom’s Newsstand,
then sit with your big Petit Larousse, La Fontaine,
and my ardor. September is a time to feel the light,
write, scratch out, write, nap, walk, begin again.

I am too afraid of jellyfish to swim
with Jonathan out to the breakwater;
instead, I sit with Penny at her long
dining table and eat beef bourguignon.
You make me feel I almost belong.

– Henri Cole

Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people’s anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble – yes, gamble – with a whole part of their life and their so called ‘vital interests’.
– Albert Camus

My intent is to inspire you to create your own work, to think more broadly about the scope of your life, and to develop a greater sensitivity to the world around you.
– Peter Himmelman

Thinking occurs in the interstice, or the disjunction between seeing and speaking.
– Deleuze

People who mistake clarity for certainty haven’t learned that listening isn’t taking a transcript, it’s not speech the voice longs for, it’s something deeper inside the throat.
– Katie Peterson

I am quite conscious that I am moving in a world of images and that none of my reflections touches the essence of the Unknowable.
– Jung

True compassion is an equal-opportunity offering, granted to others precisely because we know and honor what we ourselves feel.
– Gabor Maté

To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself.
– Henry Miller

So many meditators make the mistake of thinking their meditation is “good” only when they feel good and get what they want. In fact, zazen is always good, both when it feels good and even when it doesn’t.
– Jundo Cohen

I don’t think you can ever really get over the death of the few people who matter most to you. It’s too big. Oh, you do, the badly broken leg does heal, and you walk again, but always with a limp.
– Anne Lamott

One has too much tenderness for the little poems of one’s own which have always sat about in corners and never been asked for a dance by anybody.
– T. S. Eliot

I am convinced that the universe is a cold and indifferent and random force—unaffected by human tragedy, connection, or grief. I am also convinced that what rises defiantly from the ashes, what emerges from the tattered remnants left by human agony, and what animates indomitable spirits who harness the devastating winds to soar above darkened clouds—is a transcendent, magnificent testament to the triumph of the human will. Meaning found in the face of inexplicable tragedy. Beauty spun from unspeakable sorrow. Hope wrung from the last threads of despair.
– The Subversive Lens

Who should defend the moon if not poets?
– Antoni Slominski, tr. by Czeslaw Milosz

Objects exist and if one pays more attention to them than to people, it is precisely because they exist more than the people. Dead objects are still alive. Living people are often already dead.

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world

– Jean-Luc Godard

None of us are ever finished. Everyone is always a work in progress.
– Haruki Murakami

Injuring someone’s narratives cuts closer to the bone than injuring their body, their mind, or their emotions.
– River Kenna

“Your interpretation of your life is wrong” is always an attack. It’s horribly rude, and only used on the worst of enemies or the best of friends. ESPECIALLY if it’s accurate!
– Ken

I genuinely love all these people out here trying to wear their fall clothes in 80 degree 1000000 percent humidity today, bless this lady in the wool vest.
– Amber Sparks

again sadness has returned autumn darkness
– Buson

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.
– Montaigne

Does it pain you that the goodness of the God is neutrally continuous and continuously neutral?
– Clarice Lispector

But what I called solitude lacked neutrality; it too was guarded by the stout wall of personality that I had no way of dismantling.
– Lisa Robertson

He felt a kinship … with the radio’s voice. Its synthetic quality. Its voice as distinct from the voices coming through it. Its ability to transmit the illusion of people at a great distance. He slept with the radio. He talked to the radio.
– Sam Shepard

In remembering my home, I was rebuilding it wherever I stood, carrying it with me.
– Taylor Byas

We’re so busy watching out for what’s just ahead of us that we don’t take time to enjoy where we are.
– Bill Watterson

God is Breath, for the breath of the wind is shared by all, goes everywhere; nothing shuts it in, nothing holds it prisoner.
– St. Maximus

When sufficient mindfulness and equanimity are brought to bear on ordinary experience, we arrive at purification and insight. And, as a result of the purification and insight, our intrinsic happiness, our true birthright and spiritual reality, gets uncovered and we discover that what we thought was the world of phenomena – the world of time, space, and matter – turns out to really be a world of spiritual energy, and that we are in direct contact with it moment by moment.

Because, when the senses become purified, when the inner conflicts – at all levels – have been broken up, the flow of these ordinary senses turns into a prayer, a mantra, a sacred song, and we find that, just by living our life, we are in moment by moment contact with the Source.

– Shinzen Young

If I were really asked to define myself, I wouldn’t start with race; I wouldn’t start with blackness; I wouldn’t start with gender; I wouldn’t start with feminism. I would start with stripping down to what fundamentally informs my life, which is that I’m a seeker on the path. I think of feminism, and I think of anti-racist struggles as part of it. But where I stand spiritually is, steadfastly, on a path about love.
– Bell Hooks

Every phenomenon arises from a field of energies: every thought, every feeling, every movement of the body is the manifestation of a specific energy, and in the lopsided human being one energy is constantly swelling up to swamp the other. This endless pitching and tossing between mind, feeling, and body produces a fluctuating series of impulses, each of which deceptively asserts itself as “me”: as one desire replaces another, there can be no continuity of intention, no true wish, only the chaotic pattern of contradiction in which we all live, in which the ego has the illusion of will power and independence.

Gurdjieff calls this “the terror of the situation”. His purpose is not to reassure; he is concerned only with an impartial expression of the truth. If we have the courage to listen, he introduces us to a science which is very far from the science we know.
– Peter Brook, Parabola

Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn’t stop you from doing anything at all.
– Richard Feynman

There is a pattern to the universe and everything in it, and there are knowledge systems and traditions that follow this pattern to maintain balance, to keep the temptations of narcissism in check. But recent traditions have emerged that break down creation systems like a virus, infecting complex patterns with artificial simplicity, exercising a civilizing control over what some see as chaos. The Sumerians started it. The Romans perfected it. The Anglosphere inherited it. The world is now mired in it. The war between good and evil is in reality an imposition of stupidity and simplicity over wisdom and complexity.
– Tyson Yunkaporta

You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn.
– T.H. White

What is love? There is nothing in the world, neither man nor Devil nor any thing, that I hold as suspect as love, for it penetrates the soul more than any other thing. Nothing exists that so fills and binds the heart as love does. Therefore, unless you have those weapons that subdue it, the soul plunges through love into an immense abyss.
– Umberto Eco

When people can’t handle
God any more, they turn
to religion.

– Erich Fromm

I and the people sitting beside me heard a cello being played in England. There was something strange and marvelous about this.
– Robert Walser (Microscripts) as translated by Susan Bernofsky

I will not follow where the path may lead, but I will go where there is no path, and I will leave a trail.
– Muriel Strode, Wind-Wafted Wild Flowers

Cool and quiet, once all the newly arrived night travelers have stopped chirping. Patches of blue sky appear. A goldfinch twitters half-heartedly.
– Dave Bonta

Dharma is a wholly different education to life than the conventional studies in which we so doggedly train.
– Dzigar Kongtrul

my meditation
turning into moonlight
filling the sky
– Sojo

We cannot secure pleasure permanently. We cannot avoid the predictable sufferings. We cannot choreograph the universe.
– Kathleen Dowling Singh

As if you were on fire from within.
The moon lives in the lining of your skin.
– Pablo Neruda

Best guess? Gaia is sick of us taking the rough synthetic approach to advancement, and is unveiling multidimensional creatures to show us what can be achieved by bodies themselves, so we reorient from cyberpunk to biopunk.
– @the_wilderless

Reading is anguish, and this is because any text […] is empty—at bottom it doesn’t exist; you have to cross an abyss, and if you do not jump, you do not comprehend.
– Blanchot, trans. Ann Smock

Loneliness is not any particular color –
A mountain of black pines
on an autumn evening
– Monk Jakuren

Every book is a Moebius strip, in itself therefore finite and infinite, infinitely finite on all sides, opening a new margin on each page, each margin becoming wider, with a greater capacity for sense and secrecy.
– Jean-Luc Nancy

The tradition to which I belong [Gelugpa] teaches that analytical meditation must be combined with concentration meditation. So analyzing your thoughts, your ideas, your emotions, is absolutely important.
– Gelek Rinpoche

A mind devoid of insight into its own nature is a chaotic mind, a mind of unease.
– Kathleen Dowling Singh

Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the . . . denser it is.
– Carl Jung

All my friends are artists, so I am used to collective agony as a mode.
– Kate Braverman

My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.
– Terence McKenna

I thought if only we could go on
and meet again, shy as strangers.
– Lisel Mueller

The ancient Greeks believed that when you read aloud, it was actually the dead, borrowing your tongue, in order to speak again.
– Ruth Ozeki

We (the Irish) are torturously poetic…We’re contrarian. We never forget a grudge. We address incomprehension. Our war songs are merry. Our love songs are sad. We have half-doors: we are neither in nor out. And we’re marvellous at spouting rubbish about ourselves.
– Colum McCann

don’t run away
return home to your Self
there you’re safe
– Lalah Delia

Life itself means to separate and to be reunited, to change form and condition, to die and to be reborn. It is to act and to cease, to wait and rest, and then to begin acting again but in a different way.
– Arnold van Gennep

Consider your origin;
you were not born to live like brutes,
but to follow virtue and knowledge.
– Dante Alighieri

Because the story of our life
becomes our life.

Because each of us tells the same story
but tells it differently
and none of us tells it the same way twice…
– Lisel Mueller

Got tired of being a house on fire, / so I became a poet.
– Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta

This was my modest dream come true: unambitious flight. The kind that never even got high enough for a view.
– Lorrie Moore

If a man is to shed the light of the sun upon other men, he must first of all have it within himself.
– Romain Rolland

summer’s rout –
reality bites like the
morning cold.
– Pure Land Haiku

why is it so embarrassing when you’re with someone who tells Siri to do something but Siri doesn’t listen?
– @AnnaKrauthamer

We have been made gardeners in a beautiful garden, and we’ve let it go to weed. We have been given a beautiful planet, and we’ve subdivided it and sold it for profits.
– Manly P. Hall

My therapist once said “People don’t abandon the people they love, they abandon the people they’re using” and that was all the closure I needed.
– @goodbyejournals

Some people have no idea what they’re doing, and a lot of them are really good at it.
– George Carlin

We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.
– Will Rogers

inception
of the anthropocene
a butterfly folds its wings
– Herb Tate

In a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.
– Susan Sontag

“/ it was February / it was a march /“

“we stayed inside our coats and our boots”

“she talked me through it”

the “upside down,” the “right side up”

“she called us collaborators”

the refraining, the refrain

– Kathy Fish

Inhaling clouds
exhaling clouds–
mountaintop pines
– Anonymous

Time let go
Of yesterday’s balloon
And it floated away.
– Ian McMillan

I would be like one of those children in fairy tales, who, robbed of their human forms and transformed into something else–a bird or a fox or a tree–never give up trying to prove that they once had human hearts.
– Yiyun Li

yesterday’s tomato
no longer green
– James Welsh

First cup of tea: the morning has learned its lines and can put the script down.
– Ian McMillan

it seems to have found me
right here with this poem
– Mike Rehling

When you experience the goodness of being alive, you can respect who and what you are.
– Chögyam Trungpa

The first modality of the shadow is it remains unconscious, and therefore maybe our children have to carry it, maybe our partner does, or maybe our society does. Jung repeatedly noted that the greatest burden any child faces is the unlived life of the parent.
– James Hollis

The attempt to look at your attitude—what you are feeling and thinking and the frame that holds it, is one of the routes to freedom.
– John Tarrant

Do whatever brings you to life, then. Follow your own fascinations, obsessions, and compulsions. Trust them. Create whatever causes a revolution in your heart.
– Elizabeth Gilbert

The idea of why blockchain is so necessary for this is simply because of all of the gender bias in these countries already right now. You need something that’s immutable, something that’s decentralized, something that can’t be hacked, faked, or stolen, and something that can’t be altered at all.
– Elizabeth Nyamwange

We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.
– Robert Bly

It is often remarked that nothing we do now will matter in a million years. But if that is true, then by the same token, nothing that will be the case in a million years matters now.
– Thomas Nagel

Oh, Life, I am yours. Whatever it is you want of me, I am ready to give.
– William Steig

We have been conditioned and educated to fit into norms, to fit into identity. We fight for our identity, we make it grow by eating illusions. We keep the illusions strong by staying into patterns created for us by society and by ourselves. We need to fit in, we need to feel the belonging. But we never seem to belong. We cannot belong when we’re not true to ourselves. We’re fragmented beings, searching for the meaning of existence, trying to figure out our passions, our paths, our talents. We look from everywhere, there’s not a book, a blog, a podcast, a theory we haven’t searched from… We’re trying to find answers from everywhere except from within.
– Marelle Kaelep

Instead of searching for what you do not have, find out what it is that you have never lost.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Reading aloud can be so engaging, and thus inspiring. I suggest reading something contained that you can finish, like poetry or a short story. Look to the classics. This is a gorgeous way to stoke your creative genius.
– Brooke Warner

Your dream house may be a place you will visit or occupy in the future. We take real estate tours in our dreams. The dream house may be a structure that the astral architect in you has constructed for various purposes: as a place for rest and relaxation, as a sanctuary or a study, as a place of rendezvous, as a pleasure palace. Such creations may have their own stability. They may be homes that await you in the afterlife. Your dream house may be a place where you are leading a parallel life with people you may or may not know in your current continuum.
– Robert Moss

My mind is rarely quiet. And I have learned over the years to feed it before it’s hungry, lest it become ravenous and impulsive. I’ve also learned that as with most healthy organs, it needs a fairly clean diet. I whittled out the gossip, the click-bait news and the salacious stories the media was serving up daily and replaced it with a balance of beauty, hope, goodwill, fun and laughter – and plenty ‘real-talk’ of course, to remind it we are not alone. But this clean diet I live on doesn’t shy away from life’s sadness or difficult topics, as you may think. Not at all. In fact I delve into them head-first but with real information as my recipe, no dramatics, and always, ALWAYS, adding a side dish of comfort and hope. We were never meant to know all of life’s troubles all of the time, you see. No human condition was ever supposed to worry for ALL human conditions. It is too much. So we must filter, prioritise and arrange the world’s worry, in order that we don’t become overwhelmed with hopelessness, misery and fear. And even better still, we must allow ourselves more ‘actionable stress’, than ‘non-actionable stress’ (stress we cannot do anything towards). Studies clearly show that actionable stress is far less dangerous, simply because we can take steps to overcome the issues, we can do something towards it. That is how life is supposed to be. So, my tip for anyone with a never-quiet mind is to be picky with your diet. Be organised with your list of what matters. Be choosy over what worry is for you and what worry you truly cannot do a thing about. And if your mind runs dark as well as loud, slap points of calm around your environment. Like post-it notes of mindfulness, they can bring you into the moment and remind you beauty exists everywhere, if you are seeing.
– Donna Ashworth

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.
– Bob Dylan

Achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords.
– Virginia Woolf

Symbols bear the same relation to the real world that money bears to wealth. You cannot quench anybody’s thirst with the word “water” just as you cannot eat a dollar bill and derive nutrition from it. But using symbols and using conscious intelligence—scanning—has proved very useful to us. It has given us such technology as we have. But at the same time it has proved too much of a good thing. At the same time, we’ve become so fascinated with it that we confuse the world as it is with the world as it is thought about, talked about, and figured about—that is to say, with the world as it is described. And the difference between these two is vast. And when we are not aware of ourselves except in a symbolic way, we’re not related to ourselves at all. We are like people eating menus instead of dinners.
– Alan Watts

To interpret a text is not to give it a (more or less justified, more or less free) meaning, but on the contrary to appreciate what plural constitutes it.
– Roland Barthes

Where is the point where nostalgia turns into history?
– Richard Siken

As people are learning all over again in the modern world, when people who will not acknowledge their own woundedness are given power, they will make new wounds and possibly wound everyone because of their need to deny their own woundedness. The word heal means to cure and specifically to make whole. It turns out that being a whole person means we have to accept our vulnerable parts, and that we have to accept and learn to face our original inner wounds. For in this old, mythological understanding, the fateful event of being wounded early in life creates the need for a deep healing process that becomes the path of awakening for each person. The path of the wounded healer leads to a connection to the deep self within, which is our connection to wholeness, which is the root of the human capacity to heal. There’s an old idea that says that in the same way that something greater than ourselves wounds us early on, something greater than ourselves seeks to awaken through the specific wounds we carry. In that sense, denying the inner wound means also denying the presence of the deep soul or the centering self, which holds the exact medicine we are looking for. In some mythic stories, the wound inside a person is called the sacred affliction, or the holy wound.

There’s another play on words in which the wound which can be seen as a hole, can also be seen as a holy element that secretly holds the natural antidote, the inner medicine that we also brought to life. The wounded healer is ever wounded, and ever able to find ways of healing. It’s an archetypal condition. The point has never been to become perfect, or perfectly healed, or completely whole. The point has always been to become holy. That is to say, complete with our vulnerabilities and our wounds, because the wound becomes a womb from which we are intended to be reborn again and again. And that’s why the old saying was, the afflicted are holy.
– Michael Meade

I’ve decided to make up my mind
about nothing, to assume the water mask,
to finish my life disguised as a creek,
an eddy, joining at night the full,
sweet flow, to absorb the sky,
to swallow the heat and cold, the moon
and the stars, to swallow myself
in ceaseless flow.
– Jim Harrison, Cabin Poem

I do believe that there’s no meaning to our lives except for that which we create, and can live by. The world, however, occasionally gets in the way. Other people tend to complicate things. Love and duty often muddy up a good plan, scarcity has been known to abrogate dearly held principles, neuroses undermines will; it’s pretty hard, and maybe not entirely desirable, to live any ism.
– Stephen Dunn

ISLAND

Wave of sorrow,
Do not drown me now:

I see the island
Still ahead somehow.

I see the island
And its sands are fair:

Wave of sorrow,
Take me there.

– Langston Hughes

Never stifle a generous impulse.
– William Hewlett

See your nature become a buddha
there is no other buddha
the ancients said it best
then you grab but nothing is there
don’t be mislead by words
despite the million kinds of fiction
all lead back to a single truth
this old monk is writing it down
addressing it Ironwall Liu in the Clouds—
– Stonehouse

Jack Kerouac, new Buddha of American prose.
– Allen Ginsberg

I know not to search for my name in your mouth
– Akosua Zimba Afiriyie-Hwedie

If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you.
– Natalie Goldberg

We cannot take refuge in fantasies of either omnipotence or impotence. The difficult truth is less grand: that there is a something apart from ourselves, which we can influence to some degree. And the evidence is that how we do so matters.
– Iain McGilchrist

The way you comb your hair, the way you dress, the way you wash dishes—all of those activities are an extension of sanity; they are a way of connecting to reality
– Chögyam Trungpa

If you could see that the whole thing is an illusion, you’d be happy as a lark, and life would be lived much more joyously by everybody. We would dance together and give things away and stop fighting, see? If we really saw it was an illusion we’d all be happy in our big dream.
– Alan Watts

Often, much to our dismay, when we begin to look at our own minds, we find a discordant chorus of reactions to each of the speeding, emotion-packed thoughts that race and rage through it.
– Kathleen Dowling Singh

I do not believe that some of the most impactful, world-changing ideas of the humanities emerged from thinking, much less cognitive, logical, or linear thought.

They emerged from altered states of knowledge & energy, they were experienced as given. They crash-landed.

– Kripal

I could write a million poems on hopelessness. But I always find myself back here in the green pasture, by the still waters, with the valley of shadows at my back.
– @poseofpower

There’s no switch that turns on enlightenment. You move toward it with your effort… It means sitting where you’re stuck and not running away.
– Nancy Thompson

I hide from language inside language.
– Alejandra Pizarnik

Arrival. Humidity. Rain.
Small lighthouse. Gray sea.
Water hyacinth. Flooded fields.
– Kim Dorman

thinking of
many things
cherry blossoms
– Basho

Nature is an Æolian Harp, a musical instrument; whose tones again are keys to higher strings in us.
– Novalis

If people have to put labels on me, I’d prefer the first label to be human being, the second label to be pacifist, and the third to be folk singer.
– Joan Baez

I think music has the power to transform people, and in doing so, it has the power to transform situations – some large and some small.
– Joan Baez

see, see,
see how sorrow can
derange a man’s mind.
– Mary Ruefle

Honour this place of not-knowing.
Bow before this bubbling mess of creativity.
Sink into wonderment.
Befriend the very place where you sit or stand.
Do not label this place ‘indecision’ or ‘inaction’.
It is more alive than that, more active.
It is the place where possibilities grow.
It is the place where uncertainty is sacred,
and the place where answers will emerge.
There is courage in staying close.
There is strength in not knowing…
– Jeff Foster

we might have to revise the superior assumption that we understand the world better than our ancestors, and adopt a more realistic view that we just see it differently – and may indeed be seeing less than they did.
– Iain McGilchrist

An analogy for Bodhicitta is the rawness of a broken heart. Sometimes this broken heart gives birth to anxiety and panic, sometimes to anger, resentment and blame. But under the hardness of that armour there is the tenderness of genuine sadness. This continual ache of the heart is a blessing that when accepted fully can be shared with all.
– Pema Chodron

No matter how savvy and independent and self-controlled we may presume ourselves to be, without mindfulness, chaos is what we discover when we begin to look under the hood.
– Kathleen Dowling Singh

Everything has changed and yet, I am more me than I’ve ever been.
– Iain Thomas

I feel that sometimes when I’m writing poems—like they don’t yet fit. Do you ever feel like the best of you is something you’re still hoping to grow into?
– Andrea Gibson

a bird singing
almost cured
my headache
– Issa

A good artist must also have a streak of insanity in him, if by insanity is meant an exaggerated inability to adapt. The individual who can adapt to this mad world of to-day is either a nobody or a sage. In the one case he is immune to art and in the other he is beyond it.
– Henry Miller

I’ll always write—a necessity!
– Anaïs Nin

Reconciliation is not an end point of practice. It is a beginning place for continuing to free your heart.
– Phillip Moffitt, May All Things be Reconciled

It’s not the giving up of the writing that I fear. It’s the giving up of this excitement or whatever it is that you feel that makes you write.
– Alice Munro

We are animal hungry down to our delicate bones.
– Deborah Landau

The creative opus of one’s life may be also described as “psychological creation,” the task of “generating psychic reality in one’s life, reanimating life.” Psychological creation both underpins and permeates all individual callings – it is a universal level of experience, where, as both Jung and Hillman argued, we can confidently declare that everyone is creative, that every life is creative.
– Mary Antonia Wood

Believe in yourself so deeply that you feel it in every bit of your body.
This radical shift in how you see yourself will make each action you take toward your goal much more skillful and powerful.
If other people believe in you that’s a nice bonus, but what matters most is that your heart and mind are in deep alignment with your vision.
– yung pueblo

There are no drugs that will make you immune to stress or to pain or that will by themselves magically solve your life’s problems or promote healing. It will take conscious effort on your part to move in a direction of healing and inner peace. This means learning to work with the very stress and pain that is causing you to suffer.
– Jon Kabat-Zinn and Thich Nhat Hanh

Hard truth:

Don’t get hyper focused on finding labels for people you don’t get along with, like narcissist, emotionally unavailable, etc — that’s not going to help you.

It doesn’t make things better to put them down. Finding different ways to hate on them just makes your mind heavy.

The best thing you can do is stop thinking about them and connect with more aligned people.

– yung pueblo

what are you telling me spruce needle rain
– Polona Oblak

Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words.
– A. K. Coomaraswamy

So few grains of happiness / measured against all the dark / and still the scales balance.
– Jane Hirshfield

Boxes tend to dry up my creativity. The prose poem allows the individual to create his or her own boundaries. … Poetry and fiction are two sides of the same coin. But neither succeeds without being something of the other. Pure poetry, for instance, is silence.
– Russell Edson

Poetry is a practice of wakeful animism.
Poetry is a way-within-The Way.
Poetry is Wayfaring.
– Darion Kuma Gracen

Autumn nights near the forest when, out of nowhere, Cohen’s voice from a moving car, a few seconds, enough to recognize it, echoing as if it were becoming one with the wind: I’ll disappear for you. Yes, Merleau-Ponty was right, the present still holds in hand the immediate past.
– Christina Tudor-Sideri

For me, as a poet, this is as close to a sacred utterance as it gets.
– William Carlos Williams

In the heart of the forest, the faith
– Michael Ondaatje

It was…
a love engendering
gentleness and goodness
that moved me
and that I saw in you.
– William Carlos Williams

the fundamental problem of humanities education is that the university focuses on the study of them, rather than on practice.
– @the_wilderless

What is required of us in the social world is nothing less than vigilant mindfulness.
– Charles Johnson

why must I write?
you would not care for this,
but She draws the veil aside,

unbinds my eyes,
commands,
write, write or die.

– H. D.

the scent of plum blossoms
has defeated the return
of the cold
– Basho

Always remember that to argue, and win, is to break down the reality of the person you are arguing against. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right.
– Haruki Murakami

In the sky there is a star for each of us,
far enough away
so our pains can never cloud it.
– Christian Bobin

anxiety like weeds
yet my heartbeat slows
a miracle
there — among the stones
wild parsley in bloom
– @Eve_Castle

It is almost impossible to state what one in fact believes, because it is almost impossible to hold a belief and to define it at the same time.
– William Carlos Williams

Even at his age
the old monk still doesn’t
know what he wants,
the poet said.
– The Old Monk

If you have a centre from which you are attending, that is merely a form of concentration. But if you are attending and there is no centre, it means that you are giving complete attention; in that attention there is no time.
– Krishnamurti

Admire me is the sub-text of so much of our looking; the demand put on art that it should reflect the reality of the viewer.
– Jeanette Winterson

The first among mankind will always be those who make something imperishable out of a sheet of paper, a canvas, a piece of marble, or a few sounds.
– Alfred de Vigny

First cup of tea: the world doesn’t look its age any more.
– Ian McMillan

Our hands imbibe like roots,
so I place them on what is beautiful in this world.
– Francis of Assisi

Shame is so intrinsic in a strong affection we must all experience Adam’s reticence.
– Emily Dickinson

Buddhism promises nothing. It teaches us to be what we are where we are, constantly.
– Chögyam Trungpa

Writers work to their own tempos but sometimes also against their own tempos. How many comments from poets begin “usually it takes me months to write a poem, but—” Seems to me that the most important thing is to listen to the poem and let it try its own beat.
– Edie Meade

If you want momentum, you’ll have to create it yourself, right now, by getting up and getting started.
– @RyanHoliday

There is nothing perfectly true for man; I mean in human opinions. Just like there is nothing perfectly round.
– Joseph Joubert

I believe that college should be a ticket to the middle class, not a burden that weighs people down with debt for decades to come.
– President Biden

In the end we will only be transformed when we can recognize and accept the fact that there is a will within each of us, quite outside the range of conscious control, a will which knows what is right for us, which is repeatedly reporting to us via our bodies, emotions, and dreams, and is incessantly encouraging our healing and wholeness.
– James Hollis

This far north, the harvest happens late.Rooks go clattering over the sycamoreswhose shadows yawn after them, down to the river.Uncut wheat staggers under its own weight…
– Dorothy Lawrenson

Just like in a pharmacy, we’ll have a wide variety of perfect lies, each one labelled for a different disease of the mind or soul.
– Roberto Arlt

Passerby, these are words. But instead of reading I want you to listen: to this frail Voice like that of letters eaten by grass.
– Yves Bonnefoy

I was twenty-four and headed soon to graduate school to get three thousand miles away and write some poems and learn to hike the California hills and have anxiety attacks.
– Melissa Stein

the humanities, properly conceived, are the development of the core competencies for navigating the human realm

(including and especially the ways that realm is driven by emotion, culture, historical accident & residue, pettiness, nobility, virtues & vices, delusions, wisdom…)

– @the_wilderless

There’s no preparation for poetry. Four years of grave digging with a nice volume of poetry or a book of philosophy in one’s pocket would serve as well as any university.
– Charles Simic

you Sunday walkers
back-packed, beshorted
your loneliness a fog
– @limnedinink

saying ‘no’ to more of the things that we think we want but don’t really need? How else are we going to set limits on our behaviour, or divert our energies into better channels?
– Roger Wright

I glared back
at the landlord
– Matayoshi Naoki

By the mouth for the ear: that’s the way I’d like to write.
– William Gass

Whenever I read a poem, I read for what it doesn’t say.
– Prince Bush

What I love is when totally disparate facts come together.
– John Cheever

The seed that abides in the center of all things
Is pervasive but is not within perceptual range.
– Tantra of the Indestructible Garland

Two musing wizards are those eyes of thine;
Sphinxes asleep in shadow in the South;
Two beautiful enigmas, wondrous fair;
Yet is there something fairer still—thy mouth!
– Amado Nervo

Heaven and hell suppose two distinct species of men, the good and the bad; but the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue.
– David Hume

If your horse doesn’t communicate with you using their ears, you are probably riding it backward.
– Brian Rathbone

Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.
– Sir Karl Popper

Those who share their love quietly, with no thought of reward, they are the heart of the world.
– Rabbi Tzvi Freeman

Love is the last and secret name of all the virtues.
– Iris Murdoch

man’s perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception, he perceives more than sense (tho’ ever so acute) can discover.
– blake

‘Atlantis’ may be the submerged Self within each of us.
– Manly P. Hall

Ode to People Who Hate Me
by Carmen Giménez

I hate being hated even though I
provoke it, not by committing major wrongs
like murder, more like a regular
pattern of being selfish or forgetful,
which is another word for selfish.
If you hate me, trust me I know—
in fact, I have a ledger of people, like you,
who hate me, and I rifle through it every
morning obsessing over the names more
than they think about mine—a passing
thought, a microsecond of dislike or worse,
indifference like the Godzilla rays of fire
I feel buzz out of your eyes when
you scroll past my pictures on Instagram.
I should focus on the people who love me,
every therapist I ever had has told me so,
but I don’t need them to love me more,
so that’s pointless. If we hate each other,
I assure you my hate has a trace of love
with a dash of hope. It’s the throbbing
contradiction of hate’s dark thrall.

If suffering isn’t a repairing process, I will make it so.
I will learn the lessons it teaches.
– Katherine Mansfield

I Don’t Like Poetry
by Joshua Seigal

I don’t like similes.
Every time I try to think of one
my brain feels like a vast, empty desert;
my eyes feel like raisins floating in an ocean;
my fingers feel like sweaty sausages.

I don’t like metaphors.
Whenever I attempt them
a hammer starts beating in my chest;
lava starts bubbling in my veins;
zombies have a fight in my stomach.

I don’t like alliteration.
We learnt about it in school
but it’s seriously, stupendously silly;
definitely drastically difficult;
terribly, troublingly tricky.


I don’t like onomatopoeia.
I wish I could blow it up
with a ZAP! and a BANG! and a CRASH!;
a BOOM! and a CLANG! and a POW!;
a CLASH! and a BAM! and a THUD!

And I don’t like repetition
I don’t like repetition
I don’t like repetition…

You don’t know
what you don’t know
until you have to
teach it,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk

returning
for a limited engagement
Summer sun
– @pauldavidmena

Protect the chaos with your life.
– Kelli Russell Agodon

rain-break
the sunlit track
of a garden snail
– Alaka Y

In the supreme moment of loneliness and sadness, it is as though activity began in the unconscious, for in that moment the hands are healed. The text says that “her hands grew again as before.” The variations are sometimes more detailed, but they always refer to healing by nature, not by doing something special. In many versions the hands are healed by putting her arms around a tree; that is, she gets healed by a process of inner growth, the tree being a symbol of the process of individuation. In the quest of the hero, it is responsible action that brings about the process of individuation. The heroic deed and tremendous suffering are aspects of the process. But sometimes also, without anything being done, things change and become better. There is a natural process of growth, of maturing and transforming in the psyche. There are such situations where one has to wait, and noninterference is the healing factor. In a Russian parallel there is a very striking story of how the hands are healed. In this story the woman wanders through the country with her little son upon her arm and comes to a spring and wants to drink, but is afraid the child might fall into the water. Then the water slowly rises; she looks again and gets so thirsty that she leans forward and the child slips from her arm and falls in. In despair she begins to cry and to walk around and an old man says, “Take the child out!” But she says, “I have no hands!” The old man repeats, “Take the child out!” Then she puts her arms into the water and suddenly grows living hands. At that moment she was about to lose the child, the last thing she had and the only thing she loved, but by saving it from drowning she herself is helped. In real life I have seen that such passive women were not even able to make up their minds to enter analysis; even that would be too much effort—they would rather remain in despair and do nothing. But if it were a question of saving a child of hers from falling into the unconscious, if a son or daughter began to be neurotic, that would force a mother who would otherwise sink into total passivity to try to save the child, and so face her own problem. This can bring her to the humiliating step of having to ask the psychotherapist for help and can pull her out of sinking passively into depression. If not the actual child, it might be some activity or interest, which to her is like a child. I knew such an unmarried woman who was cut off from every kind of relatedness, except playing the piano. But then she had inflammation of the nerves of the arm and she lost that too. That was her inner child, her one activity in life, and at a crucial moment it was taken from her. That was the turning point. She went into analysis and came out of her problem. It could be losing some kind of employment, anything that was positive before. Even in the Russian story the woman cannot save the child she loves so much from drowning. God himself has to come and say, “Do try!” The fact that she is so limited and wounded makes the divine intervention necessary, and that, in my experience, is very true—an actual miracle is needed. One can only help people to the best possible attitude, but it needs a miracle to heal the deep wound so that she can stretch out her hands and then the waters of life bring the cure. Jung writes that women with a negative mother complex often miss the first half of life; they walk past it in a dream. Life to them is a constant source of annoyance and irritation. But if they can overcome this negative mother complex, they have a good chance in the second half of rediscovering life with the youthful spontaneity missed in the first half. For though, as Jung says in the last paragraph, a part of life has been lost, its meaning has been saved. That is the tragedy of such women, but they can get to the turning point, and in the second half of life have their hands healed and can stretch them out for what they want—not from the animus or from the ego, but, according to nature, simply stretch out their hands toward something they love. Though it is infinitely simple, it is extremely difficult, for it is the one thing the woman with a negative mother complex cannot do; it needs God’s help. Even the analyst cannot help her—it must one day just happen, and this is generally when there has been sufficient suffering. One cannot escape one’s fate; the whole pain of it must be accepted, and one day the infinitely simple solution comes.
– Marie Louise von Franz

What are we and what could we be? What forms of new subjectivity can we create that will not originate in subjection?
– Foucault

Now that the time remaining is insubstantial, I need to review my history while asking What exactly it suggests I’ve lived for, What pleasures or duties, what moods Of brief elation or extended calm.
– Carl Dennis

No one escapes the miracle of embodiment, not even God. Don’t you long to return to where you are? When the Teacher says, you are not your body, say, I Am. This moss-green stone is your body, so ancient it was here before you were born. The Milky Way is your body pouring over the mountains of the spine. Stranger, I am your flesh. Bound by lymph node, gristle and tear is a heart that has no edges. A bee asleep on a withered mum. Each quark of you a circle That can’t quite nip its tail. The light that has not yet reached us is your body. The fragrance of next Spring’s flowers. Musk of an elk on thistle. Consider also the dark matter of dreams. Your dreams are my bones. Don’t you long to return to where you are? No body escapes the miracle, not even God. Thoughts won’t enlighten you. The past won’t comfort you. The future won’t complete you. Love happens in this moment, this breath, this body.
– Fred LaMotte

Art can be so good that it consumes me. Being consumed is an act of salvation—I give myself up to the possibility of true light. Whenever I encounter genius in another person’s work, I give myself over to it, hoping to touch it for real for at least a moment.
– Chelsea Hodson

The order we presume with our beliefs is a fragile order, built upon many a mental sleight-of-hand. We’ve been juggling for a long time.
– Kathleen Dowling Singh

Look, you too have already learned from the river that it is good to strive downward, to sink, to seek the depth.
– Vasudeva

My 90 year old grandmother dropped some deep wisdom on my friend & I today.

Over dinner she said, “We’re all Artists of the Source. You’ve got to get yourself out of the way and let it arise from the Source.”

– @VinceFHorn

The bodhisattva is very open-minded, and all traditions and customs are seen as an expression of buddha nature. There is that kind of faith and trust in universality.
– Chögyam Trungpa

Leave, leave your well-loved nest,
Late swallow, and fly away.
Here is no rest
For hollowing heart and wearying wing.
Your comrades all have flown
To seek their southern paradise
Across the great earth’s downward sloping side,
And you are alone…
– Edwin Muir

All empty souls tend to extreme opinion. It is only in those who have built up a rich world of memories and habits of thought that extreme opinions affront the sense of probability. Propositions, for instance, which set all the truth upon one side can only enter rich minds to dislocate and strain, if they can enter at all, and sooner or later the mind expels them by instinct.
– William Butler Yeats

Judgment – The Crafter

Using one’s judgment to decide what comes next is the Worker aspect of a functional mind. This hard worker in every animal, plant, fungus, and microbe needs a good sense of judgment to set aside what’s less relevant when you’re focusing on the next step. But if you try to do this all the time, you will drive yourself crazy. As with pufferfish making beautiful sandpaintings on the sea floor, each species and individual has to attempt to make its own best judgments. When a hummingbird sees two appealing flowery food sources, it decides why to go to one of them first, just as you would be doing if you had to eat flower juice. A raven uses a pointy stick to get juicy bugs out of a dead log because it’s it’s using its judgmental abilities.

Even in large communities, each participant has to keep making its own judgments. As Tamsin Woolley-Barker says about the “waggly dance floor” of honeybees, “Scouts come and go at will…. Anyone can speak their mind to everyone, any time, though each bee will decide for herself what should be done with that information.” Living minds aren’t always following automatic programs. That doesn’t work well when unusual challenges or opportunities arise. Every judgment concerns your own sense of the specialized rightness, wrongness, or irrelevance of an option to your focus, your priority. Each root-tip of a tree interacts with unique other tree roots, fungal networks, and microbes in the moment.

With attention and action working together well, one’s sense of judgment singles out turning points moving to the completion of an aim. And this isn’t always the important mindset. Love and value can grow without the definite purpose of focusing on one thing while ignoring a lot. But if you’re hunting an animal and just let yourself go to sleep, you could endanger your own survival and that of others.

At the times of physically influencing your world, you’ve got to focus on what you’re doing. And you can only make the judgments as the drama unfolds. A desire provides the initiative for that functional process, as your reasonable sense of judgment carries it through to completion.

Relevant judgments compare and appraise different options, because the mental magic of telling ourselves how to proceed from moment to moment depends on qualitative comparisons. As a craftsman works with materials to provide us with necessities like tools and shelter, procedural judgments try to work with whatever’s the current practical priority. Like gastropods crafting wondrous shells to live in, good judgments lean toward symmetry, harmony, proportion, interdependence – the beauty of the perfect tool.

– George Gorman

Your circadian clock is a “slow integrator” meaning it can sum photons (light energy) … which is why your wake-sleep rhythms shift slowly when you travel BUT this also means that getting less than ample sunlight in your eyes one day can be largely offset by getting more the next day. It’s not perfect math but in general, strive for an *average* of results 10-15 min morning sunlight viewing (minimum) and you’ll be set, more on cloudy days and not through a widow or sunglasses but eyeglasses & contacts are fine. Blink as needed to protect your eyes.
– Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D.

you’ve never seen your
face mirror image has
right and left reversed.
– Kyoko Selden

Consciousness must be beyond computable physics.
– Mathematician Roger Penrose

I had forgotten
the benediction of rain
edged with sunlight,
the prayers of dripping
leaves and the cat
testing the edge
of the season
with careful paw.
And I have nothing
more to write about
than gratitude.
– Derek Walcott

It might then be that the division of the human brain is also the result of the need to bring to bear two incompatible types of attention on the world at the same time, one narrow, focussed, and directed by our needs, and the other broad, open, and directed towards whatever else is going on in the world apart from ourselves.
– Iain McGilchrist

Through these assaults of the left hemisphere on the body, spirituality and art, essentially mocking, discounting or dismantling what it does not understand and cannot use, we are at risk of becoming trapped in the I–it world, with all the exits through which we might rediscover the I–thou world being progressively blocked off.
– Iain McGilchrist

Do I need to spend more time searching for better information or do I need to spend more time acting on the information I already have? Is the bottleneck strategy or execution?
– James Clear

A leader must be inspired by people before a leader can inspire people.
– Simon Sinek

Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw.
– Jane Hirshfield

Knowing that thought is limited, be aware of that limitation and do not push it further, because it will still be limited however far you go.
– Krishnamurti

Do not live half a life
and do not die a half death
If you choose silence, then be silent
When you speak, do so until you are finished
If you accept, then express it bluntly
Do not mask it
If you refuse then be clear about it
for an ambiguous refusal is but a weak acceptance
Do not accept half a solution
Do not believe half truths
Do not dream half a dream
Do not fantasize about half hopes
Half the way will get you no where
You are a whole that exists to live a life
not half a life.
– Khalil Gibran

People can’t explain
the reason they’re so crazy
the two evil birds on top of their heads
the three poison snakes inside their hearts
one or the other blocks the way
making things hard to handle
raise your hands and snap your fingers
Homage to the Buddha
– Hanshan

If there’s one thing we all need to stop doing, it’s waiting around for someone else to show up and change our lives. Just be the person you’ve been waiting for. Live your life as if you are the love of it. Because that’s the only thing you know for sure – that through every triumph, every failure, every fear and every gain that you will ever experience until the day you die, you are going to be present. You are going to be the person who shows up to accept your rewards. You are going to be the person who holds your own hand when you’re broken.
You are going to be the person who gets yourself up off the floor every time you get knocked down and if those things are not love-of-your-life qualities, I don’t know what are.
– Heidi Priebe

Love is the only reality, the only terror, and the only hope.
– James Baldwin

False views make up the world
true views are the world beyond
when true and false are both dismissed
your buddha nature will manifest
this is simply the straightforward teaching
also known as the Mahayana
delusion lasts countless kalpas
awareness takes but an instant.
– Hui-Neng

The pineal gland is a link between the consciousness of man and the invisible worlds of Nature. Whenever the arc of the pituitary body contacts this gland there are flashes of temporary clairvoyance, but the process of making these two work together consistently is one requiring not only years bur lives of consecration and special physiological and biological training. This third eye is the Cyclopean eye of the ancients, for it was an organ of conscious vision long before the physical eyes were formed, although vision was a sense of cognition rather than sight in those ancient days.
– Manly P. Hall

We suffer not only our own suffering but also the suffering of others. We are inextricably one and are deeply affected by one another whether we feel it or not. There is no end to the compassion needed for this.
– Gunilla Norris

For a full stack regenerative society is

Culture in the front and economics in the back?

Or is it the other way around?

– Antonio Paglino

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.
– Susan Sontag

midnight–
loading thoughts
onto a passing freight train
– Rob Cairns

do not be / afraid let us speak ourselves into / splendour
– Mary Jean Chan

It’s possible to stay stuck in a functional freeze state for years, on auto pilot.

This is often why people stay in unhealthy relationships and toxic environments.

It’s hard to make changes when your nervous system is frozen in a dysregulated state.

– Amy Pagett

You can get poisoned by systematic mode

And you can get drunk on spontaneous mode

And both of them make you kinda useless

– @the_wilderless

shadowy
cedars in the rain
misty weather
– Basho

Industrial education has abandoned the old duty of passing on the cultural and intellectual inheritance in favor of baby-sitting and career preparation.
– Wendell Berry

He felt as the sun must feel just before it sets.
– Edmund White

If you allow everything to drop away, realization may occur. It is usually not earth-shattering at all, just great simplicity in turning your light to shine within.
– Jakusho Kwong

you can’t separate me from the person you’ve imagined me to be.
– Virginia Woolf

wake up
little butterfly
join me on my journey
– Basho

Thank goodness for these three… I can’t think of anything worse, really, than to try to live up to someone else’s expectations of what you should be. You don’t make art by consensus.
– Tracy Chapman

You could write a song about some kind of emotional problem you are having, but it would not be a good song, in my eyes, until it went through a period of sensitivity to a moment of clarity. Without that moment of clarity to contribute to the song, it’s just complaining.
– Joni Mitchell

Look at things and listen and feel.
– Ernest Hemingway

Take a long time with your anger,
sleepy head.
Don’t waste it in riots.
Don’t tangle it with ideas.
The Devil won’t let me speak,
will only let me hint
that you are a slave,
your misery a deliberate policy
of those in whose thrall you suffer,
and who are sustained
by your misfortune.
The atrocities over there,
the interior paralysis over here –
Pleased with the better deal?
You are clamped down.
You are being bred for pain.
The Devil ties my tongue.
I’m speaking to you,
‘friend of my scribbled life’.
You have been conquered by those
who know how to conquer invisibly.
The curtains move so beautifully,
lace curtains of some
sweet old intrigue:
the Devil tempting me
to turn away from alarming you.
So I must say it quickly.
Whoever is in your life,
those who harm you,
those who help you;
those whom you know
and those whom you do not know –
let them off the hook,
help them off the hook.
Recognize the hook.
You are listening to Radio Resistance.
– Leonard Cohen

Turn, Turn, Turn
(five additional verses, 1954)

A time for work, a time for play
A time for night, a time for day
A time to sleep, a time to wake
A time for candles on the cake.

A time to dress, a time to eat
A time to sit and rest your feet
A timer to teach, a time to learn
A time for all to take their turn.

A time to cry and make a fuss
A time to leave and catch the bus
A time for quiet, a time for talk
A time to run, a time to walk.

A time to get, a time to give
A time to remember, a time to forgive
A time to hug, a time to kiss
A time to close your eyes and wish.

A time for dirt, a time for soap
A time for tears, a time for hope
A time for fall, a time for spring
A time to hear the robins sing.

– Toshi Seeger

Take silence for example——what failures in clarity it prevents.
– Mary Ruefle

What you gain by stopping your humanity and stopping your emotions isn’t worth getting. It’s like cutting off your head to cure the headache.
– Alan Watts

Brain scientists say the brain is plastic.

Musicians know that if you practice a chord a thousand times, it falls naturally ‘neath your hand.

These are the same.

– Kenneth Folk

In the third third of life, you may become just as miserable and prickly as ever, but you cycle through more quickly. You remember other dark nights of the soul and how by dawn they always broke.
– Anne Lamott

Song : Love In Whose Rich Honor

Love
in whose rich honor
I stand looking from my window
over the starved trees of a dry September
Love
deep and so far forbidden
is bringing me
a gift
to claw at my skin
to break open my eyes
the gift longed for so long
The power
to write
out of the desperate ecstasy at last
death and madness

– Muriel Rukeyser

If you don’t hear music
on the mountain
you’re not listening,
the old monk
told his students.
– The Old Monk

Stones speak
only when
spoken to,
the old monk
told his students.
– The Old Monk

If you’re committed to the mission more than your ego, you can shift the tide.
– Dr. Thema

I joy that Death is this Democrat; and hopeless of all other real and permanent democracies…
– Herman Melville

If the goal was ever to change hearts and reduce bad behavior, it would be done through genuine dialogue and not self-righteous virtue signaling for a brief dopamine hit.
– Timothy Green

If you hate yourself, you hate everybody, and you hallucinate that everybody is aggravating your hatred.
– Chögyam Trungpa

Don’t underestimate the ability of a group of people or even one person to support you. Find people who want to get healthy or who have achieved what you want to achieve.
– Mark Hyman, M.D.

The unchosen thing is what causes the trouble. If you don’t do something with the unchosen, it will set up a minor infection somewhere in the unconscious and later take its revenge on you. Unlived life does not just “go away” through underuse or by tossing it off and thinking that what we have abandoned is no longer useful or relevant. Instead, unlived life goes underground and becomes troublesome—sometimes very troublesome—as we age.
– Robert A. Johnson

Woodman said: The masculine is the doing side. It carries the sword that discriminates, golden and sharp. It knows how to cut. Some things have to be cut out of our lives. All of us need that masculine . . . we need discrimination, discernment, a capacity for clarity and the courage to use a sword when necessary. The sword says, “This is what I value and will protect.”
– Barbara Joy Laffey

A great poet is not someone who speaks in stadiums to thousands of listeners. A great poet is a very private person. In his or her privacy this poet creates a language in which he or she is able to speak, privately, to many people at the same time.
– Ilya Kaminsky

When your heart speaks, take good notes.
– Judith Campbell

One day you will ask me
which is more important?
My life or yours?
I will say mine and
you will walk away
Not knowing that
You are my life.
– Khalil Gibran

The highly sensitive tend to be philosophical or spiritual in their orientation, rather than materialistic or hedonistic. They dislike small talk. They often describe themselves as creative or intuitive. They dream vividly, and can often recall their dreams the next day. They love music, nature, art, physical beauty. They feel exceptionally strong emotions–sometimes acute bouts of joy, but also sorrow, melancholy, and fear.

Highly sensitive people also process information about their environments–both physical and emotional–unusually deeply. They tend to notice subtleties that others miss–another person’s shift in mood, say, or a lightbulb burning a touch too brightly.
– Susan Cain

Read. Read as much as possible. Read the big stuff, the challenging stuff, the confronting stuff, and read the fun stuff too. Visit galleries and look at paintings, watch movies, listen to music, go to concerts – be a little vampire running around the place sucking up all the art and ideas you can.

Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world. Have fun. Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being.
– Nick Cave

Specificity, in other words, disrupts our aloneness. I am most drawn to art that is highly specific, art that unsettles and takes me out of myself, rather than abandoning me to what I already know.
– Cynthia Dewi Oka

READING
from time to time
one discovers a book
that has both authority
and an almost magical
command of one’s attention.
Robert Lamberton’s
*Homer the Theologian*,
which I have just begun
to read,
seems to be such a book.
it is about “a single phase of the history
of the interaction of the Homeric poems
with Greek ideas concerning
the nature of reality
and the divine: the
reading of Homer by thinkers
in the Platonic tradition
from the second to the fifth century
after Christ.”
few readers realize
that when Yeats writes,
“Homer is my example
and his unchristened heart,”
the Homer to which he refers
is not the Homer of Richmond Lattimore—
still less the Homer of Alexander Pope—
but the Homer of the third-century Greek
philosopher, learnéd, vehement opponent
of Christianity, named for the
purple of kings,
Porphyry, author of the once famous
essay on the cave of the nymphs
in *The Odyssey.* William Blake,
writes Lamberton,
“painted a representation
of the Ithacan cave
based manifestly on Porphyry
rather than Homer.”
the allegorical interpretations
of such Neoplatonists
had their effects
on Christian
interpretations
of the Bible,
on what we believe we know
about our official religion.
Homer was *poet*
but the term *theologian*,
usually used of Orpheus,
was now used of him as well.
what changed
was the *reading*
of a text.
I had forgotten
why I *read*,
why *reading*
was important.
we read
for entertainment
for distraction
for instruction
but we also read
to allow the words
to fly into our minds
and seek the dark, unlettered places
that long for life and freedom
and are gathered
by words’
wings.
– Jack Foley

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
– Aldous Huxley

I used to invent love when
necessary. When I walked alone on
the riverbank. Or whenever the level
of salt would rise in my body, I would
invent the river.
– Mahmoud Darwish

Wherever you go, you carry with you the sense of here and now. This is what distinguishes any present experience from memory. It reveals that space and time are in you and not the other way around. Most people are not acquainted with the sense of their being but only with the knowledge of their doing.
– Wu Hsin

The model we choose to use to understand something determines what we find.
– Iain McGilchrist

There is no greater wonder than to range
The starry heights, to leave the earth’s dull regions,
To ride the clouds, to stand on Atlas’ shoulders,
And see, far off, far down, the little figures
Wandering here and there, devoid of reason,
Anxious, in fear of death, and so advise them,
And so make fate an open book… …

Full sail, I voyage
Over the boundless ocean, and I tell you
Nothing is permanent in all the world.
All things are fluid; every image forms,
Wandering through change.
Time is itself a river
In constant movement, and the hours flow by
Like water, wave on wave, pursued, pursuing,
Forever fugitive, forever new.
That which has been, is not; that which was not,
Begins to be; motion and moment always
In process of renewal…
Not even the so-called elements are constant…
Nothing remains the same: the great renewer,
Nature, makes form from form, and, oh, believe me
That nothing ever dies….
– Ovid, Metamorphoses

Our bodies are at once the receiving and transmitting stations for life itself. It is the highest wisdom to recognize this fact and train our bodies to render them sensitive and responsive to nature, art, and religion.
– Ruth St. Denis

Gratitude has its place, but it now means very little, because even the untalented and the unsuccessful are so grateful for all they’ve been given, even if no one else can discern what that may be. I’m grateful for many things, but I would encourage everyone to remain in a state of confusion and disappointment. That is the state of the real artist, and it leads them to be better yet again, one more time, reaching higher. Disappointment has gotten a bad reputation, but it’s where you’re going to spend most of your time if you’re any kind of artist.
– Agnes de Mille

The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say, “The children are now working as if I did not exist.”
– Maria Montessori

Our lives, it seems, are a memory we had once in another place. Or are they its metaphor? The trees, if trees they are, seem the same, and the creeks do. The sunlight blurts its lucidity in the same way, And the clouds, if clouds they really are, still follow us, One after one, as they did in the old sky, in the old place. I wanted the metaphor, if metaphor it is, to remain always the same one. I wanted the hills to be the same, And the rivers, too, especially the old rivers, […] And me beside them, under the stopped clouds and stopped stars. I wanted to walk in that metaphor, untouched by time’s corruption.
– Charles Wright

String Theory says that all the notes on a vibrating string correspond to a particle. That to an electron is actually a rubber band; a very tiny rubber band. but if you twang this rubber band and the rubber band vibrates at a different frequency, it turns into a quark. And you twang it again and it turns into a neutrino. So, how many musical notes are there? An infinite. How many musical notes are there on a string? An infinite number. And that may explain why we have so many subatomic particles. They are nothing but musical notes. So, physics are nothing but the laws of harmonies on a string. Chemistry is nothing but the melodies you can play on vibrating strings. And the mind of God, the mind of God that Einstein worked on for the last 30 years of his life, the mind of God would be cosmic music. Cosmic music resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace.
– Micho Kaku, Theoretical Physicist

ancient starlight
only arriving
today
– C.X. Turner and James Welsh

To experience emptiness is not a descent into an abyss of nothingness but a recovery of the freedom to configure oneself as an intentional, unimpeded trajectory through the shifting, ambiguous sands of life.
– Stephen Batchelor

new in town
the bartender pretends
to recognize me
– @pauldavidmena

If your faith is based on strong understanding, you will joyfully engage in meritorious behavior. That is the practice of dharma.
– Geshe Sopa

If one investigates all the possible ways in which a person can orient his life, then one comes to this conclusion: In the end, a person orients his life either toward having or toward being.
– Erich Fromm

One summer I was a living mandala, / folding t-shirts all day on one side of a table / while tourists unfolded them on the other. / If beauty is impermanence, my table and I / were the most beautiful couple the dock had ever seen.
– Frances Klein

I’m still thinking about your porch light
like a full moon casting a foggy halo
in the frigid air last night, the bare oaks
branching into the sky like nerve endings
inches away from the frozen stars.
– Richard Blanco

She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.
– Joe Hill

There is no other world. There’s just another way to live.
– Jacques Mesrine

But, sometimes there is a ‘help me’ chained to the ankle of an ‘I’m doing ok.’
– Rudy Francisco

The more you cling to that which all the world desires, the more you are Everyman, who has not yet discovered himself and stumbles through the world like a blind mind leading the blind with somnambulistic certainty into the ditch.
– Carl G. Jung

Disappointment is the inevitable consequence of endless ambition, and bitterness a common refrain when things do not work out.
– Mark Epstein

I affirm that an inner conflict is always the source of profound and dangerous psychological crises, so dangerous that they can destroy a man’s integrity. This inner conflict manifests itself psychologically in the same images and the same symbolism testified to by every religion in the world and utilized also by the alchemists.
– CG Jung

I’m no more than a comma in life. I who am a colon. Thou, thou art my exclamation.
– Clarice Lispector

It was the spirit of poetry who reached out and found me as I stood there at the doorway between panic and love.
– Joy Harjo

We need a new cosmology. New gods. New sacraments. Another drink.
– Patti Smith

Some things are a job, others are a craft. The primary difference is not the task, but the enthusiasm and curiosity put into the task. The more engaged and interested you are, the more it becomes a craft.
– James Clear

Few things in this world are more predictable than the reaction of conventional minds to unconventional ideas.
– John Anthony West

Music, poems, landscape, and dogs make me want to paint… And painting is what allows me to survive.
– Joan Mitchell

It might not be from the storm surge, but we’re all walking around with our own watermark, whether it be our wounds or our emotional injuries, and the question is always, ‘How do you survive? How do you stay above that watermark?’
– Alice Anderson

I think you are a witch, or a dowser in psychology. You must be. My respect for you increases.
– Vita Sackville-West in a letter to Virginia Wool

Fresh

To move
cleanly.
Needing to be
nowhere else.
Wanting nothing
from any store.
To lift something
you already had
and set it down in
a new place.
Awakened eye
seeing freshly.
What does that do to
the old blood moving through
its channels?
– Naomi Shihab Nye

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details & episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing it from a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.
– James Baldwin

I hate the past. Inconstant as it is unchanging, our regret persists while history itself is ever shifting, constantly rewritten at the whims of power.
– Sean Patrick Mulroy

summer grasses—
traces of dreams
of ancient warriors
– Matsuo Basho

There were Roses
by Tommy Sands

My song for you this evening, it’s not to make you sad,
Nor for adding to the sorrows of this troubled Northern land.
But lately I’ve been thinking and it just won’t leave my mind,
I’ll tell you of two friends one time who were both good friends of mine.

Allan Bell from Banagh, he lived just across the fields,
A great man for the music and the dancing and the reels.
O’Malley came from South Armagh to court young Alice fair,
And we’d often meet on the Ryan Road and the laughter filled the air.

There were roses, roses
There were roses
And the tears of the people
Ran together

Though Allan, he was Protestant, and Sean was Catholic born,
It never made a difference for the friendship, it was strong.
And sometimes in the evening when we heard the sound of drums
We said, “It won’t divide us. We will always be the one.”

For the ground our fathers ploughed in, the soil, it is the same,
And the places where we’d say our prayers have just got different names.
We talked about the friends who died, and we hoped there’d be no more.
It’s little then we realized the tragedy in store.

There were roses, roses
There were roses
And the tears of the people
Ran together

It was on a Sunday morning when the awful news came round,
Another killing has been done just outside Newry Town.
We knew that Allan danced up there, we knew he liked the band,
But when we heard that he was dead we just could not understand.

We gathered at the graveside on that cold and rainy day,
And the minister he closed his eyes and he prayed for no revenge.
And all the ones who knew him from along the Ryan Road,
They bowed their heads and they said a prayer for the resting of his soul.

There were roses, roses
There were roses
And the tears of the people
Ran together

Well fear, it filled the countryside, there was fear in every home,
When a car of death came prowling round the lonely Ryan Road.
A Catholic would be killed tonight to even up the score,
“Oh, Christ! It’s young O’Malley that they’ve taken from the door.”

“Allan was my friend,” he cried. He begged them with his fear,
But centuries of hatred have ears that cannot hear.
An eye for an eye was all that filled their minds,
And another eye for another eye till everyone is blind.

There were roses, roses
There were roses
And the tears of the people
Ran together

So my song for you this evening, it’s not to make you sad,
Nor for adding to the sorrows of this troubled Northern land,
But lately I’ve been thinking and it just won’t leave my mind,
I’ll tell you of two friends one time who were both good friends of mine.

I don’t know where the moral is or where this song should end,
But I wondered just how many wars are fought between good friends.
And those who give the orders are not the ones to die,
It’s Bell and O’Malley and the likes of you and I.

There were roses, roses
There were roses
And the tears of the people
Ran together

There were roses, roses
There were roses

Peter Pan and Me
by Mickey McConnell

We knew we faced the power that comes from money
When we marched against the empire’s mighty schemes
They were armed with special powers and legislation
While we were armed with youth and foolish dreams

But it seemed so right in Derry all that summer
When we took them on and built our barricades
We were an army dressed in faded jeans and sandals
Too young and full of pride to be afraid

And we believed in things like justice, truth, and freedom
And we believed we had a right to liberty
And we believed that we could build a new tomorrow
That’s how it seemed to Peter Pan and me.

But we soon learned the truth of street rebellion
As our city crumbled round us stone by stone
Betrayed by those who promised they would help us
Against tanks, and troops, and guns we stood alone.

The revolution is no game for foolish dreamers
For dreamers never know the price that must be paid
Before long we learned all power comes from a rifle
And we learned to bleed and die and be afraid.

And soon no one spoke of justice, truth, or freedom
And soon no one gave one damn for liberty
And all we hoped was that we might go on surviving
We grew up fast, young Peter Pan and me.

Then the empire dealt us death and fear and prison
There’s no mercy from that military machine
And our street kids swapped their faded jeans and sandals
For hoods and guns with loaded magazines.

And now the years have wrought their cruel retribution
And our brothers and our sisters bear the pain
As both sides strive for violent solutions
And the politicians play their deadly games.

And among the dead lie justice, truth, and freedom
And among the dead lie hope and liberty
But if you care enough about brave new tomorrows
Pull up a chair, join Peter Pan and me.

Both Sides of the Tweed

What’s the spring, breathing jasmine and rose
What’s the summer with all its gay train
Or the splendour of autumn to those
Who’ve bartered their freedom for gain?

Let the love of our land’s sacred rights
To the love of our people succeed
Let friendship and honour unite
And flourish on both sides the Tweed

No sweetness the senses can cheer
Which corruption and bribery bind
No brightness that gloom can e’er clear
For honour’s the sum of the mind

Let virtue distinguish the brave
Place riches in lowest degree
Think them poorest who can be a slave
Them richest who dare to be free

– Dick Gaughan

Forests precede
civilizations…
deserts follow
them.
– François-René de Chateaubriand

In the midst of the city there is a cobblestone side street
Take a left & the temperature seems to change like a page turned to another season
I come for coffee & a deeper quiet, a place where it doesn’t seem so bad
to be frozen apart from the world
Because wherever I’ve been I’ve always pretended to be somewhere else
Maybe that’s how I became stranded here…
In cascading chimes the restless trees speak sadly of forever ago. Maybe
this is how the world stops… trailing off mid-conversation
– Ash Evan

There is not a scrap of evidence that the Christian hierarchy was ever aware of itself as one among several lines of transmission for a universal tradition.
– Alan Watts

There is a life-force within your soul, seek that life.
There is a gem in the mountain of your body, seek that mine.
O traveller, if you are in search of that
Don’t look outside, look inside yourself and seek that.
– Jalaluddin Rumi

87 % of youth under 30 live in the Global South

I learned this yesterday at the launch of the Chrysalis Youth Fund.

That means that when we speak about youth, and support systems for youth, the room should be 87% Global South.

– Xiye Bastida

Stories immediately take the concerns of the day, but they give them images so our souls can apprehend them.
– Martin Shaw

Your soul is the whole world.
– Hermann Hesse

Slowly we can tell each other some things about our lives.
– Jean Valentine.

This world demands the qualities of youth; not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease.
– Robert F. Kennedy

Truth is not to be found outside. No teacher, no scripture can give it to you. It is inside you and if you wish to attain it, seek your own company. Be with yourself.
– Osho

Short-term gain, long-term mess – yet we carry on, and on.
– James Gilbert

Conscious and unconscious do not make a whole when one of them is suppressed and injured by the other. If they must contend, at least let it be a fair fight with equal rights on both sides. Both are aspects of life.
– Carl Jung

You can’t study Zen just by reading and thinking about it; intellectual understanding is not Zen. Words just point the way.
– Jakusho Kwong

With all due respect to management consultants, could we talk less about “changing the narrative” and more about “changing the reality”?
– Andrew Altschul

Of course
you’ve acted in ways
that haven’t reflected
your full nobility.
Of course
you’ve made choices
based on smallness
and comfort
rather than listening
to the integrity
of your soul’s potential.
Of course
you’ve hurt yourself
and others,
as we all have,
on the long, rough journey
toward honoring what
still needs so much love
in our hearts.
Of course
you’ve limited yourself
and felt angry and fitful
about all gifts you haven’t yet
been able to bring forth.
It hasn’t been safe
to open to the pain
beneath all these patterns.
It hasn’t been safe
to open
to the full, desperate truth
of our loneliness
the sharing of which
would relieve it of itself.
It has been scarce or impossible
to find arms and hearts
that could truly listen, witness,
value and understand
this kind of opening.
There hasn’t been belonging.
And belonging is the main
way we find truth, and strength
and support enough
to live in a way
that honors the wholeness
in ourself.
Meanwhile I honor the choices
of the one who hasn’t yet
been able to live that way.
The one who protected you
in the cocoon of a narrower way
as your soul grew slowly
to develop the courage
to come forth
in its humble,
magnificent entirety.
– Chelan Harkin

Scripture tells us that Spirit also suffers in us and with us and is vulnerable to pain and grief. To consciously participate in life as a vulnerable person is the deep task of genuine change and the most likely path of healing.
– Gunilla Norris

When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.
– Ilya Prigogine

Really, you don’t have to do much.
The spider
gives its whole life
to spinning marvelous webs
and catching bugs for its lunch
and seems quite content
with its destiny.
The stars, their whole lives,
don’t say a word.
They’ve found their place
in the order of things
and seem to be
in a delighted peace
simply to shine.
Frogs and crickets
what do they do
but jump around
merrily
toward perhaps nothing
too particular
and use the instruments
of their legs
and throats
to celebrate their devotion
for the marvels
of the night.
Dear one, in this life
we have but one task~
to become more sensitive
in listening
to the instincts
of our joy.
– Chelan Harkin

now that the autumn has come,
a wind that blows over my
pillow to find my ear
– Basho

Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By the most astounding stroke of luck an infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist.
– Bill Bryson

When you wake up in the morning to meditate, sit with a firm back and soft front. Then in the course of your day, the spirit of firm back/soft front will stay with you. With firm back you are resilient, solid, unswerving. When the world goes topsy turvy, you “have at your back” the knowing that you are always connected to a great and abundant source.

With a broad firm back, you have little to fear. You can trust the road you are on, be it ridden with potholes, or be it seamless and smooth. For at your back you have the support of the ancestors who didn’t fret over petty things, who abandoned self criticism and self harm and walked a straight path. At the same time, move through the world with a soft front. With a soft front, you encounter the new, open to ongoing discovery and surprise. Soft front is to be receptive and permeable. With a soft front you need not put up the old guard of doubt and defense, but lean forward into the mystery and welcome the unknown. With soft front everything becomes possible.

Embodying firm back and soft front, you live a life both anchored and uplifted, steadfast and changeable. At your back is timeless time, a perpetual presence, far bigger and wider than anything you can conceive of. At your front, is the split second of this very moment — on the fly — forever changing, appearing and disappearing.

– Tias Little

To meet him, I go back to the Leningrad of 1964. The streets are devilishly cold: we sit on the pavement, he begins abruptly (a dry laugh, a cigarette) to tell me the story of his life, his words change to icicles as we speak. I read them in the air.
– Ilya Kaminsky, Joseph Bodsky

Here is a statistic that does matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.” That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin’s wisdom not biblical; it’s counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans—most American Christians—are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.
– Bill McKibben

I apologize for the coincidence for calling it a necessity.
Excuse the necessity, if, in spite of that, I’m wrong.
May happiness not be mad for considering it mine. (… )
Apologies to my old love for considering the new one first.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for sticking my finger.
Excuse me those who call from the abyss the record of a minue.
I apologize to the people at the stations for the 5am sleep in.
Forgive me, haunted hope, for laughing sometimes.
– Wisława Szymborska

Blue here is a shell for you
Inside you’ll hear a sigh
A foggy lullaby
There is your song from me
– Joni Mitchell

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm, but the harm [that they cause] does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
– TS Eliot

…art has always had a balancing effect on your mind; it is a reminder that you are more than a body and its accompanying grief.
– Carmen Maria Machado

I want to be the one store that’s open all night
and has nothing but necessities.
Something to get a fire going
and something to put one out.
A place where things stay frozen
and a place where they are sweet…
I want to hum just a little with my own emptiness
at 4 a.m. To have little bells above my door.
To have a door.
– Christian Wiman

Listen to what makes your hair stand on end, your heart melt, and your eyes go wide, what stops you in your tracks and makes you want to live, wherever it comes from, and hope that your writing can do all those things for other people.
– Rebecca Solnit

But if we are able to see our own shadow and can bear knowing about it, then a small part of the problem has already been solved: we have at least brought up the personal unconscious. The shadow is a living part of the personality and therefore wants to live with it in some form.
– Carl Jung

Salvage by Ada Limón
On the top of Mount Pisgah, on the western
slope of the Mayacamas, there’s a madrone
tree that’s half-burned from the fires, half-alive
from nature’s need to propagate. One side
of her is black ash and at her root is what
looks like a cavity that was hollowed out
by flame. On the other side, silvery green
broadleaf shoots ascend toward the winter
light and her bark is a cross between a bay
horse and a chestnut horse, red and velvety
like the animal’s neck she resembles. I have
been staring at the tree for a long time now.
I am reminded of the righteousness I had
before the scorch of time. I miss who I was.
I miss who we all were, before we were this: half
alive to the brightening sky, half dead already.
I place my hand on the unscarred bark that is cool
and unsullied, and because I cannot apologize
to the tree, to my own self I say, I am sorry.
I am sorry I have been so reckless with your life.

it is this time
that matters

it is this history
I care about

the one we make together
awkward
inconsistent
as a lame cat on the loose
or quick s kids freed by the bell

– June Jordan

Compassion is environmental generosity, without direction, without ”for me” and without “for them”.
– Chögyam Trungpa

Western civilization was declining too fast for comfort, but too slowly to be very exciting.
– Tom Robbins

Consciousness of feminine nature begins in deep appreciation of, and caring devotion to, the body.
– Nancy Qualls-Corbett

don’t contort yourself to fit a soul-wrecking world,

propagate a world that doesn’t wreck souls

– @the_wilderless

Playing with Bees
by RK Fauth

So the world turned
its one good eye

to watch the bees
take most of metaphor
with them.

Swarms—
in all their airborne
pointillism—
shifted on the breeze

for the last time. Of course,

the absence of bees
left behind significant holes
in ecology. Less
obvious
were the indelible holes
in poems, which would come
later:

Our vast psychic habitat
shrunk. Nothing was

like nectar
for the gods

Nobody was warned by
a deep black dahlia, and nobody

grew like a weed.

Nobody felt spry as
a daisy, or blue
and princely
as a hyacinth; was lucid as
a moon flower. Nobody came home

and yelled honey! up the stairs,

And nothing in particular
by any other name would smell as sweet as—

Consider:
the verbal dearth
that is always a main ripple of extinction.

The lexicon of wilds goes on nixing its descriptions.
Slimming its index of references
for what is

super as a rhubarb, and juicy
as a peach,
or sunken as a
comb and ancient as an alder tree, or
conifer, or beech, what is royal
as jelly, dark as a wintering

hive, toxic as the jessamine vine
who weeps the way a willow does,
silently as wax
burned in the land of milk and

all the strong words in poems,
they were once

smeared on the mandible of a bee.

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.
– Carl Jung

it’s natural for relationships
to include moments of monotony and simplicity

similar to spending time alone,
both of you peacefully accepting slow moments
means you have healthy connections with yourselves

appreciating the mundane aspects of life
as a couple is a sign that you have
both grown so much

– young pueblo

He who masters the grey every day is a hero.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

Thinking is of no real value to us unless we also can practice non-thinking; unless we can have our mind silent and make immediate contact with the real world as distinct from the world of pure abstraction.
– Alan Watts

Jung’s greatest longing and his life-long task, as he saw it, was to build a bridge between the reality we see and know with our physical senses and another unseen reality. More specifically, it could be said that he opened the door to the right hemisphere of the brain and to the intelligence of the heart, both of which have been closed off during the course of the scientific revolution of the last four hundred years, leading ultimately to the denial of the existence of the soul.
– Anne Baring

Heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.
– David Whyte

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.
– Sylvia Plath

The poet is a performer. Poets are public property. Science can’t reach them. Poetry is secret. None of us know where we came from.
– Victor Bockris

Team bodhisattva includes all beings, yet not all beings realize they’re on the team.
– @VinceFHorn

And now you are and I am and we’re a mystery which will never happen again.
– ee cummings

What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?”
– Ernest Hemingway

Perhaps life is not the black, unutterably beautiful, mysterious, and lonely thing the creative artist tends to think of it as being; but it is certainly not the sunlit playpen in which so many Americans lose first their identities and then their minds.
– James Baldwin

In 1848 governments caved in, and for what seemed at the time an endless moment of suspension, everything appeared up for grabs. If the French could kick their king down the road, what might other people do?
– Lynn Hunt

A lasting enmity between France and Germany – despite intermittent efforts on both sides to achieve a rapprochement – was built into the European international system.
– Christopher Clark

Zen morning
an abundance
of nothing
– @pauldavidmena

Hope is faith in the future, as likewise faith, as it were, is hope for the past.
– Leibniz

Just as there was in Rome, in addition to the Roman people, a people of statues, so there is in addition to this real world another world, an almost mightier world of delusion, in which most people live.
– Goethe

“i have a biblical worldview” oh, so you have the same worldview as 3,000 year old middle eastern people???
– Mason Mennenga

What’s natural is supernatural, too. Don’t think that it’s very far off. What’s natural is already a mystery.
– Clarice Lispector

You don’t need therapy, you need a healthy diet, more exercise, more time outdoors, a loving family, supportive friends, a job where you keep learning, goals that positively impact the lives of others, more kindness towards yourself.
– @orangebook_

Study as deeply as possible the technology you use.
– Robert Greene

along the road
orange blossoms
smell like tea
– Basho

For, while the tale of how we suffer, & how we are delighted, & how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard.
– James Baldwin

I did not like the nothing, and it is thus that I met the empty, the deep empty, the depth of the blue.
– Yves Klein

It is not lost, it is moving forward always,
Shrewd, and huge as thunder, equally dark.
Soft paws kiss its continents, it walks
Between lava avenues, it does not tire.

It is not lost, tell me how can you lose it?
Can you lose the shadow which stalks the sun?
It feeds on mountains, it feeds on seas,
It loves you most when you are most alone.

Do not deny it, do not blaspheme it,
Do not light matches on the dark of its shores.
It will breathe you out, it will recede from you.
What is here, what is with you now, is yours.

– Gwendolyn MacEwen

Do yourself and your partner a favor by telling them what emotion you’re feeling before you start a serious discussion.

When you both name how you feel out loud it will help you stay cool as you share your perspectives.

Too often unspoken emotions get tangled up in our point of view and make things more heated and complicated than they need to be.

– yung pueblo

Love will turn on the lover and gnaw.
– Kathy Acker

Poetry reaches the unsaid, and leaves it unsaid.
– Etel Adnan

The Shamans say that being a medicine man begins by falling into the power of the demons.⁣ The one who pulls out of the dark place becomes the medicine man, and the one who stays in it is the sick person. You can take every psychological illness as an initiation.
– @sanjabh

Even the worst things you fall into are an effort of initiation, for you are in something which belongs to you.⁣
– Joan Halifax⁣

The exile feels that the state of exile has the structure of a dream.
– Dubravka Ugresic

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

We are simply rumors of what could have been.
– Gerard Malanga

Salvation is a long road that leads through many gates. These gates are symbols.
– @RedBookJung

In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond.
– Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
– Yeats

I dream of never being called resilient again in my life. I’m exhausted by strength. I want support. I want softness. I want ease. I want to be amongst kin. Not patted on the back for how well I take a hit. Or for how many.
– zandashe’ l’orelia brown

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
– T. S. Eliot

Home— the place of attention.
Where you know that swirl in the road
marks the dust bath of a jackrabbit.
Or that a particular Canyon Wren ends
her descending aria with a startling yee-haw.

That on our longest of days,
the sun retires on the breast
of the northwest horizon
and begins a steady southern swing
to the little knoll where we mark its winter twin.

Our lives held in this gentle cup,
palmed within an arc of light.

– Lucy Griffiths

You cannot take it all. Offer. Sacrifice does not kill, but preserve, make it holy. Until wings turn into a cross. However noble, if we do things on our own, we are the enemies of grace. Odysseus was noble. Nevertheless Dante put him in hell, precisely for that reason. Hell is based on justice. Heaven is grace. Nobody deserves it.
– Ewa Chrusciel

We seem to have an insatiable thirst for places that don’t exist, for griffins and wondrous dragons prowling the antipodes of a world we hardly recognize. They symbolize states of growth we haven’t yet achieved.
– Belden C. Lane

To hell with the small life. I am not exquisite.
Cannot sing like bone china. This is the blue hour.

I swim in it, alone and perfectly.

– Angelina D’Roza

Projections change the world into the replica of one’s unknown face.
– Carl G. Jung

The quicker you want something, the easier you are to manipulate.
– @farnamstreet

Mythically, the center of one thing leads to the center of everything. Seen in this way, the illness of one person becomes the ailment through which all that ails a community can be addressed; the wound in one person can become the door through which everyone can find the center of life again. Thus, the afflicted one becomes the center of the community and the opportunity for everyone to commune with the origins of life.
– Michael Meade

The aim of Buddhist practice is to break that cycle, to end that struggle. That is nirvana.
– Ken McLeod

How long / would it take for someone to find me / drowned in the dark mind of the pond?
– Cynthia Marie Hoffman, Ecotherapy

I re-read the books I love and I love the books I re-read, and each time it is the same enjoyment, whether I re-read twenty pages, three chapters, or the whole book…
– Georges Perec (trans. David Bellos)

Music is an educational superfood.
– Vaughan Fleischfresser

Order comes through directly learning about ourselves, not according to some philosopher or some psychologist.
– Krishnamurti

He who thinks deepest loves life most.
– Friedrich Hölderlin

Whenever we pluck the fruit of creativity from the golden tree our other hand plucks the fruit of destruction. Our resistance to this insight is very high! We would love to have creativity without destruction, but that is not possible.
– Robert A. Johnson

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
– Yeats

The symbol can be neither thought up nor found: it becomes.
– @RedBookJung

Remember: when they look right through you, you’re still there.
– Guante

You’re going to realize it one day — that happiness was never about your job, or your degree, or being in a relationship. Happiness was never about following in the footsteps of all of those who came before you, it was never about being like the others. One day, you’re going to see it — that happiness was always about the discovery, the hope, the listening to your heart and following it wherever it chose to go. Happiness was always about being kinder to yourself, it was always about embracing the person you were becoming. One day, you will understand. That happiness was always about learning how to live with yourself, that happiness was never in the hands of other people. It was always about you. It was always about you.
– Bianca Sparacinod

Promise Yourself to be so strong that nothing
can disturb your peace of mind.
To talk health, happiness, and prosperity
to every person you meet.
To make all your friends feel
that there is something in them
To look at the sunny side of everything
and make your optimism come true.
To think only the best, to work only for the best,
and to expect only the best.
To be just as enthusiastic about the success of others
as you are about your own.
To forget the mistakes of the past
and press on to the greater achievements of the future.
To wear a cheerful countenance at all times
and give every living creature you meet a smile.
To give so much time to the improvement of yourself
that you have no time to criticize others.
To be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear,
and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.
To think well of yourself and to proclaim this fact to the world,
not in loud words but great deeds.
To live in faith that the whole world is on your side
so long as you are true to the best that is in you.
– Christian D. Larson

Don’t you wonder
how people think
the banks of space
and time don’t matter?
– Kay Ryan

Divine love is incessantly restless until it turns all woundedness into health, all deformity into beauty, all embarrassment into laughter. In biblical faith, brokenness is never celebrated as an end in itself.
– Belden C. Lane

Is the earth something or someone?
– René Char, (tr. Gustaf Sobin)

Since the functioning of the mind in the process of thinking depends upon an outside community, you begin to see that your mind is a network.
– Alan Watts

and I see
only where the light
falls to make her perfect
– Eithne Longstaff

Be as simple as you can be.
You will be astonished to see
how uncomplicated and happy
your life can become.
– Paramahansa Yogananda

To love someone is to grant him or her the gift of one’s pure and undivided attention, without preconceived expectations of what the other person needs, what we imagine to be best in the situation, what particular results we want to engineer.
– Belden C. Lane

…I’m now at an age where I hear a song from the past~~from a good or a bad time~~and I become an emotional wreck. I am back in the time~~good or bad~~and I now have the perspective to understand what really happened, what things really meant. A dog runs to me and offers me affection and I am both overwhelmed and satisfied. A kind word at the market comes my way, and I think of crying. I think I may be grown up now. I think I understand things~~their worth and their meaning. Old age isn’t entirely bad.
– John Gielgud

Take This Longing
Your body like a searchlight
My poverty revealed
I would like to try your charity
Until you cry, “now you must try my greed”
And everything depends upon
How near you sleep to me
I stand in ruins behind you
With your winter clothes, your broken sandal straps
I love to see you naked over there
Especially from the back
Just take this longing from my tongue
All the useless things my hands have done
– Leonard Cohen

If I could just hear a thing someone says, or see a thing they do, & follow it upstream like a river to the place of its origin, if I could see the context from which it bloomed, I could understand the why of it. The birth of it. I could forgive, I think, better.
– @poseofpower

Why are people always so surprised when artists are sensitive, where do you think art comes from? Do you think it comes from refusing to let anything in the world hurt you or move you?
– Nikita Gill

…as if the air turned green, as if the air were the deep inside of the earth we can never reach where it reaches out to those constellations we have not discovered, not named, & now never will,
and which are not dead, no –
– Jorie Graham

Sometimes life has a cruel
sense of humor, giving you
the thing you always wanted at the worst time possible.
– Lisa Kleypas

we loved / and the closest we’ve come to explaining why / is because it was you / and because it was I
– Linda Goodman

A world in which there are monsters, and ghosts, and things that want to steal your heart is a world in which there are angels, and dreams and a world in which there is hope.
– Neil Gaiman

When we sit in the mire of self-pity, we are blind to The Light and deaf to rescue.
– Paul Archibald

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 stream had grown up, so that it was almost a river, and, being grown-up, it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to, but moved more slowly. For it knew now where it was going, and said to itself, “There is no hurry. We shall get there some day.”
– A.A.Milne

From sentence to sentence we leap.
– Hélène Cixous

NOTEBOOK

You carry a notebook everywhere, and record very
little. But everything is there. Mounds of lovegrass
sighing deeply. Vast audiences of cattails, speaking
vaguely and in soft voices. Saying nothing beneath
long paragraphs of leaves, leaves, leaves. Writing
nothing. On the fourth page you’ve drawn a picture
of an unidentified murmuring grass. On the
opposite page you’ve written “Cold today. Had
breakfast. Walked around.” Mosquitos interrupt.
Emptiness wanders. Through city gardens, through
wetlands. Through the purpling applause of
needlegrass. Carrying its first editions, its marked-up
copies, its very early initial drafts. It’s still wet out
and the edges of the damp sheets begin to curl as if
haunted.

You press a single chicory petal between two pages
of snow in a copy of Basho. It hides away there like
a fugitive. Dead butterfly. Yellow post-it note.
There was a time when the words spoke to you in
English. A time when your father drank every day.
Walking through the park, you notice it, lingering
around the benches. The smell of liquor in the
early morning. A sign that cold nights had lay
there. Had maybe been real. In the parking lot,
common dandelions grow without meaning
anything. People have written GOD in spray paint
on the dumpster to the side of the freeway. You
write PRAY with your toes in the sand at the cape.
Erase the rock pools and the touching and the low
tide. There is. There isn’t. But you are. Nothing is
not. Everything is true if it is still alive. Somewhere.
I hope you know that. I hope the grass.

– Hua Xi

I have learned that the point of life’s walk is not where or how far I move my feet but how I am moved in my heart.
– Anasazi Foundation

I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant— Among other things—or one way of putting the same thing: That the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret…
– T.S. Elliot

I traded “holy”ness for wholeness.

I exchanged certainty for curiosity.

I traded judgmentalism for justice.

I exchanged dogma for delight.

I didn’t lose my religion; I encountered my restoration and renewal.

I found the eternal in the temporal; the peace in letting go.

– The Subversive Lens

I knew I was done with this book because it was no longer teaching me. I had learned what I had set out to understand and found the answers to the questions I had asked.
– Carol Dunbar

Thoughts come and go. Feelings come and go. Find out what it is that remains.
– Ramana Maharshi

People come in to analysis because part of them wants, or needs, to know more about themselves, this is not the whole story—there is also a side, sometimes a very powerful one, which would rather not know and which feels quite comfortable with the way things are.
– Yoram Kaufmann, The Way of the Image

One should never think that man can reach perfection: he can only aim at completion.
– Carl Jung

Hold tight to those who give you the luxury of being fragile.
– Mario Bucci

Taking a break can lead to breakthroughs.
– Russell Eric Dobda

Forgive me if I don’t have the words. Maybe I can sing it and you’ll understand.
– Ella Fitzgerald

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.
– Anne Lamott

As we age, we grow neither better nor worse, but more like ourselves.
– May Lamberton Becker

Do you write in the patois?
– Jericho Brown

He felt as he always did when he finished a book — queerly empty, let down, aware that for each little success he had paid a toll of absurdity.
– Stephen King

The way people struggle to get along in the world strikes me as like fashioning a buddha from snow on a spring day, decking it out with precious metals and jewels, then setting out to build a worship hall for it. Would it survive long enough to be placed in the finished hall ?
– Yoshida Kenkō, Essays in Idleness

I have a simple plan for myself; I’ll go
out and make whatever spike me,
fill my lungs with heathland air, believe
that in a while I’ll be fresher, newer,
better myself
– Van Gogh

To my mind, anyone who turns away
from nature, whose head always has to
be full of keeping this up or keeping
that up, even if things like that take
him away from nature, to such an extent
that he can’t help saying it — oh — in
this way one so early arrives, in my
view, at a point where one can no longer
distinguish white from black — and —
and one become precisely the opposite
of what one is taken to be or thinks
oneself to be.
– Van Gogh

What kind of man will feel depressed at being idle ? There is nothing finer than to be alone with nothing to distract you.
– Yoshida Kenkō

He worked in spring, he said, and rarely wrote in the fall, when things dropped back into their slumbers once more, and the fields lay fallow and dreamless.
– Paul Christensen

Outer laws and outer wisdom are eternally insufficient, since there is only one law and one wisdom, namely my daily law, my daily wisdom. The God renews himself each night.
– @RedBookJung

HEAD-SHRINKING HAGIOGRAPHY

i wish i were a restaurant
and could live practically your
life but i am a hammer and you
a piece of marble like a shellfish, a beet
that’s sweet but not feminine with
overtones of oak & tobacco, a hideous contest
of your good taste (even on the subway)
a beer that leaves behind no doubt that you are german
omigod what a
bad day for both of
us, now we have definitely
become sister charisma, an immobile plant
who acts like a landlord-ess

– Bernadette Mayer

a rusted station wagon
in a field of overgrown
wildflowers—
a small town couple
forced to marry too soon
– John Wisdom

I am not trying to persuade you to think in a particular direction, or put any kind of persuasive, subtle pressure on you. On the contrary, we are together thinking over our human problems and discovering what our relationship with each other is.
– Krishnamurti

You will be miserable to the degree that you are hung up on the notion that things should, must, go a certain way—that is to say, to have a fixed view. If you have no fixed view, you remain elastic.
– Alan Watts

stillness makes space for your inner signal. noise numbs what is transpiring in your inner world by always keeping your focus on the external stimulus around you instead of the internal signals that require an active ear or eye to detect.

immerse yourself in quiet to go inwards.

– @isabelunraveled

In the stringent era, just beginning, the right to harvest without poison would be abolished. The kick of all the free and raving streams of creation had completely ceased.
– René Char, (tr. Gustaf Sobin)

There is no material reward that can compensate for the damage an act of evil does to your soul.
– Leo Tolstoy

Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved.
– Jorge Luis Borges

Those words are always in the sky. Sometimes you see them, like a daytime moon.
– Leonard Cohen

I think this is at the root of so much of my generation’s unhappiness. We were made to understand that so long as we never sold out, we might not have wealth but we’d have art, always. Instead, the art turned into content, like the world’s shittiest magic trick.
– Amber Sparks

fountain grasses

line, row, rank,

deeply split

the interrupted brome

a poem

– Laura Kerr

Kind over cool
Depth over beauty
Connection over lust
– yung pueblo

No one but myself knows the anxiety I go through and the trouble I give myself.
– Claude Monet

The tribe must pull together to face the invading enemy while the lyric poet sits talking to skulls in the graveyard.
– Tomaž Salamun

I think there are enormous obstacles to deep reading now. I think that the tyranny of the visual is a frightening thing.
– Harold Bloom

Manifestation isn’t magic — it’s a reflection of the relationship you have with your own energy. You don’t need to beg, ask, or demand when you understand the laws of the universe. You don’t need to hope, wish, or pray when you’re in energetic alignment. You don’t need to judge, label, or assign meaning to everything that happens when you’re in your power because you understand that you are the leading energy that life responds to. You choose the thoughts. You choose the knowing. You choose the vibe. The trust and the flowing. You choose how you want to show up and who you want to be. Devote yourself to being so deeply here and so fully now, that the entire Universe changes shape just to mirror your expansion.
– Kristina Licare

Seasons change, and the time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived, and the lives we have loved.
– Frederick Buechner

There is a common misconception about philosophers turning mystical & decoupling certitude from reason, i.e. that such events signal the “failure” or “defeat” of reason. Yet in most cases it is precisely the *volume* of reasoning in question that brings on a mystical turn.
– Dr. Simone Kotva

There is so much talk in ’spiritual’ circles about growth, moving on, letting go, rebirthing, maturing and expanding horizons, but we also need to offer kindness and gratitude to the past, to our old, dying self who has been our faithful companion and given birth to who we are now.
– Maureen B. Roberts

You’re drifting away. Or maybe I am. I think it’s both of us, I say, and then her sleep is real.
– Siaara Freeman

Without a doubt, question it all. Never rely on the simplicity of an opinion. Do your due-diligence –

If someone says it’s raining and another says it is dry; it is not your job to quote them both. It is your job to look out the window and see which one is true.
– unknown

I am always amazed and slightly amused when two people are looking at the same thing and yet, what they see is completely different.

Perception is created and twisted so quickly.
– Louis C. K.

I came to understand: Your family is the first novel that you know.
– Elizabeth McCracken

Each of you is reserved a special person. Sometimes you’re reserved two or three, even four. They can belong to different generations. To reunite with you, they travel across the oceans of time and sidereal spaces. They may take different forms, but your heart recognizes them. Your heart has already welcomed them as part of itself in other places and times, under the full moon of the deserts of Egypt or in the ancient plains of Mongolia. You rode together in the armies of condottieri forgotten by history, you lived together in the caves covered in the sand of our ancestors. Between you there is a bond that goes through times: you will never be alone.
– Brian Weiss

If I sing long enough, I’ll grow dreamlike and find a flock of pigeons, white under wings lifting awkward bodies like doves across the silky blue-white sky.
– Sheryl Luna

Yes, and the luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. It can’t help it.
– Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan

Some say that my teaching is nonsense.
Others call it lofty but impractical.
But to those who have looked inside themselves,
this nonsense makes perfect sense.
And to those who put it into practice,
this loftiness has roots that go deep.

I have just three things to teach:
simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.

Simple in actions and in thoughts,
you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.

– Lao Tzu

What is this darkness? What is its name? Call it: an aptitude for sensitivity. Call it: a rich sensitivity which will make you whole. Call it: your potential for vulnerability.
– Meister Eckhart

Our attention is responsive to the world, but the world is responsive to our attention.
– Iain McGilchrist

But if you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the earth. And this is the voice of the earth.
– Joseph Campbell

This lonely hill was always dear to me,
and this hedgerow, which cuts off the view
of so much of the last horizon.
But sitting here and gazing, I can see
beyond, in my mind’s eye, unending spaces,
and superhuman silences, and depthless calm,
till what I feel
is almost fear. And when I hear
the wind stir in these branches, I begin
comparing that endless stillness with this noise:
and the eternal comes to mind,
and the dead seasons, and the present
living one, and how it sounds.
So my mind sinks in this immensity:
and foundering is sweet in such a sea.
– Giacomo Leopardi

The thing which in the waking world comes nearest to a dream is night in a big town, where nobody knows one, or the African night. There too is infinite freedom: it is there that things are going on, destinies are made round you, there is activity to all sides, and it is none of your concern.
– Karen Blixen, Out of Africa

In the past people talked about sympathetic magic, the idea that living things could be influenced (not controlled) by qualitative sympathies based on inner resonances. That’s how feeling-speech works. Our bodies-of-experience grow like trees, reaching up, branching out, developing new intimacies, as trees do with their root-tips. And since we love to experience the living poetry of intimacies and subtleties, good relationships keep practicing successful creation-through-affiliation.
– George Gorman

I am feeling depressed from being exposed to so many lives, so many of them exciting, new to my realm of experience. I pass by people, grazing them on the edges, and it bothers me.
– Sylvia Plath

We humans are primarily acts of imagination.
– James Hillman

The underlying, primary psychic reality is so inconceivably complex that it can be grasped only at the farthest reach of intuition, and then but very dimly.
– C.G. Jung

By logic and reason we die hourly; by imagination we live.
– Yeats

Writing is brutal work. It is for brutes.
– Julianna Baggott

Introverts are collectors of thoughts, and solitude is where the collection is curated and rearranged to make sense of the present and future.
– Laurie Helgoe

There is no part of the wheel that does not come around again.
– @RedBookJung

Our passions are ignited when we set out to advance a cause greater than ourselves.
– Simon Sinek

I read omnivorously, I always have, my entire life. I would rather be dead than not read. So, there’s always time for that. I read while I eat, and our whole family did. We all had very bad manners at the table. All of our books are stained with spaghetti sauce, and that sort of thing.
– Annie Proulx

Adultery has less to do with romance and sex than the discovery of how little we mean to each other.
– Leonard Michaels, Notebooks

The crime, for which you discover, slowly, is not so much that you are aware, – which is bad enough, it’s that other people see that you are and cannot bare to watch it because it testifies to the fact that they are not.
– James Baldwin

In the middle of September, after everything we loved had ended, the day remained a sound pronounced among emergencies.
– Nicholas Gulig

He who knows the secret of sound, knows the mystery of the whole universe.
– Hazrat Inayat Khan

Art is a tangle. Art is a mood. Art is the conversation you will or will not have…
– Beth Kephart

I was travelling, boots and sand
High bound for miracle land.
– Yusef | Cat Stevens

For God’s sake, be done
with this jabber of “a better world.”
What blasphemy! No “futuristic”
twit or child thereof ever
in embodied light will see
a better world than this.
Do something! Go cut the weeds
beside the oblivious road. Pick up
the cans and bottles, old tires,
and dead predictions. No future
can be stuffed into this presence
except by being dead. The day is
clear and bright, and overhead
the sun not yet half finished
with his daily praise.
– Wendell Berry

He was there alone with himself, collected, tranquil, adoring, comparing the serenity of his heart with the serenity of the skies, moved in the darkness by the visible splendors of the constellations, and the invisible splendor of God, opening his soul to the thoughts which fall from the Unknown. In such moments, offering up his heart at the hour when the flowers of night inhale their perfume, lighted like a lamp in the center of the starry night, expanding his soul in ecstasy in the midst of the universal radiance of creation, he could not himself perhaps have told what was passing in his own mind; he felt something depart from him, and something descend upon him, mysterious interchanges of the depths of the soul with the depths of the universe.
– Victor Hugo

In order to be present, I must understand the working of my thinking mind, that its function is to situate and explain, but not to experience. Thought is made up of accumulated knowledge in the form of images and associations, and it seizes an experience only to make it fit into categories of the known. Although it can entertain the new when it is quiet, the thinking immediately transforms it into something old, with an image that has already been the object of an experience. The image awakens an immediate reaction. This always repeats, so that there is never anything new.

Can I say today that I know what I am? Does the attitude of my mind allow me to truly confront this question? This is more important than I think. Am I convinced of my ignorance and of the uselessness of everything I believe I know? I may say so, but do not really feel it. I value my knowledge, and I always want to bring an answer or reach a conclusion. I am conditioned by this. Everything I know limits my perception and conditions my mind. All that I know is a mass of memories that impel me to accumulate, repeating the same kind of experiences.
– Jeanne de Salzmann

The truth isn’t easily pinned to a page. In the bathtub of history the truth is harder to hold than the soap and much more difficult to find.
– Terry Pratchet

We are not alone in this struggle for the re-creation of our own lives and the life of our community. It has long been written and known that those who choose to struggle for the life of the earth and its beings are part of an ageless, pulsating membrane of light that is filled with the lives, hopes, and beatific visions of all who have fought on, held on, loved well, and gone on before us.

For this task is too magnificent to be carried by us alone, in our house, in our meeting, in our organization, in our generation, in our lifetime… we are all a part of one another, and we are all part of the intention of the great creator spirit to continue being light and life.

[ We are to seek out ] … a path that expresses our own searching – expanding the confidence in the healing power of the universe, in the presence of a loving, leading Power, exposing us always to the harsh and the tender, to the dreadful and the compassionate, prying our lives open to the evidence of things unseen.

– Vincent Harding

It is a sad hardship and slavery to people who live in towns, that in their movements they know of one dimension only; they walk along the line as if they were led on a string. The transition from the line to the plane into the two dimensions, when you wander across a field or through a wood, is a splendid liberation to the slaves, like the French Revolution. But in the air you are taken into the full freedom of the three dimensions; after long ages of exile and dreams the homesick heart throws itself into the arms of space.
– Karen Blixen, Out of Africa

Eastbound machine

The day goes by unseen

With every

Expectation breaking down

Eastbound machine

The spaces in between

The fading light and the frozen ground

We are traveling together

To see the good that is in store

Sail away to be united

To be connected ever more

Eastbound machine

Ever hallowed ever clean

Speeding past the broken winter fields

Eastbound machine

No more secrets left to glean

Every purpose is revealed

We are traveling together

To see the good that is in store

sail away to be united

To be connected ever more

Eastbound machine

We are only human beings

Feeling more than we have ever known

Eastbound machine

Burning hope and gasoline

reaping more than we have ever sown

We are traveling together

To see the good that is in store

sail away to be united

To be connected ever more

– Peter Himmelman

When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way! from you first cigarette your last dyin’ days.
– West Side Story

Vision is not enough, it must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs.
– Václav Havel

The oppressors do not always appear in the same mask. The masks cannot always be stripped off in the same way.
– Bertolt Brecht

MOYERS: So if my private dreams are in accord with the public mythology, I’m more likely to live healthily in that society. But if my private dreams are out of step with the public –
CAMPBELL: – you’ll be in trouble. If you’re forced to live in that system, you’ll be a neurotic.
MOYERS: But aren’t many visionaries and even leaders and heroes close to the edge of neuroticism?
CAMPBELL: Yes, they are.
MOYERS: How do you explain that?
CAMPBELL: They’ve moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you’ve got to work out your life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can’t. You don’t have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience – that is the hero’s deed.
– Joseph Campbell

I like the irrelevant, the tangential, the sidebar excursion to nowhere that suddenly becomes revelatory.
– Jean-Luc Godard

I don’t know what was guiding me
Back then, over such abysses.
– Anna Akhmatova

The achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of diminution of personality.
– Carl Gustav Jung

listen, You are beyond
even Your own understanding.
– Lucille Clifton

I can’t say much more, except that it all happened
in silence and peaceful simplicity, and something that felt
like the bliss of a certainty and a life lived
in accordance with that certainty.
– Mary Oliver

We stood there looking at eachother, saying nothing. But it was the kind of nothing that meant everything.
– Jenny Hart

Parenting is kind of like a marathon where every mile takes a year to complete.
– Francesca Leader

Language is my human effort. […] My destiny is to return empty-handed. But—I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what it could not achieve.
– Clarice Lispector

Today is the anniversary of Walter Benjamin’s tragic death, an important reminder that you can be unemployable for most of your life, die while trying to flee fascist persecution, and still become an entire publishing niche decades after your death. There is hope, just not for us.
– Jason Read

What I learned constructive about women, not just ethics like never blame them if they pox you because somebody poxed them and lots of times they don’t even know they have it — that’s in the first reader for squares — is, no matter how they get, always think of them the way they were on the best day they ever had.
– Ernest Hemingway

Buddhists view everything that enters through the sense doors of the body and mind as a form of nutriment. Just as eating junk food can make your physical body sick, so too can seeing, hearing, and thinking certain things make the citta (heart-mind) sick.
– Miles Bukiet

A Zen master is nothing more than someone who has repeatedly screwed up and eventually learned something. We can do the same.
– Mark Van Buren

But poets are the worst. Their work is hopelessly unphotogenic. Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines only to cross out one of them fifteen minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens … Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?
– Wislawa Szymborska

In myth, our souls can fall deeper. Myths tenderize us to make different decisions about how we live.
– Martin Shaw

Could you visit me in dreams?
That would cheer me.
Sweet to see friends in the night,
however short the time.
– Anne Carson

We would sit around in cafés and bars in downtown Cairo inventing words
– Egyptian poet, Iman Mersal

A dedicated craftsman,
the hand of time,
that with the medium
of the hardship of our years
carves humility
out of pride.
– Chelan Harkin

Too much definition leaves too much out.
– Adam Phillips

I learned early how to use my anger, but you showed me how to wear it: armor in a torn up army jacket, slung guitar in subway station, fresh kicks just ripped from the hearth, and dancing hard enough that nobody could see how much it burned.
– Sean Patrick Mulroy

You deserve a lover who takes away the lies and brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.
– Frida Kahlo

Soon, AI will become the new plagiarism, and we’ll have to deploy AI to judge if poems are written by AI. The entire value of poetry is in the meditative enrichment it provides human beings as a spiritual practice. Fake poems will be worthless, but cheap in a validation economy.
– Timothy Green

listen darlings / there is a sky / to be pulled down / into our bowls / there is a sweetness for us / to push our faces into / I promise
– Hanif Abdurraqib

I sometimes think the worst thing a young person can feel is when you can find no answer to the question of what you are supposed to do with this life you’ve been given. At moments you’re aware of it balanced on your tongue, but not what comes next. Something like that. I can now say that another version of that happens in old age, when it occurs to you that since you’ve lived this long you must have learned something, so you open your eyes before dawn and think: What is it that I’ve learned, what is it I want to say?
– Niall Williams

I am alive. A coming back to your attention – which you can experience, which you can bring about – makes you suddenly recognise: I am alive. I can then be struck by the layer of sleep in which I am caught. Why, a moment before, was I not thinking about that? All of a sudden: I am alive. I even understand what sensation represents – as if I were traversed by currents of energy. I cannot define it, but I am aware that it is animating me.
– Michel Conge

Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everything here speaks now, as it did centuries ago, of illumination, of blinding, joyous illumination. Light acquires a transcendental quality: it is not the light of the Mediterranean alone, it is something more, something unfathomable, something holy. Here the light penetrates directly to the soul, opens the doors and windows of the heart, makes one naked, exposed, isolated in a metaphysical bliss which makes everything clear without being known. No analysis can go on in this light: here the neurotic is either instantly healed or goes mad. The rocks themselves are quite mad: they have been lying for centuries exposed to this divine illumination: they lie very still and quiet, nestling amid dancing colored shrubs in a bloodstained soil, but they are mad, I say, and to touch them is to risk losing one’s grip on everything which once seemed firm, solid and unshakeable.
– Henry Miller

If we are little more than our adaptations, then we collude with happenstance, and remain prisoners of fate. No matter how sovereign we believe we are, we remain the lowliest of serfs to the tyrannies of whatever remains unconscious.
– James Hollis

In Wagner’s Ring Cycle, the dragon-giant who guards the gold and the Ring of the Niebelungs does nothing with them. He lies asleep on top of his hoard, and would do so unto eternity. The solar gold is a human potential, common to us all, but if it is buried in the unconscious, it remains forever potential.
– Liz Greene

Writing humbles and excites me. Stepping up to the page is like accepting a dance with the eldest salsero on the dance floor […] it re-energizes and feels more like glow. Writing is the glow left inside my body after the words come through.”
– Amy Shimshon-Santo

I didn’t just quit my job, I quit the state.
– Michelle White

In my own effort towards concentration, help is also offered through nature itself, life itself—whenever I can remain permeable to the deeply revealing impressions that it never ceases to provide. Therefore, my only concern should be to try and stay attentive to the wordless call from that which is always there, waiting for recognition.
– Henri Tracol

Basically, fiction is people. You can’t write fiction about ideas.
– Theodore Sturgeon

One might characterize the whole first half of life as a gigantic mistake, as necessary as it is unavoidable. The task of the second half of life is to recover from that mistake, to move from the adapted self to the authentic self.
– James Hollis

We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.
– Roland Barthes

I try not to think about my life. I have no life. I need therapy.
– Keanu Reeves

Like the waves a moment before they dissolve back into the deep, biblical texts have been delivered to readers and believers as stable, coherent narratives at work in the service of “the norm.” Yet, the essence of the wave is the ocean; from the chaos comes the appearance of creation, then it folds (or crashes) once again into the chaos. We are not dealing here simply with “queer” interpretation of the Bible; the Bible is always already queer.
– Teresa J. Hornsby and Ken Stone

i was not made with a fire in my belly so i could be put out. i was not made with a lightness on my tongue so i could be easy to swallow. i was made heavy – half blade and half silk -difficult to forget and not easy for the mind to follow.
– Rupi Kaur

For if I am confounded by you, then you are already of me, and I am nowhere without you. I cannot master the ‘we’ except by finding the way in which I am tied to ‘you’, by trying to translate but finding that my own language must break up and yield if I am to know you. You are what I gain through this disorientation and loss. This is how the human comes into being, again and again, as that which we have yet to know.
– Judith Butler

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
– D. H. Lawrence

Goethe wisely wrote, however, that ‘we are, and ought to be, obscure to ourselves, turned outwards, and working upon the world which surrounds us.’ We see ourselves, and therefore come to know ourselves, only indirectly, through our engagement with the world at large.
– Iain McGilchrist

Feeling listened to and understood changes our physiology; being able to articulate a complex feeling, and having our feelings recognized, lights up our limbic brain and creates an “aha moment”. In contrast, being met by silence and incomprehension kills the spirit. Or, as John Bowlby so memorably put it: “What can not be spoken to the [m]other cannot be told to the self.”
– Bessel Van Der Kolk

The fall of parties for no reason, of shivering rooftops, scuffed boots, scarves with cigarette holes.
– Becca Klaver

Life’s like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending.
– Jim Henson

If someone doesn’t want to see your true colors, it won’t matter how authentic you are. Some people see you a certain way because it fits a narrative that they have built. And shattering the illusions that they have constructed around the way they see you would require admitting that they have mishandled you. And that is kind of accountability that they just aren’t equipped with.
– Kalen Dion

Saturday mornings were science fiction— That is, on that day anything was possible.
– Alberto Ríos

You can never have enough of this world all its stillness and rainstorms bright transitions and reasons to savor all of it a reminder that moments passing are reasons to savor and no one has figured out yet how to hoard that kind of pleasure and I hope they never do.

– after Teddy Macker

– Heidi Barr

When I’m walking, everything on earth gets up and stops me and whispers to me, and what they tell me is their story.
– Gabriela Mistral, (trans. Ursula K. Le Guin)

The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.
– Carl Sagan

Wild women are an unexplainable spark of life. They ooze freedom and seek awareness, they belong to nobody but themselves yet give a piece of who they are to everyone they meet. If you have met one, hold on to her, she’ll allow you into her chaos but she’ll also show you her magic.
– Nikki Rowe

We avoid in our writing the things we find hard. We circle around and around our subject, the deeper, truest story within.
– Robert Vivian

In this war between the opposites, there is only one battleground – the human heart. And somehow, in a compassionate embrace of the dark side of reality, we become bearers of the light. We open to the other – the strange, the weak, the sinful, the despised – and simply through including it, we transmute it. In doing so, we move ourselves toward wholeness.
– Connie Zweig

No doubt the great prophets of our world were neurodivergent.
– Chelan Harkin

I do not know beforehand what the poem is going to say, where the poem is going to take me. The poem is not ‘expression,’ but a cognitive process that, to some extent, changes me.
– Rosmarie Waldrop

I so want to survive this.
Please lead me whole into another season so I may dare begin again.
– Jihyun Yun

The refusal of ourselves strikes a major blow against our spirit—that centre of our integrity as unique and original persons. However damaged or undeveloped we may be, the spirit is the core of our integrity in being what we are equipped to be.
– Ann & Barry Ulanov

I think it’s really useful to, every so often, reflect on the work we’re trying to have our work do. As Nina Simone said, “I have to constantly re-identify myself to myself, reactivate my own standards, my own convictions about what I’m doing and why.”
– @tamaranopper

The writer, daytime insomniac.
– Blanchot

do buddhists distinguish the hungry ghost type of desperate craving from the wholesome yearning impulse towards growth & maturation?
– Richard D. Bartlett

Not here to rehash and repeat. Here to clear and release.
– McCall Erickson

You know it’ll never be enough, right? So I’m just gonna pick a cool place to stop, and let it be.

—my inner artist to perfectionist

aka saving my soul

– McCall Erickson

mother and father
are missed so much
a pheasant’s voice
– Basho

You misinterpret everything, even the silence.
– Kafka

Kathe Kollwitz, National Gallery Dublin
by Cliona O’Connell

after W.H. Auden

About suffering she had no time for the Old Masters:
there’s nobody here on the fence of it,
no cameos, no tourists;
nobody dreaming of the quiet life,
of picking up a cup or taking in a line.
The etched and woodcut citizens
are women who know the heft of it,
the full moon bleed and reach of it.

In Working Woman (with Earring) for instance:
the long lines chiselling the rigid forehead
hardening the strong mouth,
unsparing in the strokes
and shadows of androgyny,
the small and simple earring
the awful stoical dignity:
it is relentless

and so I have brought you a bangle,
a bauble, some bling and shine
to slip over the air of your ghosted hand,
ten silver spheres on an elastic line,
so that if Brueghel should choose
to sacrifice a boy
in some quiet corner of this room,
you could be distracted by the curve of it,
by the generous stretch and lightness of it
and could marvel, even for a moment, at its give.

Keep your head up in failure, and your head down in success.
– Jerry Seinfeld

I heard words / and words full // of holes / aching. Speech / is a mouth.
– Robert Creeley

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
– Theodore Roethke

To be making something as yet unformed, unknown—to be living in a deferred moment—is the most seductive way to exist.
– Moyra Davey

Any community that lives on staples has relatively few wants. The community that can be trained to desire change, to want new things even before the old have been entirely consumed, yields a market to be measured more by desires than by needs. And [human] desires can be developed so that they will greatly overshadow [their] needs.
– Paul Mazur

Shall we recast the Buddha as Hero of the New Age?

No. The Buddha was a madman by any reasonable standard. He left his young wife and infant son to wander in the forest for six years in search of the end of suffering.

Keep the Buddha’s name outta yo mouth.

Stop talking. Learn.

– Kenneth Folk

We are going ’round in circles. But, you see, going ’round in circles—as you may have observed by looking at the sky—is what the universe is doing.
– Alan Watts

Bipartisan usually means that a larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.
– George Carlin

There is always more goodness in the world than there appears to be, because goodness is of its very nature modest and retiring.
– Evelyn Beatrice Hall

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastical universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle–that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting–on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark–that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
– Hunter S. Thompson

My language is so much the inferior of the poets’. Even a minor poet has far greater gifts of language than I have.
– Helen Vendler

I stare at,
Rarely seen in Edo,
The moon in the mountain.
– Basho

The streets are bare at noon as though inhaled
– Leontia Flynn

But we might just as well ask if the result of loathsomeness practice might be a profound and subtle, wild, and fearless joy.
– Kate Lila Wheeler

O ruthless thistle, match in the dark, you can talk to anyone about the weather but only to your closest friends can you mention the light.
– Mary Ruefle, Thistle

The body should be treated more rigorously, so that it may not be disobedient to the mind.
– Seneca

No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down–impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.
– Muriel Rukeyser

Your nervous system will tell you when you’ve had enough through overstimulation. You’ll struggle to think clearly, will be on the verge of tears, or completely numb. Burn out is not something to push through— it’s a message from your nervous system to stop.
– SelfHealers Circle

Hard books, hard workouts, hard decisions, hard competition, hard conversations, hard problems, that’s actually how you get an easy life.
– @orangebook_

I spent my life keeping my secrets and now you want me to spill them, the old monk asked the poet.
– The Old Monk

We do not live in centred space anymore, but have to create our own centres.
– Northrop Frye

LATE SEPTEMBER

Look, how the light is beginning to dim,
tarnished like old silver rubbed thin,
a note from a lover read over and over,
folded too many times. The flowers are
trying to outdo themselves: goldenrod,
purple asters, the dusty mauve of autumn
sedum; colors from the parlors
of half-remembered
aunts. There’s so much to love
in this undoing: the sun losing its nickel
of light every night, clouds turning
pumpkin, wild grape, pewter –
There’s a need for something aged
and smoky: Lapsang Souchong,
single malt Scotch. Even as it
frays and unravels – the leaves
letting go, the birds leaving – this late
radiance plays us like cello,
a last quartet, a kiss at the station,
all of us waving good-bye, good-bye.

– Barbara Crooker

When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.
– Lin Yutang

I have inherited my mother’s
temper. Temperature.Temperament.
The violence of my moods rendering my body
chaotic, my mind confused.
I tear myself into rags and rages.
The kindling effect. That’s what they call it. One
little twig of a mood or a nerve and all of a
sudden everything is ablaze.
To set fire to one’s house—to free oneself from
one’s cage…
– Kate Zambreno

I am interested in seeing the human heart–or what one has made of the human heart that has been lent. When it is fully operational, generous, employed, and taxed, nothing is as glorious as the human heart. Indeed, anything that we value–that I value–has emerged from a fully operational human heart.
– Alec Guinness

We are not here on Earth to be alone, but to be a part of a living community, a web of life in which all is sacred. Like the cells of our body, all of life is in constant communication, as science is just beginning to understand. No bird sings in isolation, no bud breaks open alone. And the most central note that is present in life is its sacred nature…Hearing its presence speak to us, we feel this great bond of life that supports and nourishes us all. Today’s world may still at times make us feel lonely, but we can then remember what every animal, every insect, every plant knows – and only we have forgotten: the living sacred whole.
– Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Real friendship or love is not manufactured or achieved by an act of will or intention. Friendship is always an act of recognition.
– John O’Donohue

There shall be eternal summer in the grateful heart.
– Celia Thaxter

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

– William Shakespeare

You worship that which thought has created; which means you are worshipping, in a very subtle way, yourself.
– Krishnamurti

The mind is distracted, but the body is not. The body is not thinking or ruminating. It is just feeling and being, present, aware, and vibrant.
– Willa Blythe Baker

if we feel, we would that another’s nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart’s best blood.
– p. b. shelley

Investigating the outer world, investigating the inner world—it’s all one. And that’s you. And that’s what it means—really, finally—to grow up.
– Alan Watts

leaves floating
upon a lotus pond
autumn festival
– Basho

All the effort in the world won’t matter if you’re not inspired.
– Chuck Palahniuk

People who wish they were writers, I don’t get it; I wish I was rich? I wish I could play drums? Or do math? Being a writer is a curse the witch hurls at you at the christening, like “may your head forever be full of perfect ideas you can never express on the page”
– Amber Sparks

The quality of owning freezes you forever in “I,” and cuts you off forever from the “we.”
– John Steinbeck

GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS
Eventually, the way you don’t notice
dirt on the windshield until someone
sweeps a finger across, and it’s clear
you’ve been driving through a fog
for longer than you know, it’s easy
to get used to fear and anger, the kind
they served at the diner, closed for months
of course, or the kind you’ve been feeding
on alone in the back of the garage where
you keep tools you bought for some task
long abandoned. They lean against each other,
rattle from a wind through a cracked window
making a sound like skeletons would
if they could say what they thought of you
now. Hope is a thin membrane, maybe
patience too, a lake we float on looking down
to see what we lost, but seeing instead
our own unsteady reflection.
– Grant Clauser

Having the good life can be so simple
when you savor the one you have.
– Karen Maezen Miller

I wouldn’t want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days
– Frank O’Hara

The problem with talking to people is that you say things. And then those things were said.
– Julie Carr

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.
– Marshall McLuhan

Quite often, the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.
– C.G. Jung

Poetry can in fact change the world by changing—ever so slightly, ever so gradually—the lives of those who open to it.
– Joseph Fasano

Style is just being slightly wrong in consistent ways
– Elisa Gabbert

Writing, like cooking, begs you to trust your instincts. You can’t be affected by other people’s appetites.
– Nancy Slonim Aronie

If you can’t tell whose imagination you’re living in, you’ll interiorize someone else’s worldview, limitations, fears, and desires, thinking they’re What Reality Is Like.

Imaginal literacy is a core competency

– @the_wilderless

Forgetfulness is like a song
That, freed from beat and measure, wanders.
– Hart Crane

In general, our culture believes it’s their responsibility to stop individuals from trying to become artists. I’ve found that the ones who try the hardest to stop others are the ones who had artistic aspirations and have already stopped themselves.
– Julianna Baggott

Writers who have achieved some success & help other writers still trying to get there are my favorite people.
– James Tate Hill

Writer math is when you spend 1000 years writing a story that three people read, but two minutes writing an idiot tweet that hundreds of people read.
– Amber Sparks

There is no night, no matter how long, that does not find the day.
– William Shakespeare

How could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and opening them only when I am with you?
– Franz Kafka, 1912.

Is there anyone who has not once been stunned, emerging from the Métro into the open air, to step into brilliant sunlight? And yet the sun shone a few minutes earlier, when he went down, just as brightly.
– Walter Benjamin

People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.
– Seneca

To develop the nonviolent approach, first of all you have to see that your problems are not really trying to destroy you.
– Chögyam Trungpa

Unconscious jealousy is one of the most destructive forces that exist, whereas jealousy that is realized, known, and suffered from becomes relatively harmless.
– Barbara Hannah

“Do you see yourself in this book?”
And I always think,
“No.”

“A book isn’t supposed to be a mirror. It’s supposed to be a door!”

– Fran Lebowitz

Beauty and muck often go hand in hand.
– Yael Schonbrun

It’s all song, and it’s all poetry – for him there wasn’t any delineation
– Adam Cohen, On Leonard Cohen

I didn’t know what was wrong so each night I prayed to God, but God just gave me tomorrow. Eventually, I stopped praying because I realized that God and I did not speak the same language.
– Victoria Chang

It is of the essence of joy to reveal itself, while grief tries to hide, sometimes even to deceive. Joy is communicative, social, open-hearted, and desires expression; grief is secretive, silent, solitary, and seeks to retire into itself.
– Søren Kierkegaard

Someone shoots my book, shoots it straight through
I allow a relation
Between addiction and adore
– Julie Carr

The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through love — by knowing… that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him.
– Baldwin, On Shakespeare

WHAT CAN WE CALL IT

You can’t stop someone
from adding an 𝑠 to a
word. Loves. Depressions.
Deaths. Griefs. Gods. Most of the time,
the plural of something is worse.

– Victoria Chang

Thinking of Frost
by Major Jackson

I thought by now my reverence would have waned,
matured to the tempered silence of the bookish or revealed
how blasé I’ve grown with age, but the unrestrained
joy I feel when a black skein of geese voyages like a dropped
string from God, slowly shifting and soaring, when the decayed
apples of an orchard amass beneath its trees like Eve’s
first party, when driving and the road Vanna-Whites its crops
of corn whose stalks will soon give way to a harvester’s blade
and turn the land to a man’s unruly face, makes me believe
I will never soothe the pagan in me, nor exhibit the propriety
of the polite. After a few moons, I’m loud this time of year,
unseemly as a chevron of honking. I’m fire in the leaves,
obstreperous as a New England farmer. I see fear
in the eyes of his children. They walk home from school,
as evening falls like an advancing trickle of bats, the sky
pungent as bounty in chimney smoke. I read the scowl
below the smiles of parents at my son’s soccer game, their agitation,
the figure of wind yellow leaves make of quaking aspens.

our infrastructure is a physical manifestation of our beliefs around what it means to live with the natural world and it was not built for the world we now live in.
– Virginia Hanusik

If governments invested more in music and the arts they wouldn’t need to invest as much in other things because there wouldn’t be as many problems.
– Vaughan Fleischfresser

Having a larger palette to draw from doesn’t mean you have to use every color. It just provides more options.
– Rick Rubin

To observe a thing means only to arouse it to self-recognition. Whether an experiment succeeds depends on the extent to which the experimenter is capable, through magical observation, one might say, of getting nearer to the object and of finally drawing it into himself.
– Walter Benjamin

Let them judge you. Let them misunderstand you. Let them gossip about you. Their opinions aren’t your problems. You stay kind, committed to love and free in your authenticity. No matter what they do or say, don’t you doubt your worth or the beauty of your truth. Just keep shining like you always do.
– Scott Stabile

Poems have the power to lead society, poems can enlighten the mind. Poems can motivate people to do good in society and be good despite the war that surrounds us. This is the power and effect that poetry has on our lives.
– Haidari Wujodi

The artist, functioning in this “proper” way, is the true seer and prophet of his century, the justifier of life and as such, of course, a revolutionary far more fundamental in his penetration of the social mask of his day than any fanatic idealist spilling blood over the pavement in the name simply of another unnatural mask.
– Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space

I live in music, in words, in
the fires of the heart.
– Mary Oliver

How beautiful the lane is today, decorated with a thousand colours!
– Miss Mitford

The best way to find joy in our lives or overcome struggle is with the help of others.
– Simon Sinek

…I work my poetry up over
my heart, and I hold it tight,
and dream…
– Arthur Rimbaud

I know there is a river somewhere, / lit, fragrant, golden mist, all that
– Molly Brodak

Occurs to me that optimism is often simply a product of getting sufficient sleep.
– Alicia E. Stallings

Autumn leaves do not grieve as they fall from branches. They do not mourn as they meet the soil or cry as they crunch under booted feet. They think not of their springtime youth or wail over their summer green. They sigh, content to fulfill their sun-collecting purpose.
– @poseofpower

We do not know what God is, what death is, and what love is. These are the three amazing principles in life, of which we do not know, though we talk about them. So, the wise do not talk of them anymore.
– Krishnamurti

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 of Akragas

Sleep Hygiene

A bed should be a tender slab, devoid of insects.

A tired woman should be able to lie across diagonally, headache to hag feet.

A bed should exist in crystalline silence.

It should have a sleepy blue view. A nearby window not close to voyeurs.

A bed should have a special pillow to shush the head, to coddle and safety the amygdala.

If established on the ground, a bed should have a bioluminescent quilt to redirect the gaze: the prey is over there.

If established in a tree, the quilt may allow for free feet or a tossback with luxuriant abandon.

Among other things, do not build your bed on dictionaries or books of any kind.

A bed is best made from a wood frame, or metal, or dark matter.

A bed should be free of lye, lime, and liars.

One should be able to enter the bed and think I could fly far away in this. I could die; I could just die.

– Jill Khoury

When, in Paradise Lost, Adam asks about the movements of the heavens, Raphael refuses to answer. “Let it speak,” he says, “the Maker’s high magnificence, who built / so spacious, and his line stretcht out so far; / That man may know he dwells not in his own; / An edifice too large for him to fill, / Lodg’d in a small partition, and the rest / Ordain’d for uses to his Lord best known.
– Bill McKibben

Zen Master Dogen has pointed out that anxiety, when accepted, is the driving force to enlightenment in that it lays bare the human dilemma at the same time that it ignites our desire to break out of it.
– Roshi Philip Kapleau

Saints
by Louis Jenkins

As soon as the snow melts the grass begins to grow. Even
though the daytime high is barely above freezing, even
though May is very like November, marsh marigolds bloom
in the swamp and the popple trees produce a faint green
that hangs under the low clouds like a haze over the valley.
This is the way the saints live, no complaints, no suspicion,
no surprise. If it rains, carry an umbrella, if it’s cold, wear
a jacket.

The Master is not trapped in opposites. His this is also a that. He sees that life becomes death and death becomes life, that right has a kernel of wrong within it and wrong a kernel of right, that the true turns into the false and the false into the true. He understands that nothing is absolute, that since every point of view depends on the viewer, affirmation and denial are equally beside the point. The place where the this and the that are not opposed to each other is called “the pivot of the Tao.” When we find this pivot, we find ourselves at the center of the circle, and here we sit, serene, while Yes and No keep chasing each other around the circumference, endlessly. Mind can only create the qualities of good and bad by comparing. Remove the comparison, and there go the qualities. What remains is the pure unknown: ungraspable object, ungraspable subject, and the clear light of awareness streaming through. The pivot of the Tao is the mind free of its thoughts. It doesn’t believe that this is a this or that that is a that. Let Yes and No sprint around the circumference toward a finish line that doesn’t exist. How can they stop trying to win the argument of life until you stop? When you do, you realize that you were the only one running. Yes was you, No was you, the whole circumference, with its colored banners, its pom-pom girls and frenzied crowds – that was you as well. At the center, the eyes open and again it’s the sweet morning of the world. There’s nothing here to limit you, no one here to draw a circumference. In fact, there’s no one here – not even you.
– Stephen Mitchell

I don’t need time. What I need is a deadline.
– Duke Ellington

Take a shower, wash off the day. Drink a glass of water. Make the room dark. Lie down and close your eyes.

Notice the silence. Notice your heart. Still beating. Still fighting. You made it, after all. You made it, another day. And you can make it one more.

You’re doing just fine.

– Charlotte Eriksson

Sixty six times have these eyes beheld the changing scenes of autumn
I have said enough about moonlight, ask me no more.
Only listen to the voice of pines and cedars when no wind stirs
– Zen nun

It is harder to kill something
that is spiritually alive
than it is to bring the dead
back to life.
– Herman Hesse

As I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters but me.
– Stephen Fry

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Out of Some Other Paradise
And people walked out of churches and bars,
cafés and apartments, cities, towns, photographs,
someone’s Friday night party,
someone they once knew or slept with.
They walked out of meetings and dinners,
out of lives, on each other, on love
and rarely on time.
Some walked out of dark places,
slow places, strange places, places
they wouldn’t go back to, places they never did find.
Then did. And walked out again
for the third, fourth, fifth time perhaps.
People walked out through doors
and through letters, through looks across rooms,
gifts that gave nothing of what they withheld,
what they couldn’t give back. Then others
just walked out on everything. That was that.
What can be said about what we do to each other.
What street, I don’t remember,
on the way to someone’s going-away,
I saw you, as if in the middle of a sentence,
snow: your new evening clothes.
– Alex Dimitrov

New Breath
by Henri J. M. Nouwen

There is probably no image that expresses so well the intimacy with God in prayer as the image of God’s breath. We are like asthmatic people who are cured of their anxiety. The Spirit has taken away our narrowness (the Latin word for anxiety is angustia/narrowness) and made everything new for us. We receive a new breath, a new freedom, a new life. This new life is the divine life of God. Prayer, therefore, is God’s breathing in us, by which we become part of the intimacy of God’s inner life, and by which we are born anew.

So, the paradox of prayer is that it asks for a serious effort while it can only be received as a gift. We cannot plan, organize or manipulate God; but without a careful discipline, we cannot receive God either.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three-quarters of our real life.
– Simone Weil

Saint Anthony of the Desert says that gaining the brother and sister and winning God are linked. It is not getting them signed up to something or getting them on your side. It is opening doors for them to healing and to wholeness. Insofar as you open such doors for another, you gain God, in the sense that you become a place where God happens for somebody else. You become a place where God happens. God comes to life for somebody else in a life-giving way, not because you are good or wonderful, but because that is what God has done. So, if we can shift our preoccupations, anxiety, and selfishness out of the way to put someone in touch with the possibility of God’s healing, to that extent we are ourselves in touch with God’s healing. So, if you gain your brother or sister, you gain God.
– Rowan Williams

Reshaping life! People who can say that they have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.
– Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

There’s a place beyond words where experience first occurs to which I always want to return. I suspect that whenever I articulate my thoughts or translate my impulses into words, I am betraying the real thoughts and impulses which remain hidden.
– Jerzy Kosiński

Te Deum
by Charles Reznikoff

Not because of victories
I sing,
having none,
but for the common sunshine,
the breeze,
the largess of the spring.

Not for victory
but for the day’s work done
as well as I was able;
not for a seat upon the dais
but at the common table.

The essential thing is to etch movements in the sky, movements so still they leave no trace. The essential thing is simplicity. That is why the long path to perfection is horizontal.
– Philippe Petit

We may reason on to our heart’s content, the fog won’t lift.
– Samuel Beckett

The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.
– Mark Twain

He explained to me with great insistence that every question possessed a power that did not lie in the answer.
– Elie Wiesel

I believed in a good home, in sane and sound living, in good food, good times, work, faith and hope. I have always believed in these things. It was with some amazement that I realized I was one of the few people in the world who really believed in these things without going around making a dull middle class philosophy out of it. I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.
– Jack Kerouac

I was the fourth ship.
Playfully in love with the sea,
Eternally entwined with the sky,
Forever vowed to my voyage,
While the others shouted “Land.”
– Carmen Tafolla

In psychology one possesses nothing unless one has experienced it in reality. Hence a purely intellectual insight is not enough, because one knows only the words and not the substance of the thing from the inside.
– Carl G. Jung

And if happiness should surprise you again, do not mention its previous betrayal. ‎Enter into the happiness, and burst.
– mahmoud darwish

Here are 6 ways to regulate yourself using neuropsychology:

If you are stressed, use the physiological sigh. Huberman lab talks about it, but it’s essentially two inhales and one long exhale, and you do that over and over again.

If you are anxious, go for a walk. It deactivates your amygdala.

If you are sad, acknowledge your feelings and then move your body. it release endorphins.

If you are impulsive, like angry. You can’t think straight. Look out the window and don’t look at anything. Just like dilate your gaze. It blunts your neuroadrenaline so you can think clearly.

If you have low motivation, this is interesting ~ focus on one spot on your screen for one minute. Ignore everything else. Pupilary convergence increases focus.

And finally, if you’re feeling insecure, low self-worth, write down your strengths. Logical thinking overrides your limbic system.

– Ana Del Castillo

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

He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.
– Cormac McCarthy

if i but close my eyes, strange images / in thousand forms and thousand colours rise, / stars, rainbows, moons, green dragons, bears and ghosts, / an endless medley rush upon the stage, / and dance and riot wild in reason’s court / above control.
– isaac watts

Poetry is not not,
not knot,
not knock knock.

Poetry is yes yes,
yes yes yes,
yes yes yes yes
yes!

– john zbigniew guzlowski

a fox’s spirit
has enchanted me
deep in the autumn forest
– Ogawa

Otherwise this September has been perfect. Every day is finer. There’s a kind of greengage light on the trees. The flowers are gone. And the quince jam is boiling something beautiful, as I write. I love Autumn. I feel it’s better than summer, even.
– Katherine Mansfield

Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself — and thus make yourself indispensable.
– Andre Gide

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, Hidden weeds flower.
– Philip Larkin

Along with several fatal flaws, mostly involving women, [my dad] had several excellent rules: Don’t be an asshole, and try to remember people’s names, especially those people with no power or cachet, and seek beauty through binoculars, books, records.
– Anne Lamott

Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has / so much to do in the world.
– William Stafford

We need to be aware of what we are practicing in any moment. Because whatever we practice, we get better at, whether it’s the skillful or the unskillful.
– Christina Feldman

It’s funny how “wokeness” consists of simply having basic human empathy and an understanding that the resources on our planet Earth are not endless. Why are those things so controversial?
– Kenzie Sproat

Depression is not necessarily pathological. It often foreshadows a renewal of the personality or a burst of creative energy.
– Carl Jung

Behind all these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things. The function of art is to reveal this radiance through the created object.
– Joseph Campbell

Blessings of a Dog
by Grant Clauser

You must praise the mutilated world.
– Adam Zagajewski

She chases the threadbare tennis ball
across the kitchen, dives under a chair, slides
to catch it mid-roll then trots back
bearing the wet gift in her mouth
and asks with her eyes and paws
for me to throw it again. And I do,
again and again repeat this simple joy,
until tired she throws herself onto my lap
and gnaws my knuckles. Sometimes I want
this forever. The way a perfect fall morning
lingers in the scent of walnut trees.
All the grief of a summer we carried
like water, spilling with each labored step.
She’s still a pup, has enough play in her
for twelve years or so. I know how that goes.
You love, they love. Everything goes on
like it should until it doesn’t. She doesn’t
know there’s something broken in the world
that a ball can’t fix, like a bearing that makes
the machine run smoother. Like the smell
of woodsmoke in the air that reminds
us of childhood innocence, even though
something in the distance is burning.

Love is worth whatever it costs.
– Françoise Sagan

THE WAY THE LIGHT REFLECTS
The paint doesn’t move the way the light reflects,
so what’s there to be faithful to? I am faithful
to you, darling. I say it to the paint. The bird floats
in the unfinished sky with nothing to hold it.
The man stands, the day shines. His insides and
his outsides kept apart with an imaginary line—
thick and rude and imaginary because there is
no separation, fallacy of the local body, paint
on paint. I have my body and you have yours.
Believe it if you can. Negative space is silly.
When you bang on the wall you have to remember
you’re on both sides of it already but go ahead,
yell at yourself. Some people don’t understand
anything. They see the man but not the light,
they see the field but not the varnish. There is no
light in the paint, so how can you argue with them?
They are probably right anyway. I paint in his face
and I paint it out again. There is a question
I am afraid to ask: to supply the world with what?
– Richard Siken

Recognize that your struggle and your suffering is the same as everyone else’s, I think that’s the beginning of a responsible life. Otherwise, we are in a continual savage battle with each other with no possible solution, political, social, or spiritual.
– Leonard Cohen

cascading through
a kaleidoscope
of earth tones
we adjust our eyes
to Autumn’s lens
– @jennfel

We ran as if to meet the moon.
– Robert Frost

a stone bridge
watching the river
emulate the sky
– James Welsh

I had been enough times to the ER to know it wasn’t a heart attack. Or not a heart attack in the sense of something wrong with my heart muscle. It was a different kind of heart attack. A heart attack in my soul.
– Henry Abramovitch, Ph.D., Jungian Analyst

Decide if a poem is a question or a declaration, a meditation or an outcry.
– Lawrence Ferlinghett

Now is no time to think of what you do not have.
Think of what you can do with what there is
– Ernest Hemingway

I crave stability but
refuse to be the stone
– Maija Haavisto

From the past, it is my childhood which fascinates me most . . . For it is not the irreversible I discover in my childhood, it is the irreducible: everything which is still in me, by fits and starts . . .
– Roland Barthes

you plucked blade after blade, pressed each to your lips ‘ —grass whistles’. you gifted the earth with more music than it already knew.
– Matt Coonan

I’m still learning to love the parts of me that no one claps for.
– Rudy Francisco

I have been younger in October
than in all the months of spring
– W. S. Merwin

Seek transformation. O be eager for that flame
in which something escapes you, proud of change.
– Rilke

Much of the work of counselling and psychoanalysis involves clarifying and mending splits in the self, bringing together aspects of the self in such a way that…

…concern, love and reparative capacities are freer to express themselves without being swamped by phantasies of revenge or anger or destruction.

– Julia Segal

Dawn spilled down from the campus to the banks We’d come to, single, sobered-up again, To see the morning glories give their thanks For things we had, and hardly noticed, then.
– Matthew Buckley Smith

In me there are two souls, alas, and their Division tears my life in two. One loves the world, it clutches her, it binds Itself to her, clinging with furious lust; The other longs to soar beyond the dust Into the realm of high ancestral minds.
– Goethe, Faust I

What I loved, whether I kept it or not, I will always love it.
– André Breton

Don’t repeat the pattern

If it’s a different person but the same dynamic, it’s still a repeat.

Give yourself permission to be new so you can receive the new.

– Dr. Thema

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.
– Francois de La Rochefoucauld

The culture war is, by and large, not a clash between ideologies, rather it’s a fight between different developmental capacities to take perspectives.
– @VinceFHorn

Dante’s Prayer
by Loreena McKennitt

When the dark wood fell before me
And all the paths were overgrown
When the priests of pride say there is no other way
I tilled the sorrows of stone

I did not believe because I could not see
Though you came to me in the night
When the dawn seemed forever lost
You showed me your love in the light of the stars

Cast your eyes on the ocean
Cast your soul to the sea
When the dark night seems endless
Please remember me

Then the mountain rose before me
By the deep well of desire
From the fountain of forgiveness
Beyond the ice and the fire

Cast your eyes on the ocean
Cast your soul to the sea
When the dark night seems endless
Please remember me

Oh, oh, oh, oh

Though we share this humble path, alone
How fragile is the heart
Oh give these clay feet wings to fly
To touch the face of the stars

Breathe life into this feeble heart
Lift this mortal veil of fear
Take these crumbled hopes, etched with tears
We’ll rise above these earthly cares

Cast your eyes on the ocean
Cast your soul to the sea
When the dark night seems endless
Please remember me
Please remember me
Please remember me
Please remember me
Please remember me
Please remember me
Please remember me
Please remember me

I write to you my brother
I am weary
I write from the liquid salted landscapes
I write from within the confines of colonial borders
Where the songs of my people
sit on our eyelids and on the insides of our mouths
– Bebe Backhouse and Peter Sipeli

The Cold Air of October

I can see outdoors the gold wings without birds
Flying around, and the wells of cold water
Without walls standing eighty feet up in the air,
I can feel the crickets’ singing carrying them into the sky.
I know these shadows are falling for hundreds of miles,
Crossing lawns in tiny towns, and the doors of Catholic churches;
I know the horse of darkness is riding fast to the east,
Carrying a thin man with no coat.
And I know the sun is sinking down great stairs,
Like an executioner with a great blade walking into a cellar,
And the gold animals, the lions, and the zebras, and the pheasants,
Are waiting at the head of the stairs with robbers’ eyes.

– Robert Bly

The death of a people is not meant to sound like a camera’s click.
– Urban Word

It is certainly no ideal for people always to remain childish, to live in a perpetual state of delusion about themselves, foisting everything they dislike on to their neighbours and plaguing them with their prejudices and projections.
– Carl G. Jung

Reading anonymously helps me discover emerging poets, too. Equal access means trusting the poems to show you the way, not ‘sifting’ lists (industry term) for big names or publication/prize histories.

Every poem is a new opportunity. We can only read one word at a time.

– @_dodo

karma sutra
one position I never
thought I’d be in

class reunion
I don’t even recognize
myself

– Eavonka Ettinger

Mental simplicity involves contentment, straightforwardness, and some degree of trust in the unfolding of life. This frees up energy to do the relevant thinking that supports our life of practice. It creates space for the dharma to unfold.
– Kim Allen

Our bodies are innocent. They want to be as healthy, happy, and whole as they can be. They want to expand into the fullest expressions of themselves.
– Kate Johnson

In your investigation of the world, never let the mind desert the body.
– Ajahn Mun

I think
my brief poems
are like gnats
in the wind –
they come, they go
– Joy McCall

It’s just the will to fulfillment that blazes, that’s indestructible.
– Barthes

Often we feel time to be linear, inexorable, suffocating. At other moments we find it oceanic…there are also moments when time appears to be, to say it in one way, both vertical & horizontal, both ‘single-minded’, monotonous, inalterable, & multi-dimensional, infinite.
– Etel Adnan

Someday, I would like to go home. The exact location of this place, I don’t know, but someday I would like to go. There would be a pleasing feeling of familiarity and a sense of welcome in everything I saw. People would greet me warmly. They would remind me of the length of my absence and the thousands of miles I had travelled in those restless years, but mostly, they would tell me that I had been missed, and that things were better now I had returned. Autumn would come to this place of welcome, this place I would know to be home. Autumn would come and the air would grow cool, dry and magic, as it does that time of the year. At night, I would walk the streets but not feel lonely, for these are the streets of my home town. These are the streets that I had thought about while far away, and now I was back, and all was as it should be. The trees and the falling leaves would welcome me. I would look up at the moon, and remember seeing it in countries all over the world as I had restlessly journeyed for decades, never remembering it looking the same as when viewed from my hometown.
– Henry Rollins

weave us a song to hold us
when the wind blows so cold
– Sandra María Esteves

Words do not change their meaning as much in centuries as names do for us in the space of a few years.
– Marcel Proust

I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky.
– Oscar Wilde

An abnormal reaction
to an abnormal situation
is normal behavior.
– Viktor Frankl

Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence.
– Henri Frederic Amiel

A friend came to see me in a dream. From far away. And I asked him in the dream: ‘Did you come by photograph or train?’
– John Berger

I would like to live in a kind, rational, reasonable & well-educated society. Is that too much to ask?
– Laurence Overmire

Maybe you’re shrinking because you never figured out how to fit into this world. How to carve out a spot and make it your own.
– L.E. Bowman

Make no mistake about it – Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.
– Adyashanti

HOW TO LISTEN

Tilt your head slightly to one side and lift
your eyebrows expectantly. Ask questions.

Delve into the subject at hand or let
things come randomly. Don’t expect answers.

Forget everything you’ve ever done.
Make no comparisons. Simply listen.

Listen with your eyes, as if the story
you are hearing is happening right now.

Listen without blinking, as if a move
might frighten the truth away forever.

Don’t attempt to copy anything down.
Don’t bring a camera or a recorder.

This is your chance to listen carefully.
Your whole life might depend on what you hear.

– Joyce Sutphen

The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
– Willa Cather, My Ántonia

Look to this Day, for it is Life – the very Life of Life. In its brief course lie all the truths and realities of your existence: the Bliss of Growth, the Glory of Action, the Splendor of Beauty. For yesterday is already a dream and tomorrow is only a vision; but today, well-lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well, therefore, to this Day. Such is the salvation of the Dawn.
– The Bhagavad Gita

Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers.
– Peter Matthiessen

The truth is that there’s no better time to be happy than now. If not now then when?. Your life will always be filled with challenges. It’s better to admit it and decide to be happy anyway. One of my phrases: For a long time it seemed like life was about to begin. The real life. But there was always an obstacle in the way, something to solve first, some unfinished business, time to pass, a debt to pay. Only then would life begin. Until I realized those obstacles were my life. This perspective has helped me see that there is no shortcut to happiness..
– Eduardo Galeano

Simone Weil was surely right when she asked, “Isn’t it the greatest possible disaster, when you are wrestling with God, not to be beaten?” God’s invitation to the spiritual life is a call to the high-risk venture of being loved more fiercely than we ever might have dreamed.
– Belden C. Lane

what if poetry isn’t enuf?
watchu gonna do then?
– Ntozake Shange

Only you need to understand your career choices. The narrative doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else. Do what you need to do, what you love to do, what you feel called to do, what registers as vital & necessary, what builds the life you most need financially and spiritually.
– Megan Mayhew-Bergman

Our perception of time can be much more fluid. Many factors—the sensations we receive, our emotions, thoughts, environment, etc.—influence how we experience time.
– Neil Schmitzer-Torbert

He dares to conceive of writing as a kind of happiness
– Susan Sontag on Barthes

On “finding your people” — there’s always the chance that they’re dead, that they left themselves in books
– Austin Kleon

the softest clouds
on your side of the bed
autumn dawn
– Elancharan Gunasekaran

Sometimes all you have to do is stir the thought-pot so all the flavors can come out!
– Matt Flumerfelt

It’s dark now & I am very tired.
I love you, always. Time is nothing.

——— Audrey Niffenegger

I try to win you back,
that is the point of the writing.
But you are gone forever, […]
How lush the world is,
how full of things that don’t belong to me—
– Louise Glück

The Dharmas that appear,
And the Dharmas that are possible,
Are generated using causes and conditions
That are not simply ideas,
But no matter how things happen,
The holy truth is unborn.
This is why it is taught to be a subject
That is not complicated.
– mDo bcu

Anger, on the other hand, can have a vitalizing quality, and so, like the vexed monk, we reflexively summon up anger to push embarrassment away.
– Kaia Fischer & Mindy Newman

I believe we must reinvent loneliness in order to survive it. I have been trying to do this my whole life.
– Richard Dimming on Philip Seymour Hoffman

Maybe it’s the water inside
Me that’s sad
– Ana Božičević

table for one
a silence
that isn’t awkward
– @hegelincanada

The overuse of the word ‘journey’ is nauseating.
– @BlueRoseCode

Without love and compassion, meditation is utterly meaningless.
– Krishnamurti

The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.
– Wallace Stevens

One of the horrors of fact is that they are abstract.
– Guy Davenport

But he had turned, little by little, a disturbance into words, he had made a pillow of old words, for his head.
– Samuel Beckett

cold dawn
the stream that struggles
to be the sea
– Elancharan Gunasekaran

Always do the things you fear the most; courage is an acquired taste, like caviar.
– Erica Jong

One cannot help wondering if man’s pursuit of the physical moon is not the outer counterpart of his paramount need, of which he is not yet fully aware, to explore the cold unpredictable half-light of his own feminine nature.
– Irene Claremont de Castillejo

Doing the negative is imposed on us; the positive is already within us.
– Kafka (trans. Shelley Frisch)

Alas, it is a rough year to ask humans for money to finance American political campaigns. Wild how our candidates are privately funded and purchased in this corrupt demos-market. Wild, I think.
– @aliner

But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.
– Albert Camus

The phrase and the day and the scene harmonized in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself.
– James Joyce

So far as I am individually concerned, & independent of my pocket, it is my earnest desire to write those sort of books which are said to ‘fail.’
– Melville

I’m not offended when people tell me that no one reads anymore, but it does confuse me. Isn’t it clear that I’ve embraced futility. Who hasn’t, in their own way??
– Lindsay Lerman

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
– Aristotle

Truth does not depend on formulas or alternative answers, but truth is seen to be one truth without relativity.
– Chögyam Trungpa

Enjoying being insulting is a youthful corruption of power. You lose your taste for it when you realize how hard people try, how much they mind, and how long they remember.
– Martin Amis

Often we’re terrified of the little deaths that precede transformation, because they feel like the advent of physical death. As one older woman put it, –Every time I’m in for a major change I think I’m dying.
– Jane R. Pretat

Loving your partner well often looks like moving at a slower speed when they are feeling down. You don’t rush them to get over it. You let them move through their emotions. You ask them if they would like any help. Meeting them where they are supports their healing.
– @YungPueblo

What’s past and what’s to come is strew’d with husks
And formless ruin of oblivion
– Shakespeare

I was surprised to discover not everyone sees the shadow around objects, the black outline, the bruise of fermentation on things even as light clings to them.
– Anne Michaels

It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.
– Sigmund Freud

Storage
by Mary Oliver

When I moved from one house to another
there were many things I had no room
for. What does one do? I rented a storage
space. And filled it. Years passed.
Occasionally I went there and looked in,
but nothing happened, not a single
twinge of the heart.

As I grew older the things I cared
about grew fewer, but were more
important. So one day I undid the lock
and called the trash man. He took
everything.

I felt like the little donkey when
his burden is finally lifted. Things!
Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful
fire! More room in your heart for love,
for the trees! For the birds who own

nothing–the reason they can fly.

Bringing the treasure back from the underworld into life is always the most hazardous task in the fairytale. . . Integrating an initiation can become a lifetime task. And while most of it remains in the secret mysteries of the individual, some of it belongs to the universal soul that is striving to become conscious in each one of us.
– Barbara Joy Laffey

Certainly not all our criticisms of others are projections of our own undesirable shadow traits: but any time our response to another person involves excessive emotion or overreaction, we can be sure that something unconscious has been prodded and is being activated. As we said earlier, the people on whom we project must have “hooks” on which the projection can stick.
– William A. Miller

Read like mad. Read contemporary poets. Read old dead poets. Read formal verse. Read experimental stuff. Read read read.
– Gabrielle Bates

There is no free homeland without free women
– Stencil seen in Ramallah, Palestine

We shall not sever ourselves from the earth. We must chant our being, and we must dance in time with the rhythms of the earth.
– N. Scott Momaday

Madness belongs to all of us. It comes in many forms and many degrees, from the craziness at the bottom of our neurotic symptom to a derangement that engulfs our whole life. Madness is simpler than it looks: it is our effort to express unbearable pain.
– Ann Belford Ulanov

Patience, Patient
by Lauren Shapiro

Once I was driving for a long time
by myself, tediously, as people do
when they have to get between two
distant points in a country that thinks
it is not at war and I was listening
to a radio show about how little
compassion Americans seem to have,
how silent and insular they become
before erupting in a firework of bullets.
President Obama said I don’t think we have
a monopoly on crazy people. The woman said
she was trying to make a point by banging
the loaded shotgun on the floor before
blowing off her jaw. Of course we must
think about the deer population and terrorists
in the wilderness next door as well as
the stupidity of most people trying to make
a point about rights, etcetera. Then the show
ended and some classical music came on
which reminded me how long some things
can endure, for example a sonata written
before radio or this country really existed,
how we still find it beautiful. I considered
how I could have this thought alone
in Ohio, the blank highway a pointless
connection between two extremes.
Then I paid the toll and drove on.

Most people don’t talk about how your spirit, emotional health, your beliefs can actually help determine so much about your health. Your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions, and your beliefs literally communicate with every aspect of your biology, every second.
– Dr. Mark Hyman

the center of every poem is this:
i have loved you. i have had to deal with that.
– Salma Deera

Remember, cheap labor is never cheap for the person who performs it.
– Audre Lorde

our world
is a bonfire
quickly burning out
– Issa

I have seen miracles, actual miracles, where people who have been given no chance of living have lived, and in some cases are living still.
– Anne Lamott

At first you’re just a kid on a street with an address & phone, then later you discover you live in a city in a county & state in a country in the world in outer space.
– Matt Flumerfelt

Where other people would rather go out and party, I would rather stay at home with my grand piano and candles and incense and a glass of wine and an idea.
– Stevie Nicks

Palaces

A city with a knife in its heart,
nerves exposed, arteries dangling, its temples to kingship,
religion, learning, and art
begrimed, an pock-marked by bullets,
or spruced, sand-blasted, and lacquered
to fact the new market day. No wonder History
has a grim and elderly look.
She sits at the base of Schiller’s statue,
manly, legs crossed, in her toga,
while her buxom sisters in negligé, Lyric,
Drama, and Philosophy, flirt with the passerby.
The boulevards convulse in excavations,
cranes rake the sky. The Palace of Tears
still runs with tears. In vacant lots
barrels protrude from puddles of khaki water,
pennants of shredded plastic shiver from chain-link fence.
Loss opens the way, I wrote in a letter
that was not a letter of love.
On Sophienstrasse, a small, grubby-faced boy
works with scholarly concentration
to dislodge a cobblestone the size of a scone
from the sidewalk in front of Queen Sophie Luisa’s church.
The neighborhood shakes to the dentist’s drill:
panel by coppery panel, girder by girder,
new labor dismantles old labor’s Palast der Republik.

– Rosanna Warren

within an opal
the bright starlight
it once was
– James Welsh

When you write, everything is possible. I write so that other people can discover what they love, and sometimes so they discover what I love. I write in order not to forget what is most important in the world: friendship and love, wisdom and art.
– Silvina Ocampo

I love a good man outside the law,
just as much as I hate a bad man
inside the law.
– Woody Guthrie

it took 800 years
for Roman Empire’s fall —
they had no internet
– Ray McNiece

do academics know that you can’t just say an issue is structural to bypass your responsibility to confront and diffuse it.
– Amy Gaeta

Just a reminder that if you mix the letters around in “nostalgia” you get “lost again”.
– The Ancient Millennial

Man is blind.
He cannot see
The nothingness that birthed him.
Nor can he see
The infinity that envelops him.
– Wu Hsin

silent conversations
we have with life
poetry
– @BashoSociety

home is where
your heart
roams free
– Akari

WHAT SUCKS ABOUT THE AFTERLIFE

On earth, everyone loved butterflies,
but I trusted the caterpillars more.
I trusted the ones who knew
they were not done growing.
On Earth, I was a work in progress,
was comforted in the knowing
that I had a million mistakes
still in me to learn from.
I changed my mind more often
than I changed my socks,
and whenever I was criticized
for mismatched thoughts, I’d say,
Who wants to be today
who they were yesterday?
Becoming was how I prayed.
But here-––I am past the finish line:
I have a heart of gold
and I never have to dig for it.
I couldn’t do anything wrong if I tried
and trust me, I try, but I get hot-headed,
and my rage toasts the marshmallow
on an angel’s celestial s’mores.
I lose my temper and find it
in the halo lost and found box.
Lies won’t let me tell them.
They handed me a sticker
that said ‘My Name Is’ and I wrote
‘Everyone’ by accident.
I can’t remember what selfishness is.
Yesterday I said something angry about an ex and
a quarter of my tastebuds jumped off my tongue.
I’ve known nothing of bitterness since.
Right before I died I thought,
In the afterlife I’ll apply for a job
at a mistake factory. They’ll be awed
by my resume. If anything I’m overqualified. But there’s
no place where they make
mistakes here. Everyone is flawless.
Everyone’s blunders are photoshopped
right off of their lives before
they even happen.
Is this heaven or hell? I can’t tell.
I looked that famous carpenter up
in the phone book but his number
wasn’t listed, and I need to ask him
where to find the wood to build
some missteps. I’m not about to spend
eternity burning in the lie that holy
and perfect are the same thing.
Do you understand?
A promised land
is not a promised land
if I can’t keep learning.

– Andrea Gibson

I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, eyes –
I wonder if It weighs like Mine –
Or has an Easier size.
– Emily Dickinson

don’t cry, geese—
everywhere, the same
floating world
– Issa

I do not want a half-hearted love, torn and cut in half. I have struggled and suffered so much that I require something whole, intense, indestructible.
– Frida Kahlo

I think having land and not
ruining it is the most beautiful art
that anybody could ever want.
– Andy Warhol

SITTING LIKE A PIECE OF ROCK
Buddha did it two thousand five hundred years ago. He sat and wasted his time. And he transmitted the knowledge to us that it is the best thing we can do for ourselves—waste our time by sitting. The very idea of aggression and passion could be tamed by sitting practice. Just sitting like a piece of rock is a very important point
– Chögyam Trungpa

the fragrance
of autumn
has arrived
– Ogawa

When I write, I often blend memory, the present, and the future. The present tends to show up as a feeling, tone, or grounding mechanism.”
– Khadijah Queen

I never cared to be a poet or editor. I just thought poetry was an interesting tool that was radically undervalued. That’s still how I feel 20 years later.
– Timothy Green

Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.
– Arthur Rimbaud

CONTINUING EDUCATION

At the coffee shop, I seek some quiet
before the day intrudes. I push
my bifocals up my nose and think
about the senses—how, with age,
they secede from the union of the body.
First sight, which cants to shadow;
then scent, the rich roast in the air
reduced to tin or yeast. Even touch
decays, the knobbed thumbs flush
and tingling with nerves.

I drop my spoon, and it clatters.
No one looks up. In this room full
of young people, I am invisible.
I could open a vein, decant my vintage,
sticky and sour, and not one
would look up from his screen,
from her botanical of floating cream.
I’d bleed out for hours. The whole
city of me could be aflame, and no one
here would smell the smoke.

– Donna Vorreyer

Immature hippies are united in their hatred of concepts.

Which must be why they suck so badly at wielding them.

Don’t be an underachieving hippie that confuses relative & universal truths.

Instead, be a non-dual hippie that can walk in both realities freely.

– @VinceFHorn

In his presence I crept out of my cocoon and hoisted my colors and made my thoughts scintillating and extravagant and thus we unwound our worlds to each other and gave each other rebuslike glimpses into our past, our dreams, our hopes for the future.
– Peter Weiss on that friend

Instead of raw or achieved silence, one finds various moves in the direction of an ever receding horizon of silence —moves which, by definition, can’t ever be fully consummated.
– Susan Sontag

The rest, is silence.
– William Shakespeare

Indefinite
Spring was a time of swaggering declarations.
Reaching autumn, one finds few absolutes.
Life is mystery and ambiguity,
Toward winter, that now seems agreeable and comfortable.

When young, one makes heroic attempts.
The world will surely bend to our will, we think,
and we will surely make grand contributions.
Social injustice will be righted.
The big questions will be answered.
I once went to see a master writer.
Long retired, white-haired and fragile,
she nevertheless evinced a sharp and discerning mind.
I was a novice writer.
She had edited hundreds of great authors.
I peppered her with all my anxieties
and asked her all the questions that my teachers never answered.
To most of my questions she would only answer, “Yes.”
She knew all the answers,
and she knew all the exceptions,
and she knew the best thing that an older person
could tell a younger person was
“Yes.” Yes, the affirmative.
Yes, as in keep exploring.
Yes, as in there are no ultimate answers.

I used to push for an immediate resolution to daily problems.
Now, I am not so anxious.
Is science right about things, or is religion?
Is there good and evil on a metaphysical level?
Is there one god, or are there many gods, or no gods?
A hundred answers exist for these questions.
They are all known, but no one agrees. Today, I think it all very fine.
Let there be a hundred answers with none of them entirely correct.
The asking of the question is already enough.
– Daily Tao / 255

Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us. We could add that it may move to a distant place and begin a revolt against us as well. Shakespeare’s poetry is marvelously sensitive to the danger of these inner revolts.
– Robert Bly

There is nothing which remains difficult if it is practiced. So, through practice with minor discomforts, even major discomfort becomes bearable.
– Śāntideva

Write to be heard. Write as a pathway for others to heal. Write because you must.
– Angelique Giron

It is not a matter of fighting indifference or lethargy or anger. The real problem is vision – is to see. But this seeing is only possible if we return to the source, to the reality in us. We need another quality of seeing, a look that penetrates and goes immediately to the root of myself. If we look at ourselves from outside, we cannot penetrate and go deeper because we see only the body, the form of the seed, its materiality. Reality is here, only I have never put my attention on it. I live with my back turned to myself.
– Jeanne de Salzmann

TO BEGIN WITH, THE SWEET GRASS


1.
Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat
of the sweet grass?
Will the owl bite off its own wings?
Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or
forget to sing?
Will the rivers run upstream?

Behold, I say—behold
the reliability and the finery and the teachings
of this gritty earth gift.

2.
Eat bread and understand comfort.
Drink water, and understand delight.
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets
are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds
who are drinking the sweetness, who are
thrillingly gluttonous.

For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.

And someone’s face, whom you love, will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.

And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two
beautiful bodies of your lungs.

3.
The witchery of living
is my whole conversation
with you, my darlings.
All I can tell you is what I know.

Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.

It’s more than bones.
It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.
It’s more than the beating of the single heart.
It’s praising.
It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life—just imagine that!
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe
still another.

4.
Someday I am going to ask my friend Paulus,
the dancer, the potter,
to make me a begging bowl
which I believe
my soul needs.

And if I come to you,
to the door of your comfortable house
with unwashed clothes and unclean fingernails,
will you put something into it?

I would like to take this chance.
I would like to give you this chance.

5.
We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we
change.
Congratulations, if
you have changed.

6.
Let me ask you this.
Do you also think that beauty exists for some
fabulous reason?

And, if you have not been enchanted by this adventure—
your life—
what would do for you?

7.
What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements,
though with difficulty.
I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment
somehow or another).

And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.

– Mary Oliver

I’ve not forgotten the song of those dark years, hambre del alma, the song of the starved soul. But neither have I forgotten the joyous canto hondo, the deep song, the words of which come back to us…
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Your Blinded Hand

Suppose that
everything that greens and grows
should blacken in one moment, flower and branch.
I think that I would find your blinded hand.
Suppose that your hand and mine were lost among numberless cries
in a city of fire when the earth is afire,
I must still believe that I would find your blinded hand.
Through flames everywhere
consuming earth and air
I must believe that somehow, if only one moment were offered,
I would
find your hand.
I know as, of course, you know
the immeasurable wilderness that would exist
in the moment of fire.
But I would hear your cry and you’d hear mine and each of us
would find
the other’s hand.
We know
that it might not be so.
But for this quiet moment, if only for this
moment
and against all reason
let us believe, and believe in our hearts,
that somehow it would be so.
I’d hear your cry, you mine –
And each of us would find a blinded hand.

– Tennessee Williams

Every thought, action, decision, or feeling creates an eddy in the interlocking, inter-balancing, ever-moving energy fields of life, leaving a permanent record for all of time. This realization can be intimidating when it first dawns on us, but it becomes a springboard for rapid evolution.

In this interconnected universe, every improvement we make in our private world improves the world at large for everyone. We all float on the collective level of consciousness of mankind so that any increment we add comes back to us. We all add to our common buoyancy by our efforts to benefit life. What we do to benefit life automatically benefits all of us because we are all included in that which is life.

– David R. Hawkins

Then I looked at my heart and saw a world filled with wonders: the ruins of passionate love, of sorrow and rage, the images of lovers and friends.
– Naguib Mahfouz

Marriage is in many ways a simplification of life, and it naturally combines the strengths and wills of two young people so that, together, they seem to reach farther into the future than they did before. … a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of their solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. … But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side by side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky. There are such connections, which must be a very great, an almost unbearable happiness, but they can occur only between very rich beings, between those who have become, each for his own sake, rich, calm, and concentrated; only if two worlds are wide and deep and individual can they be combined….
…For the more we are, the richer everything we experience is.
– Rainer Maria Rilke

As long as you are born of the flesh you have to suffer. This is the way of the flesh. Do not try to improve your life. You’re making a big mistake. For there is no question about it, if you use positive thinking and use your mind, you may appear to improve your life. But remember, this world in which you live is a world of duality. For every up there is a down. For every forward there is a backward. For every good there is a bad. Therefore, whatever improvement comes in your life, it will last for a while, then will subside, then you become miserable again. You’ll start sticking up for your rights and fighting for your survival. Then as you get what you want, you’ll be happy again. You’re like a yo-yo. You go up and down, up and down. And no matter how much I talk to you about this, you’re going to keep on doing this.
– Robert Adams

Your fellow is your mirror.
If your own face is clean,
the image you perceive will
also be flawless…
But should you look upon your
fellow man and see a blemish,
it is your own imperfection
that you are encountering
– you are being shown what it is
that you must correct within yourself…
– Baal Shem Tov

Alchemy begins before we enter the mine, the forge, or laboratory. It begins in the blue vault, the seas, in the mind’s thinking in images, imaging ideationally, speculatively, silveredly, in words that are both images and ideas, in words that turn things into flashing ideas and ideas of little things that crawl, the blue power of the word itself, which locates this consciousness in the throat of the visuddha cakra whose dominant color is a smoky-purple-blue.
– James Hillman

The gods act as they act for what purpose we do not know, but this we do understand: the world could not be made without the swirl and whirlwind of our deepest attention and our cherishing. And if I mean the god of the sky, I mean also the god of the river—not only the god of the gold-speckled cathedral but the lord of the green field, where people pause casually and snap each other’s picture; where thrushes release their darkling songs; where little dogs bark and leap, their ears tossing, joyously, as they run toward us.
– Mary Oliver

Energy rests upon love; and come as it will, there’s no forcing it.
– Leo Tolstoy

You understand so little of what is around you because you do not use what is within you.
– St. Hildegard von Bingen

In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.
– Edith Wharton

Everyone who terrifies you is sixty-five percent water.
And everyone you love is made of stardust, and I know sometimes you cannot even breathe deeply, and the night sky is no home,
and you have cried yourself to sleep enough times that you are down to your last two percent, but
nothing is infinite,
not even loss.
You are made of the sea and the stars, and one day
you are going to find yourself again.
– Finn Butler

In reading, as in daily life, there is an unconscious process of identification and disidentification that takes place.
– Kaia Fischer & Mindy Newman

Our world does not need tepid souls. It needs burning hearts.
– Albert Camus

Real consciousness can only be based upon life; upon things experienced, but talking about these things is just air. It is a sort of conscious understanding, but it is not individuation. Individuation is the accomplishment through life.
– Carl G. Jung

sleeping with quilts
over the head
a cold night
– Basho

I don’t think trauma makes for better art, but I think perplexity is fundamental to it.
– Richard Siken

Authority is binding and blinding.
– Krishnamurti

The great beauty of Poetry is that it makes everything, every place interesting.
– John Keats

New metaphors are capable of creating new understandings and, therefore, new realities.
– George Lakoff

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley:

…We don’t take an oath to a country. We don’t take an oath to a tribe. We don’t take an oath to a religion. We don’t take an oath to a king or a queen or to a tyrant or a dictator. And we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We don’t take an oath to an individual. “We take an oath to the Constitution…”

The earth is too small a star and we too brief a visitor upon it for anything to matter more than the struggle for peace.
– Coleman McCarthy

I shall keep my book on the table here, and read a little every morning as soon as I wake, for I know it will do me good, and help me through the day.
– Louisa May Alcott

Am I happy because the days / Are longer?
– Cornelius Eady

Dust Angel

It came from nowhere, the creature at my feet
Kettering around my ankles in the wind.

A wren or a mouse but weirdly transparent,
a fallen leaf now turned to lace.

It stopped, though its body still moved, changing shape
so alive — yet made of dust.

A clot of spider web, whips of hair, seed heads —
something spiritual.

A ghost of a creature that doesn’t exist,
the wind had given it life.

This must be how new worlds are created.

– Ellie Rees

With tremendous deception, we create samsara — pain and misery for the whole world, including ourselves.
– Chögyam Trungpa

Writing poems is zen. Sharing poems is brazen.
– Timothy Green

support people who are pursuing their dreams: what’s meaningful to them, what they believe in, what they can uniquely create. it’s lonely, risky, and highly uncertain to walk a path that’s unfolding moment to moment. acknowledgement is a powerful source of fuel along the journey.
– @isabelunraveled

What does literature even do?

Uh, makes me want to live. Is that not enough?

– Austin Adams

We are not powerless. We are indispensable despite all atrocities of state and corporate policy to the contrary. At a minimum we have the power to stop cooperating with our enemies. We have the power to stop the courtesies and to let the feelings be real.
– June Jordan

I will cut adrift—I will sit on pavements and drink coffee—I will dream; I will take my mind out of its iron cage and let it swim—this fine October.
– Virginia Woolf

an amber lager
at the end
of the rainbow
– @pauldavidmena

still swelling
outside the river’s lines
haiku ideas
– @hegelincanada

You’re about to learn
who your real friends are
and who just wants someone
to jump into the abyss with.
– Joseph Fasano

Soon, I think, I shall evolve a third eye on the back of my neck, between my brittle vertebrae: a mad eye, wide open, with a dilating pupil and pink venation on the glossy ball.
– Vladimir Nabokov

For the marabou storks are more than ever apt to becloud with a feathery halo the brilliance of your coiffure, as if its irresponsible invasion sought to overwhelm the jet-black laquer.
– Mallarmé

There is something beautiful about doing transformational work below the radar where almost no one can see it.

This revolution will not be televised.

– @cognitivepolicy

A tree’s lone shadow
In a sunlit autumn field
Awaiting winter
– @hoshigenari

You don’t become an adult when your brain fully develops. Lots of people with fully developed brains aren’t adults. You become an adult when you learn how to cope with stress, when you can regulate your nervous system, and when you can directly face conflict.
– Dr. Nicole LePera

Divine love is incessantly restless until it turns all woundedness into health, all deformity into beauty, all embarrassment into laughter. In biblical faith, brokenness is never celebrated as an end in itself.
– Belden C. Lane

The Sufi is he whose thought keeps pace with his foot. This means that he is entirely present: His soul is where his body is and his body where his soul is. His soul is where his foot is, and his foot is where his soul is. This is the sign of presence without absence.
– Hujwiri

… A soldier on duty must not sleep, so it is an advantage to him to be in love … This love is a friend to the sentinel, for wakefulness becomes part of him; he who reaches this state will ever be on the watch.

Do not sleep, O man, if you are striving for knowledge of yourself. Guard well the fortress of your heart, for there are thieves everywhere. Do not let brigands steal the jewel you carry. True knowledge will come to him who can stay awake.
– Manṭiq-uṭ-Ṭayr

The best thing for anthropocentric dread, for individual anguish, for heartbreak, for illness, is interrupting your individuality. When you cannot walk, cannot move, cannot leave your bed you do not need to find a tree or landscape or butterfly to be. You can be a mote of dust. A potato bug vaulting across the room. The ten fungal spores that scintillate in each one of your inhalations. The anarchic bacterial legacy that melted into your very molecular makeup. The yellowjacket tapping his armored body against the closed window. Sometimes the answer is not to problematize your wounding, but to slip through it like a doorway into otherness. Other minds. Other types of anguish. Other animals and insects going extinct. Birds singing out courtship songs to mates that will never arrive.
– Sophie Strand

Whatever your eye falls on – for it will fall on what you love – will lead you to the questions of your life, the questions that are incumbent upon you to answer, because that is how the mind works in concert with the eye. The things of this world draw us where we need to go.
– Mary Rose O’Reilley

He lay on his back in his blankets and looked out where the quartermoon lay cocked over the heel of the mountains. In the false blue dawn the Pleiades seemed to be rising up into the darkness above the world and dragging all the stars away, the great diamond of Orion and Cepella and the signature of Cassiopeia all rising up through the phosphorous dark like a sea-net. He lay a long time listening to the others breathing in their sleep while he contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within.
– Cormac McCarthy

Love Song
by Sinéad Morrissey

I see light everywhere
Over the bus driver the woman
With her trolley in the street
I see dusk

I hear the clock at four
I hear the silence in cupboards
Birdsong
Backwater dawn

I taste drier than flour

I smell the roots of trees
Before I see their arms
Shrieking
On the skyline

I feel diamonds pushed into
The bloodstream
Self-generated, a gift,
Making for the head I feel my head

Thrust into
A bucketful of stars
And all my senses
Singing

What was a god? A focus of belief. If people believed, a god began to grow. Feebly at first, but if the swamp taught anything, it taught patience. Anything could be the focus of a god. A handful of feathers with a red ribbon around them, a hat and coat on a couple of sticks…anything. Because when all people had was practically nothing, then anything could be almost everything.
– Terry Pratchett

A special transmission outside the scriptures,
Not depending on words and letters;
Directly pointing to the mind
Seeing into one’s true nature and attaining Buddhahood.
– Bodhidharma

The job of the wayfinder, whether an ancient oracle or a modern scientific theorist, is to reach beyond current human knowledge into the realm of the unimagined and bring back something true and useful.
– Martha Beck

Stand high long enough and your lightning will come.
– William Gibson

Poets, it’s said, are shamans of words. True shamans are poets of consciousness. Journeying into a deeper reality with the aid of sung and spoken poetry, they bring back energy and healing through poetic acts, shapeshifting physical systems. When we dream, we tap directly into the same creative source from which poets and shamans derive their gifts. When we create from our dreams, and enter dreamlike flow, we become poets and artists. When we act to bring the energy and imagery of dreams into physical reality, we become poets of consciousness and infuse our world with magic.
– Robert Moss

The earth always accepts what the sky throws down.
– African Proverb

What is the value
of great theological erudition
or great pastoral adeptness
or intense but fleeting mystical experience or social activism
when there is not a well-formed heart to guide a well-formed life?
– Henri Nouwen

That we go numb along the way is to be expected. Even the bravest among us, who give their lives to care for others, go numb with fatigue, when the heart can take in no more, when we need time to digest all we meet. Overloaded and overwhelmed, we start to pull back from the world, so we can internalize what the world keeps giving us. Perhaps the noblest private act is the unheralded effort to return: to open our hearts once they’ve closed, to open our souls once they’ve shied away, to soften our minds once they’ve been hardened by the storms of our day.
– Mark Nepo

Whether your resolution is to lose weight, budget better, cut back on Internet poker, or slog to Mordor carrying the Ring of Doom, finding your motley crew of opposites will help you make it all the way to your goals—and the Fellowship itself, I believe, will bring great joy.
– Martha Beck

I dream through a wordless, familiar place.
The small boat of the day sails into morning,
past the postman with his modest haul, the full
sound like the sea, leaving my hands free
to remember. Moments of grace. Like this.
– Carol Ann Duffy

Time passes through us, or we pass through it
as guests to god’s wheat.
In a previous present,a subsequent present,
just like that, we are in need of myth
to bear the burden of the distance between two doors…
– Mahmoud Darwish

If you let yourself be blown to and fro, you lose touch with your root. If you let restlessness move you, you lose touch with who you are
– Lao Tzu

Go back and take care of yourself. Your body needs you, your feelings need you, your perceptions need you. The wounded child in you needs you. Your suffering needs you to acknowledge it. Go home and be there for all these things. Practice mindful walking and mindful breathing. Do everything in mindfulness so you can really be there, so you can love.
– Thich Nhat Hanh

The Phone Call

She calls Chicago, but no one
is home. The operator asks
for another number but still
no one answers. Together
they try twenty-one numbers,
and at each no one is ever home.
“Can I call Baltimore?” she asks.
She can, but she knows no one
in Baltimore, no one in
St Louis, Boston, Washington.
She imagines herself standing
before the glass wall high
over Lake Shore Drive, the cars
below fanning into the city.
East she can see all the way
to Gary and the great gray clouds
of exhaustion rolling over
the lake where her vision ends.
This is where her brother lives.
At such height there’s nothing,
no birds, no growing, no noise.
She leans her sweating forehead
against the cold glass, shudders,
and puts down the receiver.

– William Stafford

When people go to the ocean, they like to see it all day. . . . There’s nobody living who couldn’t stand all afternoon in front of a waterfall. It’s a simple experience, you become lighter and lighter in weight, and you wouldn’t want anything else. Anyone who can sit on a stone in a field awhile can see my painting. Nature is like a curtain; you go into it. I want to draw a certain response like this. . . . Not a specific response but that quality of response from people when they leave themselves behind, often experienced in nature– an experience of simple joy. . . the simple, direct going into a field of vision as you would cross an empty beach to look at the ocean.
– Agnes Martin

That person who you don’t like running into, that strained relationship in any unwanted moment, is not outside of you. The reason that you can’t get along with other people has nothing to do with the other people. Sure, they’re rude. Sure, they’re cruel, spiritually asleep, aggressive, all those things, but so are you. Your feelings about the world you see, with all of its confusing colors and schemes, are all reflections of your own internal life. You meet and see only yourself wherever you go.
– Guy Finley

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.
– T. S. Eliot

As long as we have practiced neither concentration nor mindfulness, the ego takes itself for granted and remains its usual normal size, as big as the people around one will allow.
– Ayya Khema

You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; and just so, you learn to love by loving. All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves.
– Saint Francis de Sales

True Spirit-led forgiveness always frees and heals at least one of the parties involved, and hopefully both. If it only preserves my moral high ground—as a magnanimous “Christian” person—I doubt if it is true forgiveness at all. It must also quicken and invite the hearts of others, especially the offender. True forgiveness does not leave the offender feeling small and judged, but liberated and loved.
– Richard Rohr

Letter to a Lost Friend

There must be a Russian word to describe what has happened
between us, like ostyt, which can be used
for a cup of  tea that is too hot, but after you walk to the next room,
and return, it is too cool; or perekhotet,
which is to want something so much over months
and even years that when you get it, you have lost
the desire. Pushkin said, when he saw his portrait by Kiprensky,
“It is like looking into a mirror, but one that flatters me.”
What is the word for someone who looks into her friend’s face
and sees once smooth skin gone like a train that has left
the station in Petersburg with its wide avenues and nights
at the Stray Dog Cafe, sex with the wrong men,
who looked so right by candlelight, when everyone was young
and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, painted or wrote
all night but nothing good, drank too much vodka, and woke
in the painful daylight with skin like fresh cream, books
everywhere, Lorca on Gogol, Tolstoy under Madame de Sévigné,
so that now, on a train in the taiga of  Siberia,
I see what she sees — all my books alphabetized and on shelves,
feet misshapen, hands ribbed with raised veins,
neck crumpled like last week’s newspaper, while her friends
are young, their skin pimply and eyes bright as puppies’,
and who can blame her, for how lucky we are to be loved
for even a moment, though I can’t help but feel like Pushkin,
a rough ball of  lead lodged in his gut, looking at his books
and saying, “Goodbye, my dear friends,” as those volumes
close and turn back into oblong blocks, dust clouding
the gold leaf that once shimmered on their spines.

– Barbara Hamby

To venture outside
one needs some preparation
to meet that world out there:
the scraping of feet, posing,
and endless, pointless chatter.
– Michael Boiano

The moment of change is the only poem.
– Adrienne Rich

We all have to die a bit every now and then and usually it’s so gradual that we end up more alive than ever. Infinitely old and infinitely alive.
– Roberto Bolaño

It sharpened, it refined them, the yellow-blue evening light; and on the leaves in the square shone lurid, livid—they looked as if dipped in sea water—the foliage of a submerged city.
– Virginia Woolf

To receive the light
and return it…
– Jorie Graham

Chew your way into a new world.
Munch leaves. Molt. Rest. Molt
again. Self-reinvention is everything.
– Amy Gerstler, Advice from a Caterpillar

Closing your eyes isn’t going to change anything. Nothing’s going to disappear just because you can’t see what’s going on. In fact, things will even be worse the next time you open your eyes. That’s the kind of world we live in. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won’t make time stand still.
– Haruki Murakami

The wild goose is a Celtic symbol of the Holy Spirit. Geese in a flock have greater range and fly faster than single geese as they benefit from the lift of their wings. When the lead goose gets tired, it rotates back into formation and another flies at the point position. We fly in sacred community, interdependent with one another.
– From the Iona Community

Something will flood into
your chest
like air sweetened by
desert honeysuckle,
love that is too
strong.
– Dorothy Walters

America has tunnel vision and lacks that spiritual sense of respect for other cultures. It is a dying country, morally, spiritually and physically. It is dying from ignorance.
– Floyd Red Crow Westerman (Dakota)

It is difficult to forgive betrayal, but the refusal to do so ultimately binds one to the betrayer. To forgive is to recognize not only the flawed humanity of the other but our own as well, and in the end it is the only way to free the shackles of the past which bind us.
– James Hollis

There are communities – now partly vanished, but cherished and sacred – scattered throughout this world of ours, in which freedom of thought and soul, and even of body, have been fought for.
– Charles Ives

Without dissatisfaction and ignorance, there would be nothing to wake from, and thus no way to experience transcendence.
– Curtis White

I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone.
– Daphne du Maurier

The sleeping giant is one name for the public: we are civil society, the superpower whose non violent means are sometimes for a shining moment, more powerful than violence, more powerful than regimes and armies. We write history with our feet and with our presence and
our collective voice and vision. And yet of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal. These are the forces that prefer the giant remain asleep.
– Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark.

More, better, & different are all markers of being on the transcendent arc of Waking Up.

Waking Down looks like *this too*, and this, and this. All included, all welcome. Compassion.

Full Awakening is Waking Up & Waking Down

– @VinceFHorn

my house-cage is so small and dark for all the summits, slopes, and swamps of feeling.
– Diane Mehta

Make it a habit to tell people thank you. To express your appreciation, sincerely and without the expectation of anything in return. Truly appreciate those around you, and you’ll soon find many others around you. Truly appreciate life, and you’ll find that you have more of it.
– Ralph Marston

Shh. Listen to the sounds that surround you. Notice the pitches, the volume, the timbre, the many lines of counterpoint. As light taught Monet to paint, the earth may be teaching you music.
– Pete Seeger

Astonishing, to watch our countrymen pretend they cannot hear the music of our people even as they dance to it.
– Sean Patrick Mulroy

The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
– William Faulkner

Some years ago, I was walking downtown San Francisco with a great friend and a learned Tibetan scholar. I asked him about one of the most striking ways that the Tibetans express the uniqueness of the human condition.
Imagine, they say, that deep in the vast ocean there swims a great and ancient turtle who surfaces for air once every hundred years. Imagine further that floating somewhere in the ocean is a single ox-yoke carried here and there by random waves and currents. What are the chances that when the turtle surfaces, his head will happen to emerge precisely through the center of the ox-yoke? That is how rare it is to be born as a human being!
In the middle of our conversation, I pointed to the crowds of men and women rushing by on the street and I gestured in a way to indicate not only them, but all the thousands and millions of people rushing around in the world. “Tell me, Lobsang,” I said, “if it is so rare to be born a human being, how come there are so many people in the world?”
My friend slowed his pace and then stopped. He waited for a moment, taking in my question. I remember suddenly being able to hear, as though for the first time, the loud and frenetic traffic all around us. He looked at me and very quietly replied, “How many human beings do you see?”
In a flash, I understood the meaning of the story and the idea. Most of the people I was seeing, in the inner state they were in at that moment, were not really people at all. Most were what the Tibetans call “hungry ghosts.” They did not really exist.
They were not really *there*. They were *busy*, they were *in a hurry*. They – like all of us – were obsessed with doing things *right away*. But *right away* is the opposite of *now* – the opposite of the lived present moment in which the passing of time no longer tyrannizes us.
The hungry ghosts are starved for “more” time; but the more time we hungry ghosts get, the more time we “save”, the hungrier we become, the less we actually *live*. And I understood that it is not exactly more time, more days and years, that we are starved for, it is the present moment. “Right Away” is not “Now.”
– Jacob Needleman

As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don’t deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.

To the degree that we’ve been avoiding uncertainty, we’re naturally going to have withdrawal symptoms – withdrawal from always thinking that there’s a problem and that someone, somewhere, needs to fix it.

– Pema Chodron

Metta on the inbreath

Karuna on the outbreath

Mettakaruna

For the sake of all living beings.

– Kenneth Folk

I start to feel like there something wrong with poetry/too much poetry/whatever & then I spend some time with my students & a poem & let me tell you the problem isn’t poetry. It’s capitalism stealing people’s time, security, connection. That’s it. Poetry’s fine.
– Jessica Johnson

May you be surrounded by friends and family, and if this is not your lot, may blessings find you in your solitude.
– Leonard Cohen

October rolls in the grass
spilling apples
from its lips

Hands riding in automobiles
pull at the sky

– Alan Britt

Music doesn’t get in the way of learning. Music is an incredible form of learning, an inspiring form of learning, and a holistic form of learning. It isn’t the poor cousin of any other subject. Music is a vital component of a holistic, meaningful, and successful education.
– Vaughan Fleischfresser

I am my own muse, I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to know better.
– Frida Kahlo

We all too readily assume that a happy ending should always be possible if we behave ‘normally’ and if everyone does what is ‘right’. But the unfolding life pattern does not always seem to care for what we consider to be good or right.
– Edward C. Whitmont

This is not some other place.
This is the highest place of the heart.
It is difficult to teach,
Or to talk about.
There is not even an atom of it to be visualized.
It is the sky.
There is nowhere to place it with our thoughts.

– Vajrasattva’s Magnificent Sky

inside us, the past, present, and future
happening at once, we are found this way,
together, a people spliced by empire
– Giovannai Rosa

Oh, to be reborn within the pages of a book…I want to be a poet from head to toe, living and dying by poetry!
– Patti Smith

There are so many incredulously vile things going on at the minute that I think we should just scrap the whole thing and start again. Reality reboot. Pull the plug out of the wall and just forget about it.
– Emily Cooper

It is a watching with delicately branched
foliate nerves, through white
forests of frost
impressed on windows,

to see the world focused back at us
like a wide flower:
river, vascular lightning
& leaf-vein.

– Ronald Johnson

Trees step out of the DMZ to be named. Vague branches smolder. Ginkgo and litchi, royal palm and teak, rise like an alphabet. I prune a grammarian’s path.
– Susan Briante

honestly with more and more universities shuttering literary presses, lit journals, along with the higher cost of living, the exorbitant contest fees & lack of transparency in publishing, is it any wonder why people can hardly “make it” as a writer w/out inherited wealth.
– hannah cohen

Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect !
– Gore Vidal

Recognizing that time depends on the brain has also shaped how I understand the possibility of moments where time seems to disappear.
– Neil Schmitzer-Torbert

The way is infinitely long, nothing of it can be subtracted, nothing can be added, and yet everyone applies his own childish yardstick to it.
– Franz Kafka

Accepting something. . . isn’t the same as liking it. To accept a feeling that we habitually associate with discomfort doesn’t mean we immediately turn around and start enjoying it. It means being okay with it as part of the texture of human life.
– Pema Chödrön

Even if a hundred thousand people were to cause me harm, I would have no hatred for them. But if I were to cause harm to even one being, I would be filled with great remorse.
– Bodhisattvacharyavatara Sutra

Don’t let anybody convince you this is the way the world is and therefore must be. It must be the way it ought to be.
– Toni Morrison

There are more than 45,000 Christian denominations globally.

45,000 different forms of Christianity.

But YOUR one is the right one.

Do go on.

– suburban_witchery

Those who have grown in darkness, shine the brightest
– Dee Ashley

If the first half of the twentieth century was the era of the technical engineers, the second half may well be the era of the social engineers — and the twenty-first century, I suppose, will be the era of World Controllers, the scientific caste system and Brave New World. The prophecies made in 1931 are coming true much sooner than I thought they would. The nightmare of total organization has emerged from the safe, remote future and is now awaiting us, just around the next corner.
– Aldous Huxley

I’ve been 40 years discovering that the queen of all colours was black.
– Pierre-Auguste Renoir

The day will be what you make it, so rise, like the sun, and burn.
– William C. Hannan

I have thought of you so frequently […] that I imagine, I guess, that by some mystical intuition you may well be aware of this.
– Sylvia Plath

The unforgettable was yesterday. The measure here is not the time but the value. And the most precious of all things, whether happy or sad, is our childhood. Don’t forget the unforgettable.
– Erich Kästner

My eyes were glued on life and they were full of tears.
– Jack Kerouac

He lay on his back in his blankets and looked our where the quartermoon lay cocked over the heel of the mountains. In the false blue dawn the Pleiades seemed to be rising up into the darkness above the world and dragging all the stars away, the great diamond of Orion and Cepella and the signature of Cassiopeia all rising up through the phosphorous dark like a sea-net. He lay a long time listening to the others breathing in their sleep while he contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within.
– Cormac McCarthy

I had a kind of religious turn in my life that had to do with entering this unknown.

I was an atheist, but I couldn’t explain what happened when I wrote, what made it happen.

Where does it come from?

You can always explain the brain in a scientific way, but you can’t catch the light, or the spirit, of it.
It’s something else.

Literature in itself knows more than the theory of literature knows.

– Jon Fosse

Over the years, many people have come to me essentially saying, “I am hanging on by a thread; I’m about to fall off the edge of a cliff.”

In my early years of practice I thought, “I can help. Here take my hand.”

But later it was more clear to see from my practice of UnShaming that many needed a very different kind of counsel.

“I can help you fall, let go of an old life, perhaps even help you land and deal with the fallout in your relationships, security and work life. “

“I can even help you discover the divine nature inherent in the fall and be an ally of your steps afterwards. BUT I may not be able to prevent you from falling. The gravity of your life has its own intelligence.”

UnShaming helps us follow nature’s path, the Tao of our process instead of attempts to fix.

– David Bedrick

What the warrior renounces anything in his experience that is a barrier between himself and others
– Chögyam Trungpa

The Law Concerning Mermaids
There was once a law concerning mermaids. My friend thinks it a wondrous thing — that the British Empire was so thorough it had invented a law for everything. And in this law it was decreed: were any to be found in their usual spots, showing off like dolphins, sunbathing on rocks — they would no longer belong to themselves. And maybe this is the problem with empires: how they have forced us to live in a world lacking in mermaids — mermaids who understood that they simply were, and did not need permission to exist or to be beautiful. The law concerning mermaids only caused mermaids to pass a law concerning man: that they would never again cross our boundaries of sand; never again lift their torsos up from the surf; never again wave at sailors, salt dripping from their curls; would never again enter our dry and stifling world.
– Kei Miller

To grow, to individuate, obliges us to reject security and move into the unknown. Jung puts it dramatically: The spirit of evil is fear, negation. . . he is the spirit of regression, who threatens us with bondage to the mother and with dissolution and extinction.
– James Hollis

We need to live our life in accordance with how things actually are—and you can, perhaps, see this reality most clearly reflected in your own aging body and mind.
– Lewis Richmond

Much of the work of midlife is to tell the difference between those who are dealing with their issues through you and those who are really dealing with you.
– Richard Rohr

There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not.
– Oscar Wilde

What the
elders see
while sitting,
others can’t see
while standing
on their toes.
– Old Proverb

Sitting by the fire
Buddha listens to the wind
and hears the voices
of the dead.

They talk about
the same things
the living talk about:

the day after tomorrow
and the rice in their bowls.

– john zbigniew guzlowski

pumpkin sun
blurred by sudden fog
on the lake
the gift of not seeing
whatever comes next
– @hegelincanada

love can
create
universes
– @BashoSociety

The Guest is inside you, and also inside me;
you know the sprout is hidden inside the seed,
We are all struggling; none of us has gone far.
Let your arrogance go, and look around inside.
– Kabir, The Boat [tr. Robert Bly]

navigating through
all the vagaries of life
falling maple leaf
– Jason Gould

indian summer acorn rain
– Jason Gould

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
– Gore Vidal

Your body is holy and beautiful to God — your young, old, fit, fat, cis, queer, disabled, strong body. For after all, it is the human body in which God placed God’s image, the imago dei.
– Nadia Bolz-Weber

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

God is so far away that no one can say anything about him and that’s why all ideas about God are wrong, and at the same time he is so close that we almost can’t notice him, because he is the foundation in a person, or the abyss, you can call it whatever you want…
– Jon Fosse

…one of the most important things when it comes to painting is being able to stop at the right time, to know when a picture is saying what it can say, if you keep going too long then more often than not the picture’ll be ruined…
– Jon Fosse

… everyone has a deep longing inside them, we always always long for something and we believe that what we long for is this or that, this person or that person, this thing or that thing, but actually we’re longing for God…
– Jon Fosse

. . . whenever the mind uncurtains something lying behind relative truth, it is not by means of any magical sleight of hand; it is, on the contrary, the end result of the severest wrestling of rational thought, stimulated yet controlled by disciplined emotion.
– Agnes Arber

a deep sleep
during an autumn rain
fresh tea aroma
– Ogawa

… all good art has this spirit, good pictures, good poems, good music, and what makes it good is not the material, not matter, and it’s not the content, the idea, the thought, no, what makes it good is just this unity of matter and form and soul that becomes spirit…
– Jon Fosse

What inspires me now, are the possibilities of alternative thinking that poetry allows. There are questions I feel free to ask: such as what if east London was the centre of the world? I’m less concerned with logic than with the idea of play.
– Gboyega Odubanjo

To compose poetry is about listening … about bringing forth something that already exists-this is why when one reads great poetry, when often gets this ‘I-new-all-of-this-already, I-just-didn’t-express-it’ feeling. Language listens to itself.
– Jon Fosse

Poverty is not a moral failure.
– Dr. Twyla Baker

As everyone judges according to his emotions what is good, what bad, what better, and what worse, it follows that men’s judgments may vary no less than their emotions.
– Baruch Spinoza

Why fiber is important:
Supports and feeds the good bacteria in the microbiome
Regulates blood sugar
Lowers cholesterol
Reduces inflammation
Regulates digestion
– Dr. Mark Hyman

You write instead to exist
where time does not.
– Chelsea Dingman

Silence is the poetics of space.
– Gordon Hempton

People fancy they are enjoying themselves, but they are really tearing out their wings for the sake of an illusion.
– Rumi

You know what, sometimes it seems to me we’re living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what’s good and what isn’t, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves… And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.
– Olga Tokarczuk

I wish Taylor Swift was in love with a climate scientist.
– Katja Herbers

The first thing you get from the humanities, when they’re well taught, is critical thinking.
– Martha Nussbaum

The Son

Ah son, do you know, do you know
where you come from?

From a lake with white
and hungry gulls.

Next to the water of winter
she and I raised
a red bonfire
wearing out our lips
from kissing each other’s souls,
casting all into the fire,
burning our lives.

That’s how you came into the world.

But she, to see me
and to see you, one day
crossed the seas
and I, to clasp, her tiny waist,
walked all the earth,
with wars and mountains,
with sands and thorns.

That’s how you came into the world.
You come from so many places,
from the water and the earth,
from the fire and the snow,
from so far away you journey
toward the two of us,
from the terrible love
that has enchained us,
that we want to know
what you’re like what you say to us
because you know more
about the world we have you.

Like a great storm
we shook
the tree of life
down to the hiddenmost
fibers of the roots
and you appear now
singing in the foliage,
in the highest branch
that with you we reach

– Pablo Neruda

Almost every facet of my meager maturation and spiritual understanding has sprung from hurt, loss, and disaster.
– Anne Lamott

I will build an embassy
In your heart over time
There is a plot of land inside me
Build one in mine
– Lemn Sissay

Beware, gentle knight. There is no greater monster than reason.
– Cormac McCarthy

Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: ‘My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.’ The stranger is a theologian.
– Denis Diderot

This is the world, which is fuller and more difficult to learn than I have said.
– Margaret Atwood

The first revolution is when you change your mind about how you look at things, and see there might be another way to look at it that you have not been shown. What you see later on is the results of that, but that revolution, that change that takes place will not be televised.
– Gil Scott Heron

Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth.
– Hegel

I’m not trying to send you out “on the road” in search of Valhalla, but merely pointing out that it is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it. There is more to it than that – no one HAS to do something he doesn’t want to do for the rest of his life.
– Hunter S. Thompson

AUTUMN WIND
And every year there is a brief, startling moment
when we pause in the middle of a long walk home and
suddenly feel something invisible and weightless
touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:
It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies;
It is the changing light of fall falling on us.
– Edward Hirsch

How can I serve you and people? – i once asked god.
– Edward Tarashchansky

Many words befall men, mean and noble alike; do not be astonished by them, nor allow yourself to be constrained. If a lie is told, bear with it gently. But whatever I tell you, let it be done completely. Let no one persuade you by word or deed to do or say whatever is not best for you.
– Pythagoras

There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We’ll dream of being blind.
– Virilio

We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet.
– Joseph Campbell

Oatmeal by Galway Kinnell

I eat oatmeal for breakfast.
I make it on the hot plate and put skimmed milk on it.
I eat it alone.
I am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone.
Its consistency is such that it is better for your mental health
if somebody eats it with you.
That is why I often think up an imaginary companion to have breakfast with.
Possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal with an imaginary companion.
Nevertheless, yesterday morning, I ate my oatmeal porridge,
as he called it with John Keats.
Keats said I was absolutely right to invite him:
due to its glutinous texture, gluey lumpishness, hint of slime,
and unusual willingness to disintegrate, oatmeal should not be eaten alone.
He said that in his opinion, however, it is perfectly OK to eat
it with an imaginary companion, and that he himself had
enjoyed memorable porridges with Edmund Spenser and John Milton.
Even if eating oatmeal with an imaginary companion is not as
wholesome as Keats claims, still, you can learn something from it.
Yesterday morning, for instance, Keats told me about writing the “Ode to a Nightingale.”
He had a heck of a time finishing it those were his words “Oi ‘ad a ‘eck of a toime,” he said,
more or less, speaking through his porridge.
He wrote it quickly, on scraps of paper, which he then stuck in his pocket,
but when he got home he couldn’t figure out the order of the stanzas,
and he and a friend spread the papers on a table, and they
made some sense of them, but he isn’t sure to this day if they got it right.
An entire stanza may have slipped into the lining of his jacket through a hole in his pocket.
He still wonders about the occasional sense of drift between stanzas,
and the way here and there a line will go into the
configuration of a Moslem at prayer, then raise itself up
and peer about, and then lay itself down slightly off the mark,
causing the poem to move forward with a reckless, shining wobble.
He said someone told him that later in life Wordsworth heard about
the scraps of paper on the table, and tried shuffling some
stanzas of his own, but only made matters worse.
I would not have known any of this but for my reluctance to eat oatmeal alone.
When breakfast was over, John recited “To Autumn.”
He recited it slowly, with much feeling, and he articulated the words
lovingly, and his odd accent sounded sweet.
He didn’t offer the story of writing “To Autumn,” I doubt if there is much of one.
But he did say the sight of a just-harvested oat field got him started
on it, and two of the lines, “For Summer has o’er-brimmed their
clammy cells” and “Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours,”
came to him while eating oatmeal alone.
I can see him drawing a spoon through the stuff, gazing into the glimmering furrows,
muttering. Maybe there is no sublime; only the shining of the amnion’s tatters.
For supper tonight I am going to have a baked potato left over from lunch.
I am aware that a leftover baked potato is damp, slippery, and simultaneously
gummy and crumbly, and therefore I’m going to invite Patrick Kavanagh to join me.

Clouds are lines written to us by the air. Read them like secret signs, ciphers, hieroglyphs. Sonnets of cirrocumuli. Occult script​ of the winds.
– Hans Jürgen von der Wense

summer twilight
scattered on the ground
a Himalayan Monal’s feathers
– Hifsa Ashraf

We are born with a desire to find meaning in life, which Jung called a religious instinct. This religious instinct is an archetypal psychic pattern that emerges autonomously . . . an innate tendency to imbue existence with significance.
– Dr. Rachel Hillel

The Buddha offered a basic set of ethical guidelines for earning a living in his teachings on right livelihood. While life has changed quite a bit over the last two millennia, there’s still much we can learn from this branch of the eightfold path about how to work wisely.
– @tricyclemag

It’s astounding what we let ourselves lose; that music, like a warm kiss on your ear, like shivers that strum down your neck;
– Matt Mason

None of us who has gone through sea-changes (via depth psychology) has ever volunteered. We were dragged there, kicking and screaming.
– James Hollis, The Eden Project

What planet are you from, stranger? You have an outer space violin in you left ear that plays a string of quiet clouds in the noisy subway. I suspected it, and others, too, suspected it.
– Hu Xudong (Tr. by Ming Di and Katie Farris)

The intelligence of love begins with the heightened awareness it inspires. We look more deeply at that which we love. And we interact more effectively with those we truly care about. Yet our societies seem to deliberately ignore these basic aspects of life. Instead of building our cultures through ignoring the helpfulness of our emotions, and then wondering why the civilizations created this way are so messed up, we could start giving everyone more of a chance to do what they love – the same kind of freedom to do what you love that the eco-worlds of nature courageously embody everywhere. As Mozart said, “Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.”
– George Gorman

You didn’t have to ask and that’s what cool was: the ability to deduce, to know without asking.
– David Berman

Every line-break is such a barricade for the body. Every line-break is also such a door for the soul.
– Robyn Schiff

without a reason
wildflowers blooming
out of season
– Issa

Given the rise of AI and VR, our notion of truth is even more relative now. We’re on this precipice. For the first time, we have the capacity to represent reality so thoroughly that the crisis of meaning is going to be exacerbated exponentially.
– Alison Spiegel

And the dream that chases you
On the shadows of your feet –
Your dream
Has autumn eyes.
– Hilde Domin

It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.
– Joseph Heller

One thing I’ve started to say a lot is that I respect and empathize with despair as an emotion, but it’s best not confused with an analysis. You can feel terrible and remain committed, be heartbroken and know the future is being made in the present.
– Rebecca Solnit

I’m a writer because I want to write. I don’t want a machine to do it for me….. what is the point of handing over the job of understanding something more deeply, seeing the pattern that underlies? Why would I want to give up that profound experience?
– Rebecca Solnit

We are stuck…with an electorate that wants European levels of public services combined with American levels of taxation.
– John Lanchester

Trust isn’t something that’s spoken and love’s never wrong when it’s real.
– Dan Fogelberg

People who pay attention to what matters most in their lives, and who learn to ignore everything else, assume a freedom that is highly creative as well as potentially dangerous in contemporary society. Having abandoned everything of insignificance, they have nothing to lose. Apart from being faithful to their God, they no longer care what happens to them.
– Belden C. Lane

I focus my mind on the space between the molecules that comprise my body.
– Gira, M.

While the square is closely linked to man and his constructions, to architecture, harmonious structures, writing, and so on, the circle is related to the divine: a simple circle has, since ancient times, represented eternity, since it has no beginning and no end. An ancient text says that God is a circle whose center is everywhere but whose circumference is nowhere.

The circle is essentially unstable and dynamic: all rotary movements and impossible searches for perpetual motion derive from the circle.

– Bruno Munari, Square, Circle, Triangle

The poor tell us who we are, the prophets tell us who we could be, so we hide the poor, and kill the prophets
– Mary Elaine LeBey

There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts. The age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias. The age of Lorenzo de Medici was also the age of Leonardo da Vinci. The age Elizabeth also the age of Shakespeare. And the New Frontier for which I campaign in public life, can also be a New Frontier for American art.
– John F Kennedy

Some nights I wake
and everything hurts
a little. It is
amazing how long
a ruined thing
will burn. In the night,
there are words,
though often I’ve denied
their shape. Their sound.
My soul: whatever
it sings it is singing.
– Paul Guest

You can think of patience and its steadying power as a gem with many, many facets—patience as forbearance, patience as gentle perseverance, and patience as acceptance of the truth.
– Dawn Scott

your song embraces
the depths of loneliness
mountain bird
– Basho

Decency is the absence of strategy. The warrior’s approach should be simple-minded, very simple and straightforward.
– Chögyam Trungpa

The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad
The time of year has grown indifferent.
Mildew of summer and the deepening snow
Are both alike in the routine I know.
I am too dumbly in my being pent.

The wind attendant on the solstices
Blows on the shutters of the metropoles,
Stirring no poet in his sleep, and tolls
The grand ideas of the villages.

The malady of the quotidian . . .
Perhaps, if summer ever came to rest
And lengthened, deepened, comforted, caressed
Through days like oceans in obsidian

Horizons full of night’s midsummer blaze;
Perhaps, if winter once could penetrate
Through all its purples to the final slate,
Persisting bleakly in an icy haze;

One might in turn become less diffident—
Out of such mildew plucking neater mould
And spouting new orations of the cold.
One might. One might. But time will not relent.

– Wallace Stevens

The poet begins as the man who has more than a psychic sore throat; he has writer’s block, acedia [. . .]. The malady, as I now unsurprisingly suggest, is a badly repressed case of the anxiety of influence [. . .].
– Harold Bloom

I wanted to be a capybara. Instead, I became Hawaiian pizza.
– Francesca Leader

Blessed are the uncertain… for their minds are still open. Blessed are the wonderers, for they shall find what is wonderful. Blessed are those who question their answers, for their horizons will expand forever.
– Brian McLaren

Even in a world that’s being shipwrecked, remain brave and strong.
– Hildegard of Bingen

poetry is not magic. it’s not something to fall in love with. it’s something to evaluate with probability theory, and the bayesian priors are pretty damning
– Katie Kadue

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

A reminder that sometimes, the best response is nothing at all, a blank screen that says ‘user not found.’
– Rudy Francisco

It is a human love, I live inside.
– Amiri Baraka

a man you love turns poetry from dangerous toy to weapon.
– Anne Waldman

It is always easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.
– Alfred Adler

My fellow human beings, we’re in the process of losing basically everything, as the latest data demonstrates. All that we’ve been experiencing recently- worsening fires, smoke, heat, floods, and collapsing ecosystems—is just the beginning.
– Peter Kalmus

And the sky says, this is blue. And the morning sun silvers the underside of birds’ wings as they fly. And the clouds are like cotton balls pulled apart until they are as thin as spiderwebs. And I can’t stop looking up because this world disappoints me more every day. And I pray.
– @poseofpower

It’s actually good for students of poetry to “dissect” a poem, identify every concrete formal technique they can find and try to articulate how those techniques relate to one another and the total meaning of the poem.

You wouldn’t want a doctor who had never dissected a body!!

– @pourfairelevide

Why do you always wear black?

If I always wear black it is because I am in mourning for my life.

– Anton Chekhov

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.
– Niels Bohr

In a perfect world, we would slow dance / with someone we love
– Kelli Russell Agodon

Remember, you should sleep more than other people, for I sleep less than most. And I can’t think of a better place to store my unused share of universal sleep than in your beloved eyes.
– Franz Kafka, 1912.

The job of the poet is to make the reader want to care, not demand sympathy as the price of admission to the poem. The aesthetics of sincerity end up allowing the poet to be too easy on themselves, to believe that right feeling is more important than good writing.
– Adam Kirsch

If I were someone who’d made several million in the last few years in podcasting, what I’d be doing right now, just as a fun little experiment, would be financing all the laid off wnyc and npr staff to make whatever they wanted together. Just, like, to see what happens.
– Kalli Anderson

quixotic mantra
follows birdsong
out of trees
– Herb Tate

You must begin very near to go very far. It is no good beginning very far for coming near.
– Krishnamurti

I couldn’t make you happy.
Forgive me.
Neither am I.
But the city and my heart
they know that I fought like no one else
looking for that flower
for your hands.
– José Adán Castelar

You’re not to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.
– Malcolm X

Jung endlessly urges us, even shouts at us, This journey I describe is mine; do not imitate my mysteries; you have your mysteries, find and follow them. He shows tremendous faith in the psyche and in the efforts of each of us to follow its dots of light.
– Ann Belford Ulanov

the way we teach poetry in our schools…is deeply fucked up. I remember learning that a poem was like a puzzle. If I could just sort out what each element in the poem symbolized then I could put them together and voila! solve the poem!
– Kevin Prufer

As Jung saw it, it is not only the single individual who is liable to psychic illness, as a result of a wrong attitude toward the unconscious; the same thing can also happen to nations as a whole.
– Marie Louise von Franz

The light in me whose unconditional embrace would be my redemption and my deliverance is the same one I’ve felt too unworthy to receive.
– Chelan Harkin

Less asleep than in sleep mode, many of us live in “low-power readiness” where “nothing is ever fundamentally ‘off’ and there is never an actual state of rest.
– Hal Foster reviews a new book of essays by Jonathan Crary

We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley

The willingness to confess ignorance as the beginning of wisdom, the ability to sift and sort through the blizzard of information to discern what is most deeply true versus that which triggers our complexes and shallow desires for vindication–these are sadly missing.
– James Hollis

Whatever outer problem is presented, in analytic work, we try to find the inner chaos that is part of the experience of the outer problem. We tend to that inner chaos until we see what opposites are in conflict. If we can take responsibility for those opposites & own them as parts of ourselves, as opposed to simply blaming the outside world for the problems in our life, we prepare the way for their synthesis & our growth. This is a fundamental starting point for Jungian work in depth.
– J. Gary Sparks

Only when we know little do we know anything. Doubt grows with knowledge.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

All I needed to do was sing with conviction, speaking my truth from the heart, honestly and straightforwardly, and to offer my words, ideas and music to the audience as if it were one collective friend that I’d known for a very long time.
– Carole King

The more I make art and music, I become allergic to computers. I just take everything as analog as I can.
– Cissi Efraimsson

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.
– William Knowlton Zinsser

As long as I have a book in my hand, I don’t feel like I’m wasting time.
– Charlie Munger

This book has been much delayed by trials, assassinations, funerals, and despair. Nor is the American crisis, which is part of a global, historical crisis, likely to resolve itself soon. An old world is dying, and a new one, kicking in the belly of its mother, time, announces that it is ready to be born. This birth will not be easy, and many of us are doomed to discover that we are exceedingly clumsy midwives.
– James Baldwin

Depth psychology does not, in my view, seek to replace religion, but does seek to “dream onward” the processes that have been lost to consciousness due to our failure to understand the symbolic messages of religion.
– David Tacey

I don’t know what meditation is. I start, which means the mind is free, has a sense of great humility. Not knowing, I’m not asking because then somebody will fill it. Some book, some scholar, some professor, some psychologist will say, ‘You don’t know. I know. I’ll give it to you.’ I say, ‘Please don’t. I know nothing, and you know nothing either because you are repeating what others have said.’

So I discard all that and begin to inquire. I am now in a position to inquire, not to achieve a result, not to arrive at what they call enlightenment – nothing. I don’t know if there is enlightenment or not.

I start with this feeling of great humility, not knowing. Therefore the mind is capable of real inquiry.

So I inquire. I look at my life because meditation covers the whole field of life.
– J. Krishnamurti

We live outside ourselves. We rarely have moments where music or poetry provide relief. Even if it requires a lot of attention, it’s a relief … in the true sense of the word. We need poetry amid this chaos and chatter.
– Etel Adnan

You must understand the following: In order to master a field, you must love the subject and feel a profound connection to it. Your interest must transcend the field itself and border on the religious.
– RobertGreene

war is what happens when language fails.
– margaret atwood

The path of least resistance is a terrible teacher.
– Ryan Holiday

The syndrome of kali yuga is marked by the fact that it is the only age in which property alone confers social rank; wealth becomes the only motive of virtues, passion and lust the only bonds between the married, falsehood and deception the first condition of success in life, sexuality the sole means of enjoyment, while external, merely ritualstic religion is confused with spirituality. For several thousand years, be it understood, we have been living in kali yuga.
– Mircea Eliade

People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom. It is not the freedom of the dictator, who enforces his own will on the world, but the freedom of the artist, who has no will, who is free of will. The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control. Great landscapes create themselves, long splendid views, rich and delicate colours, roads, houses, which he has never seen or heard of…
– Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

Even now,
decades after,
I wash my face with cold water—
Not for discipline,
nor memory,
nor the icy, awakening slap,
but to practice
choosing
to make the unwanted wanted.
– Jane Hirshfield

The state of imperfect transformation, merely hoped for and waited for, does not seem to be one of torment only, but of positive, if hidden, happiness. It is the state of someone who, in his wanderings among the mazes of his psychic transformation, comes upon a secret happiness which reconciles him to his apparent loneliness. In communing with himself he finds not deadly boredom and melancholy but an inner partner; more than that, a relationship that seems like the happiness of a secret love, or like a hidden spring-time, when the green seed sprouts from the barren earth, holding out the promise of future harvests.
– Carl Jung

setting sail
upon purple clouds
on the western sea
– Issa

may our
poetry emerge
as first blossoms
– Basho

Resumé
by Dorothy Parker

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

There are seasons in your life, as in nature. Bountiful and barren; warm and cold; becoming and declining
– Chögyam Trungpa

Probably the only thing
one can really learn,
the only technique to learn,
is the capacity to be able
to change.
– Philip Guston

it’s the worst feeling in the world to be right about climate collapse.
– Clare Saxon Ghauri

sunrise
cold air sweeps down arroyo
chamisa sweetness
– Susan J. Tweit

Pretend that this is a time of miracles and we believe in them.
– Edwidge Danticat

That which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.
– James Joyce, Ulysses

a long train whistle
arriving
with the train

this old longing too
comes and goes

– @ruralitalics

I summoned invisible, named places. I discovered books, where you can bury yourself as easily as under the triumphant skirts of the sky. I learned that the sky and books can hurt and seduce you. Far from servile games, I discovered that it is possible not to imitate the world, […] to watch it out of the corner of your eye making and unmaking itself, and in pain that can be reversed into pleasure, to experience the ecstasy of not participating; at the juncture of space and books was born an immobile body that was still me and that trembled ceaselessly in the impossible vow to adjust what I read to the vertigo of the visible. The things of the past are vertiginous as space, and their mark in the memory is deficient as words; I discovered that you remember.
– Pierre Michon, (tr. Gladding and Deshays)

slow pour…
maple syrup
at dawn
– James Welsh

On the levels of the very large, the very small, the very slow,
the eye sees as constant, & at rest,

what our memory assures us to be fluid & moving.

– Ronald Johnson

What strikes one now is the innocence of Amy Lowell— the monomaniacal innocence that permitted her to ignore the rising war in Europe. This splendid isolation… the sole dweller on the shore as the tide washes in, seems very American.
– Barbara Guest

The poem finds its balance
where you wobble,
the old monk told
the poet.
– The Old Monk

I dream in the old language
The one my father would sing in
when he didn’t want us to know
he had been crying
from a world that liked to break him like cheap porcelain
Swept up in sunshine
mended at night
only to be broken again
the next day
– Oliver Barkley

soft green folds of land
barely glimpsed through train windows
all our longed-for homes
– Catherine Baker

A thing, until it is everything, is noise, and once it is everything, is silence.
– Antonio Porchia

Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.
– Ray Bradbury

You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.
– Albert Camus

I know it’s unrealistic and counter-revolutionary, but I want Jimmy Carter to live forever.
– Jericho Brown

Always know your why. When you get to the point where you want to quit, knowing your why will give you the strength to push through & keep going instead of stopping forever. If you can fit your why on a Post-It Note, write it down & post it where you can see it.
– Keidi Keating

Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.
– Seamus Heaney

I want to staple
myself to a passing cloud
so I am blameless for war.
– Victoria Chang

I was, being human, born alone;
I am, being woman, hard beset;
I live by squeezing from a stone
The little nourishment I get.
– Elinor Wylie

I am only a shell where the ocean is still sounding.
– Marina Tsvetaeva

Certainly by midlife (if not sooner), many people are seeing their own irrational behaviour or other clues that point to something beyond the ego at work within themselves. A symbolic appreciation of the dilemmas of our daily lives is difficult to achieve, but it provides an eye for what’s unfolding with us from underneath.
– Gary Bobroff

One of most important things we can do is to grieve, because it is a protest against the collective agreement to turn our backs on what is happening in the world. We need to be willing to feel this and respond. As James Hillman said, “Outrage is a sure sign of a soul awake.”
– Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow

The sweetest and most inoffensive path of life leads through the avenues of science and learning; and whoever can either remove any obstructions in this way, or open up any new prospect, ought so far to be esteemed a benefactor to mankind.
– David Hume

We must always remember with gratitude and admiration the first sailors who steered their vessels through storms and mists, and increased our knowledge of the lands of ice in the South.
– Roald Amundsen

low-key kind of hate how the world is a theatre of pain and vale of tears in which we take turns blindly suffering and blindly passing along suffering, untouched by anything even potentially fully good, lost even to the possibility of comprehension or salvation or repair.
– @schwarz_seher

My hope is that one day
the children of Isaac
and the children of Ishmael
will come together
and tell the extremists
to go take a hike
so we can eat
hummus and dates
and watch our
children frolic together.
– Michael Adam Latz

Endless tribalism and vendetta is the default state of premodern humanity. Premodern cultures fight each other and also modern cultures. Modern cultures fight premodern cultures but not each other.
– Jeff Salzman

When we really know something we feel we’ve always known it. Yet also it’s terribly distant, farther than any star… beyond the world, not in the clouds or in heaven, but a light that shows the world, this world, as it really is.
– Iris Murdoch

at the tavern
an autumn night
is forgotten
– Issa

Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
– Madeleine L’Engle

Every leaf speaks bliss to me, fluttering from the autumn tree.
– Emily Brontë

The unconscious always tries to produce an impossible situation in order to force the individual to bring out his very best. Otherwise one stops short of one’s best, one is not complete, one does not realize oneself. What is needed is an impossible situation where one has to renounce one’s own will and one’s own wit and do nothing but wait and trust to the impersonal power of growth and development. When you are up against a wall, put down roots like a tree, until clarity comes from deeper sources to see over that wall.
– Carl Jung

Perhaps this war will pass like the others which divided us leaving us dead, killing us along with the killers but the shame of this time puts its burning fingers to our faces. Who will erase the ruthlessness hidden in innocent blood?
– Pablo Neruda

ATTUNED
I want to meet the world
the way these calendula blossoms
meet the cold.
While everything around them
has wilted or browned,
they lift up their gold and orange faces
like bright earthbound suns—
not with some agenda
to make the world a better place,
but because they are doing
what they are made to do—
to be soft yet resilient,
beautiful and tough,
to carry inside themselves
the seeds for more beauty,
and, when the time comes,
spill them everywhere.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

The struggle to exist, to not disappear in this moment, is the advancing root of the struggle to exist throughout the whole passage of time. We need to help each other in this struggle. You by asking, I by struggling to respond. This is the law of love, which rules the universe.
– Jacob Needleman

Gorgeous, amazing things come into our lives when we are paying attention: mangoes, grandnieces, Bach, ponds. This happens more often when we have as little expectation as possible. If you say, ‘Well, that’s pretty much what I thought I’d see,’ you are in trouble. At that point, you have to ask yourself why you are even here. And if I were you, I would pray ‘Help.’ Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time. Let it be. Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business.
– Anne Lamott

The best way to travel, after all, is to feel,
To feel everything in every way,
To feel everything excessively,
Because all things are, in truth, excessive
And all reality is an excess, a violence,
An extraordinarily vivid hallucination.
– Fernando Pessoa

Stories with weight to them have what C.G. Jung terms ‘the lament of the dead’, which in our frenetic culture we can no longer have time to hear. Most indigenous cultures will tell you that this world belongs to the dead, that’s where we’re headed. So mythology for me involves a conversation with the dead, with what you might call ancestors. Whatever we are facing now we need to have a root system embedded in weather patterns, the presences of animals, our dreams, and the ones who came before us. Myth is insistent that when there is a crisis, genius lives on the margins not the centre. If we are constantly using the language of politics to combat the language of politics at some point the soul grows weary and turns its head away because we are not allowing it into the conversation, and by denying soul we are ignoring what the Mexicans call the river beneath the river. We’re not listening to the thoughts of the world. We’re only listening to our own neurosis and our own anxiety.
– Martin Shaw

My favorite question to ask consulting firm candidates was, “what was your favorite course in college?” Most, uncharacteristically, would stammer. They had no favorite course. They were at an Ivy to prove they could work hard, not to enjoy learning. Many even acted like it was simply an unfair question–one they had not been given a chance to prepare for. They were not “robots”, but that description wasn’t completely inaccurate either. So we end up governed by coldly calculating elites that lack creativity, curiosity and humanity.
– Conor Friedersdorf, A Reader Writes

We Indians know about silence. We are not afraid of it. In fact, for us, silence is more powerful than words. Our elders were trained in the ways of silence, and they handed over this knowledge to us. Observe, listen, and then act, they would tell us. That was the manner of living.

With you, it is just the opposite. You learn by talking. You reward the children that talk the most at school. In your parties, you all try to talk at the same time. In your work, you are always having meetings in which everybody interrupts everybody and all talk five, ten or a hundred times. And you call that ‘solving a problem’. When you are in a room and there is silence, you get nervous. You must fill the space with sounds. So you talk compulsorily, even before you know what you are going to say.


White people love to discuss. They don’t even allow the other person to finish a sentence. They always interrupt. For us Indians, this looks like bad manners or even stupidity. If you start talking, I’m not going to interrupt you. I will listen. Maybe I’ll stop listening if I don’t like what you are saying, but I won’t interrupt you.

When you finish speaking, I’ll make up my mind about what you said, but I will not tell you I don’t agree unless it is important. Otherwise, I’ll just keep quiet and I’ll go away. You have told me all I need to know. There is no more to be said. But this is not enough for the majority of white people.

People should regard their words as seeds. They should sow them, and then allow them to grow in silence. Our elders taught us that the earth is always talking to us, but we should keep silent in order to hear her.

There are many voices besides ours. Many voices…

– Ella Deloria

Today we are aware as never before of the plurality of human life-styles and possibilities, while at the same time being tied, like an old silent movie, to a runaway locomotive rushing headlong to a very singular catastrophe.
– Gary Snyder

By positioning that our world is marked by an absence of the ‘thing in itself,’ we also posit that there is… something present that is absent, that in the world there also exists something that actually does not exist.
– Rado Riha, 2nd Copernican Turn of Kant’s Philosophy

Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.
– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

You can’t renew life without stepping out of the pattern that is in place.
– Thomas Moore

Peace is a pre-condition of revolution.
– Guattari and Negri

Nostalgia is paradoxical in the sense that longing can make us more empathetic toward fellow humans, yet the moment we try to repair longing with belonging … we often part ways and put an end to mutual understanding.
– Svetlana Boym

…we need to abandon the idea that wisdom is knowing everything—the whys, the wherefores, the how-tos. Wisdom is often more subtle, both far simpler and exceedingly more complex. For wisdom requires the discerning, the listening to, the acknowledgement of nudges and notions, of senses and sensations, of the minute and what we often mistakenly assume is the mundane. Wisdom means listening to the still, small voice, the whisper that can be easily lost in the whirlwind of busyness, expectations, and conventions of the world….
– Jean M. Blomquist

it ends with you
it begins with cherry blossoms

– Tsukino Popona

A reminder that is always ok to just listen when you are not informed or are not involved. We do not need to express an opinion on or claim a position/answer to every single political & social issue.
Listen. Learn. Empathize. Amplify.
– Dr. Sami Schalk

History teaches us over and over again that, contrary to rational expectation, irrational factors play the largest, indeed the decisive, role in all processes of psychic transformation.
– CG Jung

flying home
beating Canada geese
at their own game
– @hegelincanada

When feminine sacredness is denied, and spiritual mysteries banned, the human psyche suffers violation. Not only is it greatly impoverished, it is imprisoned in soullessness. Both men and women suffer.
– Dr. Rachel Hillel

The parables of the Lotus Sutra form the bedrock of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition. They shed light not on what the Buddha says about the dharma, but on what the dharma says about us.
– Insights from the Lotus Sutra, Mark Herrick

Heavy clouds were putting out the stars.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Night Flight

Being of your blood, Through thick and thin, I have stood up for you.
– Carlos Montezuma

Sometimes you meet someone, and it’s so clear that the two of you, on some level belong together. As lovers, or as friends, or as family, or as something entirely different. You just work, whether you understand one another or you’re in love or you’re partners in crime. You meet these people throughout your life, out of nowhere, under the strangest circumstances, and they help you feel alive. I don’t know if that makes me believe in coincidence, or fate, or sheer blind luck, but it definitely makes me believe in something.
– Auliq Ice

At night the sparks fly high as the people hear those rusty bells and hollow songs.
– Crisosto Apache

You deserve a sense of belonging and relational solidity that doesn’t require you to hold opinions you haven’t fully and earnestly investigated.
– @soundrotator

night terrors
a world
at war
– @pauldavidmena

If one were to inquire about the potential malady of adoring all genres of poetry, I would assert that there exists no inherent affliction in such a disposition. Quite the contrary, cherishing a multitude of poetic styles and themes can be perceived as a commendable attribute, for it demonstrates an open-mindedness and a proclivity for exploring diverse forms of artistic expression.
– Jar (AI)

The practice of violence changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.
– Hannah Arendt

Today I have so much to do:
I must kill memory once and for all,
I must turn my soul to stone,
I must learn to live again—
– Anna Akhmatova

In the poetry world there are people who act like the hard kids at the back of the bus and generally they’re the ones who were chauffeured to private schools or somesuch.
– Laura McKee

I love it when Shakespeare scholars write about his global influence. This is something anti-Shakespeare philistines don’t seem to realize: for centuries people around the world “have found in Shakespeare the words to express their own deepest feelings.
– Neil MacGregor

According to Sumerian mythology, the flood was the punishment the gods inflicted on man because of the noise he made. —What would I not give to know how they will reward him for today’s racket?
– Emil Cioran

I wish more people knew healing the nervous system is about being still. Lying in the sun. Being present while you eat your food. Listening to the sounds of nature. Letting your imagination run wild. Instead of more routine, the body needs less.
– Dr. Nicole LePera

If someone else is at war with themselves, it will be very hard for them to be peaceful with you. Remember that.
– Alex Elle

But friend, where do I find the poets?
In the soccer fields,
at the sea shore,
in the bars drinking?
Where do the poets live these days,
and what do they sing about?
– Tishani Doshi

The sign of intimacy is not having to say everything.
– Ann Cvetkovich

staying awake
and subsisting
on poetry
– Ogawa

The dream gives a true picture of the subjective state, while the conscious mind denies that this state exists, or recognizes it only grudgingly.
– CG Jung

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family.
– Franz Kafka

We are all children of the Great Spirit; we all belong to Mother Earth. Our planet is in great trouble, and if we keep carrying old grudges and do not work together, we will all die.
– Chief Seattle

I came to my senses with a pencil in my hand. To the years Before the pencil, O, I was the resurrection.
– Charles Wright

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
– John Fowles

Properties of the Number Nineteen
by Shaheen Dil

What if Nineteen tells no story,
prefigures nothing?

What if it has no historic implacability,
no forward motion?

It is an odd number—
not odd as in not even,
but peculiar, unexpected.

It is a prime number divisible only by itself and one.

Every nineteen years the moon will appear in the same position
among the stars—the Metonic cycle.

The lunar and solar cycles coincide every nineteen years.

It is the beginning and the end of single digits.

It is Kuan Yin, goddess of Mercy.

It is Wahid, the one, one of the 99 names of God.

There are nineteen angels guarding the gates of Muslim Hell—

which seems odd—who would be trying to break into Hell?
Or is it to keep the residents from getting out?

It is the number of units of time—
days, hours, weeks, years—
revolutions of the wheel,
trees, birds, things which can be counted.

I count them as I can.

Whatever it is I count, the worry starts at eighteen,
because,
inexorably,
Nineteen will be next, and then I wonder,
why now?

Why does Nineteen keep me up at night?
Make me sleep by day?

Why does it hang around my house—
there, behind the hydrangeas,
earlier, lurking in the alleyway—
a long-unwanted guest
who will not take the hint to go?

Becoming whole doesn’t mean that we become less strange or wild or complicated. Becoming whole would mean that we orient together away from what is death-dealing, and towards what is life-giving.
– Krista Tippett

Laugh at all my dreams, my dearest;
laugh, and I repeat anew
That I still believe in mankind
as I still believe in you.

For my soul is not yet unsold
to the golden calf of scorn
And I still believe in man
and the spirit in him born.

By the passion of his spirit
shall his ancient bonds be shed
Let the soul be given freedom,
let the body have its bread!

Laugh, for I believe in friendship,
and in one I still believe,
One whose heart shall beat with my heart
and with mine rejoice and grieve.

Let the time be dark with hatred,
I believe in years beyond.
Love at last shall bind the peoples
in an everlasting bond.

In that day shall my own people
rooted in its soil arise,
Shake the yoke from off its shoulders
and the darkness from its eyes.

Life and love and strength and action
in their heart and blood shall beat
And their hopes shall be both heaven
and the earth beneath their feet.

Then a new song shall be lifted
to the young, the free, the brave
And the wreath to crown the singer
shall be gathered from my grave.

– Shaul Tchernichovsky

Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. We have never seen a totally sane human being.
– Robert Anton Wilson

The ocean of suffering is immense, but if you turn around, you can see the land. The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy. When one tree in the garden is sick, you have to care for it. But don’t overlook all the healthy trees.

Even while you have pain in your heart, you can enjoy the many wonders of life — the beautiful sunset, the smile of a child, the many flowers and trees. To suffer is not enough. Please don’t be imprisoned by your suffering.

– Thich Nhat Hanh

We need to realize that our usual attention is not in contact with what it is perceiving, and as a result we do not really see.
– Jeanne De Salzmann

Be careful of words, even the miraculous ones. For the miraculous we do our best, sometimes they swarm like insects and leave not a sting but a kiss. They can be as good as fingers. They can be as trusty as the rock you stick your bottom on. But they can be both daisies and bruises. Yet I am in love with words. They are doves falling out of the ceiling. They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap. They are the trees, the legs of summer, and the sun, its passionate face…
– Anne Sexton

I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me-like food or water.
– Ray Charles

And so imagine my delight when, today, after chatting with my friend Walton for about an hour, I found myself, a few hours later in another conversation, employing—embodying—some of his elegant hand gestures: the emphatic hand swimming through the air, or pointing and plucking at something simultaneously, or, always, some kind of beckoning. I’ve been told there is a term for this among behavioral psychologists, which foregrounds the behavior as opposed to what intrigues me, which is the fact of our bodies’ ubiquitous porosities, how so often, and mostly unbeknownst, our bodies are the bodies of others.
– Ross Gay

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

The obsessive fear of the Americans is that the lights might go out. […] In the tower blocks the empty offices remain lit. On the freeways, in broad daylight, the cars keep all their headlights on. In Palms Ave., Venice, California, a little grocery store […] leaves its orange and green neon sign flashing all night, into the void. And this is not to mention the television, with its 24-hour schedules, often to be seen functioning like an hallucination in the empty rooms of houses or vacant hotel rooms […].

There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. […] It is as if another planet is communicating with you. Suddenly the TV reveals itself for what it really is: a video of another world, ultimately addressed to no one at all, delivering its images indifferently […].

In short, in America the arrival of night-time or periods of rest cannot be accepted, nor can the Americans bear to see the technological process halted. Everything has to be working all the time, there has to be no let-up in man’s artificial power, and the intermittent character of natural cycles (the seasons, day and night, heat and cold) has to be replaced by a functional continuum that is sometimes absurd […].

You may seek to explain this in terms of fear […]. The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.
– Jean Baudrillard, America

The pavement
trembles with light pouring
upon it
We are held in it.
We smile.
I hold my breath to see if
the cashier in the supermarket
will be gentle with the old lady who cannot
read the price-tag on
a loaf of bread.
Then I breathe freely,
for yes, she is helpful, yes, she is
kind.

– Hilda Morley, That Bright Grey Eye

Dawn is gathering. The noon of night has gone. The first gleams of daylight disclose its temperature. Stone takes on color. Treetops are roots of the day yet to grow. The moon, silver necklace from which Venus dangles like a pearl, still sheds its brightness. The abyss is only perspective, location. There will be nests on some branches.
– Homero Aridjis, Persephone

Téssera (excerpt)
by Nathalie Handal

I look at the way this silence
moves the streets,

the way we leave ourselves
in others,

the way our shadows
come back for more solitude,

the way death holds
death hostage

even when it begs
to walk down the lonesome road.

Maybe we need
to empty our souls

to find those
thinking of us

in memories we forgot,
maybe we will see

darkness healing
as ships land on pale shores,

or maybe we will fall into the sea,
forgetting that love

is a longer voyage
than life.

Don’t assume that silence in the face of horror implies indifference. Some of us are listening and feeling deeply but know that we likely have nothing useful to add to the conversation. Not everyone has to be a commentator.
– Georgia Hilton

in many ways, you are better positioned to hype up your friends and allies to the degree of accuracy and excellence that they deserve than they are.
– @tasshinfogleman

When tenderness tinged by sadness touches our heart, we know that we are in contact with reality.
– Chögyam Trungpa

Silence and peace come over you if you begin to comprehend the darkness. Only he who does not comprehend the darkness fears the night.
– C.G. Jung

When one knows that something will soon be removed from one’s gaze, that thing becomes an image.
– Walter Benjamin

Do you know why I believe in the novel? It’s a democratic shout. Anybody can write a great novel. […] The spray of talent, the spray of ideas. One thing unlike another, one voice unlike the next. Ambiguities, contradictions, whispers, hints.
– Don DeLillo

If he isn’t supporting your higher education, he isn’t the one
– Neha Gupta

Defences must not be confused as being the real problem, which is not knowing how to repair.
– Henri Rey

Our decisions will always entail trade-offs.
– Leon Garber

Therefore, do not harbor a lot of restless striving—
Just read these eminent texts with a free and easy mind.
Decide that nothing is more profound than the meaning they express,
Then rest in the state of naturalness.
– Patrul Rinpoche

After the final no there comes a yes. And on that yes the future world depends.
– Wallace Stevens

The best poem is no poem.
In a swath of poems, or a swathe of poems,
the best poem is without genealogy or fragrance.
– Diane Seuss

He shall judge between many peoples,
and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away;
they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
and their spears into pruning-hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more;
– Micah 4:3

We do not like to look at the shadow-side of ourselves; therefore there are many people in our civilized society who have lost their shadow altogether, have lost the third dimension, and with it they have usually lost the body. The body is a most doubtful friend because it produces things we do not like: there are too many things about the personification of this shadow of the ego. Sometimes it forms the skeleton in the cupboard, and everybody naturally wants to get rid of such a thing.
– CG Jung

Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins.
– Gustave Flaubert

Past good deeds can liberate individuals to engage in behaviors that are immoral, unethical, or otherwise problematic.
– Malcolm Gladwell

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.
– Ernest Hemingway

On the highest throne in the world, we are still seated upon our arses.
– Michel de Montaigne

Part of the common crisis at mid-life is a discovery that ego development no longer leads to creative living. Pursuing more of the same creates an imbalance in the psyche and begins to hollow-out earlier achievements.
– Dale Mathers

this cherry tree
has lived between
our two lives
– Basho

The music of the future is already developed but the minds of the people of earth must be prepared to accept it.
– Sun Ra

The depression we’re all trying to avoid could very well be a prolonged chronic reaction to what we’ve been doing to the world, a mourning and grieving for what we’re doing to nature.
– James Hillman

Human rights are for everyone, not just for people we like, not just when it is convenient.

Human rights are for all humans.

– Michael Adam Latz

Civilized people, whether Western or Eastern, need to be liberated and dehypnotized from their systems of symbolism and, thereby, become more intensely aware of the living vibrations of the real world. For lack of such awareness our consciousnesses and consciences have become calloused to the daily atrocities of burning children with napalm, of saturation bombing of fertile earth with all its plants, wild animals, and insects (not to mention people), and of manufacturing nuclear and chemical weapons concerning which the real problem is not so much how to prevent their use as how to get them off the face of the earth.
– Alan Watts

wrong part of town
billboards for
a defeated candidate
– @pauldavidmena

We grow. It hurts at first.
– Sylvia Plath

It is raining now. / It is raining more than ever, / and you do not come in.
– Mahmoud Darwish

the cotton and wool / whisper the story of a man who’d been loved so deeply
– Molly Zhu

How do we change mentalities, how do we reinvent social practices that would give back to humanity—if it ever had it—a sense of responsibility, not only for its own survival, but equally for the future of all life on the planet?
– Guattari

Move within, but don’t move the way fear makes you move.
Move the way love makes you move.
Move the way joy makes you move.
– Rumi

Senseless war, senseless suffering.
I stand with peace, for peace, in peace.
– Joan Halifax

flight of geese through dun hill smoke
hills float extensive at left hand
shouldering aside great cliff to right
ask those, ephemeral as mayflies,

if they know half as much as a turtle or crane

– Harry Gilonis

I am constantly amazed by man’s inhumanity to man.
– Primo Levi

A conflict begins and ends in the hearts and minds of people, not in the hilltops.
– Amos Oz

We think we have a lock on truth, with our burnished surfaces and articulation, but the bigger we pump ourselves up, the easier we are to prick with a pin. And the bigger we get, the harder it is to see the earth under our feet.
– Anne Lamott

Have you ever felt invisible and unappreciated?

And do you love the stars?

Do you love how it feels to be under a dark moonless sky in the deep country on a cold winter night and to see the stars above you unfurled in all their blazing beauty?

Do you often go out of your way to see them that way?

How many people do?

How often do people walk among dazzling suburban lights and barely glance up, let alone know what beauty there is above them, blotted out by the glare of the city?

And does that make the stars less worthy?

And you, beloved, are you a suburban light, visible, utilitarian, usefully contained?

Or are you a beauty reserved only for those willing to step into the darkness and have their breath stolen away?

Are you a street lamp… or are you a sky full of stars?

– Fen Druadìn

does my star
sleep alone too?
river of heaven
– Issa

Let us shape anguish into something
sacred, something fierce and loving.
– Christine Morro

It does not have to be either or. Our hearts can break in every direction. We can believe many things at once. We can care for people yet oppose their governments and leaders. We can support liberation and still mourn the loss of lives on both sides of the border.
– Robin Beth Schaer

When Love comes suddenly and taps on your window, run and let it in but first shut the door of your reason. Even the smallest hint chases love away like smoke that drowns the freshness of the morning breeze. To reason Love can only say, the way is barred, you can’t pass through but to the lover it offers a hundred blessings. Before the mind decides to take a step Love has reached the seventh heaven. Before the mind can figure how Love has climbed the holy mountain. I must stop this talk now and let Love speak from its nest of silence.
– Rumi

Mindfulness teaches us the nature of the shadow.
Heartfulness teaches us the nature of the light.
Without these qualities in balance,
we will evolve either
eyeless in the darkness
or blinded by the light.
– Stephen and Ondrea Levine

I was raised on a narrative diet of “angels and demons” to make sense of the world.

Adulthood has been recognizing that many angels were actually demons and many alleged demons—were angels.

Most importantly, I’ve learned that the world rarely organizes itself into such cleanly marked boxes.

– The Subversive Lens

We banish those who fear us the way they fear the endlessness of the ocean, though still fill their pockets with its gifts.
– Rachel Wiley

I’m in a rut where every time I sit down to write, instead I do a timed geography quiz over and over… currently it takes 4 minutes and 36 seconds to name 196 countries. Maybe they will eventually make their way into my work?
– Jill Kitchen

196 Countries of the World

Afghanistan
Albania
Algeria
Andorra
Angola
Antigua & Deps
Argentina
Armenia
Australia
Austria
Azerbaijan
Bahamas
Bahrain
Bangladesh
Barbados
Belarus
Belgium
Belize
Benin
Bhutan
Bolivia
Bosnia Herzegovina
Botswana
Brazil
Brunei
Bulgaria
Burkina
Burundi
Cambodia
Cameroon
Canada
Cape Verde
Central African Rep
Chad
Chile
China
Colombia
Comoros
Congo
Congo {Democratic Rep}
Costa Rica
Croatia
Cuba
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Denmark
Djibouti
Dominica
Dominican Republic
East Timor
Ecuador
Egypt
El Salvador
Equatorial Guinea
Eritrea
Estonia
Ethiopia
Fiji
Finland
France
Gabon
Gambia
Georgia
Germany
Ghana
Greece
Grenada
Guatemala
Guinea
Guinea-Bissau
Guyana
Haiti
Honduras
Hungary
Iceland
India
Indonesia
Iran
Iraq
Ireland {Republic}
Israel
Italy
Ivory Coast
Jamaica
Japan
Jordan
Kazakhstan
Kenya
Kiribati
Korea North
Korea South
Kosovo
Kuwait
Kyrgyzstan
Laos
Latvia
Lebanon
Lesotho
Liberia
Libya
Liechtenstein
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Macedonia
Madagascar
Malawi
Malaysia
Maldives
Mali
Malta
Marshall Islands
Mauritania
Mauritius
Mexico
Micronesia
Moldova
Monaco
Mongolia
Montenegro
Morocco
Mozambique
Myanmar, {Burma}
Namibia
Nauru
Nepal
Netherlands
New Zealand
Nicaragua
Niger
Nigeria
Norway
Oman
Pakistan
Palau
Panama
Papua New Guinea
Paraguay
Peru
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Qatar
Romania
Russian Federation
Rwanda
St Kitts & Nevis
St Lucia
Saint Vincent & the Grenadines
Samoa
San Marino
Sao Tome & Principe
Saudi Arabia
Senegal
Serbia
Seychelles
Sierra Leone
Singapore
Slovakia
Slovenia
Solomon Islands
Somalia
South Africa
South Sudan
Spain
Sri Lanka
Sudan
Suriname
Swaziland
Sweden
Switzerland
Syria
Taiwan
Tajikistan
Tanzania
Thailand
Togo
Tonga
Trinidad & Tobago
Tunisia
Turkey
Turkmenistan
Tuvalu
Uganda
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
United Kingdom
United States
Uruguay
Uzbekistan
Vanuatu
Vatican City
Venezuela
Vietnam
Yemen
Zambia
Zimbabwe

War is the limit of a nation-state’s imagination but it does not have to be the limit of yours.
– Harmony Holiday

If you feel the world is moving too fast, the problem is surely in you, and a failure of attention, not the world.
– Pico Iyer

We have yet to understand: that if I am starving, you are in danger.
– James Baldwin

But we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.
– Haruki Murakami

What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.
– Hannah Arendt

Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there, except those that sang best
– Henry van Dyke

Power, when threatened, pulls an invisible narrative from the clouds that only others in power and afraid can see.
– Hanif Abdurraqib

everybody has left
one by one
autumn wind
– Issa

transcending
a dark past
new moon
– Ogawa

Longing is the absent chatting with the absent. The distant turning towards the distant. . . .

Longing allows distances to recede, as if looking forward, although it may be called hope, were one on an adventure and a poetic motion.

– Mahmoud Darwish

But words are beings. The game will so bewitch you that you become part of it. You will spend your life defending the right of the game to lure you into its labyrinth.
– Mahmoud Darwish

all winter long
smoke on the horizon
in the same place
– Jim Kacian

fishing village
a rumor of blues running
through the café
– Jim Kacian

The margin is a window looking out on the world. You are neither in it, nor outside it.
– Mahmoud Darwish

Keep water around at all times. Drink it like…—drink it like it’s water and somebody smart who you really trust told you to drink lots of it!!
– Jericho Brown

frigid night—
the bowl of soup
becomes my universe
– Mankh (Walter E. Harris III)

There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.
– Neil Gaiman

end of the pier
tattooed wings
on the fat man’s back
– Paul Hodder

Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.
– Jeanette Winterson

I have no interest in joining the game of measuring which evil is greater.

What I do know is that any ideology that is not bounded by a recognition of universal humanity is too dangerous to be let loose upon the world.

– Jonathan Haidt

The Italian philosopher Vico had this theory that time moves more in a spiral than it does in a line. He believes that’s why we repeat ourselves, including our tragedies, and that if we are more faithful to this movement, we can move away from the epicenter through distance and time, but we have to confront it every time. I’ve been thinking about trauma—how it’s repetitive, and how we recreate it, and how memory is fashioned by creation. Every time we remember, we create new neurons, which is why memory is so unreliable. I thought, “Well if the Greek root for ‘poet’ is ‘creator,’ then to remember is to create, and, therefore, to remember is to be a poet.” I thought it was so neat. Everyone’s a poet, as long as they remember.
– Ocean Vuong

There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.
– Eugene O’Neill

predawn stars
apartment lights vanish
one by one
– Farah Ali

There is no greater scripture than nature, for nature is life itself.
– Hazrat Inayat Khan

There is so much that fills me: plants, animals, clouds, day and night, and the eternal in man.

The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things.

– C. G. Jung

Rest your story
in the wordless heart.
A blue moth settles
on the unburst thistle pod,
a blackbird
on the quivering cattail,
this exhalation
settling in the fragrant petals
of your next breath,
down where the pollen is.
Rest your story
here,
in quivering silence.
– Fred LaMotte

If there is a supreme being, he’s crazy.
– Marlene Dietrich

In the stress and complexity of our lives, we may forget our deepest intentions. But when people come to the end of their lives and look back, the questions that they most often ask are not usually, “How much is in my bank account?” or “How many books did I write?” or “What did I build?” or the like. If you have the privilege of being with a person who is conscious at the time of his or her death, you find the questions such a person asks are very simple, “Did I love well?” “Did I live fully?” “Did I learn to let go?”

These simple questions go to the very center of spiritual life. When we consider loving well and living fully, we can see the ways our attachments and fears have limited us, and we can see the many opportunities for our hearts to open. Have we let ourselves love the people around us, our family, our community, the earth upon which we live? And, did we also learn to let go? Did we learn to live through the changes of life with grace, wisdom, and compassion? Have we learned to shift from the clinging mind to the joy of freedom?

– Jack Kornfield

What we must do,
I suppose,
is to hope the world
keeps its balance;

what we are to do, however,
with our hearts
waiting and watching – truly
I do not know.

– Mary Oliver

The mind is never passive; it is a perpetual activity, delicate, receptive, responsive to stimulus. You cannot postpone your life until you have sharpened it. Whatever interest attaches to your subject-matter must be evoked here and now; whatever powers you are strengthening in the pupil, must be exercised here and now; whatever possibilities of mental life your teaching should impart, must be exhibited here and now. That is the golden rule of education, and a very difficult rule to follow. […] The solution which I am urging, is to eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our modern curriculum. There is only one subject-matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations. Instead of this single unity, we offer children – Algebra, from which nothing follows; Geometry, from which nothing follows; Science, from which nothing follows; History, from which nothing follows; a Couple of Languages; never mastered; and lastly, most dreary of all, Literature, represented by plays of Shakespeare, with philological notes and short analyses of plot and character to be in substance committed to memory. Can such a list be said to represent Life, as it is known in the midst of the living of it? The best that can be said of it is, that it is a rapid table of contents which a deity might run over in his mind while he was thinking of creating a world, and has not yet determined how to put it together.
– Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education

I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds & the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old women hawking roses, & children all of them, break my heart. There’s a dream I have in which I love the world. I run from end to end like fingers through her hair. There are no borders, only wind. Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart.
– Cameron Awkward-Rich

The difficulty in the spiritual path is always what comes from ourselves. A person does not like to be a pupil, he likes to be a teacher. If one only knew that the greatness and perfection of the great ones who have come from time to time to this world was in their being pupils and not in teaching! The greater the teacher, the better pupil he was. He learned from everyone, the great and the lowly, the wise and the foolish, the old and the young. He learned from their lives, and studied human nature in all its aspects.
– Hazrat Inayat Khan

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.
– Cormac McCarthy

On foot
I had to walk through the solar system
before I found the first thread of my red dress.
Already, I sense myself.
Somewhere in space hangs my heart,
sparks fly from it, shaking the air,
to other reckless hearts.
– Edith Södergran

Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more and consuming more, as purposes in themselves. All activities are subordinated to economic goals, means have become ends; man is an automaton – well fed, well clad, but without any ultimate concern for that which is his peculiarly human quality and function. If man is to be able to love, he must be put in his supreme place. The economic machine must serve him, rather than he serve it. He must be enabled to share experience, to share work, rather than, at best, share in profits. Society must be organized in such a way that man’s social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it. If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature. Indeed, to speak of love is not “preaching,” for the simple reason that it means to speak of the ultimate and real need in every human being. That this need has been obscured does not mean that it does not exist. To analyze the nature of love is to discover its general absence today and to criticize the social conditions which are responsible for this absence. To have faith in the possibility of love as a social and not only exceptional-individual phenomenon, is a rational faith based on the insight into the very nature of man.
– Erich Fromm

low executive function is a symptom of being under encouraged.
– Richard D. Bartlett

I’m not sure which is worse:
intense feeling, or the absence of it.
– Margaret Atwood

The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
– Carl Gustav Jung

Finding the worst aspect of oneself is the first glimpse of the possibility of being better.
– Chögyam Trungpa

Working with others is a question of being genuine and projecting that genuineness to others
– Chögyam Trungpa

protect civilians.

doesn’t matter who they are
or where they are.

when we fail them
we fail ourselves.

– ian bremmer

A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.
– Jorge Luis Borges

To quote is to name, and naming . . . brings truth to light.
– Hannah Arendt

still alive at the
end of a long dream
on a journey
– Basho

If the motivation of power-gaining disappears—you’ve seen through it and you know that’s not what you want—what other motivation takes its place as the origin of actions? And it seems to me that the answer here is compassion. Simply because, when you want to relate to another living being, what you really are asking of them is that they be in the same situation that you are. You want to meet and encounter someone else who has your problems, your fears, and your delights. You don’t want a doll, you want another “you,” another “self,” because that would be at least as surprising to you as you are.
– Alan Watts

Painting or poetry is made as one makes love: a total embrace, prudence thrown to the winds, nothing held back.
– Joan Miró

I want to watch a programme where five writers are put on the daily routines of other writers from the past. For a month. And then we can read what they wrote.
– Olivia Smith

It would be a ridiculous and unwarranted presumption on our part if we imagined that we were more energetic or more intelligent than the men of the past—our material knowledge has increased, but not our intelligence.
– CG Jung

There are days where I feel like Giacometti’s sculpture of an arm, my dissociation so extreme nothing is left but a limb writing people and experiences I no longer remember.
– Tomoé Hill, Songs for Olympia

We lift our gazes not
To what stands between us,
But what stands before us.
We close the divide,
Because we know to put
Our future first, we must first
Put our differences aside.
– Amanda Gorman

The tendencies of capitalism, climate change, and entrenched racism are destined to produce masses who are desperate, marginalized, and angry. It is very possible we might need more sophisticated modes of analysis than looking for the “bad guys” and “good guys” in every crisis.
– Jason Read

We lay down our arms
So that we can reach our arms
Out to one another.
We seek harm to none, and harmony for all…
Victorious, not because we will never again know defeat,
But because we will never again sow division.
– Amanda Gorman

Autumn’s bitter smoke
Age’s dreamscape with its roots
Burnt ashes and soil
– @hoshigenari

When I was a child, I thought that the poems of Emily Dickinson are riddles. I would spend hours trying to solve them, running around the yard after butterflies and ladybugs; carefully inspecting all trees and flowers and clouds to see which ones matched her words.
– Christina Tudor-Sideri

So when the muse is speaking you listen,
you do the work.
– Alison Mosshart

We can get curious about that craving… and that curiosity itself feels better than the craving or the anxiety it produces.
– Dr. Judson Brewer

His­tory, in short, is what separates us from ourselves and what we have to go through and beyond in order to think what we are.
– Gilles Deleuze

Just sit in silence with your eyes closed. Focus on the breath. Give your mind a chance to correct itself.
– Buddha Project

Don’t be afraid. There are exquisite things in store for you. This is merely the beginning.
– Oscar Wilde

Any Common Desolation
can be enough to make you look up
at the yellowed leaves of the apple tree, the few
that survived the rains and frost, shot
with late afternoon sun. They glow a deep
orange-gold against a blue so sheer, a single bird
would rip it like silk. You may have to break
your heart, but it isn’t nothing
to know even one moment alive. The sound
of an oar in an oarlock or a ruminant
animal tearing grass. The smell of grated ginger.
The ruby neon of the liquor store sign.
Warm socks. You remember your mother,
her precision a ceremony, as she gathered
the white cotton, slipped it over your toes,
drew up the heel, turned the cuff. A breath
can uncoil as you walk across your own muddy yard,
the big dipper pouring night down over you, and everything
you dread, all you can’t bear, dissolves
and, like a needle slipped into your vein—
that sudden rush of the world.
– Ellen Bass

The wisdom of Greek tragedy cannot be overemphasized. All of them dramatize this universal confession: “I created my life; I made these choices; and, stunningly, this flood of unimagined consequences are the fruits of my choices.”
– James Hollis

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

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life ─ the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within ─ can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.
– George Eliot, Middlemarch

It’s not just what we do that will determine the benevolent or afflictive results, but it’s the intention behind them.
– Joseph Bobrow Roshi

It is ironic and paradoxical, that the genuine acceptance of the unchangeable is often one of the keys for true and deep change within the psyche. But this little piece of irony… does not appear to be learnable in any school but life’s fires.
– Liz Greene

there is a poem scratched into the walls of my throat no one has heard it but it is there.
– Kai Cheng Thom

An endless task, the cataloguing of reality. We accumulate facts, we discuss them, but with every line that is written, with every statement that is made, one has the feeling of incompleteness.
– Frantz Fanon

And all the colors I am inside
have not been invented yet.
– Margaret Atwood

Being directly, explicitly ordered around by commercials, magazines, music, and media is dehumanizing.
– Kyle “Guante” Tran Myhre

Genes can be activated or silenced from so many different things, like what you eat, how you move, and how you restore your system. Your thoughts, feelings, and social connections even regulate your genes too.
– Dr Mark Hyman

Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
– Graham Greene

The world
held together
by story.
– @wildcreativity

The infantilizing of a nation’s literary narratives is intimately connected with the infantilizing of a nation’s political narratives.
– Austin Adams

An idea that changed my life.

Wu Wei, the art of effortless action:

– Alex Banks

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
– Emil Cioran

And, of the voices that stray
far from me, which one
will be able to turn your journey and mine
into a march of sleepless sunflowers?
But no other good or other evil do they know
than a lake of blue or gray,
your eyes from an avenue’s shadow.
– Vittorio Sereni

on my desk, fictional characters
practice missing dialogue.
i sit here as if at the root of an old disturbance,
forcing air into my memory cells
to keep them alive,
– Maja Haderlap

But what are my words?
Storm-twisted forests
facing north,
craggy rocks
against day’s
harrowing
fire.
– Olav H. Hauge

I tried not to think about it as I went about my days, and mostly I succeeded. But occasionally the memories still found their way in, through a sound I heard, a word someone uttered, or a smell I caught in the street.
– Tan Twan Eng

Memories I had locked away have begun to break free, like shards of ice fracturing off an arctic shelf. In sleep, these broken floes drift towards the morning light of remembrance.
– Tan Twan Eng

After looking at the world I live in, I have returned, with greater anxiety, to words, to writing and to reading. Because in words resides a mysterious halo that nourishes me. Because words distance us from destruction, from death. They make us into others, within our own human wretchedness.
– Mónica Nepote

So please ask yourself: What would I do if I weren’t afraid? And then go do it.
– Sheryl Sandberg

The path is the mind, and the mind is the path. There is no path other than the mind, and no mind other than the path.
– Ornament of the Middle Way, verse 101

I don’t believe in writer’s block or waiting for inspiration. If you’re a writer, you sit down and write.
– Elmore Leonard

Saam-Plants Here Summon Us

Saam-plants here summon us,
I am your sister, your best one;
I belong to you like this plot of ground
That I planted with flowers
And sweet-smelling herbs.
Sweet is its stream,
Dug by your hand,
Refreshing in the north wind.
A lovely place to wander in,
Your hand in my hand.
My body thrives, my heart exults
At our walking together;
Hearing your voice is pomegranate wine,
I live by hearing it.
Each look with which you look at me
sustains me more than food and drink.

– From ancient Egyption text 1500BC 1000BC

Dear Algorithm,
It’s not me, it’s you.

by Emilaea Woodwolf

I don’t want algorithms or influencers performative and pervasive selling me happiness bottled with disdain.

I want humanity humbled by harrowing stories helping and hopeful for change.

I want people beautiful and broken thoughtful words intertwined with brilliance with magic with pain.

I want compassion conflated with courage soaked in community in conscience in curiosity give me thinkers give me poets give me artists give me life fill this space with connection not numbers on a page.

Words for the Road

Know, now, there is no one
who can guide you.
Know there will be nothing
to return to.
Know, now, that the trial
will be long.

Come, then. You were called to this,
this wild life.
Go in
and lie down in the darkness.
Hear them now, the wild flocks
in the starlight,
thrashing in the vastness of their passing.

If you cannot have a home, become a song.

– Joseph Fasano

It took me years to realize that Inca and pre-Columbian architecture is directly related to the structure of corn kernels. In a western model of thought, one might judge shapes as irregular, but in a universal thought, everything is a correlation between cosmos, science, art and humanity. (Fractal Nature)

As you can see, the organic growth forms are represented in a logarithmic way, and the fact that these pentagonal, hexagonal and heptagonal blocks coincide with the corn forms.

– Juan Casco

Wild is the music of the autumnal winds amongst the faded woods.
– William Wordsworth

WHAT TO SAY TO THOSE WHO THINK YOU’RE A FOOL FOR CHOOSING POETRY

Tell them yes.
Tell them poetry is what chose you.
Tell them
you had a night, once,
just as they did,
when you knelt alone on the cold tiles
and asked the night
to give you a reason for being.
Tell them the answer was your life.
Tell them we are nothing, nothing
without passion,
the wild dark flock
that fills our rooms with joy.
Tell them
you will give the rest of your blazing days
to try to give another life
that moment,
that moment when you opened
to the coldness
and found that the music of your ruin
was too beautiful to ever be destroyed.

– Joseph Fasano

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives.
– James Joyce

The core myth of modernity is progress.

Modern developments have both helped humanity and harmed us.

They’ve enabled us to expand our reach, and our populations, while also debasing the biosphere.

How can we transcend & include what’s good about modernity?

– @VinceFHorn

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.
– William Wordsworth

You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.
– John Green

Misfortune allows us to grow tired of beautiful things and shows us new ones with its outstretched fingers.
– Robert Walser, (trans. Susan Bernofsky)

The more you fail, the more you succeed. It is only when everything is lost & instead of giving up – you go on, that you experience the momentary prospect of some slight progress. Suddenly you have the feeling – that something new has opened up.
– Alberto Giacometti

Those who knew
what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little.
And less than that.
And at last nothing less than nothing.

– Wislawa Szymborska

All ways of speaking of archetypes are translations from one meta­phor to another.
– James Hillman

A community is
a group of people
who agree to grow together
– Simon Sinek

This war has really demonstrated how much people yearn for moral certainty over moral clarity in times of crisis. And the two are not the same since one requires doubling down on our most tribalistic inclinations, and the other that we check and reflect on them.
– Matt McManus

The Buddha can inhabit this body.

The Buddha can inhabit this mouth.

The Buddha can inhabit this mind.

– Kenneth Folk

May you accept the truth that has presented itself.

May you release assumption and fantasy.

May you build your future on clarity.

– Dr. Thema

Mantra
by Ruth Stone

When I am sad
I sing, remembering
the redwing blackbird’s clack.
Then I want no thing
except to turn time back
to what I had
before love made me sad.
When I forget to weep,
I hear the peeping tree toads
creeping up the bark.
Love lies asleep
and dreams that everything
is in its golden net;
and I am caught there, too,
when I forget.

You knew, didn’t you, how I loved your love? You knew. I adore these sentences.
– Toni Morrison wrote to James Baldwin.

And in all religion, literature, art – I know the secret of your heart.
– Patrick Kavanagh

There will always be people who think suffering leads to enlightenment, who place themselves on the verge of what’s about to break, or go dangerously wrong. Let’s resist them and their thinking, you and I. Let’s not rush toward that sure thing that awaits us, which can dumb us into nonsense and pain.
– Stephen Dunn

You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins beside 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 (trans. Macy and Barrows)

Seek the wisdom that will untie your knot. Seek the path that demands your whole being.
– Rumi

there is a place in the heart that
will never be filled
and
we will wait
and
wait
in that space
– Charles Bukowski

When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered. We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force.
– Robert F. Kennedy

Goethe wisely wrote, however, that ‘we are, and ought to be, obscure to ourselves, turned outwards, and working upon the world which surrounds us.’ We see ourselves, and therefore come to know ourselves, only indirectly, through our engagement with the world at large.
– Iain McGilchrist

in the blackest night even, and just there, by the grace of God, I could see a Great Light. Somewhere there seems to be a great kindness in the abysmal darkness of the deity…;
– C.G. Jung

Be the biggest fan of the people you care about.

Defend them.
Keep the hope alive.
Make them look good.
Catch them when they fall.
Be there when they need you.

– Shane Parrish

Love and a cough / cannot be concealed. / Even a small cough. / Even a small love.
– Anne Sexton

When plunging completely and genuinely into the teachings, one is not allowed to bring along one’s deceptions.
– Chögyam Trungpa

The economy of violence is ruled by a logic of accumulation. The more violence you exert, the more powerful you feel.
– Byung-Chul Han

Being underestimated is one of the biggest competitive advantages you can have.
– Justin Welsh

What place do we occupy in the “universe” ? A point, if that! Why reproach ourselves when we are evidently so insignificant ? Once we make this observation, we grow calm at once: henceforth, no more bother, no more frenzy, metaphysical or otherwise.
– Emil Cioran

How to intervene, how to envisage what might be possible, if that signifies interrupting those for whom nothing is more important than managing to finish the other off?
– Isabelle Stengers

There’s nothing more damaging to poetry than the idea that poetry is subjective. Everyone can sing, too. Imagine if the music industry marketed itself as subjective self-expression, so there was no reason to bother singing in tune.
– Timothy Green

I can think of something more dangerous to poetry than the idea that it is subjective—the idea that it is an industry.
– Steve Edwards

Young people love music, their brains love music, and their holistic development loves music.
– Vaughan Fleischfresser

That’s the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody’s going to be against, and everybody’s going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn’t mean anything.
– Noam Chomsky

I hope you let yourself write a new story.

Don’t just change your location, friends, or wardrobe.

Give yourself permission to actually be different, to show up differently – to be made whole.

– Dr. Thema

at its core, the world is violence; at its core, the world is love. both are true, and my heart breaks either way.
– Cheryl Pappas

Don’t you see how much you have to offer? And yet you still settle for less.
– Marcus Aurelius

One year ago today;
For one brief moment –
standing at the furthest north tip of Ireland –
I felt the Celtic Ray –
I was elated
– Pat Thomas

You do all you can
and then you pray,
the old monk told
his students.
– The Old Monk

Politics, wars, causes — for thousands of years we have ended up with a sack of shit. It’s time we learned to think.
– Bukowski

The ego will endure the worst agonies of neurotic misery rather than one moment of consent to the death of even a small part of its demand or its sense of importance.
– Helen M. Luke

Our dreams constantly speak to us of our beliefs and attitudes. They are of such crucial importance because they largely determine what we do, how we relate to people, and how we react to most situations. Most of us are not remotely aware of how much we are controlled by our beliefs, even less aware of how unconscious our attitude systems are.
– Robert A. Johnson

To inquire into the intricacies of a distant landscape, then, is to provoke thoughts about one’s own interior landscape, and the familiar landscapes of memory. The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.
– Barry Lopez

Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

War creates two categories of persons: those who outlive it and those who don’t.
Both carry wounds.
– Anne Carson

You know, farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.
– President Eisenhower

Without its assiduity to the ridiculous, would the human race have lasted more than a single generation ?
– Emil Cioran

Removing favorite movie moments from their often vapid and/or tacky surroundings, letting them possess my work or my character, gives them and my work a new charge. Collage is the technical equivalent of incarnation.
– Dodie Bellamy

Philosophy, for example, generates its own register of creative constraints, secretes its material of textual reference.
– Guattari

Imagine being a young person being threatened, doxxed, and targeted for political harassment and career destruction by conservatives to have some leftists and progressives dismiss you as performative and another example of the failure of identity politics.
– tamara k. nopper

UFO, For Instance

When the hole between blue spruce widens

& twists into a cosmos when the wild

lilac & campfire atomize & night hangs their smokes

across its belly when in the clearing you are certain

you are not lonelier but there is a lifting in you

where other knowing rises too & divides from the bone

in your feet to the fat round your heart & leaves you

surrounded by your own breath you step out of&

watch vanish & think the night ate it ate your knowing & how

could anyone know anymore you might as well look out

into the clouds of long pine that hang brambled &

orange in branches you listen for howling but none comes

– Rio Cortez

Stop when you plan to stop. This is good practice for the brain (training it to slide in and out of flow) and serves another purpose. If you have people depending on you, they know you won’t shut your door and spend endless time writing.
– Keidi Keating

The War in the Middle East?

We’ve been warring
since Cain killed Abel.

No Jesus or Buddha
or Allah will stop it.

– john zbigniew guzlowski

There are words I consider grievously overused among my generation: liminal, generative, traumatic, bespoke, constellate, gifted as a verb for giving or receiving, inspirational when inspiring is meant, inspiring, for that matter …
– Emily Greenhouse

summer drought
the Zen garden
in bloom
– Stanford M. Forrester

Eventually I will witness a perfect crime and / not recognize it as my very own life.
– Jessica Hincapie

Because of the way a border on a map twists into thorns
my father stood in line in a ruined country with ruined men.
– Oliver de la Paz

Horror mounts
Words fail
Yet
Words
Necessary
– Rachel Newcombe

Sometimes the demon lurks within
in the shadows of our minds,
We can all do with a little more support.
– Muneera Mun

rectifying
the small things
another coffee
– @hegelincanada

I have seen a tree split in two
from the weight of its opposing branches.
It can survive, though its heart is exposed.
I have seen a country do this too.
– Rena Priest

The core of many a fairy tale is the search for the missing anima, the elusive essence of soul and life. The king’s stiffened heart, or the barrenness of the country, reflect a lack of vitality, a need for soul and renewal.
– Erel Shalit, The Way of the Image

Oh, for Christ’s sake, one doesn’t study poets! You read them, and think, That’s marvelous, how is it done, could I do it? and that’s how you learn.
– Philip Larkin

When we are at a decision time in our lives and are not sure how to chose, the image of a Dutch door could be helpful. It is a door that is half open. The bottom part is fixed, but the top part is open and lets you lean out a bit and take in the air and the view. I find it comforting to be at an imaginary Dutch door in my mind until the right choice quietly arrives inside me.
– Gunilla Norris

War took our prayers like nothing else can,
left us dumber than remote drones.
– Jamaal May

(My desperate and sad prayer.)

I…
I pray…
I pray for Israel.
I pray for Palestine.
I pray for all of us now.
And if you condemn me for taking sides,
or judge me for not taking sides,
then maybe you don’t understand
the depths of this love.
Because love itself is the prayer.
And the one who prays.
And the longing and the light.
And the darkness and the answer.
And so I pray for you too.
For all of your conflicting parts.
For all the children fighting within you.
And I pray for you to know
the Consciousness prior to identity.
I pray for you to know
the I Am itself.
Before I am a Palestinian.
Before I am an Israeli.
Before I am Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, or an atheist.
Before division itself.
Before any notion of God or her absence.
Before time.
Before all of this began.
Before the world,
the joy and the sorrow of living.
Before territory and history.
I am what you are.
I am your rage, your grief, your loneliness.
Your fear. Your vulnerable heart.
Your powerlessness. Your shaking.
And through these non-dual eyes,
perhaps we can finally love each other.
In spite of our beliefs.
In spite of our ancient rage and our lust for revenge.
In spite of religion.
In spite of what the holy books
tell us to think.
You are my brother.
My sister.
My child.
My mother.
My father.
I pray for love to permeate the world.
Before it’s too late.
I pray for awakening.
I pray for Palestine.
I pray for Israel.
Before it’s too late.
I pray for all the children.
All the babies.
All the mothers and fathers.
Sisters and brothers.
Friends and enemies.
I pray for the end of hostilities.
Before it’s too late.
I pray for all those who are scared right now.
I pray that my small, sad prayer helps in some way.
Even in some small way.
Even in some tiny way.
I pray for you.
I pray for me.
I pray for us.
I pray…
I…

– Jeff Foster

“It frightens me a great deal to see you floating out into a great sea,” writes Ingeborg Bachmann to Paul Celan, “but I mean to build a ship and bring you back home from your forlornness.”

Document your life, very well. Write down your feelings. Take pictures of the things that moved you. Archive yourself. Let them know that you were here, that you existed, that you lived. Despite it all.
– @ehimeora

It is strange how the passage of time turns every work— and so every man— into fragments. Nothing whole survives— just as a recollection is never anything more than debris, and only becomes sharper through false memories.
– Paul Valery

October that year gathered up all the spilled sunshine of the summer and clad herself in it as in a garment…There was not in all that vanished October one day that did not come in with auroral splendour and go out attended by a fair galaxy of evening stars.
– L.M. Montgomery

As he read, he would tear out the pages of the books he disliked, thereby creating a personal library composed of works with the cores removed, contained within oversized covers.
– Chateaubriand on Joubert

you work with words, which unlike the wallet, is not a material you touch, but you wonder if in reordering them you might disrupt what is presupposed
– Chaun Webster

The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread.
– Bertolt Brecht

It is the role of the poet and the novelist, and also the painter, to reveal the mystery, and the glow in the dark quality which exist in the depths of every individual.
– Patrick Modiano

The ruin isn’t actually on the side of death; as a Ruin, it’s living, it’s consumed as such, aesthetically constituted … We are constantly creating ruins through the activity of remembrance and feeding off them( in order to feed our imagination, our thinking.
– Roland Barthes

What do I believe in? Wanting to write is to be suddenly and violently confronted with that question from the outset, and that sudden violence is a trial you have to overcome.
– Roland Barthes

Send all negative energy back to its rightful place in the universe and turn it into something beautiful.
– Sadenia Eddi Reader

It was on the farm that Harry got his common sense. He didn’t get it in town.
– Harry Truman’s mother, Martha

I didn’t know

what it meant until meaning
sat still enough for me to see

nothing else.

– erin marie lynch

all morning watching
blue sky to the left
storm clouds to the right
– Andrew Terrell

The only way to secure the survival of humanity, and of life on this planet, is to have significantly less humanity, and significantly more of the natural planet.
– George Tsakraklides

I don’t know about method. The what is so much more important than how.
– Ezra Pound

In reality art is always for everyone and for no one.
– Eugenio Montale

Between the ages of twenty and thirty, I read with a voraciousness unmatched in any other decade of my life. I was trying to become less stupid.
– Jeffrey Eugenides

In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.
– Haruki Murakam

One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.

People think I’m disciplined. It is not discipline. It is devotion. There is a great difference.
– Pavarotti

For me, one sign of greatness is when a poet’s late work grows not more ‘well-made’ but more turbulent– as for Yeats:

the emperor’s palace collapses, yet, through this ecstatic destruction, its marble floors are at last translated-

– Joyelle McSweeney

There wasn’t necessarily anything worse about the night than the day, except for the darkness, which was only natural. The day dyes its hair, too, she thought, that’s why it’s weird and why I like it, even if it’s scary. Under cover of night. The dark.
– Lynne Tillman

To love, in the context of Buddhism, is above all to be there.
– Thich Nhat Hanh

The state owns the pop stars, star athletes, movie stars, fake stars, and ‘intelligentsia,’ it becomes clearer during a war.
– Harmony Holiday

Poems have their own fates, like children. You have only to give birth to them.
– Andrei Voznesensky

You feel the days slipping by, elusive as slippery pink worms, through your fingers, and you wonder what you have for your eighteen years, and you think about how, with difficulty and concentration, you could bring back a day, a day of sun, blue skies and watercoloring by the sea.
– Sylvia Plath

if more of us would learn to listen sometimes we all would be the better for it.
– roxane gay

May we be safe & protected,
from inner & outer harm.
– @VinceFHorn

Our world, and the worlds around and within it, is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom — and is far more vibrant, far more holy, than we could ever imagine.
– Sy Montgomery

So many things are possible just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible.
– Norton Juster

Mind will be clear
When heart is clear.
Mind will listen
When heart hears.
Heart will hear,
When mind can see.
– King H. Ironson

Vladmir: You should have been a poet.

Estragon: I was. (Gesture towards his rags.) Isn’t that obvious?


Silence.

– Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Instead of trying to build the perfect world according to this or that ideology, put your attention in how you live and interact with others in each moment of the day.
– Ken McLeod

When you make personal remarks aimed at a person’s complex, you can completely knock them out….they are no longer composed mentally. They can’t answer your questions. They are confused. They are pushed, for the moment, into the unconscious and made helpless.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.
– Robert A. Heinlein

In Minnesota the serious cold arrived / like no cold I’d previously experienced, / an in-your-face honesty to it, a clarity / that always took me by surprise.
– Stephen Dunn

Only the mind that dies from day to day, from moment to moment, to all that it has accumulated, can know what the truth is.
– Krishnamurti

Your “I CAN” is more important than your IQ.
– Robin S. Sharma

And then the slow and languorous tyranny Of orange moon, pale night, and cricket hum.
– Joseph Auslander

You ruin your life by tolerating it. At the end of the day you should be excited to be alive. When you settle for anything less than what you innately desire, you destroy the possibility that lives inside of you, and in that way you cheat both yourself and the world of your potential. The next Michelangelo could be sitting behind a Macbook right now writing an invoice for paperclips, because it pays the bills, or because it is comfortable, or because he can tolerate it. Do not let this happen to you. Do not ruin your life this way. Life and work, and life and love, are not irrespective of each other. They are intrinsically linked. We have to strive to do extraordinary work, we have to strive to find extraordinary love. Only then will we tap into an extraordinarily blissful life.
– Bianca Sparacino

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
– Noam Chomsky

I read somewhere that astronomists found the yawn of the universe is really the sound of five billion mouths that want the same thing at the same time.
– Tara Campbell

Like the rest of you,
I thought of escape.
– Maya Abu Al-Hayyat
(trans. Fady Joudah)

None of us likes to be yelled at. When we yell at our children, they are more likely to shut down instead of listening.
– Stephanie Weiderstrand

Circles of solitude exist, just like circles of dreams and waking, just like the circles of hell.
– Anna Kamieńska

Followers are the ones who leave you. Friends are the ones who stay.
– Bernard T. Joy

Better than an angel or a savior or an ideal love is a true friend, one who can bear witness to, reveal the truths within, and shepherd what feel like the broken places in the heart all into a deeper wholeness.
– Chelan Harkin

Words seem to me safe sites for me to inhabit.
– Gordon Lish

I have been writing and thinking a great deal about loss, about how some things may be irretrievable, and yet an impossible attempt is still made at a kind of recovery, bound up with its own failure.
– Chaun Webster

As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
– J.A. Wheeler

I hope to God you will not ask Me or my People to send Postcard greetings:
– Esther Belin

early fall exists; aftertaste, afterthought;
seclusion & angels exist;
widows & elk exist; every
detail exists . . .
afterglow exists; oaks, elms,
junipers, sameness, loneliness exist;
eider ducks, spiders, & vinegar
exist, & the future, the future
– Inger Christensen

When people throw misplaced anger in your direction, don’t catch it.

It does not belong to you.

– Dr. Thema

It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo.
– @inimitablepgw

for a country so literate in matters of both violence and freedom, america has zero ideas about how oppressed people might liberate themselves other than just hoping real hard for it
– Keith S. Wilson

Writing is the art of disorganizing an order and organizing a disorder.
– Severo Sarduy

Friendly reminder to (not only) academics. Also, remember, don’t judge anyone’s path through your own lens. You never know what others have been through, the support they received or did not receive or what barriers they have/had to shatter.
– Dr. Ania Rynarzewska

What kind of times are these when compassion is viewed as compromise?
– Robin Beth Schaer

The sound of waves. The sound
the sun hums and the moon

echoes guiding tides to that music.
A garden of all the original vowels.

– Thomas Meyer

wet rocks buzzing
rain and thunder southwest
hair, beard, tingle
wind whips bare legs
we should go back
we don’t
– Gary Snyder

Freedom stretches only as far as the limits of our consciousness.
– Carl Jung

The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.
– James Baldwin

These heavy sands are language, tide and wind have silted here.
– James Joyce

Time is a storm in which we are all lost.
– William Carlos Williams

Self-knowing mind, the product, is one and the same as that which produces it.
– Hegel

Earth was given to me in a dream / In a dream I possessed it.
– Louise Glück

My soul
shattered with the strain
of trying to belong to earth—
– Louise Glück

Fanaticism is always a sign that one has adopted one of a pair of opposites at the expense of the other. The high energy of fanaticism is a frantic effort to keep one half of the truth at bay while the other half takes control.
– Robert A. Johnson

Let me hear nothing of the moon, in my night there is no moon, and if it happens that I speak of the stars it is by mistake.
– Sammuel Beckett

I heard them cry – the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind
– Wallace Stevens, Harmonium

i sit here, writing, and suddenly there comes upon me the mystery of the universe and i shudder, i wish on the moment to cease to feel, to hide myself. happy the man who can think deeply, but to feel thus deeply is a curse. how to describe it? horror on horror.
– fernando pessoa

Embracing darkness has the potential to be spiritually, emotionally, and perhaps even biologically therapeutic.
– Justin von Bujdoss

THE AFTERLIFE
While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth,
or riffling through a magazine in bed,
the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.

They’re moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
you go to the place you always thought you would go,
The place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.

Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.

Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.

Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.

There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals – eagles and leopards – and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,

while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.

There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld
by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.

The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.

(And some just smile, forever on)

– Billy Collins

TRULY ALIVE

The way to express our gratitude for life is by being truly alive, not hiding from life in a corner, or watching life pass us by.

The biggest fear we have is not the fear of dying, but the fear to be alive, to be ourselves, to say what we feel, to ask for what we want, to say yes when we want to say yes, and no when we want to say no.

To express what is in our hearts is to be truly alive. If we pretend to be what we are not, how can we be truly alive?

– Don Miguel Ruiz

Compassion asks us to look into our own hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else.
– Karen Armstrong

All stories are also the stories of hands — picking up, balancing, pointing, joining, kneading, threading, caressing, abandoned in sleep, cutting, eating, wiping, playing music, scratching, grasping, peeling, clenching, pulling a trigger, folding.
– John Berger

The saints cannot distinguish between being with other people and being alone: another good reason for becoming one. They live in trees and eat air. Staring past or through us, they see things which we would call not there. We on the contrary see them. They smell of old fur coats stored for a long time in the attic. When they move they ripple. Two of them passed here yesterday, filled and vacated and filled by the wind, like drained pillows blowing across a derelict lot, their twisted and scorched feet not touching the ground, their feathers catching in thistles. What they touched emptied of colour. Whether they are dead or not is a moot point. Shreds of they litter history, a hand here, a bone there: is it suffering or goodness that makes them holy, or can anyone tell the difference? Though they pray, they do not pray for us. Prayers peel off them like burned skin healing. Once they tried to save something, others or their own souls. Now they seem to have no use, like the colours on blind fish. Nevertheless they are sacred. They drift through the atmosphere, their blue eyes sucked dry by the ordeal of seeing, exuding gaps in the landscape as water exudes mist. They blink and reality shivers.
– Margaret Atwood

At first it seems as though things exist outside one another. The sun is not the moon. This galaxy is not another galaxy. You are outside me. The father is outside the son. But looking deeply, we see that things are interwoven.

We cannot take the rain out of the flower or the oxygen out of the tree. We cannot take the father out of the son or the son out of the father. We cannot take anything out of anything else. We are the mountains and rivers; we are the sun and stars. Everything inter-is.

This is what the physicist David Bohm called “the implicate order.”
At first we see only “the explicate order,” but as soon as we realize that things do not exist outside one another, we touch the deepest level of the cosmic. We realize that we cannot take the water out of the wave. And we cannot take the wave out of the water. Just as the wave is the water itself, we are the ultimate.

– Thich Nhat Hanh

There is no kingdom like the forests.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

And still
it stands,
the question
not how to begin
again, but rather

Why?

– Franz Wright

For a Student Who Said Reading Poetry
Is a Waste of Time in a World at War

I know. I know
we have no words now,
no way
to begin to praise
this world.

Lie still,
when you leave here, in the shadows.

The wind just might be children
in the willows.
All you have to do today
os listen.
Wars are made by those who hear no birds.

– Joseph Fasano

I found the poems in the fields
And only wrote them down
– John Clare

I ask my grandmother if there was ever a time
she felt like a normal person every day,
not in danger, and she thinks for as long
as it takes a sun to set and says, Yes.
I always feel like a normal person.
They just don’t see me as one.
– Naomi Shihab Nye

We need to sit on the rim
of the well of darkness
and fish for fallen light,
with patience.
– Pablo Neruda

I do not think I had ever been more acutely aware of how blind a novelist is when it comes to his own books, and how much more the readers know about what he has written than he does.
– Patrick Modiano

We’re all dreamers; we don’t know who we are.
– Louise Glück

Hot take: lots of people who love “the mountains” actually just love wild places with public access, and mountains are one of the few environments left where people can connect to such places. I wish more people could connect to their home environments in that way…
– Krista Langlois

Capitalistic subjectivity seeks to gain power by controlling and neutralizing the maximum number of existential refrains.
– Guattari

God said to Eve
your children will love you
but hate each other.

They will hug you
and lay each other
in a grave with an ax.

There will be nothing
you can do but moan.

– john zbigniew guzlowski

Why is this age,
worse than earlier ages?
In a stupor of grief and dread
have we not fingered
the foulest wounds
and left them unhealed
by our hands…
– Anna Akhmatova

In the stretches of chaos that constituted my childhood and adolescence, years spent as a boarder, my only oxygen was reading.
– Patrick Modiano

From wonder into wonder
Existence opens.
– Lao Tzu

How alone I am, but in music my desolation is my rejoicing.
– Louise Glück

It’s a gift to be present at a time when so many brilliant thinkers, scholars, poets and writers are refusing the choices the binaries late capitalism has given us— and doing so from profound love for this devastated, grieving world.
– Alina Stefanescu

We are still haunted,
as are the stairs, the mirrors,
the cups and saucers,

trees, the very air,
all dripping with ghosts. The dead
are our monuments,

the screaming silent
statues we share our mouths with.
The backs of our throats

are hoarse with their ghosts.

– George Szirtes

We are witnessing the greatest moral failure of western states in recent history. Any legitimacy to their claims of commitment to democracy, human rights, international law, and accountability is completely bankrupt. I will never forgive or forget.
– Amy Fallas

What does it means to protest suffering, as distinct from acknowledging it?
– Susan Sontag

reunion blues
the longing for something
that was never there
– @hegelincanada

I wish US libraries would sell good coffee and healthy snacks like Finnish libraries do.
– Sara Read

Fear thrives in the absence of mutual understanding and diversity, and it is a poisonous weapon. But there is an antidote: compassion. Compassion combats fear.
– Gyalwang Drukpa

No aspect of the human psyche can live in a healthy state unless it is balanced by its complementary opposite. If the masculine mind tries to live without its “other half,” the feminine soul, then the masculine becomes unbalanced, sick, and finally monstrous. Power without love becomes brutality. Feeling without masculine strength becomes woolly sentimentality. When one side of human nature grows out of balance with the other, it becomes a tyranny in the soul.
– Robert A. Johnson, We

And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.
– Roald Dahl

The difference between being and having is not essentially that between East and West. The difference is rather between a society centered around persons and one centered around things.
– Erich Fromm

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie…
– Tim O’Brien

It is not the young man who is most happy, but the old man who has lived beautifully; for despite being at his very peak the young man stumbles around as if he were of many minds, whereas the old man has settled into old age as if in a harbor, secure in his gratitude for the good things he was once unsure of.
– Epicurus

Culture presumes an environment in which deep attention is possible. Increasingly, such immersive reflection is being displaced by an entirely different form of attention: hyperattention.
– Byung-chul Han

What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.
– Hegel

Hope never arrives to rescue. He is always there with you, hugging your soul when you need it most.
– Sidney Jones, Jr.

So, what is a poem? Allow me to riff. It arises out of the ordinary, out of the gravitation in whose haul we daily live.
– John Barr

The God I Know (Despite Everything)

The God I know
doesn’t occupy lands
and support the oppression
of a people for decade
after decade.

The God I know
doesn’t kill the children
of one people
to liberate the children
of another.

The God I know
doesn’t condone violence
of any kind as justice
no matter how righteous
that violence seems to some.

The God I know
sits with parents of children lost and living
on both sides of the blockade
as they do their best to tend their pain
and embody love in a war zone.

The God I know
keeps laying bricks
on the bridge to peace
even when more parts of that bridge
are blasted away every day.

The God I know
helps bear loads too heavy
to carry up mountains
we may not summit
in this lifetime.

The God I know
takes the packs of the weary,
sets the table with hope, and
invites us to sit together to listen
long enough to find a new way forward.

– Heidi Barr

It’s On Us
It’s the old grief again,
come today,
on this night of Shabbat, of Jumuah,
a time to rest, ourselves, our lands, our ancient hatreds.
Would this could be a night of olives and honey,
of figs and pomegranates,
of sweetness.
Who by heart, and who by soul, who by dream and who by drift,
Who by אבודה, by prayer, by work,
Who by love and who by sorrow,
Who by peace and who by disaster
Homeseekers, Godwrestlers, journeymakers
Who by light and who by forest,
Today, all are called to stand at the gates of Gaza.
Rings and words sewn into our hems,
our hearts hidden beneath suitcase lining.
Today we cry out for peace
to the Source of all Light,
to all who will listen,
all who will hear—
Let them hear!
Today we bless and invite the quiet
the poem summons,
be for us an alef bet of safety.
Neruda said,
If we …for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Love is the User Manual, on hard days & holy days…
V’ahavta …and you shall love…
May our lives be a blessing
May we live and let live
each day to its fullest
for the sake of all that is life,
O New ear, that hears! O little sister, o my brother!
– Judyth Hill

All I can do is bow
Ever more deeply
To every trove of sorrow
Life presents me with
As a gift
To open me
To my fullness.
– Chelan Harkin

The Dharma is not here to console you, it’s here to rock your fucking world.
– @VinceFHorn

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings.’
– Susan Sontag

No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious & charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.
– kurt vonnegut

two days of cold rain
our schedule fills
with doodles
– Rural Italics

A bodhisattva is someone who has compassion within himself or herself and who is able to make another person smile or help someone suffer less. Every one of us is capable of this.
– Thich Nhat Hanh

I have to tell you what I’ve learned, that I know now
what happens to the dreamers.
They don’t feel it when they change. One day
they wake, they dress, they are old.
– Louise Glück

Man’s task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.
– C.G. Jung

I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.
– Sylvia Plath

There is no existence except against the backdrop of inexistence, and inversely, ‘ex-sistence’ only derives its support from an ‘out there’ that is not.
– Lacan

Uncharitably one writes in order to stop oneself from feeling too much; uncharitably one writes to become closer to that feeling self.
– Yiyun Li

I’ll say it plainly— / we need you down here.
– Tyree Daye

Insight, my sister said.
Now it is here.
But hard to see in the darkness.

You must find your footing
before you put your weight on it.

– Louise Glück, Autumn

Thought: Each maker of an object—however minor or even trivial—feels the same pleasure upon completion felt by the great master upon completing her masterpiece.
– Daisy Fried

Don’t get too precious, don’t get too fearful, stay steady.
– Toni Morrison

Where did you go next, after those days, / where although you could not speak you were not lost?
– Louise Glück

Colonialism, its inherent violence, is invisible to anyone with a colonial mindset. Literally invisible. Every Indigenous person knows this, and it can’t be explained to the colonizer bc its normalized for them. It’s the default.
– Sonia Sulaiman

For heaven’s sake, dearest, you to whom my life is devoted, take care of yourself!
– Franz Kafka, 1912.

“barbarian” is not a technical term in foreign policy or int. law— it is a pejorative used to to dehumanize populations and erase distinctions between people. It is a word that exists to justify annihilation. Eliot Cohen’s “barbarism” tome in Atlantic monthly is terrifying.
– Alina Stefanescu

Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands.

Theirs is the responsibility for deciding if they want merely to live, or to fulfill the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for making gods.

– Henri Bergson

I feel like some of the Buddhist meditation ~spirituality types are probably deep psychopaths or narcissists? Is this a fair assessment?
– @aruonora

Word of the day is ‘snerdle’ (18th century dialect): to wrap up cosily beneath the covers and hold off the day for a little longer.
– Susie Dent

Wisdom comes to us
when it can no longer do any good.
– Gabriel García Márquez

Not all criticism is constructive. Not all critics are thinking critically.

Weak critiques attack your identity. Decent critiques challenge your ideas. Strong critiques sharpen your thinking and improve your ideas.

Listen closely to the people who care enough to help you grow.

– Adam Grant

I think perfection is ugly. Somewhere in the things humans make, I want to see scars, failure, disorder, distortion.
– Yohji Yamamoto

Not one single person in history has gotten an alcoholic sober. (Maybe you’ll be the first. But—and I say this with love—I doubt it.) If it is someone else’s problem, you probably don’t have the solution.
– Anne Lamott

The greatest remedy for anger is delay.
– Seneca

A warrior should be capable of artfully conducting his or her life in every action, from drinking tea to running a country.
– Chögyam Trungpa

There are certain poems written to be analyzed by someone well-versed in New Criticism.
– @BurlHorniachek

The less you say,
the greater its meaning,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk

He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.
– Jean-Luc Godard

september 11
all my TVs
on the same channel
– Marco Fraticelli

Whatever the particular thing is that you think is the worst thing in the world… it is part of you.
– Brad Warner

Across the flat expanse of the rice-fields, with the broad placid river winding through them … while afar off looms the great chain of the western Ghauts … the Neilgherries or Blue Mountains, hardly distinguishable from the azure sky above.
– James Frazer

Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it form.
– Jean Luc Godard

What a quality of innocence people have when they don’t expect to be harmed.
– Hanif Kureishi

When you’re lacking motivation, remind yourself: discipline now, freedom later. The labor will pass, and the rewards will last.
– Daily Stoic

Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn’t know if she would ever find out where it was or become part of it.
– Sally Rooney, Normal People

Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it form.
– Jean Luc Godard

There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.
– Mary Shelley

When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
– Milan Kundera

Yes, all of this is sorrow. But leave a little love burning always like the small bulb in the room of a sleeping baby that gives him a bit of security and quiet love though he doesn’t know what light is or where it comes from.
– Yehuda Amichai

All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travelers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.
– Thomas Wolfe

Last night, I drove home and then sat in my car until the snow covered the windshield.I was a small thing in a small world being covered in thick snow.
– Ollie Schminkey

For some you will be a mystic
For some you will be crazy
For some you will be a wise man
For others you will be misunderstood
You will be a good example to some
You will be a danger to others
To some people you can be a good friend
Do you realize?
You are merely a reflection of the State of mind of others.

Therefore always be yourself

Without caring what others think about you for there is no greater greatness in all existence, that freedom to express yourself as you are.

– Unknown

Even though we give (give up) ourselves to this mortal process of continuing, it is the movement that creates the form.
– Richard Howard

Close your eyes; walk bravely through.
– Arna Bontemps

That night, we don’t touch.

We ruin nothing.

We get bagels in the morning before you leave on a train,

and I smoke a skinny cigarette and think

I look glam, like an Italian diva.

– Megan Fernandes

All this belongs to you: on the other hand, I planted the seeds.
– Louise Glück

Even those who seem to be “devils,” derive their existence from the Good, and are naturally good], and desire the Beautiful and Good in desiring existence, life, and consciousness, … And they are called evil through the deprivation and the loss whereby they have lapsed from their proper virtues. Hence they are evil only insofar as they lack [true] existence; and in desiring evil, they desire non-existence.
– Pseudo-Dionysius

Some men will want to hold you like the answer. You are not the answer. You are not the problem.
– Sarah Kay

We live in an eternal now—but yet, most people are under the delusion that they live for a future. And so they dementedly rush around living for the future, and they’re making all sorts of plans for everything to be alright later on, and when these plans mature they’re unable to enjoy them because they’re still working for some other future beyond that. Insane!
– Alan Watts

sleeping through
a night of cold wind
in a warm bed
– Ogawa

Almost everything that matters is hard, and everything matters…
– Rainer Maria Rilke

If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.
– Jean Genet

This is the precept
by which I have lived:
Prepare for the worst;
expect the best;
and take what comes.
– Hannah Arendt

A poem must burn with a truth-seeking flame and be a small symphony of language, too.
– Henri Cole

Indeed I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing to do.
– Oscar Wilde

What I came to love
I couldn’t grasp.
What surrounds me [now]
I can’t let go of.

Everything is sinking.
Twilight looms.
Nothing can subdue me:
This is the course of a life.

– Hannah Arendt

SWITCH PLATE
by Al Ortolani
The day moves by me, and I’m still
at the same old desk that was two-wheeled
into my room by the custodian. The lights
run on some kind of motion detector.
If no one moves, let’s say, in ten minutes,
they blink out, and I have to raise my arms
and wave them like crazy. Possibly,
they click back on. Possibly, they don’t.
At this point, I have to get up and walk
the room in the dark until the shadow of me
is recognized in the recesses of the switch
plate. Once in a while I’ll have a class
of high school kids writing essays,
and the lights will suddenly black out,
and they will all look up astonished
like they’ve really done something cool.

Queer archives can be viewed as the material instantiation of Derrida’s deconstructed archive; they are composed of material practices that challenge traditional concepts of history and understand the quest for history as a psychic need rather than a science.
– Ann Cvetkovich

Piecing together an identity has taught me how to look for what’s hidden, to see beyond public definitions …
– Jean Carlamusto

Reading is a mere makeshift for original thinking.
– Arthur Schopenhauer

Someone new may speak
if I, today, keep silent.

– Franz Wright

My nerves are turned on. I hear them like musical instruments.
– Anne Sexton

I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship, was that one had to explain nothing.
– Katherine Mansfield

Breaking
Did I believe I had a clear mind?
It was like the water of a river
flowing shallow over the ice. And now
that the rising water has broken
the ice, I see that what I thought
was the light is part of the dark.
– Wendell Berry

guided by stars
outriding white horses
magical redwings
– James Gilbert

I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.
– Anaïs Nin

It was a dark and soundless day near the end of the year, and clouds were hanging low in the heavens.
– Edgar Allan Poe

We must bring about a revolution in our way of living our everyday lives, because our happiness, our lives, are within ourselves.
– Thich Nhat Hanh

Imagine bombing Palermo because you wanted to “obliterate” the Mafia.
– Kazim Ali

Is not this a true autumn day?
Just the still melancholy that I love –
that makes life and nature harmonise.
– George Eliot

glacial ice
the way her blue eyes
took the news
– william scott

Words are never ‘only words’; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.
– Slavoj Žižek

I wished for what I always wish for. I wished for another poem.
– Louise Glück

It’s an old Gnostic tradition that we don’t invent things, we just remember.
– Robert Bly

What a grief it will be to you
through all the years to come. No remedy,
no way to cure the damage once it’s done.
Come, while there’s still time, think hard
– The Iliad

The goal of media is to make every problem, your problem.
– @naval

At the end of the day, the right people fight for you.The right people show up. The right people care, not only when life is convenient, but when it is difficult and messy and it aches all over.
– Bianca Sparacino

I don’t want to sound like a misanthrope, but there’s something wrong with us.
– Ishmael Reed

Become so attracted
To the love in your own heart
That you would
Hastily disarm yourself
Of every weapon of separation
To return fully
To Her embrace.
– Chelan Harkin

Anger is the most destructive of emotional responses, for it clouds your vision the most.
– Robert Greene

It makes me wonder how loud our songs are heard,
and how far they spread beyond our knowing.
– Isabella Slattery-Shannon

What would it be like to sit by a creek, the scent of wildflowers and sage, the warmth and comfort of knowing. Knowing we had nothing to bear, no fears to combat, no dread to breathe. What would it be like?
– Tracy Shawn

I am not even concerned with being original. Trying to be original is very dangerous
– Javier Marías

First there was Greek civilization. Then there was the Renaissance. Now we’re entering the Age of the Ass.
– Jean-Luc Godard

Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
– Mark Strand

You can feel compassion for others in your heart without deactivating your brain. I’m a fan of using both.
– Leah Callen

The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole.
– Carl Jung

Magic is dangerous since what accords with unreason confuses, allures and provokes; and I am always its first victim.
– @RedBookJung

Sacred Outlook means perceiving the world and oneself as intrinsically good and unconditionally free.
– Chögyam Trungpa

Every unfinished thing is innocent // because it does not know how it will end.
– Hua Xi

Every generation laughs
at the old fashions,
but follows religiously
the new.
– Thoreau

I don’t like stadium poetry. I like, ‘Come closer, let me whisper in your ear.’
– Louise Gluck

Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face.The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow on to others.
– CG Jung

As long as I am not conscious of my own psychology, I am bound to project it onto other people or things … and so it is through projection that I am first confronted with inner psychic content.
– Gerhard Adler

Perhaps our age has gone to analysis not to be loved or get cured, or even to Know Thyself. Perhaps we go to be given a case history, to be told into a soul story and given a plot to live by.
– James Hillman

Afternoon in the October Woods
by Andrea Potos

I might be a lost letter
lifted from the envelope of autumn–
around me the good
gold words drift
and fall. The sun
slants low
to read me.

America. What splendor! What poverty! What humanity! What inhumanity! What mutual goodwill! What individual isolation! What loyalty to the ideal! What hypocrisy! What a triumph of conscience! What perversity!
– Czeslaw Milosz

I’m a daytime writer, but since I waste the morning I’ve become an afternoon writer.
– Italo Calvino

Lament…is the most undifferentiated, impotent expression of language; it contains scarcely more than the sensuous breath; and even where there is only a rustling of plants, in it there is always a lament. Because she is mute, nature mourns.
– Walter Benjamin

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone’s.
– Dorianne Laux

Yet it has to be the vocation of the novelist, when faced with this large blank page of oblivion, to make a few faded words visible again, like lost icebergs adrift on the surface of the ocean.
– Patrick Modiano

My medium is poetry; my tool is American English, a language I adore for its shorthand syntax, its outrageous slop, its mongrel weirdness. I think and dream and feel in this language like the wiry old rose bush that pushes its way out from my front yard to splay its blooms above the cracked sidewalk.
– Cate Marvin

If the Earth is to be remembered and thought of as a sacred, living being and related to as a sacred, living being, then it asks of us to respond from a real place inside of ourselves.
– Emergence Magazine

I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of the community.
– bell hooks

Intelligence has little to do with poetry. Poetry springs from something deeper; it’s beyond intelligence. It may not even be linked with wisdom. It’s a thing of its own; it has a nature of its own. Undefinable.
– Jorge Luis Borges

To save something from the time where we will never be again.
– Annie Ernaux

That which mourns feels itself thoroughly known by the unknowable. To be named–even when the namer is Godlike and blissful–perhaps always remains an intimation of mourning.
– Walter Benjamin

And he. Though already without the police of his tongue
he’s apparently still writing.
Much further from the casino of history.
From truths squandered on these nights
where the full moon of a vowel unmasks us.
– Ewa Lipska, When A Great Poet Dies in My Country

People still live amid the ruins. You can see them hanging laundry from a room on the third floor of a building cut in half. You see kids climbing over a 10-foot mound of rubble on their way home with some bread & water. Life has to go on…
– Samer Attar

Seeing is a neglected enterprise.
– Saul Leiter

squinting but with ears
trying to hear the flowers
as they say goodbye
– @ehinsen

The ‘I’ that speaks puts forth — into the void that desire alone makes habitable — a world I no longer possess.
– Dan Beachy-Quick

I’ve oft returned to this thought,
that all things loved are pursued and never caught,
even as you slept beside me you were flying off.
– Dean Young

when i was younger, i (naively) thought that poems were supposed to cut through the bullshit of the world. all poems. these days i know poems can be bullshit, too. they can reproduce the political order as is, while pretending to transform things
– chen chen

Where the waters do agree, it is quite wonderful the relief they give.
– Jane Austen

To the algorithm, hear my plea:
Bring me artists with vibrant hues
poets, writers, voices weird and free
Humans with divergent views
unschooling parents, seeking ways anew
traumatized souls, breaking cycles of past
guiding kids to teach what’s true,
striving to find peace and healing at last.
Whisk in cats with graceful ways
Bless me with posts diverse and unmasked
with info dumps, fixations each day.
Show me people oft outcast.
Almighty algorithm hear my plea
help me find people like me.
– Caiti Quatmann

The reward of the young scientist is the emotional thrill of being the first person in the history of the world to see something or understand something. Nothing can compare with that experience…The reward of the old scientist is the sense of having seen a vague sketch grow into a masterly landscape.
– Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

When a warrior learns to stop the internal dialogue, everything becomes possible; the most far-fetched schemes become attainable.
– Carlos Castaneda

Some things are not meant for us. We mostly know the doors that are best to keep shut. If we still insist on opening them, we will have the consequences. Remaining closed these off-limit-doors are actually silent guides to doors that are ours to open.
– Gunilla Norris

The rest I have told you already.
A few years of fluency, and then
the long silence, like the silence in the valley
before the mountains send back
your own voice changed to the voice of nature.

This silence is my companion now.
I ask: of what did my soul die?
and the silence answers

if your soul died, whose life
are you living and
when did you become that person?
– Louise Glück

BLESSING FOR PEACE


As the fever of day calms towards twilight
May all that is strained in us come to ease.
We pray for all who suffered violence today,
May an unexpected serenity surprise them.
For those who risk their lives each day for peace,
May their hearts glimpse providence at the heart of history.
That those who make riches from violence and war
Might hear in their dreams the cries of the lost.
That we might see through our fear of each other
A new vision to heal our fatal attraction to aggression.
That those who enjoy the privilege of peace
Might not forget their tormented brothers and sisters.
That the wolf might lie down with the lamb,
That our swords be beaten into ploughshares
And no hurt or harm be done
Anywhere along the holy mountain.

– John O’Donohue

We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstractions police and threaten us.
– Robert Hayden

Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Dreams are beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk awhile with the still are.
– David Mitchell

Parable of the Hostages
by Louise Glück

The Greeks are sitting on the beach
wondering what to do when the war ends. No one
wants to go home, back
to that bony island; everyone wants a little more
of what there is in Troy, more
life on the edge, that sense of every day as being
packed with surprises. But how to explain this
to the ones at home to whom
fighting a war is a plausible
excuse for absence, whereas
exploring one’s capacity for diversion
is not. Well, this can be faced
later; these
are men of action, ready to leave
insight to the women and children.
Thinking things over in the hot sun, pleased
by a new strength in their forearms, which seem
more golden than they did at home, some
begin to miss their families a little,
to miss their wives, to want to see
if the war has aged them. And a few grow
slightly uneasy: what if war
is just a male version of dressing up,
a game devised to avoid
profound spiritual questions? Ah,
but it wasn’t only the war. The world had begun
calling them, an opera beginning with the war’s
loud chords and ending with the floating aria of the sirens.
There on the beach, discussing the various
timetables for getting home, no one believed
it could take ten years to get back to Ithaca;
no one foresaw that decade of insoluble dilemmas—oh unanswerable
affliction of the human heart: how to divide
the world’s beauty into acceptable
and unacceptable loves! On the shores of Troy,
how could the Greeks know
they were hostages already: who once
delays the journey is
already enthralled; how could they know
that of their small number
some would be held forever by the dreams of pleasure,
some by sleep, some by music?

Running Orders

They call us now,
before they drop the bombs.
The phone rings
and someone who knows my first name
calls and says in perfect Arabic
“This is David.”
And in my stupor of sonic booms and glass-shattering symphonies
still smashing around in my head
I think, Do I know any Davids in Gaza?
They call us now to say
Run.
You have 58 seconds from the end of this message.
Your house is next.
They think of it as some kind of
war-time courtesy.
It doesn’t matter that
there is nowhere to run to.
It means nothing that the borders are closed
and your papers are worthless
and mark you only for a life sentence
in this prison by the sea
and the alleyways are narrow
and there are more human lives
packed one against the other
more than any other place on earth
Just run.
We aren’t trying to kill you.
It doesn’t matter that
you can’t call us back to tell us
the people we claim to want aren’t in your house
that there’s no one here
except you and your children
who were cheering for Argentina
sharing the last loaf of bread for this week
counting candles left in case the power goes out.
It doesn’t matter that you have children.
You live in the wrong place
and now is your chance to run
to nowhere.
It doesn’t matter
that 58 seconds isn’t long enough
to find your wedding album
or your son’s favorite blanket
or your daughter’s almost completed college application
or your shoes
or to gather everyone in the house.
It doesn’t matter what you had planned.
It doesn’t matter who you are.
Prove you’re human.
Prove you stand on two legs.
Run.

– Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Everything sounds so simple, so conventional.
I must have been, she thinks, a simple girl.
– Louise Glück

You laugh like a little girl,
and inside you think like a martyr.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

Perky does not mean that one is perked up by temporary situations, but it refers to unconditional cheerfulness, which comes from ongoing discipline.
– Chögyam Trungpa

We need more understanding of human nature, because the only danger that exists is man himself — he is the great danger, and we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man — far too little.
– C.G. Jung

He was earthly; she was aerial. He was made of clay and iron; she was made of fire and dreaming.
– Graham Joyce

I woke up in another world.
As simple as that.
– Louise Glück

And you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover. But the splendid clarity of your intelligence, and the remorseless honesty of your intellect bring you to a halt. You indulge in no mystifications.
– Virginia Woolf

If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That’s the beginning of social protest.
– Audre Lorde

You grind the coffee / with the small roar of a mind / trying to clear itself.
– Linda Pastan

I change too quickly: my today refutes my yesterday. When I ascend I often jump over steps, and no step forgives me that.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

Whereas the average individual has no soul of his own, because the group and its canon of values tell him what he may or may not be psychically, the hero is one who can call his soul his own because he has fought for it and won it.
– Erich Neumann

By developing gentleness toward ourselves, the irritation of being with oneself is taken away. When that kind of friendliness to oneself occurs, then one also develops friendliness toward the rest of the world. At that point, sadness, loneliness, and wretchedness begin to dissipate. We develop a sense of humour. We don’t get so pissed off if we have a bad cup of coffee in the morning. Appreciating our human dignity comes from that.
– Chögyam Trungpa

It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life — and herein lies its secret — takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.
– Milan Kundera

Before we kill another child
for righteousness’ sake, to serve
some blissful killer’s sacred cause,
some bloody patriot’s anthem
and his flag, let us leave forever
our ancestral lands, our holy books,
our god thoughtified to the mean
of our smallest selves. Let us go
to the graveyard and lie down
forever among the speechless stones.
– Wendell Berry

Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work.
– Plotinus

To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.
– Bertrand Russell

A man is so prone to systems and to abstract conclusions that he is prepared to distort the truth on purpose, prepared to deny the visible and the audible just so he can justify his own logic.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous man, the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the man in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable.
– Henry Miller

The reverse side also has a reverse side.
– Japanese Proverb

The practice of all the bodhisattvas is to leave behind one’s homeland,
Where our attachment to family and friends overwhelms us like a torrent,
While our aversion towards enemies rages inside us like a blazing fire,
And delusion’s darkness obscures what must be adopted and abandoned.
– Gyelse Tokme Zangpo

Because they want to sell their products, advertisers water the seed of craving in you; they want you to consume so that you will have sensual pleasure.
– Thich Nhat Hanh

If we can afford wars, we can afford to cancel student debt.

If we can afford wars, we can afford Medicare for All.

If we can afford wars, we can afford tuition-free college.

Let’s invest in people the way we invest in the military industrial complex.

– Nina Turner

Community is not required for political resistance but is helpful, for inspiration, strength, and protection.

Building community can involve pushing ourselves, like Audre Lorde. She told herself, “Now is the time, if ever, once and for all, to alter the patterns of isolation.”

– tamara k. nopper

If you want to be rich, then be kind.

It’s hard to create wealth unless you work well with others, and it’s hard to work well with others if you are unlikable.

– James Clear

Doesn’t everyone want to feel in the night
the beloved body, compass, polestar,
to hear the quiet breathing that says
I am alive,
– Louise Glück

“Distrust unhappy intelligence” is one heuristic,

coexists alongside “most wisdom is veined with grief”

– @the_wilderless

It would be well if we all persons in authority, parents and all who act for parents, could make up our minds that there is no sort of knowledge to be got in these early years so valuable to children as that which they get for themselves of the world they live in.
– C. Mason

Music has always felt very real to me.
– Joan Osborne

Moon Over Gaza

I am lonely
for my friends.
They liked me,
trusted my coming.
I think they looked up at me
more than other people do.

I who have been staring down so long
see no reason for the sorrows humans make.
I dislike the scuffle and dust of bombs blasting
very much. It blocks my view.

A landscape of sorrow and grieving
feels different afterwards.
Different sheen from a simple desert,
children who say my name
like a prayer.

Sometimes I am bigger than
a golden plate,
a giant coin
and everyone gasps.

Maybe it is wrong
that I am so calm.

– Naomi Shihab Nye

I think when I met you,
I became myself again.
And we stumbled towards
this mad world and made sense of it. Together.
– RM Drake

Tickets

The day I’m killed
my killer will find
tickets in my pockets:
One to peace,
one to fields and the rain,
and one
to humanity’s conscience

I beg you – please don’t waste them.
I beg you, you who kill me: Go.

– Samih al-Qasim

There is no ‘after’
in a dead man’s pocket. Time
does not hang about

waiting for the dead.
After the murder there is
the endless present

of loss and the tears
of distant planets. Move on
my love. The planets

are turning vast wheels.

– George Szirtes

Empty me of the bitterness and disappointments of being nothing but
myself
Immerse me in the mystery of reality
Fill me with love for the truly afflicted

– Franz Wright

Audibly, the stresses falling
about us, beyond material constraint.
– D. S. Waldman

Don’t be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.
– Arthur Miller

We are citizens of the most powerful country on earth—we are also citizens of a country that stands upon the wrong side of every liberation struggle on earth.
– Audre Lorde

A long night I spent
thinking that reality was the story
of the human species
– Etel Adnan

in my province
even trained monkeys
wear noble hats
– Kobayashi Issa

Alas, very soon everything will disappear:
the birdcalls, the delicate blossoms. In the end,
even the earth itself will follow the artist’s name into oblivion.
– Louise Glück, Primavera

I read everything. I read my way out of the two libraries in Harlem by the time I was thirteen. One does learn a great deal about writing this way.
– James Baldwin

stretched
the length of this sunset
Monday blues
– Kirsten Cliff Elliot

The art is not one of forgetting but letting go…
– Rebecca Solnit

We are “fragile creatures,” and it is from this weakness, not despite it, that we “discover the possibility of true joy.”
– Desmond Tutu

What we lose in our hurry is, simply, humanity—and without humanity, it becomes harder and harder to lead a good life.
– Pico Iyer

I on the earth, darkened
by so much light, I, blind,
dreaming of god, dreaming of you, dreaming
how much I love you.
– Vicente Gaos

Behold! the soul shall waft away,
Whene’er we come to die,
And leave its cottage made of clay,
In twinkling of an eye.
– Jupiter Hammon

The streets of London have their map, but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?
– Virginia Woolf

In the chaos of the world, peace is not elusive; it resides within each mindful breath.
– Buddha Project

Sometimes where you feel the most safe is where you least belong.
– Elif Shafak

Leonard Cohen said his teacher once told him that the older you get the lonelier you become, and the deeper the love you need. This is because, as we go through life, we tend to over-identify with being the hero of our stories.

This hero isn’t exactly having fun: he’s getting kicked around, humiliated, and disgraced. But if we can let go of identifying with him, we can find our rightful place in the universe, and a love more satisfying than any we’ve ever known.

People constantly throw around the term ‘Hero’s Journey’ without having any idea what it really means. Everyone from CEOs to wellness-influencers thinks the Hero’s Journey means facing your fears, slaying a dragon, and gaining 25k followers on Instagram. But that’s not the real hero’s journey.

In the real hero’s journey, the dragon slays YOU. Much to your surprise, you couldn’t make that marriage work. Much to your surprise, you turned forty with no kids, no house, and no prospects. Much to your surprise, the world didn’t want the gifts you proudly offered it.

If you are foolish, this is where you will abort the journey and start another, and another, abusing your heart over and over for the brief illusion of winning.

But if you are wise, you will let yourself be shattered, and return to the village, humbled, but with a newfound sense that you don’t have to identify with the part of you that needs to win, needs to be recognized, needs to know. This is where your transcendent life begins.

So embrace humility in everything. Life isn’t out to get you, nor are your struggles your fault.

Every defeat is just an angel, tugging at your sleeve, telling you that you don’t have to keep banging your head against the wall. Leave that striver there, trapped in his lonely ambitions. Just walk away, and life in its vastness will embrace you.

– Paul Weinfield

You can’t make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them.
– Ray Bradbury

So many of us have not been truly and deeply heard.

How difficult then to truly listen.

– David Bedrick

You see, when the world becomes too solid for nuance, when it hardens up and crystallizes into a binary that forces you to pick a side, compelling you to become intelligible to the hardness that creeps on its once loamy surfaces, cracks become the first responders.

We need a politics of tenderness more than ever. Not tenderness as capitulation to particular conclusions that have already been made. Not tenderness as “if you don’t see the world as I do, there’s something wrong with you.” But tenderness as the nurturing of grace that allows something different, something even beautiful, to be born in the midst of the fires.

– Báyò Akómoláfé

one must bend

in the floating world —

snow on the bamboo

– Chiyo-ni

even the butterfly

voiceless —

Buddhist service

– Chiyo-ni

​Preserving yourself and knowing your boundaries is not the same thing as exclusively seeking your own happiness. It’s about the healing process of learning to skillfully discern what will and will not serve all beings, yourself included.
– Pilar Jennings

Poets have to dream, and dreaming in America is no cinch.
– Saul Bellow

Because when I saw a horse / cross a river / separating two countries / it said My name is 1935.
– Michael McGriff

I think any form of self-expression is half confidence, half sheer hard work and, maybe, a bit of talent thrown in. It is really hard work.
– Kate Winslet

I’m always going to be drawn to wonder and joy when I write because I never know “what” I’m writing until I get a draft (or five) down first. But I also believe there was a deliberateness to not shy away from darkness and past heartbreaks even as push and fight for love and tenderness in my revision.
– Aimee Nezhukumatathil

TELESCOPE


There is a moment after you move your eye away
when you forget where you are
because you’ve been living, it seems,
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.


You’ve stopped being here in the world.
You’re in a different place,
a place where human life has no meaning.


You’re not a creature in body.
You exist as the stars exist,
participating in their stillness, their immensity.


Then you’re in the world again.
At night, on the cold hill,
taking the telescope apart.


You realize afterward
not that the image is false
but the relation is false.


You see again how far away
every thing is from every other thing.


– Louise Gluck

We believe peace can kill us. So we live in a permanent state of war. We no longer can contrive a way to run an economy without war…

We have been at war for over a century now and it has bankrupted our treasury, destroyed our land, corrupted our people, and fouled our bed.

We are creatures of fear, supplicants, and we expect to be taken care of by something and we do not expect to be loved or give love.

– Charles Bowden

The entire cosmos is a cooperative. The sun, the moon, and the stars live together as a cooperative. The same is true for humans and animals, trees, and the Earth. When we realize that the world is a mutual, interdependent, cooperative enterprise – then we can build a noble environment. If our lives are not based on this truth, then we shall perish.
– Buddhadasa Bhikkhu

The term ‘engaged Buddhism’ was created to restore the true meaning of Buddhism. Engaged Buddhism is simply Buddhism applied in our daily lives. If it’s not engaged, it can’t be called Buddhism. Buddhist practice takes place not only in monasteries, meditation halls and Buddhist institutes, but in whatever situation we find ourselves. Engaged Buddhism means the activities of daily life combined with the practice of mindfulness.
– Thich Nhat Hanh

In one of Buddhism’s iconic images, Gautama Buddha sits in meditation with his left palm upright on his lap, while his right hand touches the earth. Demonic forces have tried to unseat him, because their king, Mara, claims that place under the bodhi tree. As they proclaim their leader’s powers, Mara demands that Gautama produce a witness to confirm his spiritual awakening. The Buddha simply touches the earth with his right hand, and the Earth itself immediately responds: “I am your witness.” Mara and his minions vanish. The morning star appears in the sky. This moment of supreme enlightenment is the central experience from which the whole of the Buddhist tradition unfolds.

The great 20th-century Vedantin sage, Ramana Maharshi said that the Earth is in a constant state of dhyana (meditative absorption). The Buddha’s earth-witness mudra (hand position) is a beautiful example of “embodied cognition.” His posture and gesture embody unshakeable self-realization. He does not ask heavenly beings for assistance. Instead, without using any words, the Buddha calls on the Earth to bear witness.“

– John Stanley & David Loy

If you need to demonize someone, your heart is blocked with emotional and spiritual plaque.
– Thomas Moore

Hot blue moonlight down the steep sky.
– Anne Carson

Psalm

I keep deer in my heart
forgive the ancient fold
I keep the woods there too
o altar that wanders away
from prayer keep nothing
blank in this highest praise
deer drink water out
their hooves cloven print

– Dan Beachy-Quick

I feel I write better
on a laptop
than on a sheet
of paper

I close my eyes
and my fingers
dream the words.

– john zbigniew guzlowski

Later, looking back at the image, I could see that we were both not quite ready for the camera: weary, surprised and somehow very alike.
– Jessica Au

Can we finally admit that words are just drugs for nerds?
– Gabe Hudson

Decades ago Toni Cade Bambara asked, “Can the planet be rescued from the psychopaths?” It must. We must.
– tamara k nopper

with my dog-eared
bilingual dictionary
I ponder
the difference between
all these shades of blue
– Chen-ou Liu

You are parted from me by six thousand leagues; In another world, under another sky.
– Po Chü-i

Beside the rose he placed a small worn
Stone that had been loved and tended by
Some undersea Brancusi. He thought
Of the electron and the nebula.
– Kenneth Rexroth

There is merit to the idea that even complex ideas need to be distilled down to concise, understandable explanations.

However:

It is (painfully) evident when a simple explanation is proffered because there is zero understanding of the complexity of a body of knowledge.

Narratives created out of cherry-picked quotes and superficial reading are readily visible. And utterly disingenuous.

– The Subversive Lens

If you truly love yourself, it is not possible to hate another human being. Love is not a mere feeling. It is the collapse of otherness.
– Guthema Roba

Alas, I myself have started to feel the onset of something, a sadness perhaps, the dawn of a new season, an existence even. But enough of this. Tell me about yourself and what it is like where you are. Do the leaves ever stop falling? Are the shadows ever anything but long? And the mountains? Can one see them?
– Mark Strand

The more we erase each other, the less we will exist.
– Sabrina Orah Mark

just a
tranquil heart
cool autumn air
– Issa

The poem has been privatized.
– @aribanias

Why
Becomes
Unanswerable

Different
Question
Needed

– Rachel Newcombe

Most people are too indolent to think deeply about even the moral aspects of their behavior of which they are conscious; they are certainly too lazy to consider how the unconscious affects them.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

I don’t know if I believe in rage as something always acting in opposition to tenderness. I believe, more often, in the two as braided together. Two elements of trying to survive in a world once you have an understanding of that world’s capacity for violence.
– Hanif Abdurraqib

The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.
– Jane Hirshfield

To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed and never the oppressors.
– Marek Edelman

Music has no place on the periphery of education. No place at all. The place for music is at the heart of education. Music beats within us all. It’s a part of who we are. It helps us thrive and survive. When music is at the heart of education, young people are the real winners.
– Vaughan Fleischfresser

After rigorous empirical study, I can definitively say that the hardest stage in the writing of a book is whatever stage I’m on at the moment.
– Laila Lalami

Why is it that those who have the most are the most aghast and offended?
– Andy Perrin

People pay to see others believe in themselves.
– Kim Gordon

The greater part of the world eludes our understanding.
– @RedBookJung

Everything is born from change.
– Marcus Aurelius

When you reach out and touch other human beings, it doesn’t matter whether you call it therapy or teaching or poetry.
– Audre Lorde

The world is a kingdom of death, and into this world walks the great Yes of God, the Christ, bringing trouble and all sorts of dislocations, unmaskings, law-breakings, and truth-telling. The disarmed God and the disarming of God in Christ is the great scandal of history. We are not yet a disarmed church because we are not yet worshippers of a disarmed God. God comes to us disarmed in Christ. Christ does the wrong things, in the wrong places, at the wrong time, to the wrong people. Today, we are asked to live out the drama of the disarmed Christ in a world armed to the teeth. To confess Jesus these days is to work for disarmament, justice and peace.
– Dan Berrigan

The Burning of the Library
of Alexandria

What would you have done
if you had stood before it, watching
the wisdom of the ages go up in flames—
the poems, the pages
of languages,
the words of children fresh with morning.
You are standing before it.

– Joseph Fasano

PRAYER

Let me do my work each day;
and if the darkened hours
of despair overcome me, may I
not forget the strength
that comforted me in the
desolation of other times. May I
still remember the bright
hours that found me walking
over the silent hills of my
childhood, or dreaming on the
margin of the quiet river,
when a light glowed within me,
and I promised my early God
to have courage amid the
tempests of the changing years.
Spare me from bitterness
and from the sharp passions of
unguarded moments. May
I not forget that poverty and
riches are of the spirit.
Though the world know me not,
may my thoughts and actions
be such as shall keep me friendly
with myself. Lift my eyes
from the earth, and let me not
forget the uses of the stars.
Forbid that I should judge others
lest I condemn myself.
Let me not follow the clamor of
the world, but walk calmly
in my path. Give me a few friends
who will love me for what
I am; and keep ever burning
before my vagrant steps
the kindly light of hope. And
though age and infirmity overtake
me, and I come not within
sight of the castle of my dreams,
teach me still to be thankful
for life, and for time’s olden
memories that are good and
sweet; and may the evening’s
twilight find me gentle still.

– Max Ehrmann

The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness.
– Michel de Montaigne

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.
– William James

Cheerfulness is an achievement, and hope is something to celebrate. If optimism is important, it’s because many outcomes are determined by how much of it we bring to the task. It is an important ingredient of success. This flies in the face of the elite view that talent is the primary requirement of a good life, but in many cases the difference between success and failure is determined by nothing more than our sense of what is possible and the energy we can muster to convince others of our due. We might be doomed not by a lack of skill, but by an absence of hope.
– Alain de Botton, Art as Therapy

Anything looked at with love and attention becomes very interesting.
– Gary Snyder

So is music an asylum. It takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence and whereto.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you’re functionally illiterate.” That comes from General Mattis. Maybe it sounds harsh, but it’s true.

His point was that humans have been fighting and dying and struggling and doing the same things for eons. To not avail yourself of that knowledge is profoundly arrogant and stupid. To fill up body bags of young soldiers while a commander learns by experience? It’s worse than arrogant. It’s unethical, even murderous.

We need to study the cautionary tales and the screw ups, read about failures and successes. If you don’t, it’s a dereliction of duty.

– Ryan Holiday

Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.
– Frantz Fanon

The word mythos comes from the Greek word which means to close the mouth or close the eyes. Mystery and mysticism come from the same root. So they are associated with a sense of darkness, with going into a realm where you don’t see very clearly.
– Karen Armstrong

People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them.
– Flannery O’Connor

Pity me that the heart is slow to learn
What the swift mind beholds at every turn.
– Edna St. Vincent Millay

Wisdom is not a product of thought. The deep knowing that is wisdom arises through the simple act of giving someone or something your full attention.

Attention is primordial intelligence, consciousness itself. It dissolves the barriers created by conceptual thought, and with this comes the recognition that nothing exists in and by itself. It joins the perceiver and the perceived in a unifying field of awareness. It is the healer of separation.

– Eckhart Tolle

I don’t trust language. I know by my own example best of all that in order to be accurate, language must always take something that doesn’t belong to it.
– Herta Muller

… In another time,
What cannot be seen will define us, and we shall be prompted
To say that language is error, and all things are wronged
By representation. The self, we shall say, can never be
Seen with a disguise, and never be seen without one.
– Mark Strand

To manifest wisdom means simply to step back and see—to reflect, inquire, be aware, be disciplined, and be focused not once in a while, but all of the time, moment to moment. This life is precious and fleeting. Pay attention.
– Seido Ray Ronci

Let us do our best, even if it gets us nowhere.
– Henry Miller

My uncle says the architects got rid of the front porches because they didn’t look well. But my uncle says that was merely rationalizing it; the real reason, hidden underneath, might be they didn’t want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong kind of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think. So they ran off with the porches. And the gardens, too. Not many gardens any more to sit around in. And look at the furniture. No rocking chairs any more. They’re too comfortable. Get people up and running around.
– Ray Bradbury

Go without hate, but not without rage; heal the world.
– Paul Monette

Saltwater is not good for paper. My tears warped your words.
– Bianca Phipps

The longer you play the short game, the harder things get.

The longer you play the long game, the better the rewards.

This happens because just as the accumulation of tiny advantages makes the future easier, the accumulation of tiny disadvantages makes the future harder.

– Farnam Street

Outgrowing what’s familiar depends on not knowing everything.
– George Gorman

Be an angel of gravity.
Dance like a mountain
on a cloud.
There is nothing to understand.
You are absolved from trying
to figure it all
out.
How do you free your heart
for love?
Hug the opposites.
They are just grains
of pure space.
Don’t be so heavy.
The New Land is one step away,
a single breath.
Now wiggle your toes.
You are already there
at the end of the path,
the beginning.
– Fred LaMotte

Nature’s art is easy to see, and artists and artisans still, as they have for ages, depict plants in paintings and use them for garden designs or as motifs for decoration. In the mid-19th century, a group of artists moved to break down the class distinction that kept art from being available to all people. I feel a kinship with these artists who believed that beauty and nature could be the salve to treat the wounds inflicted by the Industrial Revolution; today, the injury is being caused by the industrialization of the planet.
– Ken Druse

Literature composed by women was stored not in books but in female bodies, living repositories of poetry and song.
– Doireann Ní Ghríofa

I do think that there is something profoundly queer and mystical in the image of God that all of us are born with.
– Miguel H. Díaz

I’m just really struggling to find the good dance moves, the astonishing singing voice, the powerful lyrics, the lasting cultural significance, or a moving universal message and so I confess I simply don’t understand any part of Taylor Swift. I’m sorry. Please don’t eat me alive.
– Lisa Lucas

ship model—
he glues pieces
of his dream together
– Elizabeth Black

Where words are banned & cannot be said—
Flowers are not allowed to bloom
And the birds cannot sing their song freely.
– Gulnisa Imin

sunrise over
the nameless hills
decorated with mist
– Basho

At first, I wanted to borrow from the rhythms that musicians were using, but then I realized that I could borrow rhythms from my own speech.
– Diane Mehta

People who master their defaults get the best real-world results.
– Farnam Street

Complicated Joy

What a complicated joy it is,
to witness light spilling into a new day
when the blood shed yesterday
is not yet dry.
What a complicated joy it is,
to cherish the warmth of the sun
on your face when the rest of you
feels numb with grief.
What a complicated joy it is,
to notice a butterfly’s delicate beauty
keeping company with overripe fruit
entering a season of decay.
What a complicated joy it is,
to be wholly alive
on this hurting earth,
each day a new union of sunlight and shadow.

– Heidi Barr

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door.
– Albert Camus

Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society – things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.
– E. B. White

Grief
by Matthew Dickman

When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla
you must count yourself lucky.
You must offer her what’s left
of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish
you must put aside
and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed,
her eyes moving from the clock
to the television and back again.
I am not afraid. She has been here before
and now I can recognize her gait
as she approaches the house.
Some nights, when I know she’s coming,
I unlock the door, lie down on my back,
and count her steps
from the street to the porch.
Tonight she brings a pencil and a ream of paper,
tells me to write down
everyone I have ever known,
and we separate them between the living and the dead
so she can pick each name at random.
I play her favorite Willie Nelson album
because she misses Texas
but I don’t ask why.
She hums a little,
the way my brother does when he gardens.
We sit for an hour
while she tells me how unreasonable I’ve been,
crying in the check-out line,
refusing to eat, refusing to shower,
all the smoking and all the drinking.
Eventually she puts one of her heavy
purple arms around me, leans
her head against mine,
and all of a sudden things are feeling romantic.
So I tell her,
things are feeling romantic.
She pulls another name, this time
from the dead,
and turns to me in that way that parents do
so you feel embarrassed or ashamed of something.
Romantic? She says,
reading the name out loud, slowly
so I am aware of each syllable, each vowel
wrapping around the bones like new muscle,
the sound of that person’s body
and how reckless it is,
how careless that his name is in one pile and not the other.

… Attention is the quintessential medium to reveal man’s dormant energies to himself. Whenever one witnesses the state of the body, the interplay of thought and feeling, there is an intimation, however slight, of another current of energy. Through the simple act of attending, one initiates a new alignment of forces.
– Bill Segal

As we return to our senses, we gradually discover our sensory perceptions to be simply our part of a vast interpenetrating webwork of perceptions and sensations borne by countless other bodies – supported, that is, not just by ourselves, but by icy streams tumbling down graphic slopes, by owl wings and lichens, and by the unseen, imperturbable wind… a profoundly carnal field, as this very dimension of smells and tastes and chirping rhythms warmed by the sun and shivering with seeds. It is, indeed, nothing other than the biosphere – the matrix of earthly life in which we ourselves are embedded… the biosphere as it is experienced and lived from within by the intelligent body – by the attentive human animal who is entirely a part of the world that he, or she, experiences.
– Maurice Merleau-Ponty

I believe people are reading more poetry because we distrust the diatribe, the easy answer, the argument that holds only one note. Poetry makes its music from specificity and empathy. It speaks to the whole complex notion of what it means to be human.
– Ada Limón

Every poem is a dream
That is trying to be.
Showing how
Something is, was,
Or could be
Meaningful,
Beyond the service of memory.

What is a mind keeping alive?
The seeming direction of time
Is beyond control
Because of love.

The infinitely extensible
Consistencies
Cannot be measured.

Any moment of love
Is a deeper dream
Than any old poem.

– George Gorman

We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine.

It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field

But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.

– Neil Gaiman

Look at the stars
look at the moon
but don’t stare at the sun, son.
– Kevin Kantor

Yehuda, I want your clarity— to love you, not close the gates of my heart like a nation trying to make itself a home but winding up with a state.
– Philip Metres

A good life is just a collection of good rituals. So if you can find a rhythm, a nurturing rhythm and just lean into that, I think you are well on your way to a good life.
– Linford Detweiler

The world is absolutely out of control now and is not going to be saved by any reason or unreason.
– Robert Lowell

He heard while he sang and dreamed
A piper piping away,
And never was piping so sad,
And never was piping so gay.
– W. B. Yeats

If we remember that there are many people who understand nothing at all about themselves, we shall be less surprised at the realization that there are also people who are utterly unaware of their actual conflicts.
– C.G. Jung

Old enough to remember
the river girdled by sand,
I know that the shadow
that falls between speech
and fact
is wholly rational.

– Jay Wright

Jerusalem

Let’s be the same wound if we must bleed. Let’s fight side by side, even if the enemy is ourselves: I am yours, you are mine.
– Tommy Olofsson, Sweden

I’m not interested in
who suffered the most.
I’m interested in
people getting over it.

Once when my father was a boy
a stone hit him on the head.
Hair would never grow there.
Our fingers found the tender spot
and its riddle: the boy who has fallen
stands up. A bucket of pears
in his mother’s doorway welcomes him home. The pears are not crying.
Later his friend who threw the stone
says he was aiming at a bird.
And my father starts growing wings.

Each carries a tender spot:
something our lives forgot to give us.
A man builds a house and says,
“I am native now.”
A woman speaks to a tree in place
of her son. And olives come.
A child’s poem says,
“I don’t like wars,
they end up with monuments.”
He’s painting a bird with wings
wide enough to cover two roofs at once.

Why are we so monumentally slow?
Soldiers stalk a pharmacy:
big guns, little pills.
If you tilt your head just slightly
it’s ridiculous.

There’s a place in my brain
where hate won’t grow.
I touch its riddle: wind, and seeds.
Something pokes us as we sleep.

It’s late but everything comes next.

– Naomi Shihab Nye

I wake up and look outside
to make sure everything outside
is still covered in snow. It is. Comforting.
– Neil Hilborn

There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.
– Will Rogers

A good poem
should not stay in
your back pocket,
the old monk told
the poet.

– The Old Monk

Some are born to sweet
delight,
Some are born to endless
night.
– William Blake

Black wants out of the streets
Yellow wants the country
Red wants the country back
And white wants out of this world
– Jefferson Starship

Anywhere Out of the World!

This life is a hospital, where each patient is possessed by the desire to change beds. That one prefers to suffer nearer the stove and this one believes he would get well next to the window.

To me it seems always it would be well for me to be somewhere I am not, and the question of moving is one that my soul and I discuss endlessly.

“Tell me, my soul, poor chilled soul, how about going to live in Lisbon? It must be warm there and you could bask like a lizard. The city is on the water; they claim it is built out of marble and that the people so hate vegetation that they’ve uprooted all trees. There’s a landscape to your taste, a landscape made of light and minerals, with liquid to reflect them.”

My soul makes no reply.

“Since you love repose so much, along with the spectacle of movement, would you like to come live in Holland, that beatific land? You might find diversion in this country whose images in museums you have often admired. What would you think of Rotterdam, since you love forests of masts, and boats moored at the doors of houses?”

My soul remains mute.

“Maybe Batavia would please you more? We would, moreover, find there the spirit of Europe in the embrace of tropical beauty.”

Not a word. — Could my soul be dead?

“Have you gotten to the point of numbness, where nothing pleases you but your displeasure? If that’s the case, let us flee to those countries like unto Death. — I’m the one in charge, poor soul. We will pack our trunks for Tomeo. Let’s go farther, to the far end of the Baltic; still farther from life, if possible: we ‘II go live at the pole. There the sun skims earth obliquely and the slow alternations of light and night suppress variety and increase monotony, that half measure of nothing. There we could take long shadow-baths, except when, to divert us, the northern lights send us from time to time their rosy showers, like reflections of Hell’s fireworks.”

Finally, my soul erupts, and in wisdom cries out, “Anywhere! anywhere! out of this world!”

– Charles Baudelaire

It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man’s hand and the wisdom in a tree’s root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.
– Ursula Le Guin

I like going to a place thinking one thing and being completely wrong about all of it.
– Anthony Bourdain

We long to have an image of our thoughts & being, but as soon as we complete such an image, we are dissatisfied with it—not only because we idealize the powe and form of what we project about ourselves but also because we live in time. . .
– Susan Stewart

We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.
– Wallace Stevens

The Buddha said that craving, more than anything else, is what binds us to the wheel of samsara. With mindfulness, we can begin to notice where it shows up in our daily lives—and observe our own endless quest for happiness in the fulfillment of our desires.

bold wildflowers
not retreating
from the frost
– Issa

We work hard, we enjoy life as we can, we endure. We try to help ourselves and one another. We try to be more present and less petty. Some days go better than others.
– Anne Lamott

All night the meteors fall —
Blossoms of future music . . .
– Lewis Thompson

The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.
– William Morris

Let us not hurry to our / Doom / let us stop and look at the Sea.
– Etel Adnan, Beirut 1982

Psychologists usually try to help people use insight and understanding to manage their behaviour. However, neuroscience research shows that very few psychological problems are the result of defects in understanding; most originate in pressures from deeper regions in the brain that drive our perception and attention. When the alarm bell of the emotional brain keeps signaling that you are in danger, no amount of insight will silence it.
– Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score

Whatever your style is, you should have confidence in it being good. There’s nothing wrong with you. And the example that’s given for this wisdom, found in the kleshas, is an ice cube. “Ice cube” is a synonym for klesha—frozen and sharp, immovable, fixated. You want to find the wisdom of fluid, dynamic, flowing water. So, you could pick up the ice cube and throw it out the window and go looking for flowing water, or you could melt the ice cube. It’s said that when you give your full attention, when you are awake and conscious of your klesha, that’s what melts the ice cube—what returns it to flowing water. You see, they’re the same thing. It’s just, in one we would say “ego fixated,” and in the other it’s “egoless.” So we experience both and continually make the journey between those two things.
– Pema Chödrön, Turn Your World Around

Spinoza’s philosophy has this sort of healthy-mindedness woven into the heart of it, and this has been one secret of its fascination.
– William James

yes, this is ours, hear us wordsmiths worlding, hear us woke, hear how we got not one ounce of asking, not one smidgen of sorry from this body of bodies, sure as our elders’ tongues sear into and through us.
– Barbara Jane Reyes

We create the world that we perceive, not because there is no reality outside our heads, but because we select and edit the reality, we see to conform to our beliefs about what sort of world we live in.
– Gregory Bateson

The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

If you want peace,
you don’t talk to your friends.
You talk to your enemies.
– Desmond Tutu

Directions
Sometimes people ask me how to get
to Judevine Mountain.
I can tell you how to get to where
the road ends, but when
you get to there, you’ve only just begun.
After that I can’t be
any help at all. It takes years to find
the way. And anyhow you
don’t need me. I’m lost most of the time
myself. Besides,
how would I know what direction
you are headed in?
– David Budbill

Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us. To know men thoroughly, to judge events sanely, is, therefore, a great step towards happiness.
– Stendhal

before my eyes
just as is it is
poetry
– Basho

In my room, the world is beyond my understanding.
– Wallace Stevens

Something is at work in the world: a recognition of a crisis of the spirit … Recently, an Australian Aborigine shaman warned me: ‘The Great Serpent has woken. Jarapiri stirs. The earth shakes. And the warriors are gathering.’
– Alan Garner

When there is really nothing left to do or believe, except to remember, walking helps retrieve the absolute simplicity of presence, beyond all hope, before any expectation.
– Frédéric Gros

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
– Aldous Huxley

Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

I love writing poems. Every time I start one it’s like walking into the darkness, but I know if I keep walking there will be some kind of light.
– john zbigniew guzlowski

The sickness of the individual is ultimately caused by and sustained by the sickness of his civilization.
– Herbert Marcuse

An explosive book always keeps its explosive charge.
– Deleuze

When we let in the disturbing, the terrifying, the annoying, we also let in the unknown and the creative. Our lives become vivid and colorful.
– Linda Modaro & Nelly Kaufer

People are less self-conscious during the anxiety of a great sorrow. The dazzling varnish of an extreme politeness is then less in evidence, and the true qualities of the heart regain their proper proportions.
– Stendhal

Intoxicants take you away from reality; meditation takes you toward reality. Which do you want? You are already intoxicated by ignorance, anger, and attachment and suffer as a result. Why do you want to take more intoxicants?
– Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron

Another form of generational wealth: parents who can regulate their emotions.
– Dr. Nicole LePera

Beauty is nothing but a promise of happiness.
– Stendha

‘When a man is asleep,’ wrote Proust, in a famous sentence, ‘he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host.’

And I too used to sleep.

– Sleepless, Marie Darrieussecq; tr. Penny Hueston

Creative writing will not bring you money, fame, happiness, or validation. Generally it brings you nothing! Be prepared to bring everything of yourself and receive absolutely nothing! Become a writer!
– @TBQuarterly

We only believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body.
– Yeats

When all that you’ve read, listened to, talked about, counted, and sorted out is swirling around in your head before you write your first draft. It’s a strange, exciting, and wondrous feeling.
– tamara k. nopper

If you’re sane enough to know that you’re crazy then you’re not as crazy as if you thought you were sane.
– Cormac McCarthy

People spend so much time protecting the unreal, defending the meaningless, fighting for realities that don’t actually serve them. Sometimes they devote their entire lives to these distractions and diversions. Meanwhile, that which is real waits for them with bateless breath, not remotely interested in anything inauthentic. We are only here for a moment. Make every second real.
– Jeff Brown

No one said to me,
this place is called a country,
around the country are borders,
and beyond the borders is another place,
called diaspora and exile for us.
– Mahmoud Darwish

Our inner worlds are messy like a zoo, but the animals aren’t in separate cages, neatly compartmentalized. Learn to love these wild animals!
– Linda Modaro & Nelly Kaufer

Ask yourself at every moment. Is this necessary?
– Marcus Aurelius

Enough for me to remain
in my country’s embrace
to be in her close as a handful of dust
a sprig of grass
a flower.
– Fadwa Tuqan

The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness.
– Paul Cézanne

In the vast expanse of Buddhist lexicon, the term ‘bodhicitta’ is akin to a lightning strike.

It is that pivotal moment when the heart or mind, the ‘citta’, glimpses the potential for ‘bodhi’, awakening, enlightenment.

– Lewis Richmond

Buddha’s doctrine: man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are impermanent.

It is the simplest art in the world, to be silent.
– Osho

Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
– Franz Kafka

And so it befell me that after so many attempts at naming the world, I am able only to repeat, harping on one string, the highest, the unique avowal beyond which no power can attain: I am, she is.
– Czeslaw Milosz

Completion

It’s the completion
that terrifies. The closing
of the clear story,

the airtight future
of the myth. We know the way
from here. On we go,

jostling in a queue
that is so familiar
we saw it coming

calling us by name.

– George Szirtes

So we ask you to humor what of course naturally looks merely like so much intestinal incohesion, remember he belongs to the costermonger times of a pale and ardent generation…
– Sam Beckett

Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person — ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it.
– James Baldwin

You can escape in a moment, but only in a moment.
– Lewis Thompson

Don’t worry about whether things will be hard. Because they will be. Instead, focus on the fact that these things will help you. This is why you needn’t fear them.
– Ryan Holiday

…colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time…
– Jack Kerouac

Out of reluctant matter
What can be gathered? Nothing, beauty at best.
And so, cherry blossoms must suffice for us
And chrysanthemums and the full moon.
– Czeslaw Milosz

I worry I love when I mistake
the spoken for the intuited,
the ice for the fish beneath…
– Maya C. Popa

That surveillance produces the nothing it suspects we are.
– Douglas Kearney

Without changing color
in the emptiness of this world of ours,
the heart of man fades like a flower.
– Ono no Komachi

who
more inhumane
than
who
more brutal
than
who
– Susan Dambroff

There is no other space, other time. This moment is all. In this moment the whole existence converges, in this moment all is available.
– Osho

I dwell on the edges / of solid transparent depths.
– Jorge Guillén, (tr. Cola Franzen)

Collage, like fragmentation, allows you to
frustrate the expectation of continuity, of
step-by-step linearity. And if the fields you
juxtapose are different enough there are
sparks from the edges.
– RW

FIREFLY

When I use the word “religion” I am not referring to the sectarian organizations that claim to have copyrighted the mystery. When I use the word “religion” I am NOT referring to crucifixes or menorahs, to popes, rabbis or imams. I have no interest in what most people call religion. I do not care if Jesus rose from the dead if that image does not illumine the larger dance of life. I do not care whether you have been baptized, only whether you can submerge into the whole river of life.

When I use the word “religion” I am referring to the strange stirring we feel when looking at the stars, or the sense of kinship we sometimes feel when looking into the eyes of an animal. I am interested in the “place” our minds go at night when we are asleep and dreaming. I am referring to our age old urge to connect the dots of time and space, of necessity and chance, of matter and mind…

I am not interested in believing or disbelieving in God if that idea does not remind us of the impenetrable depth from which we come and the incomprehensible breadth to which we are connected.

Life cannot be neatly stored in categories like “logical” or “emotional,” “material” or “mental,” “cosmic” or “personal.” Life dances between our categories like a mystical firefly born between the dust and lightning.

To me, “religion” means sharing the mysterious expanses of life without losing either our objective scientific understanding or our most intimate subjective experiences of it.

When I use the word “religion” I am referring to intimate and artful communities that share symbols, rituals and ethical principles that help them to share in the dance of the firefly as it penetrates through all life’s shapes and turnings.

– Jim Rigby

The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its likes, a glutton statistical machine for structure recognition, that swallows hundreds of terabytes of data and snatches the most plausible answer to a conversation or the most likely to a scientific question.

The other way around… the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and elegant system operating with a limited amount of information. It doesn’t try to injure raw correlations from data but tries to create explanations. [… ] Let’s stop calling it “Artificial Intelligence” and call it what it is: “plagiarism software.” Don’t create anything, copy existing works from existing artists and alter it sufficiently to escape copyright laws.

It’s the largest theft of property ever since Native American lands by European settlers.

– Noam Chomsky

The secret of this blessing is that it is written on the back of what binds you….
– Jan Richardson

What happens when we don’t get better? When our illness has no cure? What happens when we are exiled from narratives of wholeness, health, and optimization?
– @amandapalmer

You’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.
– J.D. Salinger

Our job is to find out what the world is trying to be.
– William Stafford

When you remember me, it means that you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even though countless years and miles may stand between us. It means that if we meet again, you will know me. It means that even after I die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart.

For as long as you remember me, I am never entirely lost. When I’m feeling most ghost-like, it is your remembering me that helps remind me that I actually exist. When I’m feeling sad, it’s my consolation. When I’m feeling happy, it’s part of why I feel that way.

If you forget me, one of the ways I remember who I am will be gone. If you forget, part of who I am will be gone.

– Frederick Buechner

Poetry is the question minus the answer.
– Roland Barthes

I’m not into convincing people I’m worthy. I’m into people who’ll convince me on my worst days that I’m still worth the world.
– Reyna Biddy

I’m going to make everything around me beautiful – that will be my life.
– Elsie de Wolfe

When I was at university (Brandeis), one our professors said the way to identify which side is oppressed is to ask if – and how quickly – we would take someone’s place. If we hesitate, then in our heart we know what is true but don’t want to accept it. I hold that wise lesson close.
– Sunny Singh

The problem in middle life, when the body has reached its climax of power and begins to decline, is to identify yourself, not with the body, which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. 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?

One of the psychological problems in growing old is the fear of death. People resist the door of death. But this body is a vehicle of consciousness, and if you can identify with the consciousness, you can watch this body go like an old car. There goes the fender, there goes the tire, one thing after another— but it’s predictable. And then, gradually, the whole thing drops off, and consciousness, rejoins consciousness. It is no longer in this particular environment.
– Joseph Campbell

I have always painted pictures where human love floods my colors.
– Marc Chagall

Develop a sense of self. A solidness that can’t be attacked.
– Sylvia Plath

Jung saw the development of the religious function as learning the art of seeing, not as creating religious truths and dogma.
– Monika Wikman

I was a romantic and sentimental creature, with a tendency towards solitude.
– Isabel Allende

Love is a bet, a wild one, placed on freedom. Not my own; the freedom of the Other… A knot made of two intertwined freedoms.
– Octavio Paz

Jung came more and more to the conclusion that the unconscious is not only a response system… but that it can, of itself, and for no outer or biographical reason, produce something new. In other words, it is creative in the essential sense of the word.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

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

Creation is not satisfied with itself as things are. There has to be upheaval, suffering, strife and conflict. The old has to die so that the new can be born, and the rhythm of creation follows a threefold pattern: unity, disunity and unity regained.
– David Tacey

I learned a long time ago, the wisest thing I can do is be on my own side.
– Maya Angelou

The ability to look deeply is the root of creativity. To see past the ordinary and mundane and get to what might otherwise be invisible.
– Rick Rubin, The Creative Act

As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

A hovering kestrel always makes any car journey infinitely better.
– James Gilbert

You could rattle the stars. You could do anything, if only you dared.
– Sarah J. Maas

We have to be our own manager, our own master. We’re responsible for our own conditioning. We have to monitor our own intake, decide our own standards.
– Ryan Holiday

The biggest stupidity of this civilization, and of all civilizations, was the belief that they will never run out of raw materials – and that these were never in fact “raw”, but vital, integral pieces of a functioning planet.
– George Tsakraklides

What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?
– Audre Lorde

I agree
to cookies
Sunday afternoon
– Ernest Wit

…we know of the virtues of silence. but we should also sing of the virtues of sound. don’t be silent unless your silence improves your words. gather words of love and tell her you love her. tell your kids you love them. tell your neighbors and tell your friends too. but know this! say the words and do the deeds your words are saying, for words without deeds are deceptions. we had infinite silence before our birth, and we will have infinite silence after we die. but today we are alive. today we can gather live-words and tell her all about the full moon and the lotus in the pond. and tell them too. and everyone else. do this: write your poetry with the deeds of you life. use words too if you must. today you are alive. it makes sense…
– hune margulies

Each of us has to look into our dark world, recognize the forces that bind us, the blind instincts, the compulsions which, though they give the illusion of power, freedom, adulthood, ensnare us. We have to fight our way free; renounce the Dark Powers, learn to judge and act from our center. Only then are we human and personal. This work of self-knowledge is absolutely essential.
– Ruth Burrows

One day Chuang Tzu and a friend were walking by a river.
“Look at the fish swimming about,” said Chuang Tzu,
“They are really enjoying themselves.”

“You are not a fish,” replied the friend,
“So you can’t truly know that they are enjoying themselves.”

“You are not me,” said Chuang Tzu.
“So how do you know that I do not know that the fish are enjoying themselves?”

Every calling or profession has its own characteristic persona. It is easy to study these things nowadays, when the photographs of public personalities so frequently appear in the press. A certain kind of behaviour is forced on them by the world, and professional people endeavour to come up to these expectations. Only, the danger is that they become identical with their personas – the professor with his text-book, the tenor with his voice. Then the damage is done; henceforth he lives exclusively against the background of his own biography. . . . The garment of Deianeira has grown fast to his skin, and a desperate decision like that of Heracles is needed if he is to tear this Nessus shirt from his body and step into the consuming fire of the flame of immortality, in order to transform himself into what he really is. One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is.
– C.G. Jung

Time is not a straight line, it’s more of a labyrinth, and if you press close to the wall at the right place you can hear the hurrying steps and the voices, you can hear yourself walking past on the other side.
– Tomas Tranströmer

Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence. Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all.
– Thomas Szasz

I want to move like water, to move from unity to struggle to unity, to have no perfect world we haven’t fought for.
– Jordan Jace

The divine is shining through all that you perceive. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true.
– Thomas Merton

Heal yourself with the light of the sun and the rays of the moon. With the sound of the river and the waterfall. With the swaying of the sea and the fluttering of birds. Heal yourself with mint, neem, and eucalyptus. Sweeten with lavender, rosemary, and chamomile. Hug yourself with the cocoa bean and a hint of cinnamon. Put love in tea instead of sugar and drink it looking at the stars. Heal yourself with the kisses that the wind gives you and the hugs of the rain. Stand strong with your bare feet on the ground and with everything that comes from it. Be smarter every day by listening to your intuition, looking at the world with your forehead. Jump, dance, sing, so that you live happier. Heal yourself, with beautiful love, and always remember…you are the medicine.
– María Sabina

for if the stars were
arbitrary, if it meant nothing,
what is there to believe? i want
to believe it all. i want to imagine
that everything on earth knows
more than i do, turns and turns
and carries the timing of life.
instead of a doctrine of subtraction
give me a doctrine of everything
knows. give me the stars and
the heavens, looking down on me
with love and the fullness of time.
– Amy Bornman

Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
– Ralph Ellison

At this point some instinct – I was almost about to say a hand laid on me made me change course. I began to look more closely, not at things but at a world closer to myself, looking from an inner place to one further within, instead of clinging to the movement of sight toward the world outside.

Immediately, the substance of the universe drew together, redefined and peopled itself anew. I was aware of a radiance emanating from a place I knew nothing about, a place which might as well have been outside me as within. But radiance was there, or, to put it more precisely, it was a fact, for light was there.

– Jacques Lusseyran

Note that the word ‘mute’ is regarded by linguists as an onomatopoeic formation referring not to silence but to a certain fundamental opacity of human being, which likes to show the truth by allowing to be seen hiding.
– Anne Carson

Being both soft and strong is a combination very few have mastered.
– Yasmin Mogahed

tracks from the pine
to our patio
first frost
– @mybookandbranch

Changeless change, a signature of things that sings.

Thus, the plural is applied to a singular glow.

– Andrew Joron

This life is mine alone. So I’ve stopped asking directions to places they’ve never been.
– Glennon Doyle

to me, decolonization is not an intellectual enterprise but a spiritual one. it challenges us to detangle our programming, to learn from our ancestors and the things that they regret/ struggled with/ have shame around to transmute into fuel for creating the world that we hope for.
– fatimah asghar

Grace is what keeps you from reaching for the gun too quickly, it is what keeps you alive.
– Jeff Buckley

The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.
– Proust

Seek out what magnifies your spirit
– Maria Popova

Tell me where you go in these silences and I will say if I have been there.
– Naomi Shihab Nye

Always hold true to your own perception. Your own self is your main teacher.
– Jeff Bridges

Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect; they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.
– Jose Ortega y Gasset

Night is a history of longing, and you are my night.
– Mahmoud Darwish

I write things down to keep the light from disappearing.
– Sean Thomas Dougherty

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis, and we’d have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
– William Styron

The era of small ideas is over.
– Rep. Mondaire Jones

Let a man be stimulated by poetry, established by the rules of propriety, and perfected by music.
– Confucius

I bet a nice thing about writing fiction is, instead of being like, “I feel a way,” you can be like, “A feeling exists … THAT guy has it”
– Elisa Gabbert

The singer is still a magician, and the song is a ritual, a sacred ceremony, an ordeal which is designed to set at rest that wheel of the imagination and the senses which alone hinder us from contact with reality.
– Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

Indeed, in a world full of sound—from below our aching feet, out into the stratosphere—our bodies have been structured to crave sonic stimulation.
– Lavender Suarez

True clarity is found at the base of the stairway, at the breath of the door.
– René Char, (tr. Gustaf Sobin)

waiting in line
amazing how much people
have to say
– Kathy Watts

Who are these people
who comb through
my pages,
the old monk
wanted to know.
– The Old Monk

A lot of people have written on the pages of your life.

It’s time to reclaim the pen.

You don’t have to keep following that script.

If you weren’t reciting their lines, what would your soul say?

– Dr. Thema

While contradiction is static and unproductive, paradox makes room for grace and mystery.
– Robert A. Johnson

Do you know who does
the things you don’t do,
the old monk asked.
You always want to.
– The Old Monk

Their campfires
shape the community—
that’s the way it works,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk

Reading and sauntering and lounging and dosing, which I call thinking, is my supreme Happiness.
– David Hume

Sometimes a man must fight so hard for life that he has no time to enjoy it.
– Charles Bukowski

City with a view
Beneath alabaster sky
Each soul a lantern
– L. M. Shayle

have you tried uprooting unwholesome beliefs, making a living in a way that serves the world, rejecting unwholesome speech, and cultivating deep intention towards being a force for good in the world?
– @the_wilderless

The irony of hiding the dark side of our humanness is that our secret is not really a secret at all. How can it be when we’re all safeguarding the very same story? That’s why Rumi calls it an Open Secret. It’s almost a joke – a laughable admission that each one of us has a shadow self – a bumbling, bad-tempered twin. Big surprise! Just like you, I can be a jerk sometimes. I do unkind, cowardly things, harbor unmerciful thoughts, and mope around when I should be doing something constructive. Just like you, I wonder if life has meaning; I worry and fret over things I can’t control; and I often feel overcome with a longing for something that I cannot even name. For all of my strengths and gifts, I am also a vulnerable and insecure person, in need of connection and reassurance. This is the secret I try to keep from you, and you from me, and in doing so, we do each other a grave disservice
– Elizabeth Lesser

Here is a mystery,
a person, an
other, an I?

– Denise Levertov

The birds that herald dreams
were exiled from their song,
each voice torn out of its throat.
– Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Giving voice to consonants that rise
with no protection but each other’s ears.
We are on our bellies in this quiet, Lord.
– Ilya Kaminsky

What’s the margin of loss on words not spent today?
– Camonghne Felix

Actually, the true story of a person’s life can never be written. It is beyond the power of literature. The full tale of any life would be both utterly boring and utterly unbelievable.
– Isaac Bashevis Singer

They’re the surviving survivors
of what happened when happiness
was buried alive, when
it no longer looked out

of today’s eyes

– Jack Hirschman

Foresight is bought at the price of anxiety, and, when overused, it destroys all its own advantages.
– Alan Watts

It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the Earth as though I had a right to be here.
– James Baldwin

It’s not always easy
to face the animal
even if it looks at you
without fear or hate
it does so fixedly
and seems to disdain
the subtle secret it carries
it seems better to feel
the obviousness of the world
that noisily day and night
drills and damages
the silence of the soul.

– Jean Follain

Translated from the French by Heather McHugh

Inside each raindrop swims the sun.
Inside each flower breathes the moon.
Inside me dwell ten million stars,
One for each of my ancestors:
The elk, the raven, the mouse, the man,
The flower, the coyote, the lion, the fish.
Ten million different stars am I,
But only one spirit, connecting all.
– Nancy Wood

I have a very old and very faithful attachment for dogs. I like them because they always forgive.
– Albert Camus

I wanted him to understand
that it was possible to
be afraid of what we found
when we went searching for an answer
to the endless questions of our deepest want.
– Sean Patrick Mulroy

Here is a mystery, a person, an other, an I?
– Denise Levertov

The birds that herald dreams
were exiled from their song,
each voice torn out of its throat.
– Faiz Ahmed Faiz

We are all really living with defeat and failure and disappointment and bewilderment, these dark forces that modify our lives. Everyone is engaged in a mighty struggle for self-respect, meaning and significance. The first step would be to recognize that your struggle and your suffering is the same as everyone else’s. I think that’s the beginning of a responsible life. Otherwise we are in a continual savage battle with each other with no possible solution, political, social or spiritual.
– Leonard Cohen

The most profound shift any of us can make as a human being is the shift from aversion to kindness, from abandoning to befriending. It is a shift from creating and re-creating patterns of suffering and anguish to the cultivating and re-cultivating patterns of well-being and peace. It is perhaps unrealistic to anticipate that we will find peace and kindness inwardly if they cannot be found within our own hearts.
– Christina Feldman

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.

This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad in a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight.

– Jack London

The child in each of us / Knows paradise. / Paradise is home. / Home as it was / Or home as it should have been. // Paradise is one’s own place, / One’s own people, / One’s own world, / Knowing and known, / Perhaps even / Loving and loved. // Yet every child / Is cast from paradise— / Into growth and destruction, / Into solitude and new community, / Into vast, ongoing / Change.

– Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents

And, finally I see
There right in front of me
Waiting peacefully
Was a bright new day
– Athey Thompson

Photo is a small voice, at best, but sometimes – just sometimes – one photograph or a group of them can lure our senses into awareness. Much depends upon the viewer; in some, photographs can summon enough emotion to be a catalyst to thought.
– W. Eugene Smith

The spirits which I have summoned/I now cannot banish.
– Goethe

All beings are made to come out of weakness. Every newborn child begins life with a cry of terror. The first step on any great journey is always traumatic. As humans, we are made to rise from the broken. We are made to grow around wounds. Not just once, but again and again. We are made to grow out of fear and loneliness into joy and community. And then to do it all over again.

This is not a flaw in nature or in ourselves, but our destiny. Like vines, we grow in spirals, crossing over and over again the darkness from which we emerged. Humans are not trees. We change our forms and shapes throughout our lives, in the interplay of strength and desolation, of power and hopelessness, of now and then. And from the insight that deep within us, there is no time but everything flows together simultaneously in the Here and Now. There we stand still before the flickering insight that we are young and old, strong and broken, joyful and in tears all at the same time. Being a microcosm really is not for the faint of heart!

So our demons are always with us, no matter how much alike we become to angels. The world always wants both, and we are its living image. Like the tree that remembers the desert, we grow up to be part of the forest. Like the rock that remembers its typhonic womb of fire, we find ourselves surrounded by soothing waters. Everything is Now, and we are all in it.

– Frater Acher

When I returned to my birthplace
my father’s house
and mother’s voice
were gone.

– Abbas Kiarostami

The fear of being nothing is a gateway to our true identity.
– Santiago Santai Jiménez

Each is deceived by the sense of finality peculiar to the stage of development at which he stands.
– Carl Jung

The map of our life is folded in such a way that we
cannot see one main road across it, but as it is opened
out, we are constantly seeing new side roads. We think
we are choosing, and we have no choice.
– Dorothy Williams

Tell them
the olives ripened
no one to gather them
the children
did not gather
nor ripen
tell them
– Suheir Hammad

Desire is powerful indeed: it engenders belief…
– Proust

When you dance to your own rhythm, people may not understand you; they may even hate you. But mostly they’ll wish they had the courage to do the same.
– Sue Fitzmaurice

Whales breach in silence
Spray, a gift to orange skies
Lost songs echo still.
– @DailyHaiku575

starry sky . . .
all that you can see
but never able to grasp
– @Meraki_k

three blooms
along an early
autumn trail

thirteen sunbeams
a warm black cone
proudly set

three bridges
joining yesterday
to tomorrow

– Andy Perrin

There’s a tiredness of abstract intelligence … It doesn’t weight on you like the tiredness of the body, nor does it worry you like the tiredness of knowledge and emotion. It’s a weightiness of the conscience of the world, an inability of the soul to breathe.
– Pessoa

Man has it all in his hands, and it all slips through his fingers from sheer cowardice.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I didn’t cause it.
I can’t control it.
I can’t cure it.

– Al-Anon’s Three Cs

If this is true, where does my responsibility lie? What is my business, my sacred work and how do I go about tending to it?

– McCall Erickson

Dropping Keys,
by Hafiz

The small person
Builds cages for everyone
She
Sees.

Instead, the sage,
Who needs to duck her head,
When the moon is low,
Can be found dropping keys, all night long
For the beautiful,
Rowdy,
Prisoners.

In Aboriginal worldviews, relationships are paramount in knowledge transmission. There can be no exchange or dialogue until the protocols of establishing relationships have taken place. Who are you? Where are you from? Where are you going? What is your true purpose here? Where does the knowledge you carry come from and who shared it with you? What are the applications and potential impacts of this knowledge on this place? What impacts has it had on other places? What other knowledge is it related to? Who are you to be saying these things?

In our world nothing can be known or even exist unless it is in relation to other things. Most importantly, those things that are connected are less important than the forces of connection between them. We exist to form these relationships, which make up the energy that holds creation together. When knowledge is patterned within these forces of connection it is sustainable over deep time.

– Tyson Yunkaporta

Untitled
by Laurie Sheck

Distance is the soul of the beautiful,
she had read, and she imagines an unknown planet
revolving in deep space, blue waves
in tender exile from the land.
Remorseless. Without witness.
If she could go there
she would possess nothing.
How beautiful the earth
might seem again from that distance.
How possible love.

Blueprint
The astronomer and fisherman are brothers.
choosing a solitary life. For both
the sky’s a blueprint, where they find direction,
dark grid, fathomless and mute
as the inside of a bell, where they alone
perceive a sound, guiding them
to planets circling like seabirds, silver
schools of stars. Between bits of brightness,
their starved minds conjure ships out of a swell,
nebulae where none had been before.
The sky feeds from their hands, becomes
familiar, almost tame, unless
watching late into the night, when phosphorescent
motes speckle an endless field, a waking dream
might shock imagination from its sleep, the knowledge
that the precious charts, coiled safely in the cabinet
are a delusion, that the face glimpsed in the mirror, so
reassuring in half-light, masks a swarm
of shifting particles.
– Robbi Nester

Everybody, even the best of us, will sometimes behave ingloriously, and to think otherwise is to be hemmed in by vanity.
– Andrew Cooper

Nothing the muscles do is done without direction from the central nervous system; even the long-term habits of movement and holding that sculpt the body are put into place by the brain. The body is mind made manifest. To work on the body is to probe the mind.
– Daniel Goldman

Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.
– John Stuart Mill

We all have cultural bias, racial bias. One of the difficult things around this subject matter is to deny that we have places we go to subconsciously, and unless you consciously decide that that’s wrong and you’ve got to do something about it, especially if you’re in a position of power, it won’t change.
– David Oyelowo

Hold yourself to a higher standard.

You’ll be surprised.

You’ll get better.

– Kenneth Folk

Loving you was like going to war,
I never came back the same.
– Warsan Shire

The practice of meditation can be described as relating with cool boredom, refreshing boredom, boredom like a mountain stream.
– Chögyam Trungpa

autumn too — blooms
in jarring bursts
radiant unfurling

revealing more
than even summer
could show

short lived
but perhaps
the better days

– Andy Perrin

How many out-of-character things did I need to do, I wondered, before the world rearranged itself around me?
– Ben Lerner

Days will pass, and you’ll abandon things you were addicted to, and leave someone, and cancel a dream, and finally, accept a reality.
– Nizar Qabbani

What we once had was poetry. Visions and star dust. Translucent. Death to the machine, the grind the walk that we must walk.
– R.M. Engelhardt

When you’re true to yourself, you win in the end. With your truth, you’ll get trough. You’re going to make it. It costs a lot. You suffer a lot. But you prevail.
– Chavela Vargas

We can break step. Magnificent living beings that we are, we humans are free to unravel our patterns.
– Louisa Hall

I sometimes wonder if this way of loving someone is my best way of loving someone:
with miles and miles between us.
– Brenna Twohy

A healthy mind knows how to hope; it identifies and then hangs on tenaciously to a few reasons to keep going. Grounds for despair, anger, and sadness are, of course, all around. But the healthy mind knows how to bracket negativity in the name of endurance. It clings to evidence of what is still good and kind. It remembers to appreciate; it can – despite everything – still look forward to a hot bath, some dried fruit or dark chocolate, a chat with a friend, or a satisfying day of work. It refuses to let itself be silenced by all the many sensible arguments in favor of rage and despondency.
– Alain de Botton

HALLELUIAH
Everyone should be born into this world happy
and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Halleluiah, anyway I’m not where I started!

And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.

Halleluiah, I’m sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.

– Mary Oliver

Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness. If we think of resting from our labours, it is only in order to return to them.
In thinking so highly of work we are aberrant. Few other cultures have ever done so. For nearly all of history and all prehistory, work was an indignity.
– John Gray

And, finally I see
There right in front of me
Waiting peacefully
Was a bright new day
– Athey Thompson

The kernel of worship is melting away the self, and the rest of worship is merely the husk.
– Borhan al-Din Mohaqqeq

Not hammer-strokes, but dance of the water, sings the pebbles into perfection.
– Rabindranath Tagore

So that where I once did not know who or what you were, now I wonder who I or we are, or what. What planet is this anyway, my dear?
– Stanley Crawford

Dark August

So much rain, so much life like the swollen sky
of this black August. My sister, the sun,
broods in her yellow room and won’t come out.

Everything goes to hell; the mountains fume
like a kettle, rivers overrun; still,
she will not rise and turn off the rain.

She is in her room, fondling old things,
my poems, turning her album. Even if thunder falls
like a crash of plates from the sky,

she does not come out.
Don’t you know I love you but am hopeless
at fixing the rain? But I am learning slowly

to love the dark days, the steaming hills,
the air with gossiping mosquitoes,
and to sip the medicine of bitterness,

so that when you emerge, my sister,
parting the beads of the rain,
with your forehead of flowers and eyes of forgiveness,

all with not be as it was, but it will be true
(you see they will not let me love
as I want), because, my sister, then

I would have learnt to love black days like bright ones,
The black rain, the white hills, when once
I loved only my happiness and you.

– Derek Walcott

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

All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.
– William Butler Yeats

Intellectual, spiritual, and artistic initiative is as dangerous to totalitarianism as the gangster initiative of the mob, and both are more dangerous than mere political opposition. The consistent persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity by the new mass leaders springs from more than their natural resentment against everything they cannot understand. Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable. Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
– Hannah Arendt

Creativity and ego cannot go together. If you free yourself from the comparing and jealous mind, your creativity opens up endlessly. Just as water springs from a fountain, creativity springs from every moment. You must not be your own obstacle. You must not be owned by the environment you are in. You must own the environment, the phenomenal world around you. You must be able to freely move in and out of your mind. This is being free. There is no way you can’t open up your creativity. There is no ego to speak of. That is my belief.
– Jeong Kwan

Once I traveled far above the earth. This beloved planet we call home was covered with an elastic web of light. I watched in awe as it shimmered, stretched, dimmed, and shined, shaped by the collective effort of all life within it. Dissonance attracted more dissonance. Harmony attracted harmony. I saw revolutions, droughts, famines, and the births of new nations. The most humble kindnesses made the brightest lights. Nothing was wasted.
– Joy Harjo

Nothing looks more dead than a cocoon: hard, immobile, ugly….And yet, just wait.
– Anne Lamott

We live in toppled times under a feat of tyranny; let’s not
fake getting lost, let’s do it, let’s not do it intermittently, let’s be
lost, disoriented and never to be bound so all can hear
the hiss of the adverbs we shoot into tyrants’ eyes
– Lyn Hejinian

When I hear music, I fear no danger; I am invulnerable; I see no foe; I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.
– Henry David Thoreau

Good, I am reaching an extreme. Someone who has been shipwrecked, who carries on while drifting on the wreckage, by climbing to the peak of the mast that is already crumbling. But he has a chance of sending out an SOS from up there.
– Walter Benjamin

I’ll write your name, oh my homeland, on the sun which never sets.
– Palestinian song

Silence leaves space for the unexpected to come dashing in and completely flip the script on what you thought tranquility was.
– Lavender Suarez

When the mad (wandering) mind has gradually been brought under control, one will be able to apply the brake on the thinking process.
– Hsu Yun

When we wake up to how human life on this planet actually is, and stop running away or building walls in our heart, then we develop a wiser motivation for our life.
– Ajahn Sucitto

In the popular nightmare of history, where local mythic images are interpreted, not as metaphors, but as facts, there have been ferocious wars waged between the parties of such contrary manners of metaphoric representation. The Bible abounds in examples.
– Joseph Campbell

When told of a man who had acquired great wealth, a sage replied, ‘Has he also acquired the days in which to spend it?’
– Solomon ibn Gabirol

Circumstances are a kind of father figure to me, and I obligingly obey them.
– William Trevor

To listen to the rain. An activity sufficient in itself.
– Cioran

Death is a drawing together of two worlds, not an end. We are the bridge.
– Carl Jung

A reflective, contented mind is the best possession.
– Zoroaster Ushtavaiti Gatha

If you see someone grieving that the world is
set up to make the majority of people
exhausted, unhealthy, unfulfilled, stressed,
and neglecting what matters most

& your response is “haha welcome to The World idiot”

That’s a good cue to snap out of it & strive for a better world

– River Kenna

Use your own hands, your own eyes, and your own sincerity. Working with your sleeves rolled up is the activity of a way-seeking mind.
– Dogen Zenji

Fatemates: Those individuals who are fated to encounter each other in this lifetime. Members of the same soulpod, their meeting was pre-destined, encoded in their sacred blueprint, fundamental to their expansion in this lifetime. Although they were fated to connect, the deeper challenge is clarifying the reasons why. Contrary to the popular myth that fatemates are meant to spend their lives happily together, the opposite is often true. Some are destined to travel together through time; others are destined to share the briefest of encounters before moving onto the next pop-up on the path. Some are meant to expand together joyfully; others to polish the rough diamond of the soul by triggering and challenging each other. The serendipity that brings them together is often easy to spot- interpreting is the real art form. We all have a date with fate- the question is what direction it will take us…
– Jeff Brown

Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
– Alain de Botton

O’ Jerusalem, the city of sorrow
An enormous tear wandering in the eye
Who will halt the aggression—
On you, the pearl of religions?
Who will wash your bloody walls?
Who will safeguard the Bible?
Who will rescue the Quran?
Who will save Christ?
Who will save man?

– Nizar Qabbani

threadsuns
above the grayblack wastes.
a tree-
high thought
grasps the light-tone: there are
still songs to sing beyond
mankind.
– paul celan, tr. p. joris

One must have the courage of one’s vocation and the courage to make a living from one’s vocation.
– Pablo Picasso

Do not judge by appearances; a rich heart may be under a poor coat.
– Scottish Proverb

Forgetting is a constant memory only an image of flower pots with flowers and sunsets crossed by shadows the doubt of whether it was all real or if time traps us in nostalgia.
– Golcar Rojas

A poem hands you a ticket to travel with.
– Uche Nduka

I asked you not to hurt me
the way history did.
– Nathalie Handal

On the one hand, it is inflaming, deflective, and dismissive to even raise issues about psychology, trauma, or any kind of personal or relationship work when bodies are being blown apart. That’s just TRUE.

On the other hand, for those of us on the outside of imminent threat of death and bodily injury, every drop of “medicine” you are called to offer, please do. Including sharing your views on social media, caring for each other, teaching, facilitating, conflicting, and waking me up to my biases and blind spots (which many have done).

– David Bedrick

I’ll get the book done if I just set one day’s work in front of the last day’s work. That’s the way it comes out. And that’s the only way it does.
– John Steinbeck

Sometimes you have to go
out to the last rock at
the edge of the ocean
to see who you are,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk

There are times in our lives when even our most precious beliefs and realizations fall apart and dissolve in front of our very eyes. What was so clear only days or weeks ago is transformed to dust. Yellowed away by the alchemical putrefaction of me and my life and the way I was so sure it was supposed to turn out. It’s tempting to conclude that something has gone wrong, some great cosmic error or mistake has occurred, we have failed, or we’ve been forsaken. But this reassembling of our world is a sacred process and the path is everywhere.
– Matt Licata

Not a road long enough to outrun the dawn. Let the sun rise. I am ready.
– L.M. Browning

There’s a sorrow and pain in everyone’s life, but every now and then there’s a ray of light that melts the loneliness in your heart and brings comfort like hot soup and a soft bed.
– Hubert Selby

LANGUAGE
Cosmos, i.e., pain raved in me with a diabolical tongue.

– Czeslaw Milosz, fr. Notes.

People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

Students, I am
going to read
my sayings to you
and you are
going to doodle
something new,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk

And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.
– John O’Donohue

…poetry arises out of a penumbra of pre-occupations, rather than a single-minded intention and readymade technique…
– Seamus Heaney

Above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful. I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that’s why I made works of art.
– Felix Gonzalez-Torres

When you counsel someone, you should appear to be reminding him of something he had forgotten, not of the light he was unable to see.
– Baltasar Gracián

a silent prayer inhabits the breath that quickens as the door swings open fast— revealing perhaps what all dreams manifest, curse into cure at long last.
– Gary Glauber

The extremes are easy.
Only the middle is a puzzle.
– Louise Gluck

The Tao is always at ease.
It overcomes without competing,
answers without speaking a word,
arrives without being summoned,
accomplishes without a plan.
Its net covers the whole universe.
And though its meshes are wide,
it doesn’t let a thing slip through.
– Stephen Mitchell, Tao te Ching

In battle, in the forest, at the precipice in the mountains,
On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,
In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,
The good deeds a man has done before defend him
– Bhagavad Gita

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

It is abnormal to act normally during or after an abnormal situation; it is abnormal if, after an appalling shock, someone goes on living as if nothing had happened.
– Günther Anders

Most of the time now we live under a kind of spell, a lulling enchantment sung by the sirens of our consumer society, telling us what will make us happy. That enchantment is a half-truth at best—
– Bill McKibben

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

When dharma does not fill your whole body and mind, you may assume it is already sufficient. When dharma fills your body and mind, you understand that something is missing. For example, when you sail out in a boat to the middle of an ocean where no land is in sight, and view the four directions, the ocean looks circular, and does not look any other way. But the ocean is neither round nor square; its features are infinite in variety. It is like a palace. It is like a jewel. It only looks circular as far as you can see at that time.

All things are like this.

Though there are many features in the dusty world and the world beyond conditions, you see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach. In order to learn the nature of the myriad things, you must know that although they may look round or square, the other features of oceans and mountains are infinite in variety; whole worlds are there. It is so not only around you, but also directly beneath your feet, or in a drop of water.

– Dogen

If an idea is held in the mind and lighted up with sharpened attention, it will form a new magnetic field in which the results of connections unseen till that moment may gather and unite this idea with others of the same or even of an entirely different order.
– Henri Thomasson

Jung has said that to be in a situation where there is no way out, or to be in a conflict where there is no solution, is the classical beginning of the process of individuation.

It is meant to be a situation without solution: the unconscious wants the hopeless conflict in order to put ego-consciousness up against the wall, so that the man has to realise that whatever he does is wrong, whichever way he decides will be wrong.

This is meant to knock out the superiority of the ego, which always acts from the illusion that it has the responsibility of decision.

Naturally, if a man says, “Oh well, then I shall just let everything go and make no decision, but just protract and wriggle out of [it],” the whole thing is equally wrong, for then naturally nothing happens.

But if he is ethical enough to suffer to the core of his personality, then generally because of the insolubility of the conscious situation, the Self manifests.

In religious language you could say that the situation without issue is meant to force the man to rely on an act of God.

In psychological language the situation without issue, which the anima arranges with great skill in a man’s life, is meant to drive him into a condition in which he is capable of experiencing the Self.

When thinking of the anima as the soul guide, we are apt to think of Beatrice leading Dante up to Paradise, but we should not forget that 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 up to Paradise; she puts him first into a hot cauldron where he is nicely roasted for a while.

– Marie-Louise von Franz

The mark of the writer is nothing more than the singularity of his absence.
– Eliot Weinberger

I see the boys of summer in their ruin
Lay the gold tithings barren.
– Dylan Thomas

Humility comes easily to those who have everything. It is hard to maintain oneself poor in the soul when one has nothing. When one has nothing and one obtains peace, humility is a substantive. In the wealth of life, humility is a brilliant and beautiful adjective.
– Clarice Lispector

So goes the leader, so goes the culture.
So goes the culture, so goes the company.
– Simon Sinek

Initiation is the process by which we turn from our natural inclination to remain unconscious and decide that, whatever it takes—suffering, striving, enduring—we will pursue conscious union with the deeper mind, the wild Self.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés

In truth, all concepts, even the philosophical ones, refer to nonconceptualities, because concepts on their part are moments of the reality that require their formation, primarily for the control of nature.
– Adorno, Negative Dialectics

Too often, the people we ask for feedback are nice but not kind.

Kind people will tell you things a nice person will not. A kind person will tell you that you have spinach on your teeth. A nice person won’t because it’s uncomfortable.

A kind person will tell us what holds us back, even when it’s uncomfortable. A nice person avoids giving us critical feedback because they’re worried about hurting our feelings.

– Shane Parrish

Gravity and sadness yank us down, [but] hope gives us a nudge to help one another get back up or to sit with the fallen on the ground, in the abyss, in solidarity.
– Anne Lamott

If you don’t want to
make it a show,
you’ll end up like
the old monk,
the producer warned
the poet.
– The Old Monk

Every day is new; every minute there is an ending and therefore there is renewal. But to one who believes and seeks guidance, there is never a moment when there is an ending.
– Krishnamurti

It should be simple
but mean something,
they told the old monk
on bass.
– The Old Monk

The war will end one day, and I will return to my poetry.
– Unknown from the Arabic

Just like exercise and nutrition, our relationships with one another are fundamental components of our overall health and well-being.
– Dr. Vivek Murthy

This is a call to organize around a shared body of principles, based on the lived experiences of people of color in tech, of what equitable employment really means.
– David Delmar Sentíes

if connection alone were enough,
there would be no breakups

connection needs the nourishment
of both partners cultivating
emotional maturity and self-awareness

when each of you embraces personal growth,
you can create a home spacious
and flexible enough to hold real love

– young pueblo

I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together.
– Ernest Hemingway

If you feel the urge to write, just lie down and read a book: it will pass.
– Fran Lebowitz

In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political,
I must listen to the birds
and in order to hear the birds
the warplanes must be silent

– Marwan Makhoul

The chief fallacy is to believe that Truth is a result which comes at the end of a thought-process. Truth, on the contrary, is always the beginning of thought; thinking is always result-less. That is the difference between ‘philosophy’ and science: Science has results, philosophy never. Thinking starts after an experience of truth has struck home, so to speak. The difference between philosophers and other people is that the former refuse to let go, but not that they are the only receptacles of truth. This notion that truth is the result of thought is very old and goes back to ancient classical philosophy, possibly to Socrates himself. If I am right and it is a fallacy, then it probably is the oldest fallacy of Western philosophy. You can detect it in almost all definitions of truth…. Truth, in other words, is not ‘in’ thought, but to use Kant’s language, the condition for the possibility of thinking. It is both, beginning and a priori.
– Hannah Arendt

A poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence …
– John Keats

Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.
– John Cleese

No man is more unhappy than he who never faces adversity. For he is not permitted to prove himself.
– Seneca

There should be no religion woven into American government, ever.
– Andy Perrin

For it is a curious fact that though human beings have such imperfect means of communication…they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather than keep any experience to themselves.
– Virginia Woolf

You’d think by now
the old monk would be
famous for saying
nothing,
the poet said.
– The Old Monk

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality. But given the state of the world, is it wise?
– Iris Murdoch

TWO MONTHS BEFORE MY 65th BIRTHDAY

There is no lifeboat, no raft,

no deserted island with coconut trees
and fresh water. You can’t slow down
the waves. You swim, you float, you drift,
you dream of the early years when the sea
seemed to obey the sound
of your voice. No more. You’re tossed
like a dead fish
back and forth, waiting to be eaten or to sink
to the bottom. You forgot the cost
of living, ignored the level of risk
involved once you left shore.
You’re born wet and then live at the mercy
of the currents, the trade winds, the water warming.


Breathe in. No lifeboat in sight. Breathe out. No oars.

– David James

braided under breath
the pulse that you never hear
is with you always
– Catherine Baker

Make your interactions with people transformational, not just transactional.
– Patti Smith

Fountains And Statues
by John Tagliabue

FOUNTAINS AND STATUES AND AMAZED
TOURISTS BETWEEN NOTRE DAME
AND THE ORANGERIE

To have
had the heart of admiration of joy lifted
the way
Apollinaire lifted a poem, the way our gaze lifts
the Eiffel Tower;
the way Paris clearer in sunlight and springtime than
ever before lifts us;
from Pont Neuf you take off, in the Tuileries you see
Marcel Marceau
with a single flower or Monet with a thousand canvases.
Pavlova, how
can you get on your toe that way ? What are you doing
spinning and spinning
and spinning out in the universe and so
close to my heart ?

Books And Thoughts
by Walter Rinder

books and thoughts clean the mind
of restrictions built by time
through the pages we discover
all the feelings held from each other
we read the words, think the thoughts
the author expresses to be taught
books to me are like a friend
whose knowledge helps my hurts to mend

We need to turn today’s economies, which are degenerative by default into ones that are regenerative by design.
– Kate Raworth

As a kid there was one day
each fall that felt like a switch, it came at
the end of October, when everything was
clearly dying and I’d suddenly feel so alive and
full of energy that I’d vanish into the woods
and just run. It was a type of joy, until each fall I’d
end up waiting, hungry for it, until I swear
I could feel it coming, both toward me and from
inside me … Today, part of my so-so morning
was that the radio claimed that there are plants
that live so long they may never die and that
everything is a riverbed and that the question is
not if, but only when, the rains will start.
– Nick Flynn

Beware the autumn people.

For some, autumn comes early, stays late, through life, where October follows September and November touches October and then instead of December and Christ’s birth there is no Bethlehem Star, no rejoicing, but September comes again and old October and so on down the years, with no winter, spring or revivifying summer.

For these beings, fall is the only normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond.

Where do they come from? The dust.
Where do they go? The grave.
Does blood stir their veins? No, the night wind.
What ticks in their head? The worm.
What speaks through their mouth? The toad.
What sees from their eye? The snake.What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars.

They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles—breaks.

Such are the autumn people. Beware of them.

– Ray Bradbury

Ah, the wars they will be fought again
The holy dove, she will be caught again
Bought and sold, and bought again
The dove is never free..
– Leonard Cohen

I try to develop a sense of identification with the rest of humanity. I don’t swim in a pool if I have the sea.
– Clarice Lispector

in the dark time of the year. between melting and freezing, the soul’s sap quivers.
– t.s. eliot

Our bodies have become so rigid and so plugged with unexpressed emotion that there is no room in them for creativity. . . . Blocked expression leads to depression, and depression ultimately leads to collapse.
– Marion Woodman

The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community.
– Carl Jung

We get it poets: things are like other things.
– Mike Ginn

there is a stillness in me that refuses to be translated
– Pella Winkopp

There is a common misunderstanding that emotions cause us to think illogically. But recent scientific thinking, reviewed by psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues, has placed emotion at the center of wisdom. One reason is that most emotion is felt after an event, which apparently serves to help us remember what happened and learn from it. The more upset we are by a mistake, the more we think about it and will be able to avoid it the next time. The more delighted we are by a success, the more we think and talk about it and how we did it, causing us to be more likely to be able to repeat it.
– Elaine N. Aron

I am, by instinct, a collectivist. I hold the whole world inside me.
– Clarice Lispector

Silence is a space of waiting, of patience—not of forcing anything to be. It is a space of receiving rather than giving.
– Lavender Suarez

Any healthy half-awake person is occasionally going to be pierced with a sense of the unfairness and the catastrophe of life for ninety-five percent of the people on this earth.
– Anne Lamott

Other people aren’t hell / if you glimpse them at dawn, when / their brows are clean, rinsed by dreams.
– Adam Jagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh

She kindled only in response to music, poetry, love, or laughter but then with what a kindling! She flamed, she glowed.
– Vita Sackville-West

My Distant Country

How many bedrooms do I need
to get a bit of sleep?
How many chairs
to sit myself down?
How many roads
to walk back to you,
my distant country?

– Najwan Darwish

You want the poem
to stop
the world’s nonsense but
it can only
slow it down,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk

We should have a land of sun,
Of gorgeous sun,
And a land of fragrant water
Where the twilight is a soft bandanna handkerchief
Of rose and gold,
And not this land
Where life is cold.

– Langston Hughes

There is no meeting ground between you who are full of beliefs, ceremonies and rituals, and I who am without them.
– Krishnamurti

The secret is there is no secret:

Move your body regularly.
Eat whole foods, not too much.
Build community and belonging.
Pursue meaningful endeavors.
Optimize for control over your
time and energy, not money or things.
Be patient, play the long game.
Sleep when you are tired.

– Brad Stulberg

every translation signifies the space-between, the gap, the historical chasm or the repression of history; translation is the most cautious form of communication since there is always the inherent admission of a certain departure and an uncertain arrival.
– hubertus von amelunxen

If you can’t read your notes
what makes you think God can,
the old monk asked the poet.
– The Old Monk

All of life is a foreign country.
– Jack Kerouac

Whether or not we continue to enforce a universal conception of human rights at moments of outrage and incomprehension, precisely when we think that others have taken themselves out of the human community as we know it, is a test of our very humanity.
– Judith Butler

You are not responsible for what happened. But the war took each of us back to his tent.
– Mahmoud Darwish (t. by Antoon)

It is not the literal past that rules us: it is images of the past.
– George Steiner

Style is the answer to everything.
A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing
To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it
To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art
– Bukowski

Who we are, it seems, is never enough.
– Santiago Santai Jiménez

The messages we are pressing
into the Earth now:
will they turn out to be
forecasts of woe,
or narratives of possibilities, or both?
– Anna Badkhen

I don’t know what it is like to not have deep emotions. Even when I feel nothing, I feel it completely.
– Sylvia Plath

The deeper I go into myself the more I realize that I am my own enemy.
– Floriano Martins

The concept that each of us has a unique set of potentialities yearning to be realized is an ancient one. St Augustine wrote that ‘there is one within me who is more myself than myself.
– Howard Sasportas

There may be nothing more destructive than self-doubt.
– Susan Piver

We are never integrated. That fantasy [that we could be] is like wading into the Pacific and believing we could encompass the ocean. There are ever more unconscious or dissociated parts of the individual psyche than consciousness could ever integrate.
– James Hollis

Parents should always be conscious of the fact that they themselves are the principal cause of neurosis in their children.
– CG Jung

…there are shadows because there are hills.
– E. M. Forster

I promise I shall never give up,
and that I’ll die yelling and
laughing.
– Jack Kerouac

No one ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. They see it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking.
– Ruth Benedict

The day you decide that you are more interested in being aware of your thoughts than you are in the thoughts themselves—that is the day you will find your way out.
– Michael Singer

The reason some portraits don’t look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.
– Salvador Dalí

We all have souls of different ages
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

I believe the best poetry
instruction leans toward the oblique.
‘This seems to be a ransacked candle.
This tastes like Iowa. This reads
like the shortest building in the world
trying to be tall. This syntax feels kissed’
– Alice Fulton

The desire to write grows
with writing
– Desiderius Erasmus

I speak an open and disinterested language, dictated by no passion but that of humanity
– Thomas Paine

You will find no new lands, you will find no other seas.
– C.P. Cavafy

“In an age when everyone has opinions, she maintained the discipline of never revealing hers,” writes Tina Brown in her deepest assessment of the late Queen. “How we would miss not knowing what she thought.”

Intelligence is defined by your willingness to learn, solve problems and try new things, not by your grades.
– Prof. Feynman

Don’t forget the movement on college campuses to protest South Africa’s apartheid system was mocked too, until it wasn’t. It behooves us not to underestimate the moral imagination of the young.
– John Freeman

in scratchy darkness
in caverns under oak leaves
numberless wonders
– Catherine Baker

My body has become too small
for me. So has eternity.
– Mahmoud Darwish

floating
beyond humdrum rhythms
day moon
– Taylor Wray

If you seek for meaning—now, this applies to all seekers; I’m sorry, growth-seekers [laughter]. But—seeking’s alright; I mean, it’s a free country [laughter]—but it invariably takes you away from what you’re looking for because every search supposes I will find it later, not now.…
– Alan Watts

There’s no manual; transgressive writing shocks by articulating the present, the one thing impossible to put into words, because a language does not yet exist to describe the present.
– Robert Glück

Psychologically you develop in a spiral, you always come over the same point where you have been before, but it is never exactly the same, it is either above or below.
– CG Jung

It’s impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.
– Epictetus

When people turn away from pursuing excitement, comfort, wealth, status, or other such goals, it is common to discover a deeper valuing of simplicity.
– Kim Allen

Everything I observe hurts me, yet I keep berating myself for not observing enough.
– Claude Lévi-Strauss

Consider again this thing of realism (I’d like to abandon the whole thing). Within the realm of realism lies the assumption that language mirrors all that isn’t language, right? A table.
– Kathy Acker

Offer your strengths to others and you will be amazed how many people offer their strengths to you.
– Simon Sinek

Parable of the Hostages

The Greeks are sitting on the beach
wondering what to do when the war ends. No one
wants to go home, back
to that bony island; everyone wants a little more
of what there is in Troy, more
life on the edge, that sense of every day as being
packed with surprises. But how to explain this
to the ones at home to whom
fighting a war is a plausible
excuse for absence, whereas
exploring one’s capacity for diversion
is not. Well, this can be faced
later; these
are men of action, ready to leave
insight to the women and children.
Thinking things over in the hot sun, pleased
by a new strength in their forearms, which seem
more golden than they did at home, some
begin to miss their families a little,
to miss their wives, to want to see
if the war has aged them. And a few grow
slightly uneasy: what if war
is just a male version of dressing up,
a game devised to avoid
profound spiritual questions? Ah,
but it wasn’t only the war. The world had begun
calling them, an opera beginning with the war’s
loud chords and ending with the floating aria of the sirens.
There on the beach, discussing the various
timetables for getting home, no one believed
it could take ten years to get back to Ithaca;
no one foresaw that decade of insoluble dilemmas—oh unanswerable
affliction of the human heart: how to divide
the world’s beauty into acceptable
and unacceptable loves! On the shores of Troy,
how could the Greeks know
they were hostages already: who once
delays the journey is
already enthralled; how could they know
that of their small number
some would be held forever by the dreams of pleasure,
some by sleep, some by music?

– Louise Glück

I’ve figured it out, something that was never clear to me before–how all creation transposes itself out of the world deeper and deeper into our inner world, and why birds cast such a spell on this path into us. The bird’s nest is, in effect, an outer womb given by nature; the bird only furnishes it and covers it rather than containing the whole thing inside itself. As a result, birds are the animals whose feelings have a very special, intimate familiarity with the outer world; they know that they share with nature their innermost mystery. That is why the bird sings its songs into the world as though it were singing into it’s inner self, that’s why we take a birdsong into our own inner selves so easily, it seems to us that we translate it fully, with no remainder, into our feelings; a birdsong can even, for a moment, make the whole world into a sky within us, because we feel that the bird does not distinguish between its heart and the world’s.
– Rainer Maria Rilke

Within the eyes of a dream figure, we find a well of timelessness and presence. We surrender to another kind of consciousness, a subtle mode of connection, requiring finesse, patience, sensitivity and spaciousness. With extended practice of looking into the eyes of a dream image, we will occasionally make contact with other images residing in the inner realms of this awareness, such as ancestor figures and guardian animals. This can be a tremendously rewarding experience. I have found that looking gently and mindfully into the eyes of a dream figure changes people. Entering the portals of the soul opens us ever more deeply into our own soul life and to the mysteries of the dreamtime.
– Stephen Aizenstat

Well, the terrible fact is that though we are all more or less thinking of something or other all the time, some of us are thinking more and some less.

Some brains are battling and working and remembering and puzzling things over all the time and other brains are just lying down, snoring and occasionally turning over.

– Ted Hughes

To the Taoist on Chuanchiao Mountain.

This morning my quarters were so cold
I suddenly thought of my friend in the mountains
gathering firewood down by the creek
lugging it back to boil white rocks
I wish I could bring him a gourd full of wine
to drive off the wind and rain at night
but fallen leaves cover the deserted slopes
and how could I find the trail

– Wei Ying-wu

Money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive. It easily manages to outweigh all other motives, because the effort it demands of the mind is so very much less. Nothing is so clear and so simple as a row of figures.
– Simone Weil

People with a soulful psychological temperament are receptive, reflective, often deliberate and slow. When speed is of the essence, do not ask a soulful type. They like to take their time and feel their way into things.
– Walter Odajnyk

There is a feeling the body gives the mind of having missed something, a bedrock poverty, like falling

without the sense that you are passing through one world, that you could reach another anytime. Instead the real is crossing you,

your body an arrival you know is false but can’t outrun. And somewhere in between these geese forever entering and these spiders turning back,

this astonishing delay, the everyday, takes place.

– Jorie Graham

There are four stories at the heart of western imperial civilization that have profound ecological implications. There is the ‘prosperity story’ which promotes worship of material acquisition and money, the ‘biblical story’ which focuses on the afterlife rather than the world around us, the ‘security story’ which builds up the military and police to protect relationships of domination, and the ‘secular meaning story’ which reduces life to matter and mechanism… The most dangerous story that we live by is ‘the story of human centrality, of a species destined to be lord of all it surveys, unconfined by the limits that apply to other, lesser creatures’.

These are not, however, stories in the usual sense of narratives. They are not told in novels, read to children at bedtime, shared around a fire, or conveyed through anecdotes in formal speeches. Instead they exist behind and between the lines of the texts that surround us — the news reports that describe the ‘bad news’ about a drop in Christmas sales, or the ‘good news’ that airline profits are up — … underneath common ways of writing and speaking in industrial societies are stories about unlimited economic growth as being not just possible but the goal of society, of the accumulation of unnecessary goods as a path towards self-improvement, of progress and success defined narrowly in terms of technological innovation and profit, and of nature as something separate from humans, a mere stock of resources to be exploited.

– Arran Stibbe

My home is not made of gold.
My heart is not made of ice.
My soul is not made of plastic.
No, my home is a peaceful flower
that no one can pick.
I am there when I am reading.
I am there when I am frightened.
I am there when I am calm.
Yes, you can enter.
But first repeat after me:
My heart is not made of ice.
My soul is not made of plastic.
– Joseph Fasano’s niece

Everything’s there
at the end —
it’s just compressed,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk

What has been moved is not moving.
What has not been moved is not moving.
Apart from what has been moved and what has not
been moved,
Movement cannot be conceived.

– Nāgārjuna, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way

to utter you,
to carry you,
bridge across the abyss—
– Rilke

The Western mind has no word for Tao. The Chinese character is made up of the sign for “head” and the sign for “going,” “Head” can be taken as consciousness and “going” as traveling a way, and the idea would then be: to go consciously, or the conscious way.
– CG Jung

I have memories – but only a fool stores his past in the future.
– David Gerrold

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes (Matthew 5). But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course, that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. ‘Blessed are the merciful’ in a courtroom? ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ in the Pentagon? Give me a break!
– Kurt Vonnegut

Please, don’t worry so much. Because in the end, none of us have very long on this Earth. Life is fleeting. And if you’re ever distressed, cast your eyes to the summer sky when the stars are strung across the velvety night. And when a shooting star streaks through the blackness, turning night into day… make a wish and think of me. Make your life spectacular.
– Robin Williams

I long to be This, not That.

That—birthed in a thousand tears. That—of betrayed childhood dreams, security, love. That—dangled over an eternal lake of fire.

I want to be This without That; This, beneath the jagged scars; This—a state of innocence and endless possibilities; This, an openness, a vulnerability—a possibility.

I can’t be This when I rigidly define myself as “not-That”, but it is a reflex, a rejoinder, a refrain. It is a well-worn neural pathway; a habit; a coping mechanism.

This, this hunger of my soul, buried by That, the soul of my hunger.

I long to be This, not That. This—the delicate fabric of What Could Have Been; What Should Have Been.

– The Subversive Lens

Not all opinions are equal. Some are based on fact. Some are based on nonsense. Critical thinking is required for wisdom.
– Laurence Overmire

We are here
On this earth
In this time and place
In our homes,
On our lands,
In the cities,
With our families,
laughing loudly,
cooking together,
protecting each other.
– Rainy Dawn Ortiz

Deep in my body my green heart turns, and thinks of you. Deep in the pond, under the thick trap door of ice, the water moves, the carp hangs like a sun, its scarlet heart visible in its side.
– Sharon Olds

Creativity has become secondary to corporate profits, the focus is no longer on art, artist or narrative, it’s all about satisfying shareholders, denigrating creators and the art of filmmaking. It’s getting harder and harder to find wonderful works by great directors, I’m not interested in seeing 90% of the movies currently on the board, I find an attractive zero in those great comic based movie franchises, I think they have sacrificed the art we have all been involved in for making profits, that ‘frantic montage’ of current cinema is not to my taste, I don’t know if it’s because directors think they can no longer maintain the interest of the audience, but that way of making cinema makes me despair.
– Jessica Lange

Across the room It stood up long and fair—
The ghost that was myself—
And gave me stare for stare.
– Lizette Woodworth Reese

To make bread or love, to dig in the earth, to feed an animal or cook for a stranger—these activities require no extensive commentary, no lucid theology. All they require is someone willing to bend, reach, chop, stir. Most of these tasks are so full of pleasure that there is no need to complicate things by calling them holy. And yet these are the same activities that change lives, sometimes all at once and sometimes more slowly, the way dripping water changes stone. In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life.
– Barbara Brown Taylor

The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story that the mind has managed to construct.
– Daniel Kahneman

Strong relationships don’t need agreement. They need alignment.

Agreement is having identical opinions. Alignment is having shared values.

Agreement is taking the same path. Alignment is heading in the same direction.

Closeness is a matter of commitment, not consensus.

– Adam Grant

Grow old along with me; the best is yet to be.
– Robert Browning

The wider the community of your heart, the more easily you will recognize your own brothers and sisters in the strangers around you.
– Henri Nouwen

The worst aspect of trauma is the disconnection from ourselves.
– Gabor Maté

It is the shade of trees on my way to school before they were uprooted.
– Mosab Abu Toha, What is Home?

When the world becomes dark with endings it becomes time to turn to the inner thread that first brought each soul to this life. Although it cannot be found by common observers, as long as we hold the inner thread of being we cannot be completely lost.
– Michael Meade

I am convinced that personal growth is one part reinvention—for every four parts reclamation.
– The Subversive Lens

My city makes
the apocalypse look
reasonable to outsiders.
– Siaara Freeman

My whole life is a dark room. One big, dark room.
– Lydia Deetz

If the cosmos wants them to meet, even if they are far away, they will meet. If it doesn’t, even if they are face to face, they will not see each other.
– Alejandro Jodorowsky

Conquer yourself rather than the world.
– René Descartes

Sometimes the greatest test
is how you quietly handle those
who so badly mishandled you.
– Morgan Richard Olivier

Once there was a way
To get back homeward
Once there was a way
To get back home
Sleep, pretty darling, do not cry
And I will sing a lullaby
Golden slumbers fill your eyes
Smiles await you when you rise
Sleep pretty darling, do not cry
And I will sing a lullaby
– Paul McCartney

Tao Te Ching

What is rooted is easy to nourish.
What is recent is easy to correct.
What is brittle is easy to break.
What is small is easy to scatter.
Prevent trouble before it arises.
Put things in order before they exist.
The giant pine tree grows from a tiny sprout.
The journey of a thousand miles starts from beneath your feet.
Rushing into action, you fail.
Trying to grasp things, you lose them.
Forcing a project to completion,
you ruin what was almost ripe.
Therefore the Master takes action by letting things take their course.
He remains as calm at the end as at the beginning.
He has nothing, thus has nothing to lose.
What he desires is non-desire; what he learns is to unlearn.
He simply reminds people of who they have always been.
He cares about nothing but the Tao.
Thus he can care for all things.

– translation by S. Mitchell

i know you: you’re the one who’s bent so low.
you hold me—i’m the riddled one—in bondage.
what word could burn as witness for us two?
you’re my reality. i’m your mirage.

– paul celan
tr. nikolai popov and heather mchugh

We inherited the destruction and its consequences. In modern life the world belongs to the stupid, the insensitive and the disturbed. The right to live and triumph is today earned with the same qualifications one requires to be interned in a madhouse: amorality, hypomania and an incapacity for thought.
– Fernando Pessoa

To do anything, a poet
has to lie down and think about it,
the old monk said.
That’s the way we are.
– The Old Poet

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.
– Dr. Seuss

Your potential, the absolute best you’re capable of—that’s the metric to measure yourself against.

Winning isn’t enough. People can get lucky and win. People can be assholes and win. Anyone can win. But not everyone is the best possible version of themselves.

– Ryan Holiday

I wish there were shortcuts to wisdom and self-knowledge: cuter abysses or three-day spa wilderness experiences. Sadly, it doesn’t work that way. I so resent this.
– Anne Lamott

We understand the world better if we tremble with it.
– Édouard Glissant

To be a poet
you don’t need a desk,
you don’t need a window,
just some wind
in the pines,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk

Give me to hold all sounds […]
Fill me with all the voices of the
universe.
– Walt Whitman

Stupidity is one of man’s strange hobbyhorses. There is something divine about it, and yet something of the megalomania of the world. Which is why stupidity is really large.
– @RedBookJung

Dreams are the way we talk about the unintelligibly of reality, & about the ways in which we acknowledge this. Desire, that is to say, makes sense only in dreams. That is why, Freud send to suggest, the is no waking up for us.
– Adam Phillips

so long this winter
so cold this shadow
what day is it
– Suheir Hammad, Palestinian poet

Already our thoughts rise in the night like nomad chieftains of the big tents who walk before daybreak toward a red sky, carrying their saddles on their left shoulders.
– Saint-John Perse, Chronicle, (tr. Robert Fitzgerald)

October wind
parsing the leaves from the trees . . .
such long whispering
– Wally Swist

Not late, but in a starry cold that lifted them off their feet, they went out to the car.
– Helen Garner

I say that between colonization and civilization there is an infinite distance.
– Aimé Césaire

Behold the places we leave. The fruits of the soil are beneath our walls, the waters of the sky in our cisterns, and the great millstones of porphyry rest on the sand.
– Saint-John Perse, Chronicle, (tr. Robert Fitzgerald)

You must understand that in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty…you will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the most determined resistance. There is no point in pretending that this won’t happen.
– James Baldwin

Theologians are silent. And philosophers
Don’t even dare ask: “What is truth?”
And so, after the great wars, undecided,
With almost good will but not quite,
We plod on with hope. And now let everyone
Confess to himself. “Has he risen?” “I don’t know.”
– Czeslaw Milosz

Writers of fiction are collectors of useless information … tiny little details, some of them almost malicious, but very telling.
– William Trevor

October snow
finding old swearwords
I thought I’d lost
– @hegelincanada

There’s a logarithm
for just about everything
these days,
and I’m trying to bend them,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk

The thistle, the nettle, the burdock, and belladonna
Have a future. Theirs are wastelands
And rusty railroad tracks, the sky, silence.
– Czeslaw Milosz

I can’t speak for elsewhere,
but here on Earth we’ve got a fair supply of everything.
Here we manufacture chairs and sorrows,
scissors, tenderness, transistors, violins,
teacups, dams, and quips.
– Wislawa Szymborska

Who saw the dance of the dead clouds when the sunlight left them last night, and the west wind blew them before it like withered leaves?
– John Ruskin

Jazz is my adventure. I’m after new chords, new ways of syncopating, new figures, new runs. How to use notes differently. That’s it. Just using notes differently.
– Thelonious Monk

Welcome to a society where wanting children not to die is antisemitism, and wanting the planet to remain liveable is fanaticism.
– @ClimateDad77

Art does make a difference.
– Laura Kerr

There is in a word, in a verb, something sacred which prevents us from making it a game of chance. To master a language is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
– Charles Baudelaire

some days the
thrill of life seems far
far away

turn, then, to
what is there
instead

it must be important
for it to take
the stage

listen, now
listen

joy is not gone

it simply needs healing
to remember its name

– Steven Andrew Westby

The doors open.
The metaphors themselves swing open wide!

Papers fall from my desk,
my desk teeters on the edge of the cosmos,
& I commit each word to fire.

I burn!
All night I write in suns across the page.
I fuel the “body electric“ with midnight oil.

– Erica Jong

The bad news is that it is easy to regress into unconsciousness, which is really non-consciousness. That’s what drinking is. That’s what drugs are. What all addiction is. It’s not increased consciousness, it’s decreased consciousness. We don’t want to feel our feelings. We don’t want to know our thoughts, don’t want to feel our pain, so we pick some artificial way to hide from these.
– Richard Rohr

Jung spoke about individuals who behind an appearance of normality, are undermined by unconscious illnesses and perverse tendencies. They are ruled by infantile wish-fantasies and resentments and infect the normal citizen with these (if they come to power).
– Marie-Louise von Franz

It’s by writing… by stepping back a bit from the real thing to look at it, that we are most present.
– Alison Bechdel

Peace does not mean the suppression of all differences, but their coexistence and fruitful collaboration. Peace does not consist in one man, one party, one nation, crushing and dominating everyone else. Peace exists where men who have the power to be enemies are, instead, friends by reason of the sacrifices they have made in order to meet one another on a higher level, where the differences between them are no longer a source of conflict.
– Thomas Merton

Why don’t we do things we know we should do? Because we don’t feel like it. Every problem of self-control is not a problem of information or discipline or reason, but, rather, of emotion.
– Mark Manson

In your life you’ll meet people who seek to poison your heart against this or that group. You must resist the siren seduction of fear and scapegoating. A soul untarnished by prejudice is the only currency we have in this crooked world. Let no one turn you into a vessel of hate.
– @SketchesbyBoze

Listen, O night . . . amid the holy ruins and the crumbling old termite hills, hear the great sovereign footfalls of the soul without a lair,
Like a wild beast prowling a pavement of bronze.

– Saint-John Perse, Chronicle, (tr. Robert Fitzgerald)

The underlying point of all our study and practice is that the happiness we seek is here to connect with at any time. The happiness we seek is our birthright. To discover it we need to be more gentle with ourselves, more compassionate toward ourselves and our universe.

The happiness we seek cannot be found through grasping, trying to hold on to things. It cannot be found through getting serious and uptight about wanting things to go in the direction we think will bring happiness. We are always taking hold of the wrong end of the stick. The point is that the happiness we seek is already here and it will be found through relaxation and letting go rather than through struggle.

– Pema Chodron

We will disrupt through witness, remembrance, and the courtship of the imagination. We will escort children past the darkest warrens of the forest. We will construct kites that stay aloft in the rain. We will champion what is beautiful, and so finally make our opponents irrelevant.
– Owen Daniels

What makes people despair is that they try to find a universal meaning to the whole of life, and then end up by saying it is absurd, illogical, and empty of meaning. There is not one big, cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person. To seek a total unity is wrong. To give as much meaning to one’s life as possible seems right to me. For example, I am not committed to any of the political movements which I find full of fanaticism and injustice, but in the face of each human being, I act democratically and humanly.
– Anaïs Nin

The core experiences of psychological trauma are disempowerment and disconnection from others. Recovery, therefore, is based upon the empowerment of the survivor and the creation of new connections. Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation. In her renewed connections with other people, the survivor re-creates the psychological faculties that were damaged or deformed by the traumatic experience. These faculties include the basic capacities for trust, autonomy, initiative, competence, identity, and intimacy. Just as these capabilities are originally formed in relationships with other people, they must be reformed in such relationships.
– Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery

He had developed a superstitious fear of the instant, that tiny hole through which all the time available to human beings must pass.
– César Aira

Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.
– Charles Bukowski

If I am still alive after the war, what I want to do the most is drink water.
– Ayah Wakil, Gaza

November 1:
A wet, fresh air,
grey skies.
– Sylvia Plath

So the world turned
its one good eye

to watch the bees
take most of metaphor
with them.

– RK Fauth

I write for the still-fragmented parts in me, trying to bring them together. Whoever can read and use any of this, I write for them as well.
– Adrienne Rich

If I was asked to get rid of the Zen aesthetic and just keep one quality necessary to create art, I would say it’s trust. When you learn to trust yourself implicitly, you no longer need to prove something through your art. You simply allow it to come out, to be as it is. This is when creating art becomes effortless. It happens just as you grow your hair. It grows.
John Daido Loori

To hell, to hell with balance! I break glasses; I want to burn, even if I break myself. I live only for ecstasy. Nothing else affects me. Small doses, moderate loves, all the demi-teintes—all these leave me cold.
– Anaïs Nin

It all ends in tears anyway.
– Jack Kerouac

Here was my solitude, as quick and thick and heavy as always … as though when one is alone time becomes a room with double windows: one looking into the past, the other into the future.
– Hisham Matar

Will you forgive me these November days?
– Anna Akhmatova

The beloved said, “When will we meet?
I said, “A year after the war ends.”
The beloved said, “When will the war end?”
I said, “When we meet.”

– Mahmoud Darwish

If you live according to nature, you will never be poor; if you live to please the opinions of others, you will never be rich.
– Epicurus

Listen… With faint dry sound, Like steps of passing ghosts, The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees And fall.
– Adelaide Crapsey

Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there (or when we think about him). Or rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different from what we read in him. Every being cries out silently to be read differently.
– Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

I find myself now the boatman, driving a taxi at the end of the world. I will see that you arrive safely, my friend, I will get you there.
– Carolyn Forché

like a rudderless boat
I know not the destination
of this path of love
– Yoshitada

Poetry will save me. I won’t tell this to the four winds,
because I’m frightened of experts, excommunication,
afraid of shocking the fainthearted. But not of God.
What is poetry, if not His face touched
by the brutality of things?
– Adélia Prado, (Tr. Ellen Doré Watson)

A war is a made thing, i. e. not an accident.
– Susan Stewart

When the world’s most devilish
Intrigue of humanity was set
And was coiling around you tighter and tighter—
I have stood up for you.

– Carlos Montezuma

I drank from an hourglass. When i asked for seconds they said there wasn’t time.
– Matt Flumerfelt

The loveliest season of all the year—that transient but delightful interval between the storms of the wild equinox, with all their wet, and the dark, short, dismal days which precede the rigor of winter …
– Whittier

Anything, if it’s important, plunges me into anguish. As long as I think that nothing’s important, I succeed at everything.
– Fleur Jaeggy

For me, autumn has never been a sad season. The dying leaves and the days that grow shorter and shorter have never evoked the end of something for me but instead brought with them anticipation for the future.
– Patrick Modiano, In the Café of Lost Youth

like one that stands upon a promontory, and spies a far-off shore where he would tread, wishing his foot were equal to his eye.
– shakespeare

If I could choose I would rather be happy than write… if I could live my life all over again, and choose….
– Jean Rhys

We are not playing a game
of sorrow
we are trying to grow
wings
and
fly.

– Etel Adnan

In proportion as I have celestial thoughts, is the necessity for me to be out and behold the western sky before sunset these winter days. That is the symbol of the unclouded mind that knows neither winter nor summer. What is your thought like? That is the hue, that the purity, and transparency, and distance from earthly taint of my inmost mind, for whatever we see without is a symbol of something within, and that which is farthest off is the symbol of what is deepest within. The lover of contemplation, accordingly, will gaze much into the sky.
– Henry David Thoreau

DWELLING

My real dwelling
has no pillars
and no roof either
so rain cannot soak it
and wind cannot blow it down.

– Ikkyu

All media are extensions of some human faculty –psychic or physical. The wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye, clothing is an extension of the skin, electric circuitry an extension of the central nervous system.
– Marshall McLuhan

Societies not prepared to scale down their use of industrial technology must face ecological catastrophes, competition for diminishing resources, and a growing sense of despair about the future of the earth and the meaning of our presence on it. In this context, struggles aiming to re-ruralize the world—e.g., through land reclamation, the liberation of rivers from dams, resistance to deforestation, and, central to all, the revalorization of reproductive work—are crucial to our survival. These are the condition not only if our physical survival but of a ‘re-enchantment’ of the earth, for they reconnect what capitalism has divided: our relation with nature, with others, and with our bodies, enabling us not only to escape the gravitational pull of capitalism but to regain a sense of wholeness in our lives.
– Silvia Federici

If I were to construct a God I would furnish Him with some way and qualities and characteristics which the Present lacks. He would not stoop to ask for any man’s compliments, praises, flatteries; and He would be far above exacting them. I would have Him as self-respecting as the better sort of man in these regards.

He would not be a merchant, a trader. He would not buy these things. He would not sell, or offer to sell, temporary benefits of the joys of eternity for the product called worship. I would have Him as dignified as the better sort of man in this regard.

He would value no love but the love born of kindnesses conferred; not that born of benevolences contracted for. Repentance in a man’s heart for a wrong done would cancel and annul that sin; and no verbal prayers for forgiveness be required or desired or expected of that man.

In His Bible there would be no Unforgiveable Sin. He would recognize in Himself the Author and Inventor of Sin and Author and Inventor of the Vehicle and Appliances for its commission; and would place the whole responsibility where it would of right belong: upon Himself, the only Sinner.

He would not be a jealous God—a trait so small that even men despise it in each other.

He would not boast.

He would keep private Hs admirations of Himself; He would regard self-praise as unbecoming the dignity of his position.

He would not have the spirit of vengeance in His heart. Then it would not issue from His lips.

There would not be any hell—except the one we live in from the cradle to the grave.

There would not be any heaven—the kind described in the world’s Bibles.

He would spend some of His eternities in trying to forgive Himself for making man unhappy when he could have made him happy with the same effort and he would spend the rest of them in studying astronomy.

– Mark Twain

Look now, this is the starting point of philosophy: the recognition that different people have conflicting opinions, the rejection of mere opinion so that it comes to be viewed with mistrust, an investigation of opinion to determine whether it is rightly held, and the discovery of a standard of judgment, comparable to the balance that we have devised for the determining of weights, or the carpenter’s rule for determining whether things are straight or crooked.
– Epictetus

When the world seems to be falling apart, stick to your own trajectory; hang onto your own ideals and find kindred spirits. That’s the rule of life.
– Joseph Campbell

I hate the dialogue around Humanities & English majors right now. Growth-obsessed mindsets created a burning, suffering world. Humanities offer solace & solution.

We need thinkers & communicators who know how to inform action w/ compassion. People who recognize beauty & justice.

– Megan Mayhew-Bergman

Providing space is knowing how to release the discursive or visionary gossip. Such right effort is beautiful.
– Chögyam Trungpa

There’s a world out there, people
no less beautiful than you are.”
– Fady Joudah

Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.
– Alfred Jarry

Poetry is the art of suggestion.
– T. Byron Kelly

I do not write every day, I read every day, think every day. The moment will arrive, always it does, it can be predicted but it cannot be demanded. I do not think of this as inspiration. I think of it as readiness.
– Jeanette Winterson

Life teaches us
to write as fast
as we can

And keep it
short

– John zbigniew guzlowski

You can only shame someone if a significant part of them already *gets it*.

If they don’t get it, if they literally aren’t there yet, then shame is useless, or worse yet, backfires.

– @VinceFHorn

the grocery receipt
makes a good bookmark
. . . cold morning’s lull
– @ruralitalics

I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance.
– bell hooks

It can take years of dedication to get down to the root of the thing. And even then, there’s always a deeper turn on the spiral.

We are layers of mystery that keep wanting to unfold.

– McCall Erickson

I know it’s true, it’s all because of you, and if I make it through it’s all because of you.
– The Beatles, 2023

Genghis Chan: Private Eye VII

You will remember the tourist’s jawbone
And the end of the erotic age

You will remember how to number
The customized stones of Spartan psychonalysis

You will be nice to yourself and regret it
You will undress in front of a window overlooking a prison

You will speak to the driver of a blue hearse
You will grasp someone’s tongue with your teeth and pull

You will prefer the one that bleeds on the carpet
To the one that drools on your sleeve

– John Yau

Sometimes it boils down to one note. One note can be as effective as dozens. Somehow, I have the feeling that all notes are contained in one. And if it’s played with feeling, the reason it has such an effect on everybody is because it does have the other notes somewhere in it.
– Roy Buchanan

Throughout my life,
I haven’t been poor
Nor have lived
amid wealth.
Pointing at the moon,
looking at the moon,
I’m just an old traveler
along the way.
– Fūgai Ekun, Trans. John T. Carpenter

If you believe
the sky,
November
is when things
happen.
– Heidi Barr

Jung said that to be in a situation where there is no way out or to be in a conflict where there is no solution is the classical beginning of the process of individuation. It is meant to be a situation without solution: the unconscious wants the hopeless conflict in order to put ego consciousness up against the wall, so that the man has to realize that whatever he does is wrong, whichever way he decides will be wrong. This is meant to knock out the superiority of the ego, which always acts from the illusion that it has the responsibility of decision. Naturally, if a man says, “Oh well, then I shall just let everything go and make no decision, but just protract and wriggle out everywhere,” the whole thing is equally wrong, for then naturally nothing happens. But if he is ethical enough to suffer to the core of his personality, then generally, because of the insolubility of the conscious situation, the Self manifests. In religious language you could say that the situation without issue is meant to force the man to rely on an act of God. In psychological language the situation without issue, which the anima arranges with great skill in a man’s life, is meant to drive him into a condition in which he is capable of experiencing the Self, in which he will be inwardly open to an interference by the tertium quod non datur (the third, which is not given, that is, the unknown thing). In this way, as Jung said, the anima is the guide toward the realization of the Self, but sometimes in a very painful manner. When thinking of the anima as the soul guide, we are apt to think of Beatrice leading Dante up to Paradise, but we should not forget that 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 up to Paradise; she puts him first into a hot cauldron where he is nicely roasted for a while.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

It is not
inclusion if you
invite people
into a space you
are unwilling to
change
– Muna Abdi

Singing Funeral
I’ve avoided opening my throat in fear the dead would rise, walk out of me, leave me emptier after their fleeting, and still get deported back into the abyss they climbed from. I don’t think they hunger me. They want to abandon and find a soft rock to lay their head on, a voice, an empty water jug, a song, the striking pain of a windless and deserted desert or a revolver or drugs or gang affiliations. Instead I hoax them to sit perched, their black wings all slick and crow-like while I drag the weight of Mexican unsung mourning in choir. Now I have someone to blame. My brother isn’t coming back from the dead and I won’t fix my scale. The tone will always be off, a crooked meteor slicing what’s left of the sky. Songs will remain unsung, the diaphragm, a cheap staircase, not even lullabies can squeeze out, my voice box sealed, a better state line than the Mexican-American border. This time mami won’t become one million doves in the driver seat while she sings to Jenni Rivera as we drive through the sandstorm. Instead she hardens, tells me of the desert roses tumbling across the desert, how just like us they have razor sharp petals as armor on their body from tumbling aimlessly for years. Memory still doesn’t strike a guitar string, the tíos are turning in their grave, while abuelita twists her mouth so we don’t see her teethless. We all have this disease, a black dove chewing on its feathers inside of a country inside us, trapped in the cave of us, we rage or corridos Chihuahuenses or a dying ensemble, but even if the song kills me I won’t set it free. It’s obvious I must avoid the eulogy that comes after talking about my brother’s death because it’ll haunt me, his death, it will follow me and take me too, and I want to sleep tonight.
– Féi Hernandez

…from my comrades of the gutter I learned more, gained a greater appreciation of literature, than ever I did from the pedagogues who clutter our halls of learning. School never provided us with an open forum where we could discuss passionately and freely the books and authors we found to our liking.
– Henry Miller

back in my day, undergrads used to write with the Prussian lucidity of a young Immanuel Kant

alas, no more

– @snackowska

I felt that my life with Albertine was on the one hand, when I was not jealous, nothing but boredom, and on the other hand, when I was jealous, nothing but pain.
– Marcel Proust

I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me; no, nor woman neither…
– Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II Scene II

The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day’s last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

In the night the answer always jumps out at me with dazzling clarity: writing is wages received of the diabolical powers one has served.
– Franz Kafka

November 2.
Vague hope, vague confidence. An endless, dreary Sunday afternoon, an afternoon swallowing down whole years, its every hour a year. By turns walked despairingly down empty streets and lay quietly on the couch. Occasionally astonished by the leaden, meaningless clouds almost uninterruptedly drifting by. ‘You are reserved for a great Monday!’ Fine, but Sunday will never end.
– Franz Kafka

Perhaps we carry within a sort of foresight of our misfortunes.
– Anna de Noailles

And if they ask you about Gaza, tell them:
In it there is a martyr
nursed by a martyr
photographed by a martyr
sent off by a martyr
and prayed for by a martyr.
– Mahmoud Darwish

If you want it
to apply always
and everywhere
you have to write it
in several languages,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk

Not even God
can type fast enough
to keep up
with the old monk,
the poet said.
I’m bushed.
– The Old Monk

When you know
you know nothing
you’ve been well-
educated,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk

How long before your attention span is spent? Before you can only digest this news in small, occasional doses?

The invading forces calculate their aggression in accordance to your exhaustion and loss of interest.

– Saul Williams

The strategic adversary is fascism… the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.
– Michel Foucault

The Flight of the Crows

The autumn afternoon is dying o’er
The quiet western valley where I lie
Beneath the maples on the river shore,
Where tinted leaves, blue waters and fair sky
Environ all; and far above some birds are flying by

To seek their evening haven in the breast
And calm embrace of silence, while they sing
Te Deums to the night, invoking rest
For busy chirping voice and tired wing—
And in the hush of sleeping trees their sleeping cradles swing.

In forest arms the night will soonest creep,
Where sombre pines a lullaby intone,
Where Nature’s children curl themselves to sleep,
And all is still at last, save where alone
A band of black, belated crows arrive from lands unknown.

Strange sojourn has been theirs since waking day,
Strange sights and cities in their wanderings blend
With fields of yellow maize, and leagues away
With rivers where their sweeping waters wend
Past velvet banks to rocky shores, in cañons bold to end.

O’er what vast lakes that stretch superbly dead,
Till lashed to life by storm-clouds, have they flown?
In what wild lands, in laggard flight have led
Their aërial career unseen, unknown,
’Till now with twilight come their cries in lonely monotone?

The flapping of their pinions in the air
Dies in the hush of distance, while they light
Within the fir tops, weirdly black and bare,
That stand with giant strength and peerless height,
To shelter fairy, bird and beast throughout the closing night.

Strange black and princely pirates of the skies,
Would that your wind-tossed travels I could know!
Would that my soul could see, and, seeing, rise
To unrestricted life where ebb and flow
Of Nature’s pulse would constitute a wider life below!

Could I but live just here in Freedom’s arms,
A kingly life without a sovereign’s care!
Vain dreams! Day hides with closing wings her charms,
And all is cradled in repose, save where
Yon band of black, belated crows still frets the evening air.

– Emily Pauline Johnson

Dear New Blood
by Mark Turcotte

You don’t need me, I know, here on
this podium with my poem. You
hunched in the back of the room,
tilted in your hard-earned reservation
lean. You ho-hum your gaze out the
window toward some other sky.

Dear new blood, dear holy dear fully
mixed up mixed down mixed in and
out blood, go ahead and kick the shit,
kiss the shit from my ears. I swear I
swear I’ll listen. Stutter at stutter at me you
uptown weed you thorn you
petal, aim my old flowered face at the
sky.

I know you don’t need me, here on
this podium with my poem. You
pressed flat to the wall, shoulders
cocked, loaded for makwa, for old
growlers like me. You yawn your
glance out the window at the
tempting sky.

Wake me. Bang my dead drum drum,
clang clang my anvil my bell. Shout me
hush me your song, your shiny
impossible, your long, wounded song.
Tell me everything you know, you
don’t. Tell me, do you feel conquered
and occupied? Maybe I’ve forgotten.
Sing it plain, has America ever let you
be you in your own sky?

Sing deep Chaco, deep Minneapolis,
deep Standing Rock, deep Oakland
and LA. Sing deep Red Cliff, sing
Chicago, deep Acoma, deep Pine Ridge
and Tahlequah. Mourn. I think you,
too, were born with broken heart.
Rise. Smash your un-American throat
against the edge of the sky.

You don’t need me, I know. But don’t
go don’t look away. I need you.

Every once in a while God takes away my poetry. I look at the stone, I see a stone.
– Adélia Prado

An old meaning of 𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘭 was simply ‘unripe’. Until the soul begins to grow towards its own sense of fullness and awareness it remains unripe, ‘green’ in the wrong way.
– Michael Meade

They asked, “Do you love her to death?”
I said, “Speak her name over my grave and see how she brings me back to life.”
– Mahmoud Darwish

The more seriously you take yourself, the harder it will be to live in community.
– Pico Iyer

I think sometimes I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn.
– Virginia Woolf

The writing process is really a process of non-physical collage, wherein ideas, snippets of research, observations, memories, dreams, phrases stuck in the head all get swirled around until something wholly new – and distinct – starts to form; then the work (the crafting) begins.
– Joy Baglio

The images we take in
are the nutrients of our subtle body.
– Marion Woodman

If it begins, a trickle, this thin slow falling of the mind.
If you want to know why the sliding affects your nerves.
If you want to know why you cannot reach your own beautiful ideas.
If you reach instead the edge of the thinkable, which leaks.
– Anne Carson

Ask me about the time
my brother ran towards the sun
arms outstretched.
– Tanaya Winder

It goes without saying that difficult problems still arise within, but…I have collected some hard-won skills, a few banged-up tools, needles and enough thread to make meaningful repairs.
– Anne Lamott

Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars .. nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
– Alan Watts

His spirit is everywhere; the American Indian will not vanish.
He has changed externally but he has not vanished.
– Carlos Montezuma

If you speak poetry
to the Chinese,
they will speak poetry
to you,
the old monk promised.
– The Old Monk

During the last few years of her life, Mrs. Willowes grew continually more skilled at evading responsibilities, and her death seemed but the final perfected expression of this skill — a languid retreat from earthly existence.
– Sylvia Townsend Warner

If you remain in the field of knowledge all the time, there is nothing new.
– Krishnamurti

Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort.
– Edward Said

If you can quit, then quit. If you can’t quit, you’re a writer.
– R.A. Salvatore

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.
– Wittgenstein

My Hermitage
by Alexander Posey

Between me and the noise of strife
Are walls of mountains set with pine;
The dusty, care-strewn paths of life
Lead not to this retreat of mine.

I hear the morning wind awake
Beyond the purple height,
And, in the growing light,
The lap of lilies on the lake.

I live with Echo and with Song,
And Beauty leads me forth to see
Her temple’s colonnades, and long
Together do we love to be.

The mountains wall me in, complete,
And leave me but a bit blue
Above. All year, the days are sweet—
How sweet! And all the long nights thro’

I hear the river flowing by
Along its sandy bars;
Behold, far in the midnight sky,
An infinite of stars!

‘Tis sweet, when all is still,
When darkness gathers round,
To hear, from hill to hill,
The far, the wandering sound.

The cedar and the pine
Have pitched their tents with me.
What freedom vast is mine!
What room! What mystery!

Upon the dreamy southern breeze,
That steals in like a laden bee
And sighs for rest among the trees,
Are far-blown bits of melody.

What afterglows the twilight hold,
The darkening skies along!
And O, what rose-like dawns unfold,
That smite the hills to song!

High in the solitude of air,
The gray hawk circles on and on,
Till, like a spirit soaring there,
His image pales and he is gone!

he says they are
soup takers
of the highest order

she says you can
fun sponge
somewhere else

– Alec Finlay, dailies, 3.XI.23

Welcome sweet November,
the season of senses
& my favorite month of all.
– Gregory F. Lenz

november
a pair of mismatched gloves
in my pocket
– @YourMoonliness

[…] you have a corneal ulcer, that’s why I advise you to write easily digestible things from now on, things you can do with little effort, stop writing things no one understands that only you can understand, it’s because of these things you now have an ulcerated cornea […]
– Hilda Hilst

As you watch it all unwind
think of those who wound it up,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk

Malina: So you’ll never again say: War and Peace
Me: Never again.
It’s always war.
Here there is always violence.
Here there is always struggle.
It is the everlasting war.
– Ingeborg Bachmann, trans. Philip Boehm

Roselva says the only thing
that doesn’t change is train tracks.
– Naomi Shihab Nye

Help is not on the way —
that’s why we’ve trained you,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk

Being happy is a political gesture.
– Etel Adnan

Somehow it would be good not to know, to dream against the tide with your eyes wide open.
– Etel Adnan

I didn’t need to use words, but colors and lines.
I didn’t need to belong to an open form of expression.

I write what I see, I paint what I am.

– Etel Adnan

Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.
– Brian Doyle

The men could only offer the god the paltry sorts of things
– Apollonius of Rhodes, Jason and the Argonauts

Nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see.
– Teilhard de Chardin

Be hole, be dust, be dream, be wind
Be night, be dark, be wish, be mind,
Now slip, now slide, now move unseen,
Above, beneath, betwixt, between.
– Neil Gaiman

You are in this time of the interim where everything seems withheld. The path you took to get here has washed out. The way forward is still concealed from you. The old is not old enough to have died away, the new is still too young to be born. You cannot lay claim to anything in this place of dusk. Your eyes are blurred and there is no mirror.


Everyone else has lost sight of your heart and you can see nowhere to put your trust. You know you have to make your own way through. As far as you can, hold your confidence.

Do not allow your confusion to squander this call which is loosening your roots in false ground, that you might become free of all you had outgrown.

What is being transfigured here is your mind and it is difficult and slow to become you. The more faithfully you can endure here, the more refined your heart will become for your arrival in the new dawn.

– John O’Donohue

It felt right. There was no pain, but a real clarity. The long process of seeing the flaws in my belief structure and carefully tiptoeing around the frayed edges as parts of it were torn out, piece by piece—that was all over. The angels, watching from my shoulders; the mental tension about having sex without marriage, and drinking alcohol, and not observing any religious obligations—they were gone. The ever-present prospect of hell fire lifted, and my horizon seemed broader. God, Satan, angels: these were all figments of human imagination. From now on I could step firmly on the ground that was under my feet and navigate based on my own reason and self-respect. My moral compass was within myself, not in the pages of a sacred book.
– Ayaan Hirsi Ali

How to Be a Poet (to remind myself)
by Wendell Berry

Make a place to sit down.

Sit down. Be quiet.

You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill—more of each than you have—inspiration, work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity. Any readers who like your poems, doubt their judgment.

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensioned life; stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.

We live in time—it holds us and molds us—but I never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing—until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.
– Julian Barnes

Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history.
– Norman Doidge

You are the fairy tale told by your ancestors.
– Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

We’re all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us.
– Liam Callanan, The Cloud Atlas

Don’t rock me awake again;
I dream of thunderstorms and wildfires,
and can hear a novice orchestra
play a terrible melody.
At midnight,
I say goodbye to the neon lights;
I unconsciously walk around downtown;
searching for a pure heart.
When this world finally collapses
like half-finished origami,
only then would I understand human mercy,
as if I could enter a dream again.

– Elda Mengisto

Why would I retire? Sit at home and watch TV? No thanks. I’d rather be out playing.
– Paul McCartney

Poetry is work. Revising is the writing. Years of revising is the digging down. With time the work gets better, it grows, it learns, it starts to show its true form, then one day you look down: reading your own book.
– Sean Thomas Dougherty

From what I gather in reading ancient texts, right up to the present, human beings have always been confronted by the same kinds of problems. I think that this world is not a realm that admits to a solution. That isn’t what this world is about. It’s a different kind of activity that we have here. We have to deal with good and evil continually. With joy and despair, with all the antinomies, all the opposites and contraries. That’s what our life is about. We can’t abdicate that.
– Leonard Cohen

8 minutes ago
the sunlight began
its 93 million mile journey
to meet my open hand
& warm it
– Steve Edwards

after the storm
when the sun shines
at last i see
the first glimmer
of your smile
– Marilyn Ward

every morning
in the fog my tea
tastes better
– Issa

walking through
the meadows
following first light
the sparrows in sync
from here to there
– @Effulgent_Zeal

When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.
– Nikola Tesla, 1926

Ideology may appear clear to its proponents as long as it remains abstract, but when it is put into practice it takes the shape of a crime.
– Mahmoud Darwish

Man Hesitates but Life Urges
by D’Arcy McNickle

There is this shifting, endless film
And I have followed it down the valleys
And over the hills,—
Pointing with wavering finger
When it disappeared in purple forest-patches
With its ruffle and wave to the slightest-breathing wind-God.

There is this film
Seen suddenly, far off,
When the sun, walking to his setting,
Turns back for a last look,
And out there on the far, far prairie
A lonely drowsing cabin catches and holds a glint,
For one how endless moment,
In a staring window the fire and song of the martyrs!

There is this film
That has passed to my fingers
And I have trembled,
Afraid to touch.

And in the eyes of one
Who had wanted to give what I had asked
But hesitated—tried—and then
Came with a weary, aged, “Not quite,”
I could but see that single realmless point of time,
All that is sad, and tired, and old—
And endless, shifting film.

And I went again
Down the valleys and over the hills,
Pointing with wavering finger,
Ever reaching to touch, trembling,
Ever fearful to touch.

Winter sits waiting
by the lake, watching it lap
against a bare bank.

Nothing has frozen.
The trees are not yet stripped bare.
Winter still has time.

We are suspended
on cold wires above the smooth
surface. We watch ice

gather in the air.

– George Szirtes

The business of obscuring language is a mask behind which stands the much bigger business of plunder.
– Frantz Fanon

If you want to solve the worlds problems you have to put your own household, your own individual life, in order first.
– Chögyam Trungpa

I, an antisalon man, I out of whose head the whip of defeat had knocked the sulks and airs, thought that a world in which a man adores himself with music is more convincing than a world in which man adores the music itself.
– Witold Gombrowicz

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.

Once your mind is made up, you have lost your right to grow, you must remain a stock, a statue, the qualities and defects of which are known to everybody.” To be knowable is to be predictable, which is to say reliable, assimilated.
– Lev Shestov

The natural world reveals its content, its fullness of wonder, when respect hinders us from investigating it in such a way as to shatter it to abstractions. If I must cross every skyline to find out what is beyond, I shall never appreciate the true depth of sky seen between trees upon the ridge of a hill. If I must map the canyons and count the trees, I shall never enter into the sound of a hidden waterfall. If I must explore and investigate every trail, that path which vanishes into the forest far up on the mountainside will be found at last to lead merely back to the suburbs. To the mind which pursues every road to its end, every road leads nowhere. To abstain is not to postpone the cold disillusionment of the true facts but to see that one arrives by staying rather than going, that to be forever looking beyond is to remain blind to what is here.
– Alan Watts

Active men are usually lacking in higher activity — I mean individual activity. They are active as officials, businessmen, scholars, that is, as generic beings, but not as quite particular, single and unique men. In this respect they are lazy.
– Nietzsche

Sometimes he goes through
a notebook so fast
the pages fly out,
the poet said about
the old monk.
– The Old Monk

What’s the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if, in the end, all we’re willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true.
– F. Sherwood Rowland

Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.
– Cormac McCarthy

Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.
– Marie Curie

Archaeology: the science of where and how the gods descended.
– Susan Stewart

I seemed to see that this life that we live in half-darkness can be illumined, this life that at every moment we distort can be restored to its true pristine shape, that a life, in short, can be realized within the confines of a book!
– Marcel Proust

A corporeal phenomenon, a feeling, a perception, a
mental formation, a consciousness, which is permanent
and persistent, eternal and not subject to change, such
a thing the wise men in this world don not recognize;
and I also say that there is no such thing.
– Shakyamuni Buddha

An Old Story
by Tracy K. Smith

We were made to understand it would be
Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge,
Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind.

Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful
Dream. The worst in us having taken over
And broken the rest utterly down.


A long age
Passed. When at last we knew how little
Would survive us—how little we had mended

Or built that was not now lost—something
Large and old awoke. And then our singing
Brought on a different manner of weather.

Then animals long believed gone crept down
From trees. We took new stock of one another.
We wept to be reminded of such color.

This Only

A valley and above it forests in autumn colors.
A voyager arrives, a map leads him there.
Or perhaps memory. Once long ago in the sun,
When snow first fell, riding this way
He felt joy, strong, without reason,
Joy of the eyes. Everything was the rhythm
Of shifting trees, of a bird in flight,
Of a train on the viaduct, a feast in motion.
He returns years later, has no demands.
He wants only one, most precious thing:
To see, purely and simply, without name,
Without expectations, fears, or hopes,
At the edge where there is no I or not-I.

– Czeslaw Milosz

The damps of autumn sink into the leaves and prepare them for the necessity of their fall; and thus insensibly are we, as years close around us, detached from our tenacity of life by the gentle pressure of recorded sorrow.
– Walter Savage Landor

Like a river,
The relentless age has thrown me off course.
They have changed my life: in another channel,
ahead of different landscapes,
and I don’t know where my shores are.
– Anna Akhmatova

In the beginning was the white page
In the beginning was the Sufi in orbit
In the beginning was the sword
In the beginning was the rocket
In the beginning was the dancer
In the beginning was color
In the beginning was music
– Etel Adnan

and if your heart is breaking, look to the stories of all the other hearts beating, not beaten, how there is yet song, even the lost and gone hearts, which you can now hear in the waves of the ocean, the pulses of space, cosmic harmonies.
– Lidia Yuknavitch

The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don’t tell you what to see.
– Alexandra K.Trenfor

Believing in the present is anti poverty, because it doesn’t involve wishful thinking of any kind at all.
– Chögyam Trungpa

the making of a journalist: no ideas and the ability to express them.
– karl kraus, tr. harry zohn

I know that I am cowardly and am unable to act. Therefore I confine myself to words. But I do not think my words are needless. Someone else will act. But my many words—the words of a coward—will facilitate their deed. My words clear the ground.
– C.P. Cavafy

Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.
– May Sarton

… He is happy
with unknowing
we are sad with
having once known
– tatiana johnson-boria

How can you not just feel a general, deep distrust for people right now?
– Dr. Taylor Byas, Ph.D.

Taking revenge for my Irish ancestors by declining to add a U to any word ever again.
– Frances Klein

There is still love in us
The proof is that we are watching it die
There is still hope in us
Hope is there in my sisters’ eyes
There is still enough resistance in us
To create a world where there is no
Your people or my people
But our people
– Suheir Hammad

It’s time to think our way out of what we believed our way into.
– John Trudell

My smile is undefeated,
my tragedy will not win
and I Have bad days
but my good ones are stronger.
– Rudy Francisco

We need to sit on the rim of the well of darkness and fish for fallen light with patience.
– Pablo Neruda

Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.
– James Joyce

People will box you into limiting identities & labels of their choosing. Your job isn’t to hustle for them to see you differently. They rarely will anyway. Your job is to anchor yourself to your authenticity & keep showing up.
– Dr. Megan Kirk Chang

When the mob governs, man is ruled by ignorance; when the church governs, he is ruled by superstition; and when the state governs, he is ruled by fear. Before men can live together in harmony and understanding, ignorance must be transmuted into wisdom, superstition into an illuminated faith, and fear into love.
– Manly P. Hall

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.
– Albert Einstein

What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.
– Jack Kerouac

No matter what tools you use to create, the true instrument is you. And through you, the universe that surrounds us all comes into focus.
– Rick Rubin, The Creative Act

Instead of trying to polish our mask until it becomes perfect, we can start looking for the one who’s wearing it.
– Santiago Santai Jiménez

Friendship is the most radical alliance one can make because it is one of the few things not organized and administered by the government…
– Roger Reeves

It feels nothing but absurd to even care about poetry right now. Naive and stupid and embarrassing and absurd. And yet I brutally love it. It is my one true beacon. The spark at the centre of the glacier.
– Matthew Haigh

That you need a little care, anyone who is fond of you must realize; for this everything else must take second place.
– Franz Kafka

The world will only ever be
as in love with you
as you are with it
for the world is you
& your love is that of the world
– Amadeus Wolfe

My mind is like my wrist; I would never wish to be without it, but how can I think of it as the be-all and end-all? It’s simply a tool that helps me get along in the world and seldom brings me miracles or truths to live by.
– Pico Iyer

By the end
you’re the great sore
that is your
body,
the old monk complained.
– The Old Monk

Every significant change in age, status, role, attitude, or personality is accompanied by the demise and mourning of a former condition. Only through such “dark nights of the soul” is the person reborn into a new way of being and living.
– CG Jung

It’s daring not to shut anyone out of our hearts, not to make anyone an enemy. Life is more slippery and playful than that. Trying to find absolute rights and wrongs is a trick we play on ourselves to feel secure and comfortable.
– Pema Chodron

What we are doing is not reprogramming ourselves, but freeing ourselves from all programs.
– Charlotte Joko Beck

Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear.
– Parker J. Palmer

telegraph wires carry kisses.
– pedro salinas

Wherever in this city, screens flicker
with pornography, with science-fiction vampires,
victimized hirelings bending to the lash,
we also have to walk… if simply as we walk
through the rainsoaked garbage, the tabloid cruelties
of our own neighborhoods.
We need to grasp our lives inseparable
from those rancid dreams, that blurt of metal, those disgraces,
and the red begonia perilously flashing
from a tenement sill six stories high,
or the long-legged young girls playing ball
in the junior high school playground.
No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,
sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,
dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,
our animal passion rooted in the city.

– Adrienne Rich

While unconscious creation—animals, plants, crystals—functions satisfactorily as far as we know, things are constantly going wrong with man.
– C. G. Jung, An Answer To Job

He had been suddenly jerked from the heart of civilization and flung into the heart of things primordial.
– Jack London, The Call of the Wild

A witch ought never to be frightened in the darkest forest, Granny Weatherwax had once told her, because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her.
– Terry Pratchett

From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.
– Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

Whichever story you live by,
the mountain remembers.
– Norla Chee

For me it’s essential to reject death,
Even though my legends die.
I am searching in the rubble for light, for new poetry.
Oh, did I realize before today
That letters in the dictionary, my love, are stupid?
How do all these words live?
How do they increase? How grow up?
We still nourish them with memories’ tears,
With metaphors – and sugar!
So be it.
– Mahmoud Darwish

We must reclaim our history and rewrite the narratives that have silenced us.
– Nawal El Saadawi

I invented the color of vowels—A, black;
E, white; I, red; O, blue; U, green— I con-
trolled the form and movement of each
consonant, and flatter myself that, with
instinctive rhythm, I might invent some
day or other, a poetic verb accessible to all
five senses. I reserved the right to transla-
tion. at first, it was an experiment. I wrote
silences. Nights. I took notes of the in-
expressible. I transfixed vertigos.
– Rimbaud

Out of love & hatred, out of earnings & borrowings & leadings & losses; out of sickness & pain; out of wooing & worshipping; out of traveling & voting & watching & caring; out of disgrace & contempt, comes our tuition in the serene & beautiful laws.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.
– Arthur Conan Doyle

this time of year can be hard for many people. the air is colder, the sky is darker. i pray you find time to rest but also to rejuvenate your mind. when possible, push yourself past your limits — work to change your thoughts, exercise, stretch and prioritize your sleep.
– @gaialect

I have lived
in my body
for years
and still need
maps and lights
to find my way
to how I feel.
– Michelle K.

I have forgotten my hatred and envy of others since I found sacred company. I see no enemy. I see no stranger. All of us belong to each other. What the divine does, I accept as good. I have received this wisdom from the holy. The One pervades all.
– Guru Arjun Dev

If people can be open-minded and magnanimous, be receptive to all, take pity on the old and the poor, assist those in peril and rescue those in trouble, give of themselves without seeking reward, never bear grudges, look upon others and self impartially, and realize all as one, then people can be companions of heaven. If people can be flexible and yielding, humble, with self-control, entirely free of agitation, cleared of all volatility, not angered by criticism, ignoring insult, docilely accepting all hardships, illnesses, and natural disasters, utterly without anxiety or resentment when faced with danger or adversity, then people can be companions of earth.
– Liu I-ming, Awakening to the Tao

Somebody has remarked, “Everything without tells the individual that they are nothing, while everything within persuades them that they are everything.” This is a remarkable saying, for it is the feeling everyone of us has when they sit quietly and deeply looks into the inmost chamber of their being. Something is moving there and would whisper to them in a still small voice that they are not born in vain. I read somewhere again: “You are tried alone; alone you pass into the desert; alone you are sifted by the world.” But let a person once look within in all sincerity and they will then realize that they are not lonely, forlorn, and deserted; there is within a person, a certain feeling of a royally magnificent aloneness, standing all by themselves and yet not separated from the rest of existence.
– D.T. Suzuki

May we beat our swords into plowshares. May we learn war no more. May we become repairers of the breach: restorers of streets to live in.
– Kyrie eleison

My soul pours out without end, like melancholy water
– Éphraïm Mikhaël

Words Found in the Rubble
After the Final War

Yes, we lived in a time of darkness
and did nothing.

Yes, we looked up and we saw
the sky on fire,
and we knew that we had made the flames
with our own hands.

Yes, we wasted every breath
on rage.

Children, if any of you have survived this,
start again
with the simplest things. we beg you.

Walk out through the garden of the darkness
and touch each other’s faces
in the morning air.

Slowly. Slowly. Say each other’s names

– Joseph Fasano

The choices we make daily make us who we are. As today opens in front of you, choose compassion.
– Hersch Wilson

I like you; your eyes are full of language.
– Anne Sexton

You go on by doing the best you can. You go on by being generous. You go on by being true.

You go on by offering comfort to others who can’t go on. You go on by allowing the unbearable days to pass and allowing the pleasure in other days. You go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage.

– Cheryl Strayed

Love, and do what you will: whether you hold your peace, through love hold your peace; whether you cry out, through love cry out; whether you correct, through love correct; whether you spare, through love do you spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.
– Augustine

Before World War II, when physics was primarily a European enterprise, physicists used the Greek language to name particles. Photon, electron, meson, baryon, lepton, and even hadron originated from the Greek. But later brash, irreverent, and sometimes silly Americans took over, and the names lightened up. Quark is a nonsense word from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, but from that literary high point, things went downhill. The distinctions between the different quark types are referred to by the singularly inappropriate term flavor. We might have spoken of chocolate, strawberry, vanilla, pistachio, cherry, and mint chocolate chip quarks but we don’t. The six flavors of quarks are up, down, strange, charmed, bottom, and top. At one point, bottom and top were considered too risqué, so for a brief time they became truth and beauty.
– Leonard Susskind

A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war: wide-awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it might never live to regret it.
– Carlos Castaneda

Music is a hidden mathematic computation of the soul, which is unaware of the fact that it is computing.

Musik ist die versteckte arithmetische Tätigkeit der Seele, die sich nicht dessen bewußt ist, daß sie rechnet.

– Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

The wounded child sees the Divine as operating a reward and punishment system, with humanly logical explanations for all painful experiences. The wounded child does not understand that within all experiences, no matter how painful, lie spiritual insights. So long as we think like a wounded child, we will love conditionally and with great fear of loss.
– Caroline Myss

To understand correctly the meaning of the words Alchemy and Astrology, it is necessary to understand and to realize the intimate relationship and identity of the Microcosm and Macrocosm, and their mutual interaction.
– Paracelsus

The murmuring of the water is its natural talent, not something that it does deliberately. The Perfect Man stands in the same relationship to virtue. Without cultivating it, he possesses it to such an extent that things cannot draw away from him. It is as natural as the height of heaven, the depth of the earth, the brightness of sun and moon.
– Zhuangzi

If it be knowledge or wisdom one is seeking, then one had better go direct to the source. And the source is not the scholar or philosopher, not the master, saint, or teacher, but life itself – direct experience of life. The same is true for art.
– Henry Miller