The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions.
– Parker J. Palmer
There is Something About a Forest
That Compels Introspection
– Eloise J. Roorbach
Reconciliation is not to quickly forgive and forget, as if it never happened or we somehow are gifted with a form of amnesia. Reconciliation requires that we remember and change, but with honesty about our experience and curiosity about the humanness of the other whom we fear.
– John Paul Lederach
Reconciliation:
The word reconciliation comes from the words meaning “flow together again”
When people reconcile with one another, they are able to live in harmony.
The Hardest Word
by Kirsty MacColl
With me in the valley you out on the hill
I can just see you if I close my eyes
Climbing those mountains I picture you still
I see your smile just as I saw the sunrise
This land is ancient it’s built out of bones
At war with each other, the mother, the father
The sisters, the brothers, the daughters and sons
Be kind to each other, your father, your mother
On the horizon the eagles are flying
And I mean no more than a cloud in the sky
I never know if I’m laughing or crying
The hardest word is the word goodbye
Teach me the old ways I’m ready to learn
Be kind to the sister, be kind to the brother
The writer, the singer, the poet, the clown
Be good to the man and be kind to them all
And we are ancient built from bones
Make time for the young and make time for the old
Be kind to each other oh that’s what I know
Be kind to the mothers, daughters and sons
The true and the great and the scared and the small
Be kind to each other, be kind to them all
Forgive our indignity and we forgive yours
As I am the mother, you are the father
Entwined in each other, now and forever
The fathers of daughters, the mothers of sons
Forever and ever and ever as one
As we are the fathers, we are the sons
And we are the daughters, the mothers and brothers
Forever and ever and ever as one
Last night I had the strangest dream
I’d ever dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war
I dreamed I saw a mighty room
Filled with women and men
And the paper they were signing said
They’d never fight again
And when the paper was all signed
And a million copies made
They all joined hands and bowed their heads
And grateful prayers were prayed
And the people in the streets below
Were dancing ’round and ’round
While swords and guns and uniforms
Were scattered on the ground
Last night I had the strangest dream
I’d never dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war.
– Pete Seeger
Yom Kippur
by Beth Kander
I won’t eat, she thought, and that will fix it.
I’ll spend the day fasting and praying as my ancestors did. I’ll wear white clothes and somber expressions. I will murmur ancient prayers and close my eyes and connect with something bigger than myself.
I’ll ask nicely.
I’ll say please.
Over and over, I’ll say I’m sorry.
I’ll apologize to God.
And things will be better.
But first, she thought, I’ll eat.
I’ll make the sort of meal that will see me through twenty-six hours of refraining from repast. I’ll fill my belly and fortify myself for the denial ahead. I’ll be ready.
I’ll have seconds.
I’ll say yes to dessert.
And things will be better.
She ate alone.
Plenty of food.
Her phone buzzed, and she almost didn’t answer it.
Almost sunset, she thought. Who would be calling?
When she saw who was calling, her heart lost the beat, had trouble regaining its rhythm.
If I answer, she thought, I’ll have to apologize.
The thought was uncomfortable.
It would be easier to just apologize to God.
So much easier.
She almost rejected the call. Instead she slid her finger across the screen, and slipped into the conversation she had avoided for so long.
There was a pause.
A breath in, and out.
The longest exhale.
I’m sorry, they both said.
And things were, incrementally, almost imperceptibly, but undeniably, better.
The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and loving kindness, a community practicing mindful living. And the practice can be carried out as a group, as a city, as a nation.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Everything that has a beginning has an ending. Make your peace with that and all will be well.
– Jack Kornfield
Fred LaMotte:
You’ll find a new world
in the silence
between thoughts.
Plant seeds of peace
there.
To be able to listen—
really, wholly passively, self-effacingly listen—
without presupposing, classifying, improving, controverting, evaluating,
approving or disapproving,
without dueling with what is being said,
without rehearsing the rebuttal in advance,
without free-associating to portions of what is
being said so that succeeding portions are not heard at all—
such listening is rare.
– Abraham Maslow
Education is an accelerant, an auger, a solvent, a fertilizer, a water-blurred stone in a rising stream—the most necessary, most vital nutrient—the spur and spark of all creativity. Free of all magic—free of capricious “gods”—free of false stars—the truest of untruths—the futile pursuit that fulfills the deepest need. For me, education, is everything.
– Elijah Morton
Finally, you asked what you could do, how to behave. Please, take care of yourself. Seek out beautiful things, inspirations, connections and validating friends. Perhaps you could keep a journal and write stuff down. The written word can put to rest many imagined demons. Identify things that concern you in the world and make incremental efforts to remedy them. At all costs, try to cultivate a sense of humour. See things through that courageous heart of yours. Be merciful to yourself. Be kind to yourself. Be kind.
– Nick Cave
It is difficult to learn the names of the vows,
let alone observe them.
So at least you should strive
to be loving to people,
especially those who are close to you
such as friends, relatives,
Dharma brothers and sisters, and neighbours. Try to avoid harming them.
Be respectful to them,
as all are enlightened in their true nature.
Then, in a simple way,
you are moving towards
fulfilling the pratimoksha vow
of not harming others,
the bodhisattvas’ vow
of being loving to others,
and the tantric vow of pure perception.
– H.H. 4th Dodrupchen Rinpoche
The Sound of One Hand
The master of Kennin temple was Mokurai, Silent Thunder. He had a little protege named Toyo who was only twelve years old. Toyo saw the older disciples visit the master’s room each morning and evening to receive instruction in sanzen or personal guidance in which they were given koans to stop mind-wandering.
Toyo wished to do sanzen also.
“Wait a while,” said Mokurai. “You are too young.”
But the child insisted, so the teacher finally consented.
In the evening little Toyo went at the proper time to the threshold of Mokurai’s sanzen room. He struck the gong to announce his presence, bowed respectfully three times outside the door, and went to sit before the master in respectful silence.
“You can hear the sound of two hands when they clap together,” said Mokurai. “Now show me the sound of one hand.”
Toyo bowed and went to his room to consider this problem. From his window he could hear the music of the geishas. “Ah, I have it!” he proclaimed.
The next evening, when his teacher asked him to illustrate the sound of one hand, Toyo began to play the music of the geishas.
“No, no,” said Mokurai. “That will never do. That is not the sound of one hand. You’ve not got it at all.”
Thinking that such music might interrupt, Toyo moved his abode to a quiet place. He meditated again. “What can the sound of one hand be?” He happened to hear some water dripping. “I have it,”imagined Toyo.
When he next appeared before his teacher, Toyo imitated dripping water.
“What is that?” asked Mokurai. “That is the sound of dripping water, but not the sound of one hand. Try again.”
In vain Toyo meditated to hear the sound of one hand. He heard the sighing of the wind. But the sound was rejected.
He heard the cry of an owl. This also was refused.
The sound of one hand was not the locusts.
For more than ten times Toyo visited Mokurai with different sounds. All were wrong. For almost a year he pondered what the sound of one hand might be.
At last little Toyo entered true meditation and transcended all sounds. “I could collect no more,” he explained later, “so I reached the soundless sound.”
Toyo had realized the sound of one hand.
Jac O’Keeffe:
The greatest teaching is in silence.
If you’re silent enough, things come to you.
The wisdom is inside of you.
Even a good thing isn’t as good as nothing.
– Zen proverb
The great Sufi Dhūl-Nūn al-Misrī said, “Whatever you think, God is the opposite of that.”
We meet in a shared lucid dream some will locate in their future, others in the past. Unintended effect: generating an alternate world timeline. Gotta watch that.
– Robert Moss
Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors
by William Butler Yeats
What they undertook to do
They brought to pass;
All things hang like a drop of dew
Upon a blade of grass.
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles
– Gary Snyder
I step out and suddenly notice this.
Summer arrives, has arrived, is arriving.
Birds grow less than leaves although they cheep, dip, arc, a call across the tall fence from an invisible neighbor to his child is heard right down to the secret mood and the child also hears.
One hears in the silence that follows the great desire for approval and love which summer holds aloft, all damp leeched from it like a thing floating out on a frail but perfect twig end.
Light seeming to darken in it yet glow.
Please, it says, but not with the eager and need of spring.
Come what may, says summer, smack in the middle I will stand and breathe, the future is a super fluidity I do not taste, no, there is no numbering here, it is a gorgeous swelling, no emotion, as in this love is no emotions, no, also no memory. We have it all now and all there ever was is us now.
– Jorie Graham
All Down the Lake
It wasn’t so much that the dinner conversation
had bored me as that I was simply tired
of words, particularly my own. So afterwards
I slipped away and followed the path down
to the boathouse, where I sat in a lawn chair.
The lake was perfectly still, the inky hills
on the far shore mirrored between two skies
of deepening blue and streaked with clouds
tinged with the last pink. At first I didn’t notice
the strange sounds, then didn’t recognize them
as human: the faint, distorted, jumbled voices
of dinner conversations all down the lake’s
mile length, sliding across the glossy surface
only to rebound off the shore and swirl together
in a confusion of murmurous babble.
Now and then a weird inflection or wild laugh
broke free from the hubbub and twisted up
like a bottle rocket left over from the Fourth.
It was a relief and, really, a pleasure
not to make out the words, or even the coherent
intonations of sense-making and just focus
on the hallucinatory, far-off din. Then slowly,
as the dinner parties one-by-one dispersed,
the voices dropped away until only
a few remained—less alien-sounding now—
then none, the lake itself a mind
that had finally quieted its chatter
just as the first stars glimmered into being
and a bullfrog started calling, deep and steady.
– Jeffrey Harrison
I’ve learned over the years to free-fall into what’s happening… Things start to happen under your pencil that you don’t want to happen, or don’t understand. But that’s when the work starts to have a beating heart.
– Andre Dubus III
Anthony Bourdain wrote:
Americans love Mexican food. We consume nachos, tacos, burritos, tortas, enchiladas, tamales and anything resembling Mexican in enormous quantities. We love Mexican beverages, happily knocking back huge amounts of tequila, mezcal, and Mexican beer every year. We love Mexican people—we sure employ a lot of them. Despite our ridiculously hypocritical attitudes towards immigration, we demand that Mexicans cook a large percentage of the food we eat, grow the ingredients we need to make that food, clean our houses, mow our lawns, wash our dishes, and look after our children. As any chef will tell you, our entire service economy—the restaurant business as we know it—in most American cities, would collapse overnight without Mexican workers. Some, of course, like to claim that Mexicans are “stealing American jobs.” But in two decades as a chef and employer, I never had ONE American kid walk in my door and apply for a dishwashing job, a porter’s position—or even a job as a prep cook. Mexicans do much of the work in this country that Americans, probably, simply won’t do.
We love Mexican drugs. Maybe not you personally, but “we”, as a nation, certainly consume titanic amounts of them—and go to extraordinary lengths and expense to acquire them. We love Mexican music, Mexican beaches, Mexican architecture, interior design, Mexican films.
So, why don’t we love Mexico?
We throw up our hands and shrug at what happens and what is happening just across the border. Maybe we are embarrassed. Mexico, after all, has always been there for us, to service our darkest needs and desires. Whether it’s dress up like fools and get passed-out drunk and sunburned on spring break in Cancun, throw pesos at strippers in Tijuana, or get toasted on Mexican drugs, we are seldom on our best behavior in Mexico. They have seen many of us at our worst. They know our darkest desires.
In the service of our appetites, we spend billions and billions of dollars each year on Mexican drugs—while at the same time spending billions and billions more trying to prevent those drugs from reaching us. The effect on our society is everywhere to be seen. Whether it’s kids nodding off and overdosing in small town Vermont, gang violence in L.A., burned out neighborhoods in Detroit—it’s there to see. What we don’t see, however, haven’t really noticed, and don’t seem to much care about, is the 80,000 dead in Mexico, just in the past few years—mostly innocent victims. Eighty thousand families who’ve been touched directly by the so-called “War On Drugs”.
Mexico. Our brother from another mother. A country, with whom, like it or not, we are inexorably, deeply involved, in a close but often uncomfortable embrace. Look at it. It’s beautiful. It has some of the most ravishingly beautiful beaches on earth. Mountains, desert, jungle. Beautiful colonial architecture, a tragic, elegant, violent, ludicrous, heroic, lamentable, heartbreaking history. Mexican wine country rivals Tuscany for gorgeousness. Its archeological sites—the remnants of great empires, unrivaled anywhere. And as much as we think we know and love it, we have barely scratched the surface of what Mexican food really is. It is NOT melted cheese over tortilla chips. It is not simple, or easy. It is not simply “bro food” at halftime. It is in fact, old—older even than the great cuisines of Europe, and often deeply complex, refined, subtle, and sophisticated. A true mole sauce, for instance, can take DAYS to make, a balance of freshly (always fresh) ingredients painstakingly prepared by hand. It could be, should be, one of the most exciting cuisines on the planet, if we paid attention. The old school cooks of Oaxaca make some of the more difficult and nuanced sauces in gastronomy. And some of the new generation—many of whom have trained in the kitchens of America and Europe—have returned home to take Mexican food to new and thrilling heights.
It’s a country I feel particularly attached to and grateful for. In nearly 30 years of cooking professionally, just about every time I walked into a new kitchen, it was a Mexican guy who looked after me, had my back, showed me what was what, and was there—and on the case—when the cooks like me, with backgrounds like mine, ran away to go skiing or surfing or simply flaked. I have been fortunate to track where some of those cooks come from, to go back home with them. To small towns populated mostly by women—where in the evening, families gather at the town’s phone kiosk, waiting for calls from their husbands, sons and brothers who have left to work in our kitchens in the cities of the North. I have been fortunate enough to see where that affinity for cooking comes from, to experience moms and grandmothers preparing many delicious things, with pride and real love, passing that food made by hand from their hands to mine.
In years of making television in Mexico, it’s one of the places we, as a crew, are happiest when the day’s work is over. We’ll gather around a street stall and order soft tacos with fresh, bright, delicious salsas, drink cold Mexican beer, sip smoky mezcals, and listen with moist eyes to sentimental songs from street musicians. We will look around and remark, for the hundredth time, what an extraordinary place this is.
The received wisdom is that Mexico will never change. That is hopelessly corrupt, from top to bottom. That it is useless to resist—to care, to hope for a happier future. But there are heroes out there who refuse to go along. On this episode of “Parts Unknown,” we meet a few of them. People who are standing up against overwhelming odds, demanding accountability, demanding change—at great, even horrifying personal cost.
Enlightenment is an experience
of an absence of paranoia.
– Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse
There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy bitsy statues.
– Thomas Merton
When crows find a dying snake,
they behave as if they were eagles.
When I see myself as a victim,
I am hurt by trifling failures.
– Shantideva
The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself. The thing of course, is to make yourself alive. Most people remain all of their lives in a stupor.
The point of being an artist is that you may live.
– Sherwood Anderson
O Small Sad Ecstasy of Love
I like being with you all night with closed eyes.
What luck—here you are
coming
along the stars!
I did a road trip
all over my mind and heart
and
there you were
kneeling by the roadside
with your little toolkit
fixing something.
Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.
– Anne Carson
Great truths are contained inside small absurdities.
– Andrew Bacevich
I thought it was impossible to have a better life than Anthony Bourdain. But his final bittersweet gift just knocked me on my ass with the stark reminder that adventure, love, prosperity, prestige…anything we aspire to at all…is really just the currency we use to buy the four things that really matter: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins. Realizing that even that kiss that melts your heart… only melts it because those four fairy godmothers waved their magic wands and turned your brain into a freakin princess. But if our brain hits us with a really shitty exchange rate, if suddenly winning that Academy Award only buys us a day’s ration of serotonin, then how the hell are we supposed to stock up for our whole lives? That Anthony Bourdain can stand on the highest mountain and feel nothing but a desire to move toward oblivion is all I need to kick me in the ass and ask the most important question, how’s my exchange rate? What can I do to get more joy out of everyhting I’m presented with, big or small? How does anyone do that? I guess there begins one’s lifelong quest for God, psychedelic drugs, transcendental meditation, or whatever the hell else you need to do to bring true value to the external pleasures of the world. Anything that promises, not pleasure, but perspective. There’s a good case to be made that those are the things worth seeking first, before even love and success. Because watching my little boy flood his brain with happiness because he found a cool stick on the lawn is all the evidence I need that “how you experience” is so much more important than “what you experience.
– Sean Carter
Summer Magic
So many cares to vex the day,
So many fears to haunt the night,
My heart was all but weaned away
From every lure of old delight.
Then summer came, announced by June,
With beauty, miracle and mirth.
She hung aloft the rounding moon,
She poured her sunshine on the earth,
She drove the sap and broke the bud,
She set the crimson rose afire.
She stirred again my sullen blood,
And waked in me a new desire.
Before my cottage door she spread
The softest carpet nature weaves,
And deftly arched above my head
A canopy of shady leaves.
Her nights were dreams of jeweled skies,
Her days were bowers rife with song,
And many a scheme did she devise
To heal the hurt and soothe the wrong.
For on the hill or in the dell,
Or where the brook went leaping by
Or where the fields would surge and swell
With golden wheat or bearded rye,
I felt her heart against my own,
I breathed the sweetness of her breath,
Till all the cark of time had flown,
And I was lord of life and death.
– Leslie Pinckney Hill
Daydream about finding a diverse and left-y small town with quirky bookstores and great coffee and old houses that aren’t a million dollars. Does this place exist?
– Stephanie Sylverne
So proud
of brilliant writers
doing hard things
– Calvert Morgan
The Latin word ‘solstitium’ breaks down as follows: the sun (‘sol’) suddenly stands still (‘stare’) in its progress across the heavens, having reached its maximum boreal or astral declination.
– Quignard, Abysses, tr. Chris Turner
I still struggle immensely with the loss of people from my life, especially when they leave abruptly. I’ve been ghosted enough by partners, friends, and family that I expect to not feel the sting as badly. But it never hurts any less, never stops becoming internalized.
– Travis Chi Wing Lau
Ours is an age between world views, creative yet disoriented, a transitional era when the old cultural vision no longer holds and the new has not yet constellated.
– Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche
I’ve been remembering how completely optional it is to take the time to be someone’s friend, and how deeply grateful I am for the close friends who make time for me.
– Ethan Nichtern
Adventure-seasoned and storm-buffeted,
I shun all signs of anchorage, because
The zest of life exceeds the bound of laws.
– Claude McKay
Crossing over
a summer stream
sandals in hand
– Buson
Jung chose to use the word archetype, instead of instinct, in order to emphasize that the same stored pattern might present itself through either instinctual behavior or through images.
– Robin Robertson, The Shadow’s Gift
A poet is never just a woman or a man. Every poet is salted with fire. A poet is a mirror, a transcriber.
– Susan Howe
Oh, to be rid of my fixed ideas of how things “ought” to be.
– Susan Sontag
Poetry is subconscious conversation, it is as much the work of those who understand it and those who make it.
– Sonia Sanchez
But do not fear me because my language is strange /
I bring neither happiness nor misery /
Nor do I drape flags across chests /
Nor bring the rings of planets /
…
I guide my chest to my mouth /
And my mouth to the door of the dream.
– Pablo Neruda
Lesson One: I give up.
– Zen saying
words do not
do not make love
they make absence
– Alejandra Pizarnik
Picasso painted such beautiful doves, and still we send human beings into the desert to blow up buildings.
– Kelly Schirmann
On average, the deeper people’s knowledge of a topic, the more calmly they talk about it.
– Paul Graham
Happiness reigns
it’s carts pulling me.
Yeah, my future is bright
but my past’s trying to ruin me.
– Kae Tempest, Let Them Eat Chaos
endless
war doesn’t quite
greet endless aesthetics
or perhaps they
touch like two
digitally composed
globes that animate
one globular unreal
& easily perceived
something on the
verge of something
else
– Anselm Berrigan
Not Blind
by Taghrid Abdelal
No it isn’t. But love
took one of my eyes for itself, love
had vision before birth, did
discuss with me the accuracy
of what transpires in lenses.
And then it went blind—slowly
soaked us up from behind a veil,
and we couldn’t see it.
A deaf air said to me
that borders believe
space is smaller than the world
since children draw Earth
smaller than their houses
and draw eyes bigger than their faces.
Here love failed to find its eyes,
borrowed my lips
for better form.
Love, why don’t you stay as you are,
without official title,
subsistent on whoever desires you
for five minutes
before your suicide?
How cruel
you announce your sex
with paradise.
– translated by Fady Joudah
An infinite reservoir of cosmic wisdom resides in the depths of contemplation.
– Roy Gillett
Solstice walk
in the rain
on the longest day.
How vivid in colour our world is.
Gentle pitter-patter of droplets
on pavement
mixing with burbling notes,
tiny songsters
hidden
amidst the foliage.
Music is imbued in our everyday.
What whispers carry to you
on the wind?
– Ahlyah Ali
In my heart its always summer, always sea, always us.
– @VladaMars
June Sunset
by Sarojini Naidu
Here shall my heart find its haven of calm,
By rush-fringed rivers and rain-fed streams
That glimmer thro’ meadows of lily and palm.
Here shall my soul find its true repose
Under a sunset sky of dreams
Diaphanous, amber and rose.
The air is aglow with the glint and whirl
Of swift wild wings in their homeward flight,
Sapphire, emerald, topaz, and pearl.
Afloat in the evening light.
A brown quail cries from the tamarisk bushes,
A bulbul calls from the cassia-plume,
And thro’ the wet earth the gentian pushes
Her spikes of silvery bloom.
Where’er the foot of the bright shower passes
Fragrant and fresh delights unfold;
The wild fawns feed on the scented grasses,
Wild bees on the cactus-gold.
An ox-cart stumbles upon the rocks,
And a wistful music pursues the breeze
From a shepherd’s pipe as he gathers his flocks
Under the pipal-trees.
And a young Banjara driving her cattle
Lifts up her voice as she glitters by
In an ancient ballad of love and battle
Set to the beat of a mystic tune,
And the faint stars gleam in the eastern sky
To herald a rising moon.
Poetry is truly an anaerobic creature, creating the atmosphere to sustain itself from the very atmosphere of itself that it creates. It is foolish to look outside the act of making poetry for that oxygen. One’s personal poetry, the fruit of one’s temperament, is an unassailable realm. Its success or failure has hardly anything to do with anyone else in the deepest sense.
– Thomas McCarthy
You don’t solve a maze by rushing through. You have to stop and think. You have to walk slowly and carefully, reining in your energy – otherwise you’ll get hopelessly lost.
– Ryan Holiday
STARTLED SOLSTICE
Ask for an emerald belt,
hung with home tools, peacemakers:
wooden spoon, string of pearls,
basket of wild rush and hummingbird feathers.
Ask for the waters of resolution,
sea sponge of re-awaken.
Exchange your sackcloth for verdigris spandex,
cut low over the kidneys,
let your curves have voice and belly bell out,
exchange breath with candlelight:
burn in and out slowly.
Suddenly you are entirely jasmine,
blooming as never before,
valley turned tumult of bright,
bougainvillea and wild white poppy.
Air a fine vintage, sparkling, and slightly acidic,
scent of acacia and amor seco.
Tell stories on hectares of corn, ox plowed,
Scythed into rampant lush, burrofest come fall.
Make your heart an infusion for the Beloved to sip.
Make thirst be as lips to cup, as stars strewn across fish net.
Don’t take a ruler to the need to belong together –
Use eons, use raspberries,
there is no ledger sheet in love.
Stir profit and loss until the heat of spin and sunder
turn into powder and dissolve.
Throw the switch on the erotic circuit:
That’s the secret of marine phosphorescence,
water gone sweet, enrobe us,
pure bonbon, in depths of fallen light.
Considering surface,
cast a serpent on the waters –
you’ll be the lucky one, rolling over in the morning from dream
into those freckled arms!
Say: What makes me dive in headfirst,
Meaning: Refractory pattern of calcite bring us to color twice over.
Drench us into life, O Isis,
Xochiquetzal, ignite us into pleasure,
honeysuckle sweet, sharp as sensual grassblade –
Dakinis, take us to winds extreme,
Lilith, paint us into our darkness,
Gaia, Ala, Izanami, send us to seed, seeking light,
Brigid of the Wells, may we be wriggle and liquefy,
Numi, teach us to shed skin, re-claim freshet and seep.
When the knight asks what ails you,
you can answer as ever with the health of meadows,
the warbler’s long song.
BLESSED SOLSTICE, Y’ALL!
– Judyth Hill
My sense of hope can get a little wobbly on a Monday. It’s the day when our present circumstances can feel the most endless to me. But I keep learning how blessedly stubborn hope can be—true hope, real hope, hope that is something quite other than wishful thinking. Hope seems to keep working in me like a deep muscle memory, setting me in motion when I don’t know how to move on my own. If your own hope has been getting wobbly, this is for you.
BLESSING OF HOPE
So may we know
the hope
that is not just
for someday
but for this day—
here, now,
in this moment
that opens to us:
hope not made
of wishes
but of substance,
hope made of sinew
and muscle
and bone,
hope that has breath
and a beating heart,
hope that will not
keep quiet
and be polite,
hope that knows
how to holler
when it is called for,
hope that knows
how to sing
when there seems
little cause,
hope that raises us
from the dead—
not someday
but this day,
every day,
again and
again and
again.
– Jan Richardson, The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief
Coconut water tastes like a reminder that we can’t have everything we want.
– @monetwithlove
The neurotic has the feeling that he wants something, can’t say what it is, and is nevertheless frustrated not to get it. Satisfaction having been foreclosed long ago, he becomes a kind of hesitant, recessive, bemused personality.
– Benjamin Kunkel
I want to rediscover the secret of great speech and of great burning. I want to say storm. I want to say river. I want to say tornado. I want to say leaf, I want to say tree. I want to be soaked by every rainfall, moistened by every dew. As frenetic blood rolls on the slow current of the eye, I want to roll words like maddened horses like new children like clotted milk like curfew like traces of a temple like precious stones buried deep enough to daunt all miners. The man who couldn’t understand me couldn’t understand the roaring of a tiger.
– Aimé Césaire, Return to my Native Land, translated by John Berger and Anne Bostock
Cosmic Suffering by Chögyam Trungpa
The question of basic pain, or cosmic suffering, is not so much one of physical pain, but it is more like a basic ache, basic uncertainty, or basic neurosis. You feel fundamentally terrible and resentful that the world has cheated you. It is the basic pain of resentfulness, which aspirins cannot cure. The problem is that we are unable to work with reality properly and fully. We reflect constantly on society and the world. When it is too hot, we think it should be cold; when it is too cold, we think it should be hot. We would like to control the cosmos, to have whatever we want! We want complete hospitality to be established.
– Exposing Ego’s Dirty Tricks, Milarepa: Lessons from the Life and Songs of Tibet’s Great Yogi
Why do we need a guru?
Because in order to cure our diseased minds, we need the help of someone who knows
how to do it. Since it is extremely difficult
to understand how the mind works,
we need the guidance of an expert in this area.
Furthermore, gaining liberation,
or inner freedom, is not an easy thing. Everything we have ever said or done
on this trip we call life
has had its origin in the mind,
and in the same way, the entire path
to liberation and enlightenment
depends on the mind.
However, if we think of all our life’s experiences, how convinced are we
that they have all come from the mind?
In order to really understand how this is true, we need someone with the right kind
of knowledge to explain it to us.
In other words, we need a guru.
If we just think about this in a superficial way, we’ll probably say to ourselves,
“I know what I want;
I know what my life’s about.”
We might think we know, but we really don’t.
For example, we think environmental pollution comes from industry,
but where does industry come from?
It’s a creation of the human mind.
In the same way, all the world’s confusion,
from that of societies to that of the individual, is mind-created. If people could simply imbue their minds with peaceful tranquility
and loving kindness,
none of the world problems we see around us would arise.
In order to develop peaceful tranquility of mind, we have to employ a method
that brings that result.
Since we don’t know what such methods are
or how to put them into practice,
we need an experienced teacher
to show us that reality.
We can say that there are two types of guru—relative and absolute.
The absolute guru is the all-knowing wisdom that is one with bliss;
that wisdom is the absolute guru.
In order to realize this wisdom within ourselves, we need a relative guru to show us how.
Therefore, guru doesn’t necessarily
mean something physical,
but beginners, who don’t possess much inner knowledge, definitely need a physical guru. After some time, when we have enough confidence and self-knowledge
to travel the path to enlightenment alone,
we don’t need to always be in the presence
of our relative guru, but until that time,
we’re like yo-yos. When we’re around our guru, our mind is subdued, but as soon
as we’re a mile or two away,
our mind goes completely berserk.
That shows how we are.
Putting it another way,
the guru is the antidote to the confused mind—as long as they are the right guru.
A guru who’s a bad influence and leads us
to more confusion and restlessness
is a false guru; not a guru at all.
– Lama Thubten Yeshe
Thoughts
…nothing but brain pollen.
– Shinzen
When it’s going well, it’s a pleasure. When it’s not going well, it’s like working with a crane to lift words onto the page.
– Paula Fox
Half a page—and the morning is already ancient.
– Michael Ondaatje
And I wait
For your warm, full voice to come to me
Like the music of falling stars
And the sound of tumbling jewels.
I cry
Because you have thought of me
And have called me
From the invisible world.
– Nizar Qabbani
I believe that we must re-establish a culture of monasteries, that one day or another – perhaps I will be dead before – it will be necessary for those who still read to retire in large phalansteries, perhaps in the countryside , like the Amish of Pennsylvania.
– Umberto Eco
I still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and the vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.
– Rebecca Solnit
When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.
– Jacob Riis
Suppose that what you fear
could be trapped
and held in Paris.
Then you would have
the courage to go
everywhere in the world.
All the directions of the compass
open to you,
except the degrees east or west
of true north
that lead to Paris.
…
You’re not really willing
to stand on a mountainside,
miles away,
and watch the Paris lights
come up at night.
Just to be on the safe side,
you decide to stay completely
out of France.
But then danger
seems too close
even to those boundaries,
and you feel
the timid part of you
covering the whole globe again.
You need the kind of friend
who learns your secret and says,
“See Paris first.”
– Marsha Truman Cooper, Substantial Holdings
The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts’ui Pên conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us. In the present one, which a favorable fate has granted me, you have arrived at my house; in another, while crossing the garden, you found me dead; in still another, I utter these same words, but I am a mistake, a ghost.
– Jorge Luis Borges
our voice is wild and simple.
You are untranslatable
Into any one tongue.
– Anna Akhmatova
The Feral Ones
by Tad Hargrave
I’ve been reading a book recently, The Shepherd’s Life by James Rebanks and I wanted to share a passage from it,
“Shepherds hate other people’s dogs near their sheep. Whilst our sheepdogs are our proudest and most loved servants, other people’s dogs pose thing but a problem to all of us, because a dog that hasn’t been trained and is left off the lead near sheep can get too excited and go into full hunting mode. It can be difficult to get dog owners to understand the threat, but about once every two years, throughout my adult life, a dog has given chase to a sheep or a lamb and before you know it the sheep is pulled down, or lies down, exhausted. Because the dog has not been trained to control itself in these situations, it tears at the wool or the skin, until you have a sheep it its ears torn, or its throat ripped out. About once every month we have a dog incident that threatens to escalate… One person’s freedom is another man’s misery.”
The problem of course, isn’t with all canines. It’s not inherent in the canine species to behave this way. Foxes and wolves don’t do this. They hunt to kill and eat. Wild animals do not kill for sport. They have been raised in the wild and been mentored by the older animals in their packs. They’ve seen how it is and how to behave. They know that there is no bowl of food waiting for them at home to feed them.
Other trained sheepdogs would not do this. They know how to behave around sheep. They know they have a bowl of food at home and that, with these animals, their role is that of protector, not predator. They’re there to corral them, not kill them.
Feral animals do this. A feral animal is stuck between domesticated life and their inner wildness. They’re neither fully trained neither fully wild and so, when their blood gets up, they don’t know what to do with those feelings. And so animals get chased and mauled but then not eaten. I suppose to the feral animals, it’s all good sport. It’s fun. I don’t imagine there are any bad intentions on the dog’s part. Being stuck in between worlds, they don’t see what a violation of the natural way of things it is. They are simply doing what feral dogs know to do.
Of course, the shepherd isn’t really mad at the dog. They dog is just doing what comes naturally to it. They’re mad at the dog’s owner for letting them off their leash. Some owners have no idea the havoc their dogs can wreak. Others do but, perhaps thinking they’ll get away with it, or because they see no sheep nearby or just because, at the end of the day, they value their freedom to go for a beautiful countryside walk more than they value sheep of the farmers and the farmer’s time and emotional well being.
It seems to me that there are parallels here between this and the ways that I have seen white men approach conversations about racism. It seems like a feral approach. And yet, white people can’t seem to understand why people of colour do not want them anywhere near their carefully tended flocks of conversations and experiences around racism. People of colour have had so many experiences of white people, tethered to no one or nothing that might know better about how to engage or not engage with this exciting new thing, who simply charge into the fray, their nervous systems shot to overwhelm and lacking a deep, indigenous and respectful approach or any training on how to contend with these issues. And they’ve seen the damage it causes while the white people trot off, pleased with themselves and the fun they’ve had while their flock has been badly frightened and some injured or killed.
A wild animal is tethered to its wildness and its pack.
A domesticated animal is tethered to its training and owners.
A feral animal is tethered to nothing.
And, in this modern, freedom-addicted, limit-hating and growth-obsessed world, white men seem to be tethered to nothing at all. Not to land. Not to people. Not to community. Not to consequence.
People of colour have had well intentioned white people, who should know better, bring friends to diverse events and seen those friends act in ways were destructive to the event itself. And they look to the one who brought them as if to say, “What the fuck were you thinking?”
I recall hosting a party once and a woman who, until that moment, I had deeply respected, brought two guests: a husband and wife. The wife carried a spiritually aloof vibe that was strange but forgivable. The husband wandered around making all of the women uncomfortable with how much he was touching them. When they told him not to touch them, he told them they shouldn’t go to parties if they didn’t want to be touched.
I sent a terse email to my friend letting her know that those people were not welcome at my parties anymore.
But, of course, I imagine shepherd’s might sometimes find themselves facing a feral dog with no owner in sight. There’s no dog owner to cuss out and so the anger is directed towards these damned city dwelling, tourists and their dogs.
And so, it’s no wonder when people of colour express their exasperation at ‘white people’ for the way they behave and how that frustration boils over when white people, imagining they know so much, tell people of colour that they shouldn’t be so angry with white people. It must boggle their minds.
White people don’t see the damage that this system of white supremacy wreaks on the lives of people of colour and we don’t easily see the ways that we act as instruments of it. And we don’t see the consequence of our doing nothing about it.
For white people, conversations about racism are often intellectual banter, a chance to flex debating skills and to play our favourite game, Devil’s Advocate. For people of colour, racism isn’t a conversation. It’s a daily, life and death reality.
If I were a person of colour, I imagine I’d be deeply suspicious of white people appearing in social justice circles as well. The track record is not good.
Consider the words of Muhammed Ali, “There are many white people who mean right and in their hearts wanna do right. If 10,000 snakes were coming down that aisle now, and I had a door that I could shut, and in that 10,000, 1,000 meant right, 1,000 rattlesnakes didn’t want to bite me, I knew they were good… Should I let all these rattlesnakes come down, hoping that that thousand get together and form a shield? Or should I just close the door and stay safe?”
James Rebanks continues by recounting a particular story of a dog owner to whom the riot act was read.
“When I was growing up, I thought my father and his peers were needlessly rough in their handling of situations like that. They would swear and give people and old-fashioned rollicking if they had their dogs off leads where they shouldn’t have. I used to think that some gentle explaining would suffice. But you live and learn. I’ve tried the gentle friendly approach until I am blue in the face and it generally results in the other people carrying on regardless. So now I rant and rave and generally do a great impression of a furious farmer who will shoot their dogs with immediate effect unless they are put on a lead. It works much better.”
It seems to be something like that.
This is the summit of contemplation, and
no art can touch it
blue, so blue, the far-out archipelago
and the sea shimmering,
shimmering
no art can touch it, the mind can only
try to become attuned to it
to become quiet, and space itself out, to
become open and still, unworlded
knowing itself in the diamond country, in
the ultimate unlettered light.
– Kenneth White, A high blue day on Scalpay
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin:
Please,” she said reasonably, with a smile, with just the right amount of deference, just the right mix of data and passion, with charts and narrative, with cost curves, and high res video of corals and icecaps, “might we have a livable planet for future generations?
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin:
If one part of your theory is invalid, your theory is invalid. For instance if your theory posits an infinite planet, I’m not super concerned with its finer points. Would instead recommend a new theory
A Persian word for ‘beautiful’ or ‘enchanting’ is ‘del-āvīz’ which means ‘heart-hanger’ or ‘something the heart hangs onto.’
– @PersianPoetics
The true call of the desert, of the mountains, or the sea, is their silence – free of the networks of dead speech.
– Freya Stark, Perseus in the Wind
In fact I think we’d be fooling ourselves if we had a audience this large and didn’t realize that there were some enemies present.
– Malcolm X
Discovery
by Florence Ripley Mastin
The gray path glided before me
Through cool, green shadows;
Little leaves hung in the soft air
Like drowsy moths;
A group of dark trees, gravely conferring,
Made me conscious of the gaucherie of sound;
Farther on, a slim lilac
Drew me down to her on the warm grass.
“How sweet is peace!”
My serene heart said.
Then, suddenly, in a curve of the road,
Red tulips!
A bright battalion, swaying,
They marched with fluttering flags,
And gay fifes playing!
A swift flame leapt in my heart;
I burned with passion;
I was tainted with cruelty;
I wanted to march in the wind,
To tear the silence with gay music,
And to slash the sober green
Until it sobbed and bled.
The tulips have found me out.
Although few of us attract any really vicious enemies, we always have to deal with people who irritate us. For beginners, quietly to avoid confrontation can be considered a practice. But if you ever get stuck with the most exasperating person on the planet, take a leaf out of Lord Atisha’s book. When he travelled to Tibet, Atisha kept the most infuriating person he knew close to him to make certain he had plenty of opportunities for practising patience. We may not be able to go quite that far, but faced with an unavoidable and exasperating companion, the least we can do is use the opportunity to take irritation as the object of our practice. The point the Buddha was making, though, is that the state of our minds is inevitably reflected in our everyday reactions.
For example, how quickly does your mood change when your plans are frustrated? One minute you feel fine, then a north wind blows up a whole host of memories of past emotional crises and you find yourself reliving every painful detail over and over again. You get into such a state that you cannot keep your unhappiness to yourself and you phone a friend. He listens attentively as you exhibit your pain with no thought of the effect you are having, and soon your friend is as depressed and unsettled as you are. What’s the point?
As an aspiring bodhisattva, if you feel the need to indulge your sufferings, do it alone. Don’t drag anyone else into your emotional extravaganza, particularly if you are a tonglen practitioner and committed to taking on the suffering of all sentient beings rather than sharing it out. Basically, it is high time the dharma actually penetrated the minds of dharma students, especially those who, like myself, have been around a while. And even if you only manage to pull off that kind of penetration once in a hundred attempts, it is an achievement worthy of a medal.
– Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, Not for Happiness
At the same time I’ve seen quite different effects doing therapeutic Gestalt dreamwork than from doing high doses of vipassana-insight meditation, so there are real patterned differences between different methodological approaches to the mind, and that’s important.
At the end of the day though, it takes a lot of experiential training on both sides to begin to have a nuanced dialogue about this. Not many have the training required to join that conversation…
– Vince Fakhoury Horn
Second only to freedom, learning is the most precious option on earth.
– Norman Cousins
I want to feel both the beauty and the pain of the age we are living in. I want to survive my life without becoming numb. I want to speak and comprehend words of wounding without having these words become the landscape where I dwell. I want to possess a light touch that can elevate darkness to the realm of stars.
– Terry Tempest Williams
I’m reading about the birth of MTV in AARP in case you want to feel old.
– Aileen Weintraub
Imagine having the ability to not just speak rudely to the powerful, but to publicly humiliate them in front of the nation. We can’t really do that now, the public sphere is too diverse — bifurcated and branched out in every possible direction — but 2,500 years ago in Athens you could. Citizens had the right of parrhesia, a kind of radical free speech that allowed them to share their thoughts on any subject or any person, and no one used it more effectively than the comic playwrights of the period.
– Mark Haskell Smith
Glimpses are one of the simplest
and most effective ways
to learn effortless mindfulness.
A glimpse is a type of micro-meditation
that allows you to shift, let go, and open
to an expansive, pervasive awareness grounded in essential peace, love, and wisdom. This awareness is always with you
but is usually obscured by mental chatter
and a self-limited point of view.
Different glimpses work for different people. Try a few and give them several seconds
to several minutes to see if you feel the shift
in your perspective and sense of self.
➖➖➖
GLIMPSE: Wordless Awareness
1. Close your eyes. Picture a time when you were doing something like hiking in nature. In your mind, see and feel every detail of that day. Hear the sounds, smell the smells, and feel the air on your skin; notice the enjoyment of being with your companions or by yourself; recall the feeling of walking those last few yards toward your destination.
2. Visualize and feel yourself as you have reached your goal and are looking out over the wide-open vista. Feel that openness, connection to nature, sense of peace and well-being. Having reached your goal, feel what it’s like when there’s no more striving and nothing to do. See that wide-open sky with no agenda to think about, and then simply stop. Feel this deep sense of relief and peace.
3. Now, let go of the visualization, the past, and all associated memories slowly and completely. Remain connected to the joy of being that is here within you.
4. Open your eyes. Realize that the well-being that was experienced then is also here now. It does not require you to go to any particular place in the past or the future once it’s discovered within.
It’s often effective to record the mindful glimpses you like best in your own voice, at a pace that seems right for you. Then listen to your own voice lead you home.
– Loch Kelly
Keep in mind always the present you are constructing; it should be the future you want.
– Alice Walker
If we want to see a more peaceful world, we have to learn to collaborate. Young people shouldn’t follow previous patterns of behaviour. New conditions, like our interdependent, globalised world, require new ideas. Dividing people into ‘us’ and ‘them’ is out of date.
– Dalai Lama
The conductor of an orchestra doesn’t make a sound. He depends, for his power, on his ability to make other people powerful.
– Benjamin Zander
One of most important things I have learned seems terribly obvious.
You cannot explicitly change that which is implicit.
And this is where the Warm Data work has been so difficult to defend in a world that seems to have forgotten the potency of the implicit.
It is also so juicy.
– Nora Bateson
Peony
Peony, my love,
Chinese flower,
June flower,
garish ball of
sweet perfume,
red, pink, white.
In the house a vase-full
makes the whole place
redolent of peony.
The essence of the start of summer.
– David Budbill, Tumbling Toward the End
Forget the suffering
You caused others.
Forget the suffering
Others caused you.
– Czeslaw Milosz
The “don’t-know” attitude lauded in contemporary Buddhist and mindfulness discourse might serve to deescalate internal tensions ratcheted up by false assumptions and petty judgements.
– Matthew Remski
There is no such thing as permanence at all.
Everything is constantly changing.
Everything is in a flux.
Because you cannot face the impermanence
of all relationships, you invent sentiments,
romance, and dramatic emotions
to give them certainty.
Therefore you are always in conflict.
– U.G. Krishnamurti
I don’t know where a poem comes from until after I’ve lived with it a long time. I’ve a notion that a poem comes from absolutely everything that ever happened to you.
– Donald Hall
Three years after my life collapsed, and I’m still surprised (hurt) when people completely ghost me. They’re always poetry-world people. Poets, if you’re a cowardly cog of a human being, just leave me alone. I have real friends now. And real work to do.
– Joseph Massey
I was never more hated than when I tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth.
– Ralph Ellison
Zen has stolen
all that I know
…Thank you!
– Shinzen
Once you understand symbolic things, you, too, will see symbols everywhere.
– Joseph Campbell
Yeah meditation is cool, but have you tried living a life of integrity on-and-off the cushion?
What’s keeping you from opening to Big Heart?
– Vincent Horn
Thank you for your anger
That says so clearly
“Something is off
Some dignity has not been honored”
Thank you for your messiness
And chaos,
Those perfect responses
To expectations of being in control
And keeping it all together
Being inhumanely tight
Thank you for your shadows
Those permission slips
Into deeper wholeness
Thank you deeply
For those things you’ve called
Your flaws
Those who courageously overthrow
The great oppressor
Perfectionism
Dear one!
These cracks are not problems
They’re entrance points
Into authenticity
Our deepest wounds
Are not things to be ashamed of
Accepting them
Is the great shortcut
To God.
– Chelan Harkin
A striking number of political prisoners who wrote memoirs attribute their survival to their ability to tell stories […]. In the world of the camps and the prisons, where books were scarce and films were rare, a good storyteller was highly prized.
Leonid Finkelstein says that he will be forever grateful to a thief who, “on my first prison day, recognized this potential in me, and said, ‘You’ve probably read a lot of books. Tell them to people, and you will be living very well.’ And indeed I was living better than the rest. […] I ran into people who said, ‘You are Leonchik-the-storyteller, I heard about you’ […].”
Alexander Wat retold Stendhal’s The Red and the Black to a group of bandits while in prison. Alexander Dolgun recounted the plot of Les Miserables. Janusz Bardach told the story of The Three Musketeers: “I felt my status rise with every twist of the plot.”
Others found the same. On her hot, stuffy train to Vladivostok, Evgeniya Ginzburg learned that “there were material advantages in reciting poetry … For instance, after each act of Griboyedov’s The Misfortune of Being Clever, I was given a drink of water out of someone else’s mug as a reward for ‘services to the community.
– Anne Applebaum
Stress is caused
by being
here
but
wanting to be
there.
– Eckhart Tolle
Kaleidoscopic Empathy via Sophie Strand
“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. 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 honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn,” writes T.H. White on the education of the young King Arthur. Arthur, like the sixth century Bard Taliesin, learns not by book, but by becoming. The sixth century poem attributed to Taliesin, reads, “I have been a blue salmon,I have been a dog, a stag, a roebuck on the mountain… A stallion, a bull, a buck, I was reaped and placed in an oven”. In order to become a storyteller, an advisor to kings, and a spiritual intermediary, Taliesin has had to live other lives, other stories. But the most important overlap between the young Arthur and Taliesin is that they learn not by becoming other human beings. They learn by entering into badgers and fish and insects: the minds of the more-than-human world.
The best thing for being sad is interrupting your individuality. Imagine lengthening, feeling your skin polish into sheerness, crystal into glass, your mind fluid, placid. You are a cup of water. And then slowly, purposely, pour yourself into another mode of consciousness. Take on what biologist Jakob von Uexküll called a creature’s “umwelt”: their particular somatic body map, their situated sensory experience of world. Western materialism warns against anthropomorphism. And I agree that the exercise will necessarily fail. Unlike an octopus, my nervous system is not concentrated in my arms. Unlike the mistletoe, I do not know what it is like to parasitically, intimately, invade the body of a cactus. But that does not mean using our imaginative muscle for greater empathy is unimportant. I think, in fact, it is the most important skill for us to be developing as storytellers, artists, scientists, activists, and anyone anguished by escalating extinctions and ecological collapse. The best thing for being sad is practicing being more-than-human.
The injunction against anthropomorphism seems like a misdirection to me. Believing that the world is mindless, mute, matter might be more dangerous than believing that a housecat has a personality, and that a mountain could possess its own lithic eroticism. In fact, it could be argued that the fictional “objectivity” of material reductionism is a grander type of anthropomorphism. Everything belongs to the human. Everything is blanketed by capitalism, our predetermined expectations, our teleology. Everything isn’t necessarily made human, but seen as made “for” humans. Everything is our standing reserve.
This is not a universal belief. Indigenous cultures the world over had known that animals, insects, fungi, landscapes, and weather are other “people”. They don’t behave like us. They don’t even live on the same timescales. But it is deeply important that we tell stories about their experiences. That we actively try to inhabit their wants and needs, so we are not always making decisions from a singular, human perspective. Everything we do is entangled with our ecosystem. Every breath we take loops us into relationship with the trees and grasses and soil around us. It only makes sense that we should try and understand how our decisions might feel and live inside another species body.
What if every time a logging company proposes to cut down a forest, they had to log an intimate story of the experience of every animal, fungi, insect, plant, and stone in that area? Each “chapter” would take into consideration the sensory apparatus, the scientific studies, the indigenous lore, the behavior of each being and then attempt to inhabit it and to experience what the clearcutting would feel like to that situated perspective. Then every logger, every investor, every person involved in the logging operation would have to attend a many weeks long conference where the report was read aloud.
There is much talk, these days, about neural plasticity and neurogenesis. We are concerned with keeping our brains limber and adaptive by challenging them with new tasks and by creating new neural pathways with the aid of psychedelics. Why not also practice empathic plasticity? I tend to like the metaphor and the visual play of the kaleidoscope. Invented by the Scotsman David Brewster in 1817, the optical instrument has been remarkably good at avoiding inclusion in usefulness. It is still, to this day, seen as a marvel and a child’s toy. I have a strong intuition that it is these tools of marvel and beauty, that as John O’Donohue writes, remain “immune to our strategies”, will be of the most help going forward.
Kaleidoscope derives from the Greek word kalos for beauty, eidos for form, and skopéō meaning to consider. Kaleidoscopes tilt mirrors towards each other at an angle, situated within a tube that often contains loose colored cells. Every rotation of the tube provides a stochastic arrangement of the cells, repeating the reflection to create a visually disorienting and stunning display. The view through the kaleidoscope is unpredictable and ever-shifting. Kaleidoscopes ask us to consider the mutable forms of beauty. And they ask us to do this without expectation and without aim. The kaleidoscope is a plaything, a child’s toy. It cannot be easily coopted by dominant paradigms.
I want to offer Kaleidoscopic Empathy as an important exercise for an age of ecological collapse and extinction. The aim is not to “perfect” or “correctly” inhabit another being’s experience. The aim is to play. And to strengthen the muscle of empathy. Practice, whenever you enter into a forest, or go on a walk, or sit by a river, pouring yourself into the mind of every bird, fly, bumble bee, bindweed, grub you see. Center yourself in the wind-buoyed swiftness of the kestrel and then rotate the kaleidoscope, slip into the shadow of the sturgeon below the river surface, beginning to feel the chemical prickle that will lead the fish upstream to spawn. Then again, faster, condense into a Wolbachia bacteria riding inside a mosquito. Get comfortable with being other beings. With considering their experience not just intellectually, but somatically. Go outside and lie down on a patch of grass and melt into a thousand hyphal strands, weaving embodied appetite into the soil. Imagine what it would be like to hear with your whole body, to eat with your whole face.
The aim is not to accomplish anything. The kaleidoscope teaches us agility and play. The aim is to expand our scope for empathy. If, like the boy Arthur, we want to care for the kingdom, we must know what it is like to “be” the kingdom. We must pour ourselves, empathically, curiously, into the world.
Healer’s dis-ease: The occupation of working on our healing BECAUSE we see ourselves as ill, broken, needing to be fixed, or corrected – as if something is wrong with us.
It’s not that there aren’t illnesses, traumas, and growth potentials. THERE ARE AND THEY CAN BE HELL.
BUT our vision of ourselves can become so focused on what’s wrong with us that we begin to think “I AM sick,” in other words, “Sick is who I am” – a kind of self-hypnosis.
This view can become insidiously shaming and damaging to the life project, with serious side effects, including:
– We can become blind to other ways in which our beauty, intelligence, power and divinity shine.
– We can stop forging connections to our depths – areas that may exist totally independent of our illnesses and difficulties.
– We can forget the profound gifts we were given that must be shared and used to build relationships.
– We can disown or disconnect from the enormous powers we have, seeing ourselves as ONLY unable, less than, or victim to our struggles.
– We may even fail to recognize the powers and radicalness inherent in how our difficulties differentiate us for the culture’s status quo.
– We can disonnect from our wildly radical creative impulses, especially if they express themselves outside the norm.
– David Bedrick
I think poetry essentially sensitizes you to the abuses and pleasures and delicacies of the world. It makes you more alert. But a heightened consciousness is often difficult to live with.
– Zeeshan Pathan
The recipe for perpetual ignorance is : Be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.
– Elbert Hubbard, The Philistine
It wasn’t until I moved to the East Coast that I realized that some people just…go somewhere else for the whole summer
– Amber Sparks
I don’t think a writer should speak for a community. You may do it inadvertently, but I don’t think it should be one of your aims.
– Pat Barker
Whether we want it or not, power remains one of the central issues in all of our lives.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Reviewing every once in a while: relationships, perspectives, beliefs, biases, daily habits (including what you eat, drink, consume, listen to, watch, buy, and do), is the way to conscious, empowered living. Step out of any programs not meant for you & choose what’s truly for you
– @IAmMyBestToday
constantly reminded of how, for women, writing about our lives is really rewriting. we are not only generating something new; we are pushing back against what has been written about us & reckoning with all we’ve been told about who we are & should be.
– Madeleine Barnes
Daring not to admit we may be our own deceivers, we anxiously seek someone to accuse of deceiving us.
– Daniel Boorstin
People who are experiencing homelessness get to have standards, preferences, and be picky because they’re people and live in a country where there’s ample resources. They don’t have to gladly accept whatever you give them.
– Dana White
May you exit circles where you feel the need to dilute, shrink, or hide. May your friendships and relationships expand you and cause you to shine.
– Dr. Thema
A clean slate, with your own face on
– @SylviaPlathBot
Whenever I lose faith in poetry I have to remember *which* poetry I’m losing faith in. That distinction is very important.
– Roy G. Guzmán
Emotions come and go. Conscious breathing is my anchor.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Imagine you had one precious lifetime and happened to pop-up during a planetary emergency. What would you do?
– Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health
are three requirements for happiness,
though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
– Gustave Flaubert
I think the reason
pawns can’t move backwards
is because if they could,
they’d kill their own kings
in a heartbeat.
– Guante
Some answers can be found by looking up or rising above.
Other answers can be found down below, digging in the ground.
– David Bedrick
Frank Ostaseki:
Wise words from an old friend help me orient this morning.
We must shift our allegiances from fear to curiosity, from attachment to letting go, from control to trust, and from entitlement to humility.
– Angeles Arrien
many strive to be extraordinary
setting goals
chasing dreams
pursuing passions
earning medals and honors
quoting sages
yet to be truly extraordinary
learn to be simple
eat when hungry
nap when tired
weed the garden when the soil hearkens
and walk in the woods
till you forget
your name.
– Shinzen
Forget playing
the field.
Do you have
any idea how wild
I could grow
in the flowerpot
beside your desk?
– Andrea Gibson
In reality, in nature, grandmothers are a stabilizing influence on packs and herds. Grandma elephants keep adolescent bulls from going rogue. The presence of a grandmother is the house is the single best predictor for a child’s health and well being. But the priests (of all religions) need to demote the grandmother in order for them to assert their dominance and expertise.
Recently I was visiting a church and saw the young pastor talking about this or that from the pulpit. And in the pew were (mostly) old women…who had birthed children, kept children fed on no money, fought for their families, kept them house, stayed up all night nursing them through fevers, had buried children and lovers. Who is the wisdom holder? To whom should we turn for guidance?
– Perdita Finn
I won’t always be here
wearing these sneakers
eating this oatmeal
I won’t always be here
writing these words
talking, not talking
I won’t always be here
loving who I love
– David Bedrick
A poet yesterday on a zoom said that it’s impossible to feed the spirit in a dense city; maybe that’s the reason for this weird symbiosis.
– Clifford Mynes
Faith is a simple practice, at its best.
– Les Butchart
everything that lives was born from a relationship. broken homes are relationships too. and so are broken hearts. death is the precise moment when we cease all relationships. but we ask: if the fundamental fact of life is the meeting between i and you, why so many failed relationships? we have devoted our mental energies to conquering the world, and some of us to conquering the mind, but we must redirect our searches and begin to learn the hardest of all tasks known to humankind: how to meet a being in genuine relationship. we search within and we search without, and some of us believe that there is a search beyond the within and the without. but the entirety of the human story is our search for lost betweens.
– hune margulies
CHOOSING TO THINK OF IT
Today, ten thousand people will die
and their small replacements will bring joy
and this will make sense to someone
removed from any sense of loss.
I, too, will die a little and carry on,
doing some paperwork, driving myself
home. The sky is simply overcast,
nothing is any less than it was
yesterday or the day before. In short,
there’s no reason or every reason
why I’m choosing to think of this now.
The short-lived holiness
true lovers know, making them unaccountable
except to spirit and themselves – suddenly
I want to be that insufferable and selfish,
that sharpened and tuned.
I’m going to think of what it means
to be an animal crossing a highway,
to be a human without a useful prayer
setting off on one of those journeys
we humans take. I don’t expect anything
to change. I just want to be filled up
a little more with what exists,
tipped toward the laughter which understands
I’m nothing and all there is.
By evening, the promised storm
will arrive. A few in small boats
will be taken by surprise.
There will be survivors, and even they will die.
– Stephen Dunn
Soon again the dead will outnumber
the living. Last night the moon was fat. I dreamt
so many dreams, and all were death. I can’t guess
where green goes. Sucked back under
the earth to brood and bear a brash, relentless crop
of weed and wing? Or into the sallow sky to drop
a pale green dusk or help a wan sun rise again,
a sickly dawn?
And what a wilderness to mourn in:
curbs lined with the rotting dead; this wailing in the wind;
the severed hands of sycamores awash downriver
bereft of wrist or limb. Just where
in our faith or physics did we ever consider
what would come of this veined, green
benediction suspended above us all summer?
– Marjorie Stelmach
The Once Invisible Garden
How did I come to be
this particular version of me,
and not some other, this morning
of purple delphiniums blooming,
like royalty—destined
to meet these three dogs
asleep at my feet, and not others—
this soft summer morning,
sitting on her screened porch
become ours, our wind chime,
singing of wind and time,
yellow-white digitalis
feeding bees and filling me—
and more abundance to come:
basil, tomatoes, zucchini.
What luck or fate, instinct,
or grace brought me here?—
in shade, beneath hidden stars,
a soft, summer morning,
seeing with my whole being,
love made visible.
– Laura Foley
Men must want to do things of their own innermost drives. People, not commercial organizations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work. Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness — they cannot work and their civilization collapses.
– Frank Herbert, Children of Dune
How do I look away now that I have seen you?
– Rachel Mennies
At nineteen, I knew nothing about the inner workings of my own heart, let alone the hearts of others. Still, I thought I had a pretty good grasp of how happiness and sadness worked. What I couldn’t yet grasp were all the myriad phenomenon that lay in the space between happiness and sadness, how they related to each other. As a result, I often felt anxious and helpless.
– Haruki Murakami
It’s not too late to recover. You’re young, you’re tough. You’re adaptable. You can patch up your wounds, lift up your head and move on.
– Haruki Murakami
sky brimming blue
and cloudless
a perfectly good umbrella
lies on the sidewalk
confidently tossed
by someone who looked
up and decided for today
and for forever
they no longer believe
in the rain
– @olicketysplit
In Persian, the difference between ‘mercy’ and ‘difficulty’ is a single dot: ‘rahmat’ (رحمت) versus ‘zahmat’ (زحمت).
– @PersianPoetics
True translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal. One reads and rereads the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them to reach, to touch, the vision or experience that prompted them. One then gathers up what one has found there and takes this quivering almost wordless “thing” and places it behind the language it needs to be translated into. And now the principal task is to persuade the host language to take in and welcome the “thing” that is waiting to be articulated.
– John Berger
Somehow, we need to create a new “habit of mind,” as individuals and as a society. We need a mental attitude that values and protects stillness, privacy, solitude, slowness, personal reflection; that honors the inner life; that allows each of us to wander about without schedule within our own minds.
– Alan Lightman
Stanley Kunitz, poem on Roethke
There was a big blond uncle-bear,
wounded, smoke-eyed, wild,
who shambled from the west
with his bags full of havoc.
He spoke the bears’ grunt-language,
waving his paws
and rocking on his legs.
Both of us were drunk,
slapping each other on the back,
sweaty with genius.
He spouted his nonsense-rhymes,
roaring like a behemoth.
You crawled under the sofa.
A patchwork of unfinished phrasings,
Fragmented feelings and forgotten meanings.
The frustration and fatigue of this moonlight poetry.
– J. K. McDowell
Everything is an elegy these days, all chipped rings, / clipped wings.
– @stumpyduong
Ground doesn’t mind spit
Soup is one of the oldest words
Loves comes sideways
Thoughts don’t have to align
– George Gorman
We can mourn what’s lost AND cherish what’s left. We can absolutely do both. We don’t really have a choice.
– Mary Annaïse Heglar
Feeling you outside my window
seeing just a glimpse of you entering
l follow
into the sublime
– Wendy Robertson Fyfe
I’m like a traveller who suddenly finds himself in a strange town, without knowing how he got there, which makes me think of those who lose their memory and for a long time are not themselves but someone else.
– Fernando Pessoa
There’s an English idiom, ‘Stop and think.’ Nobody can think unless he stops.
– Hannah Arendt
in a jerusalem day you hear prayers all the time. in almost every language and religious confessions. people walk past each other with their minds immersed on many beliefs and their hearts surrendered on him in whom they belief. but i seek the small gestures: like the smiles, the signs of delight at the smells, the little kids weaving dangerously with broken bikes, or the couples hiding behind a narrow alley to look at each other and just touch, thinking no one can see them! these gestures alone are proof of holiness in the heart and in the deeds. perhaps holiness is a word we use to distract our hearts and deeds from the search for the poetry of true encounter. but if you ever feel the night breezes on your skin, perhaps you would see what i see and hear what i hear and allow yourself to just be. to encounter is to be.
– hune margulies
Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention writing has transformed human consciousness.
– Walter J. Ong
Hey, you know what’s scarier than 114 heat and 20 mph winds when you live in the west?
Nothing.
– @Liz_Prato
Purged of all impurities of attachment, aversion and confusion, the Buddha is worthy of oblations, offerings, respect and homage.
– @_Buddha_Quotes
A reminder that these heat waves aren’t tragedies, they’re crimes.
The fossil fuel industry knew decades ago that this is what their pollution was causing, so they spent billions to lie to the public and block climate action.
– @jamieclimate
Just a reminder that not only are we all suffering from the west coast heat wave, migrating salmon cannot survive in raised water temperatures.
We’ve fucked up real bad, is what I’m saying.
– @Fox_E_Lori
All finite things reveal infinitude:
The mountain with its singular bright shade
Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow,
The after-light upon ice-burdened pines;
Odor of basswood on a mountain-slope,
A scent beloved of bees;
Silence of water above a sunken tree:
The pure serene of memory in one man, —
A ripple widening from a single stone
Winding around the waters of the world.
– ROETHKE
I will not die an unlived life
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
…
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance;
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.
– Dawna Markova
Rivers
by Czeslaw Milosz
So lasting they are, the rivers!” Only think. Sources somewhere in the mountains pulsate and springs seep from a rock, join in a stream, in the current of a river, and the river flows through centuries, millennia. Tribes, nations pass, and the river is still there, and yet it is not, for water does not stay the same, only the place and the name persist, as a metaphor for a permanent form and changing matter. The same rivers flowed in Europe when none of today’s countries existed and no languages known to us were spoken. It is in the names of rivers that traces of lost tribes survive. They lived, though, so long ago that nothing is certain and scholars make guesses which to other scholars seem unfounded. It is not even known how many of these names come from before the Indo-European invasion, which is estimated to have taken place two thousand to three thousand years B. C. Our civilization poisoned river waters, and their contamination acquires a powerful emotional meaning. As the course of a river is a symbol of time, we are inclined to think of a poisoned time. And yet the sources continue to gush and we believe time will be purified one day. I am a worshipper of flowing and would like to entrust my sins to the waters, let them be carried to the sea.
– Translated by Robert Hass
The more I learn of physics, the more I am drawn to metaphysics.
– Einstein
bide in non-abiding — don’t land anywhere.
– Adyashanti
DAISIES
Go ahead: say what you’re thinking. The garden
is not the real world. Machines
are the real world. Say frankly what any fool
could read in your face: it makes sense
to avoid us, to resist
nostalgia. It is
not modern enough, the sound the wind makes
stirring a meadow of daisies: the mind
cannot shine following it. And the mind
wants to shine, plainly, as
machines shine, and not
grow deep, as, for example, roots. It is very touching,
all the same, to see you cautiously
approaching the meadow’s border in early morning,
when no one could possibly
be watching you. The longer you stand at the edge,
the more nervous you seem. No one wants to hear
impressions of the natural world: you will be
laughed at again; scorn will be piled on you.
As for what you’re actually
hearing this morning: think twice
before you tell anyone what was said in this field
and by whom.
– Louise Glück
Watching the first sunlight
touch the tops of the palms
what could I ask […]
I dream I am here
in the morning
and the dream is its own time […]
There I am
morning clouds
in the east wind
No one is in the garden
the autumn daisies
have the day to themselves […]
I needed my mistakes
in their own order
to get me here […]
I call that singing bird my friend
though I know nothing else about him
and he does not know I exist […]
In my youth I believed in somewhere else
I put faith in travel
now I am becoming my own tree.
– W.S. Merwin, Wild Oats
Hold me
to you and I’ll inherit the aching. We never can
tangle ourselves in a way that won’t be
unwound.
– Sarah Brockhaus
Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this […] sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.
– Salman Rushdie
Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. […] those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter’s tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.
– Salman Rushdie
The common idea that I am an atheist is based on a big mistake. Anyone who interprets my scientific theories this way, did not understand them.
– EINSTEIN
The sacred radiance of our original nature never darkens.
It has shined forth since beginningless time.
Do you wish to enter the gate that leads to this?
Simply do not give rise to conceptual thinking.
– Zen Master So Sahn
I advise my companions on the Way: establish an enduring commitment and maintain a steady mind; remove errant thoughts and give prominence to the undertaking of Nature and Existence; inquire into the principles of creation and transformation with an unwavering mind. Advance by removing one layer after the other: when you remove one layer, continue to the next one until you finally reach the inner core of all things. Then you will be able to see that all the dust of this world is a precious jewel.
Rambling at will, you will go anywhere you like, and everywhere will be the truth. Entirely awakened and entirely realized, you will move without obstructions.
Why should you fear that you will not fulfill your Nature and your Existence?
– Liu Yiming, Cultivating the Tao
Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love.
– Czeslaw Milosz
It’s hard for me to know that you’re really enjoying the moment, that you’re really happy, if I don’t hear that you know that it’s temporary.
– Fusilier
In the beginning nothing comes, in the middle nothing stays, in the end nothing goes.
– Milarepa
We are allowing a handful of corporations to boil us alive so they can have more money to spend in an economy that will not exist.
– Anat Shenker-Osorio
Our country and our government needs to develop the moral courage to admit mistakes, when they have been made. Instead, we are witnessing the rise of an ugly spirit threatening the right of free expression and freedom to dissent.
– Martin Luther King Jr.
Sometimes I imagine history and science and memory are puppets, and I’m pushing them onto the stage of inquiry and asking them to have a conversation—to share their knowledge, to argue with each other… what explosions are uniquely possible in combination?
– Leslie Jamison
One needn’t fly to the stars to study the Universe.
– James Scott Smith
Light’s colors fold into arias
Melting
What color is spirit?
All
What color am I?
Every
Feel the sounds colors give
Flow you in blue
Lie you in green
Bathe you in gold
Robe you in red
Champagne you in white
Sleep you in black
Grow you in violet
Touch the sound of color
Water the blue flow
Springtime the green
Summer suns golden
Autumn wears red robes
Winter snows white
Night tenders black
Goodness, soft violet
Hear the sounds light makes
Cascades in the waterfalls
Throbs in the surf
Thrills patterns through trees
Sighs in the marshes
Soars geometry in mountains
Measured, tread animals
Inspired, the winged
Dulcet nod wildflowers
Pulsing the wheat
Using our own hands
Creating’s the beat
– Bobbie Gorman
Fear and Loathing (Comin’ and Goin’)
I come to party, I show up alone,
I feel the beat on my feet, and I’m soloing.
I sing sunshine hits in the club.
Sunshine hits baby. That’s just how I live, lawd—
And Lord was like—
I fled the scene,
done all I possibly could. The way it works is,
sunshine hits something and so, there issomething.
Gradually, you become unlike that something
You used to hold. I had held a cassette tape
in my hands, had held
a church in my hands,
had held it with heavy hands, had felt love
Like adrenaline, to which no one in the church spoke.
I had heard music emanating
from a cassette player, had heard it in church,
had looked into the pastor’s eyes, had held her eyes
In my hands, had felt her love like a fee.
Evil eyes,
everyone knows
what your poems are about. Whatever it is
got me laughing.
– Anaïs Duplan
Happiness is the art of being broken
With least sound. The old, whom circumstance
Has ground smooth as green bottle-glass
On the sea’s furious grindstone, very often
Practice it to perfection. (For them, death
Is the one definitive shrug
In an infinite series, all prior gestures
Take relevance from this, as much express
Sorrow for stiff canary or cold son.)
Always the first fragmentation
Stirs us to fear…Beyond that point
We learn where we belong, in what uncaring
Complex depths we roll, lashed by light,
Tumbling in anemone-dazzled fathoms
Seek innocence in surrender,
Senility an ironic act of charity
Easing the agony of disparateness until
That day when, all identity lost, we serve
As curious for children roaming beaches,
Makeshift monocles through which they view
The same green transitory world we also knew.
– Bruce Dawe
Followers of the Way, you take words that come out of the mouths of old teachers and think this must be the Way. Blind idiots! You go through life betraying your own two eyes!
– Lin-chi
Fundamentally, preserving art as a space for exploration, transgression, and new ways of thinking is more important than making sure no one is offended or might misread something… especially (I think) for marginalized groups.
– Lincoln Michel
One practice that I especially like is taking mental snapshots. You can begin by closing your eyes. Then turn your head in any direction—up, down, sideways. It doesn’t matter which way. The idea is that you’re not exactly sure what you’ll see when you open your eyes.
Then, abruptly open your eyes and see what’s in front of you. Almost immediately, you will revert to labeling everything, but try to observe that moment before the labeling happens. In a relaxed and open way, try to take a mental snapshot of that instant, which is empty of imputed meaning.
– Pema Chodron
Thoughts rise to the surface which reach back into the centuries. At times I feel as if I’m spread out over the landscape and inside things, and I myself am living in every tree, in the clouds and the procession of the seasons ..
– Carl Jung
Depths and surfaces should mix .. so that new life can develop. New life does not develop outside us, but within us.
– Carl Jung
Like the human heart, societies and economies, too, are subject to premature beats, local tachycardias, fibrillations and flutters … chaotic irregularities, and paroxysms.
– Alvin Toffler
Like the human heart, societies and economies, too, are subject to premature beats, local tachycardias, fibrillations and flutters … chaotic irregularities, and paroxysms.
– Alvin Toffler
Our wounds need nurturing care in order to heal. If we are to nurture and heal, we must admit that the wounds exist.
– Iyanla Vanzant
What, then, would be the meaning of human life?
There is none for me. I endure life by creating order in a small sphere. Order is not the right term – by creating coherence with my artistic work.
– Anselm Kiefer
The body is a haunted terrain—a living record of personal, familial, social, and epigenetic memory. To look at my father’s body now—the way he shuffles when he walks, the atrophy in his once-nimble fingers, the nerve pain in his feet, the cloudiness in his eyes as he loses his sight—it too is a record of a forgotten life, and of the systems that failed it. I carry the memory of him in his splendor and his decline. And what I carry of him is also connected to the land, its seam connecting memory, legacy into the future. Memory itself is a kind of map, linked to textures, smells, songs, places, the act of remembering in and of itself a kind of haunting. Music is one of the few portals I have into my fragmented memory, and writing the only way I know to recover my people from the nothing of forgetting, to resist the erasure of the border and its constant overwriting of history, to salvage what is disappearing.
– Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
Dear Day,
by Catherine Pierce
Lately I am more aware of how easily
you might lope carelessly off into a fog
of never and gray, and so when you come
in the morning with your pincers on,
when you wake me with your snorts
and hacks, when you lie down next to me
with your scales poking all my soft places,
I hold you to me. The bruises will heal,
and it isn’t your fault you’re so spiny.
Day, you lower your monstrous head
and let me pat it. You are gleaming
and everything. You are genus unknown,
phylum unnamed. You glint and lumber,
you drool and growl. Soon, maybe,
you’ll let me climb on your back. Soon,
maybe, we’ll bullet together into forests
and glades and gladness. So stay. Walk
beside me with your armor on, breathe
flames at the beasts that bite. If I get singed,
it’s okay. I’d pay levy upon levy
for your glittering shadow beside me.
I wish I could buy everyone’s books and everyone’s art. I’m sorry that I can only do a few. I do what I can. But I respect the hell out of all of you.
– Leah Callen
Every time Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car comes up on my playlist, I’m like “awww shit, man, buckle up…” as she then performs an oral recitation of one of the best American short stories from the last 30 years and I know I’ll be reduced to sobs in less than 4 minutes…
– E.A. Newman, Writer
How evil do you have to be to be a fossil fuel executive in 2021? After all this?
There is zero social license remaining for this planet-wrecking technology. None. We don’t need them. And even worse, they are a clear and present threat to our survival.
– Eric Holthaus
Our Happiness
by Eileen Myles
was when the
lights were
out
the whole city
in darkness
& we drove north
to our friend’s
yellow apt.
where she had
power & we
could work
later we stayed
in the darkened
apt. you sick
in bed & me
writing ambitiously
by candle light
in thin blue
books
your neighbor had
a generator &
after a while
we had a little
bit of light
I walked the
dog & you
were still
a little bit
sick
we sat on a stoop
one day in the
late afternoon
we had very little
money. enough for
a strong cappuccino
which we shared
sitting there &
suddenly the
city was lit.
Suffering is what happens when you stop creating.
– Brianna Wiest
‘For a while’ is a phrase whose length can’t be measured. At least by the person who’s waiting.
– Haruki Murakami
The woods were made for the hunter of dreams…
– S.W. Foss
Seeing the Sky
Seeing the sky is one analogy used for the practice of a sudden glimpse of nowness. Another analogy is looking at one’s own eyes without using a mirror. This practice is not like meditation at all. It is non-meditation, because in looking at one’s own eyes without a mirror there is nothing to see and no one to look. One just makes the gesture of looking. Looking at space or looking at the sky is the same thing: one cannot see anything in space. One just make the gesture of focusing one’s eyes on space.
– Chögyam Trungpa
An empty stomach, an empty wallet, and a broken heart can teach you some of the best lessons in life.
– Robin Williams
The spirit which I think I can discern is loaded with the spoils of matter. I now see all the grandeur, all the physical and historical attributes with which science has been loading matter for the last hundred and fifty years–I see all these transferred to one characteristic stuff which includes all things. Entropy has been replaced for me by ‘the highest consciousness’ as the essential physical function of the universe. The world seems to me to ‘tumble’, if I can so put it, forward and upward upon the spiritual ; and this inversion of cosmogony has the consequence of giving a cosmic consistency to the centres of consciousness–to the monads : this personal treasure, the centre within every soul, is imperishable, and the supreme Centre must be both lovable and loving.
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Letters from a Traveller
…to learn and not to do is really not to learn. To know and not to do is really not to know.
– Stephen Covey
Nobody gets me but the riverwash
– Nicholas Pierotti
Two Gardens
You have two gardens,
your own garden and that of your beloved.
First you have to take care of your own garden and master the art of gardening.
In each one of us there are flowers
and garbage. The garbage is the anger, fear, discrimination, and jealousy within us.
If you water the garbage,
you will strengthen the negative seeds.
If you water the flowers of compassion, understanding, and love,
you will strengthen the positive seeds.
What you grow is up to you.
If you don’t know how to practice
selective watering in your own garden,
then you won’t have enough wisdom
to help water the flowers
in the garden of your beloved.
In cultivating your own garden well,
you also help to cultivate her garden.
Even a week of practice
can make a big difference. You can do it.
Every time you practice walking mindfully, investing your mind and body in every step,
you are taking your situation in hand.
Every time you breathe in
and know you are breathing,
every time you breathe out and smile
to your out-breath, you are yourself,
you are your own master,
and you are the gardener of your own garden. We are relying on you to take good care
of your garden, so that you can help
your beloved take care of hers.
If you have a difficult relationship,
and you want to make peace
with the other person,
you have to go home to yourself.
Go home to your garden
and cultivate the flowers of peace, compassion, understanding and joy.
Only after that
can you come to your partner
and be patient and compassionate.
– Thich Nhat Hanh, Fidelity
In a philosopher’s garden:
Our gardens are symbols of home rather than seduction. Young people with fire in their blood are seldom found in them. The garden is the scene of middle age, of the slow passage from sexual excitement to domestic routine.
– Roger Scruton
Academia treats Indigenous knowledge and language like something to steal a piece of before we inevitably go extinct. This relationship isn’t reciprocal, it’s not respectful.
– @chapwelilthings
It has taken me all these years to make the simplest discovery: that I am surrounded by two classes of maniacs. The first are the believers, who think they know the reason why we find ourselves in this ludicrous predicament yet act for all the world as if they don’t. The second are the unbelievers, who don’t know the reason and don’t care if they don’t.
– Walker Percy
[…A]n entry in my journal about the appetite of silence. Is silence a form of hunger, I wrote, and then answered my own question: yes and no. Reading this now, I am disappointed in the wishy-washy quality of my thinking, I would like to go back and erase that answer. Yes, I would write, silence is a hunger for the anatomy of a moment, for the inside of things.
– Bob Hicok
From Tanka Diary
by Harryette Mullen
The botanical garden is just as I remember,
although it is certain that everything
has changed since my last visit.
How many hilarious questions these fuzzy
fiddleheads are inquiring of spring
will be answered as green ferns unfurl?
Walking the path, I stop to pick up
bleached bark from a tree, curled into
a scroll of ancient wisdom I am unable to read.
Even in my dreams I’m hiking
these mountain trails expecting to find a rock
that nature has shaped to remind me of a heart.
I watch how desperately we need political memory, so that we are not always imagining ourselves the ever-inventors of our revolution.
– Cherríe Moraga
Fishing on the Susquehanna in July
by Billy Collins
I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna
or on any river for that matter
to be perfectly honest.
Not in July or any month
have I had the pleasure—if it is a pleasure—
of fishing on the Susquehanna.
I am more likely to be found
in a quiet room like this one—
a painting of a woman on the wall,
a bowl of tangerines on the table—
trying to manufacture the sensation
of fishing on the Susquehanna.
There is little doubt
that others have been fishing
on the Susquehanna,
rowing upstream in a wooden boat,
sliding the oars under the water
then raising them to drip in the light.
But the nearest I have ever come to
fishing on the Susquehanna
was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia
when I balanced a little egg of time
in front of a painting
in which that river curled around a bend
under a blue cloud-ruffled sky,
dense trees along the banks,
and a fellow with a red bandanna
sitting in a small, green
flat-bottom boat
holding the thin whip of a pole.
That is something I am unlikely
ever to do, I remember
saying to myself and the person next to me.
Then I blinked and moved on
to other American scenes
of haystacks, water whitening over rocks,
even one of a brown hare
who seemed so wired with alertness
I imagined him springing right out of the frame.
The life of our community was simple
and sane, and I threw myself into it
with all my love and energy.
I did this with all the skill of a very strongly formed and defended personality.
Deep prayer and meditation experiences sustained me for a long time.
After some years I felt I could trust
the community, so I rested for a breather. Around this time, one of the older sisters died.
I had been close to her, and it triggered
a succession of memories:
the death of my twin brother at our birth,
the near-death of my mother,
the distance, hatred, and loss of my father.
I realized how split off my life had been because of my sorrow.
I saw that even in the monastic community
I had lived on the surface,
had been running from the grief
and emptiness. I finally stopped.
That realization started years of healing work to find the place where the grief,
the monastery, the pain of my own life,
and the pain of the world could be held
in the same sacred heart.”
“When I came back it was as if
my 12 years of experiences in India and Tibet were a dream. The memory and value
of those transcendental experiences
was in some way a dream
challenged by the culture shock
of returning to my family
and to work in the West.
Old patterns came back surprisingly quickly.
I got irritable, confused.
I wasn’t taking care of my body,
I worried about money, about relationship.
At the worst point I feared
that I was losing what I had learned.
Then I realized I couldn’t live
in some enlightened memory.
What became clear is that spiritual practice
is only what you’re doing now.
Anything else is a fantasy.”
‘A clearly enlightened person falls in the well. How is this so? After any powerful spiritual experience, there is an inevitable descent,
a struggle to embody what we have seen.’
The well we fall into can be created
by clinging to our experience
and spiritual ideals or by holding inflated ideas about our teachers, our path, or our self.
The well can be the unfinished business
of our psychological and emotional life —
an unwillingness to acknowledge
our own shadow, to include the human needs, the pain, and the darkness that we carry,
to see that we always have one foot
in the dark. As bright as it is,
the universe also needs us to open
to its other side.
– Jack Kornfield
We are required, I think, to be polite and considerate of others: This is a sort of social compact we have with each other–and very few people honor it, I might add. I’ll stay out of your way, smiling all the time, and you stay out of mine. If I stumble or my tire goes flat or I appear to be short of funds or food, I’ll happily drop by and help out. But, for the most part, you stay over there and I’ll stay over here. You’ll learn as you live a bit longer that there are very few people who are really interested in who you are and what you’re doing: That handful who do care and who do want to see you do well are treasures. Hold them very dear and very close to you. Forgive them almost anything. Be there for them. But most of life is solitary and hard–you work and you study and you fail and you do the damned things over and over again. And this is your responsibility. Most people, as I’ve said, are stupid and lazy and really only concerned with getting through the next couple of hours with silliness and stimulation and something to eat. Be polite. Look ahead. Ignore them. Do the work. Move forward.
– Katharine Hepburn/Interview with James Grissom
The most profitable consumer is an addict, much like the most profitable business is a monopoly.
– Jacob Wren
I am interested in why people stay attached to lives that don’t work, as though people would not survive the wholesale transformation of those attachments…as though they would rather be miserable, stuck, or numb than tipped over in the middle of invention.
– Lauren Berlant
The eyes understand wordlessly — for words conceal more than they reveal.
— Lawrence Durrell
Still Waiting
by Harryette Mullen
for Alison Saar
Please approach with care these figures in black.
Regard with care the weight they bear,
the scars that mark their hearts.
Do you think you can handle these bodies of graphite & coal dust?
This color might rub off. A drop of this red liquid
could stain your skin.
This black powder could blow you sky high.
No ordinary pigments blacken our blues.
Would you mop the floor with this bucket of blood?
Would you rinse your soiled laundry in this basin of tears?
Would you suckle hot milk from this cracked vessel?
Would you be baptized in this fountain of funky sweat?
Please approach with care
these bodies still waiting to be touched.
We invite you to come closer.
We permit you to touch & be touched.
We hope you will engage with care.
What works the best for me, without fail, is to create a very scary mind map of what I definitely do not want to mention, and then methodically address each one of those boulders.
– Jacqueline Jones LaMon
The origins of poetry are clearly rooted in obscurity, in secretiveness, in incantation, in spells that must at once invoke and protect, tell the secret and keep it.
– Mary Ruefle
What Jung espouses is not the abdication of the ego but the participation of the ego in conversation with the unconscious. The ego is under no obligation to accept, without demur, the alternative perspectives that the unconscious presents.
– Michael Vannoy Adams
Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.
– Dr. Alexis Carrel
We expect God to speak in words, while in reality God mostly speaks in wordless signs, silences, circumstances, movements, synchronicities, geometry, tensions, passages of time, meetings, failures, victories.
– @mikael_jibril
Trying to keep a fast moving river the same
is a fool’s game.
It is continuously flowing,
carving banks, shifting bottom-side,
smoothing stones.
When I ponder this aging process
I too am a flowing river
with subtle changes too small
for the outside observer to see
except for the graying hair
and wrinkly skin.
This body riddled with discomfort
can no longer free spar safely and
rolling too triggers vertigo and balance issues
I prefer to avoid.
Now kata and katana focused
I enjoy the journey and flow of carving
new banks, polishing new stones…
and yet
even this will change
as time marches on
but no worries
no frets —
I have tributaries.
– Shinzen
As far as I’m concerned, there is only one study and that is the way in which things relate to one another.
– Wayne Thiebaud
As you’re recovering
from the old, dying god
we’ve inherited
from our forefathers
that hasn’t served you,
as we all are,
and the boss of your heart
has finally gained the courage
to be open to hire
a more loving candidate
for Lord of The Universe—
this time around
it’s time to get
some standards:
This time, make sure God
feel like a close sister
holding you on your worst days.
Insist that God be big enough
for the full range of your collapse
Tell this God
She must be available
to buoy your joy
You’re tired of being shamed
and gaslit
by the Creator,
creating us imperfect
and then blaming us for it
Tell Her you’ve long deserved something better
You want Her to be as attentive
as each breath,
you want Her to be your watering hole,
a place where your soul
can reliably drink
No more hiding your heart
and tiptoeing
around some myth
of Her wrath
Let it be known
you’re no longer afraid
to hurt God’s feelings
with your truth,
and quite frankly
the fragile/abusive old god paradigm
could stand to grow
in resilience
Announce that you’re tired
of being a martyr
and ready to pull life close
to tell it exactly what you want
It’s time to set some boundaries:
Tell Her you’re not looking for a rebound
and if She doesn’t have the qualifications
you’re looking for
you’ll settle for celestial anarchy
until you until you find
the right fit.
– Chelan Harkin
The thousand-tongued delirium of the human heart
Entices me again into the liquid room
Of generation where imaginative souls conspire
We have believed in everything from dawn to doom,
In all things dreaming, lounging, crooning ancient tunes
For what clandestine reasons there are always these:
A breaking wave that will not stay on any shore
A silver fire that feeds the inveterate will to life
A hungry heart that will not suck for platitudes
Time is the way we dream and space is the way we love
The farthest stars are the pennies we tossed in a wishing well
You and I are the way all tales begin and end
We have to remind ourselves again and again of the truth
Take my hand. We are always going far away.
Take my heart. We are all confederates in this storm.
– George Gorman
May your
great ambition be
to alchemize
any ordinary moment
into pure gold
by saturating it
with your joy.
– Chelan Harkin
The love unit most damaged by the Industrial revolution has been the father-son bond.
– Robert Bly
That which you most need will be found where you least want to look.
– Carl Jung
If desires are not uprooted, sorrows grow again in you.
– Buddha
We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and ourselves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.
– Audre Lorde
If you’ve made mistakes in the past but have now learned not to repeat them, you brighten the world like a moon when released from a cloud.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Why Shame Gets a Bad Rap
At every level within a self-organizing system, the common self-regulatory task is to mediate the optimal balance between internal and external realms—between “self” and the “not-self” environment, in order to maintain flexible boundaries (in both time and space) in the face of ongoing change….these functional “self-regulatory” services are all provided by emotional qualia.
– Katherine Peil Kaufmann
This is the age of personal revolutions and that’s when people and things change.
– Cat Stevens
We learn something every day, and lots of times it’s that what we learned the day before was wrong.
– Bill Vaughn
As you know, there was a famous quarrel between Max Planck and Einstein, in which Einstein claimed that, on paper, the human mind was capable of inventing mathematical models of reality. In this he generalized his own experience because that is what he did. Einstein conceived his theories more or less completely on paper, and experimental developments in physics proved that his models explained phenomena very well. So Einstein says that the fact that a model constructed by the human mind in an introverted situation fits with outer facts is just a miracle and must be taken as such. Planck does not agree, but thinks that we conceive a model which we check by experiment, after which we revise our model, so that there is a kind of dialectic friction between experiment and model by which we slowly arrive at an explanatory fact compounded of the two. Plato-Aristotle in a new form! But both have forgotten something- the unconscious. We know something more than those two men, namely that when Einstein makes a new model of reality he is helped by his unconscious, without which he would not have arrived at his theories…But what role DOES the unconscious play?…either the unconscious knows about other realities, or what we call the unconscious is a part of the same thing as outer reality, for we do not know how the unconscious is linked with matter.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
Always be adaptable.
What got you to where you are now might not necessarily get you to where you want to go.
– @TheMentalBreak
He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.
– Francois de La Rochefoucauld
We don’t think upon a low level.
We think high.
– Bob Marley
The root cause that makes us wander in samsara is the chaining of our thoughts, and it is said that discursive thought is the ‘great ignorance’, that makes us fall into the ocean of samsara. Unless we do something about it, this chaining of thoughts will go on and on forever. So it is very important to employ the correct remedy, and here the main remedy is to cultivate the state free from wandering thoughts.
– Kyabje Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
i wish poems could just end on cliffhangers like a tv episode. like it’s just “oooh how will the speaker get out of this pickle??? tune in next poem to find out!!!
– Chen Chen
A Very Strange and Solemn Feeling Came Over Me as I Stood There
With No Sound but the Rustle of the Pines, No One Near Me
And the Sun So Glorious, as for Me Alone
It Seemed as If I Felt God as I Never Did Before
And I Prayed in My Heart That I Might Keep
This Happy Sense of Nearness All My Life
– Louisa May Alcott
Poetry—
but what is poetry anyway?
More than one rickety answer
has tumbled since that question was first raised.
But I just keep on not knowing, and I cling to that
like a redemptive handrail.
– Wisława Szymborska
have you lived with utmost care?—
have you articulated emotions like the edges of leaves?—
– Arthur Sze, Transpirations
Society is so afraid of desire that it was transformed into consumption.
– Nikki Wallschlaeger
A kiss is a lovely trick to stop speech.
– Ingrid Bergman
Today, as never before, the fates of men are so intimately linked to one another that a disaster for one is a disaster for everybody.
– Natalia Ginzburg
Your goal in life is to find out the people who need you the most, to find out the business that needs you the most, to find the project and the art that needs you the most. There is something out there just for you.
– Naval Ravikant
The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.
– Gustave Flaubert
There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun.
– Pablo Picasso
A writer never takes a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.
– Eugène Ionesco
A Brave Insouciance
When a flock of birds articulates
Its wild wing-beating dance
In unison without misstep
That’s more than plan or a chance
“Design or pure happenstance?”
Is missing the point
Something comes from neither one
Whenever a choice is made
Such brave insouciance
Thrives in wild dealings
Which won’t hew to human aims
Except through feeling-speech
As when a dolphin heeds the cry
Of a desperately drowning man
Every life is hobbled
By its own particular virtues
A coconut tree
Doesn’t mind standing still
As it transforms sun
And rain into life
A mole may not see much
But he can still dig it
A dolphin walks not at all
As she swims a blue streak
Through life’s many specialized
Devil-may-care decisions
Are the greatest conversations
And ecosystems made
– George Gorman
Normal consciousness is a state of stupor, in which sensibility to the wholly real and responsiveness to the stimuli of the spirit are reduced. The mystics, knowing that [humans are] involved in a hidden history of the cosmos, endeavor to awaken from the drowsiness and apathy and to regain the state of wakefulness for their enchanted souls.
– Rabbi Abraham Heschel
Each day before our surroundings
become flat with familiarity
and the shapes of our lives click into place,
dimensionless and average as Tetris cubes,
before hunger knocks from our bellies
like a cantankerous old man
and the duties of the day stack up like dishes
and the architecture of our basic needs
commissions all thought
to construct the 4-door sedan of safety,
before gravity clings to our skin
like a cumbersome parasite
and the colored dust of dreams
sweeps itself obscure in the vacuum of reason,
each morning before we wrestle the world
and our hearts into the shape of our brains,
look around and say, “Wow!”
Feed yourself fire.
Scoop up the day entire
like a planet-sized bouquet of marvel
sent by the Universe directly into your arms
and say, “Wow!”
Break yourself down
into the basic components of primitive awe
and let the crescendo of each moment
carbonate every capillary
and say, “Wow!”
Yes, before our poems become calloused
with revision
let them shriek off the page of spontaneity
and before our metaphors get too regular,
let the sun stay
a conflagration of homing pigeons
that fights through fire
each day to find us.
– Chelan Harkin
Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.
– bell hooks
Every story is a palimpsest, composed of layers of tellings and retellings, and every time we think we are parroting a well-known anecdote the words shed their feathers and sprout new ones for the occasion.
– Alberto Manguel, Packing My Library
CHOGYAM TRUNGPA RINPOCHE
Please don’t hurt others…
Please try to work with people and be helpful to them.
A fantastically large number of people need help.
Please try to help them, for goodness sake, for heaven and earth.
Don’t just collect Oriental wisdoms one after the other.
Don’t just sit on an empty zafu, an empty meditation cushion.
But go out and try to help others, if you can.
That is the main point…
Your help doesn’t have to be a big deal.
To begin with, just work with your friends and work with yourself at the same time.
It is about time we became responsible for this world.
Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.
– Albert Szent-Georgi
Maybe happiness is this: not feeling like you should be elsewhere, doing something else, being someone else.
– Isaac Asimov
I tell you, sir, it’s the end of the world. Never have we known such behavior from the students. It’s all those accursed new inventions that are ruining everything. Artillery, serpentines, bombards, and especially printing, that other plague from Germany. No more manuscripts! No more books! Printing is killing the bookshop. The end of the world is at hand.
– Victor Hugo
Thought becomes inspired when it resembles the world and evokes the mystery without which there would be no thought and no possibility of a world. Inspired thought is always possible—if not present—whatever happiness and unhappiness may be in attendance.
– René Magritte
To believe that your mind is in need of change – and is changeable – through following a spiritual friend and applying the teachings for transformation—how many people do we know that really believe that? Those who have that inspiration are very, very rare. Like stars in the daytime, as it is said. However, to not undertake the path is to miss the point of life.
– Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
In the soul-spiritual world from whence we come, to which we return at death – and which, in an importnat sense, we never leave – communication with other beings takes the form of wordless soul resonance. Its medium is not audible sound tones but soundless tones of feeling – soul tones. We ride and ‘read’ our felt resonance with other beings, as we might ride out resonance with a piece of music and ‘read’ the wordless meanings it conveys. In this world, music is a universal language, In that world, feeling tones are the meium of musical resonance linking one soul with another. They do not simply travel through us like surface emotions that rise and fall, come and go. Instead we travel through them, transported as by music into those qualitative dimensions of our own soul that constitute our resonant link with other souls and the world of soul. Behind the visual world of our dreams themselves is a tonal world. And if dreams are a type of stage on which we allow ourselves to personify and dramatise our life of soul, then beneath this stage is an inner orchestra. The music it plays – the music of feeling tone – is what then finds expression in the nightly dramas of our dreams.
– Peter Wilberg, Head, Heart and Hara
Please do not understand me too quickly.
– André Gide
The soul becomes dyed by the color of its thoughts.
– Marcus Aurelius
It’s the music that counts.
– Stevie Ray
At last I can be with you!
The grinding hours
since I left your side!
The labor of being fully human,
working my opposable thumb,
talking, and walking upright.
Now I have unclasped
unzipped, stepped out of.
Husked, soft, a be-er only,
I do nothing, but point
my bare feet into your
clean smoothness
feel your quiet strength
the whole length of my body.
I close my eyes, hear myself
moan, so grateful to be held this way.
– Meredith Holmes
The universe is full of radiant suggestion.
– Mary Oliver
…if we are really to understand the nature of knowledge, then we are going to have to delve much deeper into the nature of all living things…and realize that knowing is living and surviving.
– Henry Plotkin, Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge
maybe it was your great, great grandfather who stood in his stirrups while riding cobbled streets to catch a final glimpse of the british clippers as they tucked tail and ran back to england.
another nation is born, this time an odd duck who’s identity is an infantile mish mash of nationalities
with potential for eagle wings more heartachingly beautiful than the holding hands chorus of We Are the World… an unsung ideal gestates sung by a statue that’s nowadays all crumbing:
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
“Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
but ideals are for fools and cowards and worse, hopefuls.
here and there these days come moments of unabashed giving, loving and ‘here i AM!’ living that i see in the fiery eyes of a 9 year old dancing her ass off, the wet soft gaze of a dying, but newly born great grandmother meeting an infant who’s yet to even open her eyes fully.
this independence day a kind of sovereignty recalls itself in me and a fierce pride is here that i can’t place anywhere…
a native kid finds his spot in the wilds after a week or so into a vision quest, but the spot also finds him, see?
there is only life
there is only life
there is only this inclusion before the rebirth of a house allowing a dream of walls and skin and names to begin with
but fucking anyhow,
here i AM!!!
happy independence day
to you with the balls to walk this place as you are –
a hello from the touchpoint of sky and ground
fresh as the scream of a cougar or the laugh of some wild kid.
for my part, thanks for being here.
you’re amazing.
– Mateo Geoly
There are so
many different
ways of being tender
with yourself-
Here is one –
the world builds
a fancy little box
for you to fit in.
you look at the box
carefully and say,
no thanks!
you tell them you
are a wild ocean and
the ocean cannot fit
inside a box even if
it is made of gold
or rainbow, it is
still a box.
even if it is put
together by a highly
skilled carpenter,
it is still a box.
you tell them the ocean
can only be contained
by its own eloquence.
tell them you are a falcon
and you caress the sky
with your wings.
tell them the world
itself is a box made of
beliefs and ideas.
– Guthema Roba
People these days use whatever little dharma they know to augment afflictive emotion, and then engender tremendous pride and conceit over it. They teach the Dharma without taming their own minds. But as with a river rock , not even a hair’s tip of benefit penetrates the other people. Even worse, incorrigible people [are attracted] to this dharma that increases conflict. When individuals who could be tamed by the Dharma encounter such incorrigible, their desire for the sacred Dharma is lost. It is not the fault of the Dharma; it is the fault of individuals.
– MACHIG LABDRÖN
Summer Stars
Bend low again, night of summer stars.
So near you are, sky of summer stars,
So near, a long-arm man can pick off stars,
Pick off what he wants in the sky bowl,
So near you are, summer stars,
So near, strumming, strumming,
So lazy and hum-strumming.
– Carl Sandburg
I came into poetry feeling as though, on some level, these words were not just mine but my grandparents’, their parents’.
– Joy Harjo
they visited / me in a stanza where we could be nearest each other / breathing
– Layli Long Soldier
If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.
– Julian of Norwich
I could never be one of two I could never be two in one as married couples do and can, I am but one all one, one and all one, and so I have never been married to any one.
– Gertrude Stein
We’ve all been repeatedly shaken up
like being in a top-loader washing machine, churning and churning.
This deep trauma lasted nearly 18 months.
And now we are expected to come out of it
and be “normal” again. No way.
We are still churning. How can we emerge gracefully and come out whole?
Being gentle to ourself and recognizing
the extreme trauma we’ve been through
is a start. Give ourself some space to heal. Remembering that all 7 billion people
have suffered similar emotional trauma
helps open our heart again.
Send them whatever healing you and they need. Send it on light-beams
sparkling with 5-colored light.
Do this repeatedly. Emaho!
This life is noble
and we are noble women and men.
At least the potential for nobility is present.
It is our Buddha nature that allows us
to become fully enlightened.
Nobility is equated not with aristocracy,
but something far more valuable.
It is equated with being an Arya.
An Arya directly “sees” emptiness,
without a conceptual intermediary.
So, we are all potential nobility.
While nobility is not yet enlightenment,
it is a very advanced state of being
getting close to enlightenment. Emaho!
– Dr. Barry Kerzin
Posterity — you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.
– John Quincy Adams
Many of us seek diversions—
going to the city, traveling,
seeing films and so forth.
If one recognizes the nature of one’s own mind, then that itself is the real entertainment,
the real display. Simply to rest in Mahamudra, in the nature of mind, one will come
to an understanding of all situations
in samsara and nirvana.
Then it will not be necessary
to go looking for entertainment.
When we practice meditation
in a place where there is no other person,
then we have the conditions for realizing
and stabilizing awareness of mind’s nature. From this perspective we understand
the meaning of Tilopa’s words—
that not seeing is the supreme insight.
If we have this kind of realization
in our practice, then there is no need
to seek any kind of diversion or entertainment.
– Garchen Rinpoche
Only when you are taking others casually and yourself as very important do we cause harm to others. When you are taking others as somewhat secondary to your own needs, wants, and the whimsical self-serving habits of your own old ego, which is a very familiar old mindset, then there’s not really any balance. You have so much love for yourself and very little care for others; you are protective of yourself but not of others; your sensitivity is to how you feel and are doing-are your needs being met or not- but you feel no sensitivity at all for others.
When this is happening, it is like when the ice and the snow are melting up in the mountains and the river is gorging and volume of the water is increasing and there’s a danger of flooding. You know you ought to do something before the river lands at your doorstep. Because it’s very difficult in that moment, in that very short time before the water floods your home, to manage to divert the river.
Similarly, in order to keep our habit of cherishing ourselves above others in check, mind training and a good amount of discipline practice in body, speech and mind are needed long before we reach that critical juncture and might cause others harm.
– Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
As in nature, the soul and the spirit have resources that are astonishing. Like wolves and other creatures, the soul and spirit are able to thrive on very little, and sometimes for a long time on nothing. To me, it is the miracle of miracles that this is so.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés
People think they live more intensely than animals, than plants, and especially than things. Animals sense that they live more intensely than plants and things. Plants dream that they live more intensely than things. But things last, and this lasting is more alive than anything else.
– Olga Tokarczuk
lotuses in bloom— /
on my cheeks the morning sun /
isn’t yet warm
– Sugita Hisajo
Your “rebellious” behaviors—too much ice cream, an excess of TV, too much caffeine, refusal to exercise, to mediate, to improve—whatever it may be, are often a rebellion to your demands that you be perfect and that you control yourself. Part of us refuses to be treated this way. This advocating for more just treatment, for our wholeness to be related to with more respect is often what is mislabeled as self-sabotage. This “self-sabotage” never happens in vacuum. It is the part of you that speaks up to say, “actually, I’d rather be human and whole than maintain a polished front.” If we are to integrate the controlling and the rebellious fragments into a healthier whole, both sides must listen to the underlying fears and desires that are driving the behaviors. Both sides must weep out how far they’ve been from compassionate understanding of themselves and each other. Both sides must find a way to genuinely embrace.
– Chelan Harkin
My brain is stuck on an 19th century literary sand bank, and most times I am unaware the river is passing me by.
– Richard Toews
Mystery arises when there is communication between different kinds of beings.
– Kenneth Burke, The Western Round Table on Modern Art
What if instead of running a Billionaire Boy’s Club “mine’s bigger than your’s” space race Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Yuri Milner met for breakfast at Pancake House to work out a plan for ending world hunger?
– Charles Coe
When first asked, ‘Where are you from?’ I was hardly old enough to hold my sentences together, barely graduated from my mother’s back.
– Akosua Zimba Afiriyie-Hwedie
One should not be displeased by the thing sent by the Beloved. This is against etiquette of love.
– Lalaji
Don’t let your solitude obscure the presence of something within it that wants to emerge. Precisely this presence will help your solitude expand. People are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy. But it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult, as it is true for everything alive. Everything in nature grows and defends itself in its own way and against all opposition, straining from within and at any price, to become distinctively itself. It is good to be solitary, because solitude is difficult, and that a thing is difficult must be even more of a reason for us to undertake it.
To love is good, too, for love is difficult. For one person to care for another, that is perhaps the most difficult thing required of us, the utmost and final test, the work for which all other work is but a preparation. With our whole being, with all the strength we have gathered, we must learn to love. This learning is ever a committed and enduring process.
– R.M. Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Black boys can’t afford to play cops and robbers when we’re always considered the latter, don’t have the luxury of playing war when we’re already in one.
– Javon Johnson
Extinguish my eyes, I’ll go on seeing you.
Seal my ears, I’ll go on hearing you.
And without feet I can make my way to you,
without a mouth I can swear your name.
Break off my arms, I’ll take hold of you
with my heart as with a hand.
Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat.
And if you consume my brain with fire,
I’ll feel you burn in every drop of my blood.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
There is no right or wrong in spiritual experience. There is only that which is, to which we must surrender. It is the mind’s lack of capacity to accept spiritual experience that destroys its energy. Without this nourishment the brain will not grow in the direction that is necessary for the next level of experience to take place, and so the person receiving these gifts with the limitation of their own personality will grow on a tangent until they become the expression of their own limitation. If God wishes to enter you through the ear, he enters through the ear; if he wishes to enter you through the nose, he enters through the nose. It is not for us to judge how spiritual energy operates. We must gratefully receive it in any way that it comes. It is a waste of time to try to explain the nature of God.
– Rudi
When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Stop thinking of the end of the world as a singular event.
– @fictionalbeck
Buddhism is not concerned just with private destiny, but with the lives and consciousness of all beings…Any attempt to understand Buddhism apart from its social dimension is fundamentally a mistake. Until Western Buddhists understand this, their embrace of Buddhism will not help very much in the efforts to bring about meaningful and positive social change, or even in their struggle to transform their ego.
– Sulak Sivaraksa
The mystery of storytelling is the miracle of a single living seed which can populate whole acres of human minds.
– Ben Okri
I will not die an unlived life
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
…
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance;
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.
– Dawna Markova
strange earth, strange
that we will die into
this bright, blue oblivion
though the day is beautiful
& later, the night will
also be (beautiful)
– Aracelis Girmay, the black maria
Simply seek happiness, and you are not likely to find it. Seek to create and love without regard to your happiness, and you are likely to be happy much of the time.
– Dr. M. Scott Peck
We can get stuck in a life we don’t like bc we lack the access & opportunities. Sometimes, though, we may be missing the humility to learn how to be faithful to our vision, to fail & follow through. Poetry (the process, not the product) taught me the latter. I count myself lucky.
– Cynthia Dewi Oka
Admiring anyone and everyone who is being productive because, let me tell you, I am decidedly not.
– Sarah Weinman
Poems do not endure as objects but as presences. When you read anything worth remembering, you liberate a human voice; you release into the world again a companion spirit.
I read poems to hear that voice. And I write to speak to those I have heard.
– Louise Glück
I firmly believe that in small towns all over the US, there is art and music and writing that would be considered important but will never be experienced by the masses. Much of this work is being created by the financially disadvantaged.
– Jenny Cresswell
“I was wrong” often means “it was a phase.” It wasn’t that you were absolutely wrong, it’s just that you didn’t have a fuller picture & heart available to you at that time.
– Vince Fakhoury Horn
I know a lot of creatives who are worried that we’ll never make it, but you already have the traits of a true artist: crippling anxiety, perpetual self-doubt, a boundless ability to procrastinate
– Owl! at the Library
It is an alternative to violence… stay in bed and grow your hair.
– John Lennon
I write, erase, rewrite
erase again, then
a flower blooms
– Hokusai
I have trained my daughter—every time we leave our apartment—to exclaim “Let’s do this like Buddhists!”
It’s one of the crowning achievements of my life as a parent so far.
– Ethan Nichtern
A proposal: all international climate negotiations should be held in 45 degree C rooms.
– @rutherdan
Three friends who care about you are better than a million followers.
– @ethannichtern
There’s no reason why every line must begin at the left hand margin. A silly habit, as if all the thoughts in the brain were lined up like a conscript army.
– Allen Ginsberg, Indian Journals
For if the whole world praised him he would not be moved. If the whole world blamed him he would not be discouraged. He knows the difference between that which is within, and that which is without.
– Chuang Tzu
Mindful among the mindless, awake while others dream, swift as the race horse, the wakeful outstrip the field.
– The Buddha
We Live in the Most Exquisite Terrarium
by Catherine Pierce
The fresh macadam is glossed with rain
and from the roadside, garden zinnias shout
their unabashed reds and fuchsias.
In a department store, a man
deftly arranges lipsticks by gradations
of purple, Velvet Violet to Punch-
Drunk Plum. A college radio deejay
follows new folk with old punk;
she knows it’s important to keep
the airwaves sparking. This yard is soft
with Bermuda grass. This yard is coarse
with tall fescue. Look at our Climate
Controlled Storage Units. Look at
our socks rolled together in pairs.
Look at the emails we’ve crafted
in order to make someone think of us
once the lights go out. We curate
this place with such care. As if there’s
nothing outside its blue dome. Or
as if we get to stay in here forever.
THE BEST TIME OF THE DAY
Cool summer nights.
Windows open.
Lamps burning.
Fruit in the bowl.
And your head on my shoulder.
These the happiest moments in the day.
Next to the early morning hours,
of course.
And the time
just before lunch.
And the afternoon, and
early evening hours.
But I do love
these summer nights.
Even more, I think,
than those other times.
The work finished for the day.
And no one who can reach us now.
Or ever.
– Raymond Carver
The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings.
by Donika Kelly
I am taken with the hot animal
of my skin, grateful to swing my limbs
and have them move as I intend, though
my knee, though my shoulder, though something
is torn or tearing. Today, a dozen squid, dead
on the harbor beach: one mostly buried,
one with skin empty as a shell and hollow
feeling, and, though the tentacles look soft,
I do not touch them. I imagine they
were startled to find themselves in the sun.
I imagine the tide simply went out
without them. I imagine they cannot
feel the black flies charting the raised hills
of their eyes. I write my name in the sand:
Donika Kelly. I watch eighteen seagulls
skim the sandbar and lift low in the sky.
I pick up a pebble that looks like a green egg.
To the ditch lily I say I am in love.
To the Jeep parked haphazardly on the narrow
street I am in love. To the roses, white
petals rimmed brown, to the yellow lined
pavement, to the house trimmed in gold I am
in love. I shout with the rough calculus
of walking. Just let me find my way back,
let me move like a tide come in.
My mother forbade us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.
– Anne Carson
listen! everyone! you have your own poem now
it’s yours as much as your heart as much as your own life is
– C. K. Williams
Zone
Why all this need to get out
of your comfort zone?
That’s impossible.
The whole cosmos is a comfort zone.
Stars and planets never veer
from their orbits and spheres.
Yet they’re not complacent about it.
They tremble through a continuum
of ecstasy, ever-amazed
that they don’t collide.
The daffodil returns to its seed,
only to sprout again, content
in bulb, leaf, or blossom,
never complaining,
“I’m too comfortable here!”
We humans are the only whiners
in the universe,
which to all other creatures
is a constant ceremony of intoxication,
ever-recurring yet never the same.
Galaxies, flowers, electrons,
even panthers dance in their zone.
Why doesn’t your body remember
that comfort of the wild,
ambling down its atavistic path,
easy in fang, feral in pleasure?
The only thing in heaven and earth
that isn’t comfortable
is your mind.
Don’t expand your comfort zone.
Expand your awareness.
Then you’ll comprehend
how full of miracles is one
square inch of black loam,
the adventure of Being
right where you are.
How you’re always hanging
without a rope over the cliff
of this moment, about to drop
a thousand feet into
another Now.
Don’t worry.
You’re caught and kept.
The Comforter enfolds you.
– Alfred K. Lamotte
Here, take this palmful of raspberries
as my gift. It isn’t much
but we’ve often said our needs
are simple, some quiet
time alone on the patio
in the cool morning, coffee,
a few words over the newspaper.
I’ve rinsed these berries
so you can tumble them
right into your cereal, one minute
on the vine, the next in your bowl,
my hand to your mouth.
Let’s say my words were as simply
sweet as these berries, chosen
as carefully, plucked and held,
then delivered as perfect
morsels of meaning. Not
what you hear, which is never
what I mean to say. Will you take
these berries? Will you feel their weight
on your tongue, taste their tang
as they slide into you, small, bright, honest:
the only gift I have to give?
– Albert Garcia
Our fundamental nature is intrinsic.
No sane, intelligent human being
is impeded from being in touch
with this basic nature.
There is no one standing between you and it, no one is appearing like a mara
to perform dances of distraction.
At any given moment, each one of you —
even with no understanding of Buddhism — has the natural potential to realize
you are completely and inseparably united
with your intrinsic wisdom nature.
You have never been separate from it
for a moment. It is not a sometimes-there-sometimes-not quality
or an adornment that’s been attached
or added on to you.
– Khandro Rinpoche
We’ve traded in drinks for mantras, drugs for altered states of consciousness, and blaming for moral righteousness.
– Jessica DiNisco
MILAREPA
Response To A Logician
I bow at the feet of my teacher Marpa.
And sing this song in response to you.
Listen, pay heed to what I say,
forget your critique for a while.
The best seeing is the way of “non-seeing” —
the radiance of the mind itself.
The best prize is what cannot be looked for —
the priceless treasure of the mind itself.
The most nourishing food is “non-eating” —
the transcendent food of samadhi.
The most thirst-quenching drink is “non-drinking” —
the nectar of heartfelt compassion.
Oh, this self-realizing awareness
is beyond words and description!
The mind is not the world of children,
nor is it that of logicians.
Attaining the truth of “non-attainment,”
you receive the highest initiation.
Perceiving the void of high and low,
you reach the sublime stage.
Approaching the truth of “non-movement,”
you follow the supreme path.
Knowing the end of birth and death,
the ultimate purpose is fulfilled.
Seeing the emptiness of reason,
supreme logic is perfected.
When you know that great and small are groundless,
you have entered the highest gateway.
Comprehending beyond good and evil
opens the way to perfect skill.
Experiencing the dissolution of duality,
you embrace the highest view.
Observing the truth of “non-observation”
opens the way to meditating.
Comprehending beyond “ought” and “oughtn’t”
opens the way to perfect action.
When you realize the truth of “non-effort,”
you are approaching the highest fruition.
Ignorant are those who lack this truth:
arrogant teachers inflated by learning,
scholars bewitched by mere words,
and yogis seduced by prejudice.
For though they yearn for freedom,
they find only enslavement.
***1,000 Songs
Poetry, plays, novels, music, they are the cry of the human spirit trying to understand itself and make sense of our world.
– L.M. Elliott
The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.
– Albert Einstein
People who speak or act in an ordinary fashion are most likely to be those who have been the recipients of higher experiences. But because they do not rage around, wild-eyed, people think that they are very ordinary folk and therefore not aware of anything unknown to the general run of man.
– Idries Shah
Food is not nutrients.
It’s a vast range of relational processes holding together microbiome, soil, agriculture, family, ceremony, and communication.
Communication is not signal.
It’s a vast range of transcontextual tonalities limiting what is possible to commune.
Health is not a state of being.
It’s a vast range of both ancient and spontaneous tending to transcontexual memberships… in ways that tickle mutual learning into vitality.
– Nora Bateson
a poem of unwanted forgettings.
by hune margulies
the streets of jerusalem
are like any others.
except for the sun.
the moon.
and the tears.
when i walk in the streets of jerusalem.
i hold my hands behind my back.
if you ever loved a woman
in the streets of jerusalem
you would know why.
in the streets of jerusalem
some people smile
some don’t.
i’ve seen this elsewhere too.
and i’m puzzled.
the streets of jerusalem will teach you.
they will take away your poems of despair.
i listen to the smells of zaatar and olive oil.
and to the memories of nitza in the little alley.
just like in any other street.
– hune margulies
Existential philosophy didn’t teach me that “nothing matters”, what it did teach me was that most things matter very, very little, and a few things matter a great deal. Learning to distinguish between the two is one of most important skills in life.
– Existential Comics
REST STEP
Don’t take a walk,
give one.
Barefoot or
bootshod, pause
ever so briefly as you
press the earth
with the softest center
of your climb.
Hikers of steep trails
call it the rest-step,
which is a kind of prayer
at the core of going.
Remember that
this whole planet feels
the wandering harmony
of your body and breath
as you pathlessly meander
through trillium silence
or scrub pine,
never quite arriving, just
caressing the loam
with your sole.
– Fred LaMotte
PRIORITIES
What do you care about?
Have you asked yourself the question?
What do you care about?
I mean, really.
A hell of a lot of things are going wrong in this world.
Hell of a lot of things we could do better.
You know what they are.
Do you care?
Or do you just want to sit back and
Watch Television?
Let the world go to hell, you say?
Is that it?
Fair enough.
Who am I to say? I’m just a poet.
But I just wanted to make sure
You asked yourself the question.
Because the world is dependent
One way or another
On the sincerity of your answer.
– Laurence Overmire
Man is a microcosm, or a little world, because he is an extract from all the stars and planets of the whole firmament, from the earth and the elements; and so he is their quintessence.
– Paracelsus
Dying man couldn’t make up his mind which place to go to — both have their advantages, ‘heaven for climate, hell for company!
– Mark Twain
There is something about you brighter than the sun and more mysterious than the night sky… Who are you when you are not thinking yourself into existence?
– Adyashanti
Letting go means not dwelling on something which has come to mind. It also means experiencing that quality of non-grasping awareness which pulls nothing from the flow—experiencing a great spaciousness which simply lets everything come and lets everything go…
– Stephen Levine
When we walk in forgetfulness, we imprint our anxieties and sorrows on Mother Earth and on those around us. But when we walk in mindfulness, each step creates a fresh breeze of peace, joy, and harmony.
– Nguyen Anh-Huong and Thich Nhat Hanh
Here in lies the problem of pursuing a new level of consciousness. It has to be done using the only tool we have – our current level of consciousness.
– Jeff Carreira
And certain things around us will change, become easier or harder, one thing or the other, but nothing will ever really be any different. I believe that. We have made our decisions, our lives have been set in motion, and they will go on and on until they stop. But if that is true, then what? I mean, what if you believe that, but you keep it covered up, until one day something happens that should change something, but then you see nothing is going to change after all. What then? Meanwhile, the people around you continue to talk and act as if you were the same person as yesterday, or last night, or five minutes before, but you are really undergoing a crisis, your heart feels damaged.
– Raymond Carver
Here in lies the problem of pursuing a new level of consciousness. It has to be done using the only tool we have – our current level of consciousness.
– Jeff Carreira
And certain things around us will change, become easier or harder, one thing or the other, but nothing will ever really be any different. I believe that. We have made our decisions, our lives have been set in motion, and they will go on and on until they stop. But if that is true, then what? I mean, what if you believe that, but you keep it covered up, until one day something happens that should change something, but then you see nothing is going to change after all. What then? Meanwhile, the people around you continue to talk and act as if you were the same person as yesterday, or last night, or five minutes before, but you are really undergoing a crisis, your heart feels damaged.
– Raymond Carver
There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song – but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.
– Pablo Neruda
Lastly, I wish to say to the people of good will, to the workers, to the poets, that the whole future has been expressed in this line by Rimbaud: only with a burning patience can we conquer the splendid City which will give light, justice and dignity to all mankind.
– Pablo Neruda
There was a fence with spaces you
could look through if you wanted to.
An architect who saw this thing
stood there one summer evening.
Took out the spaces with great care.
And built a castle in the air.
The fence was utterly dumbfounded –
Each post stood there with nothing round it.
– Christian Morgenstern
People who speak or act in an ordinary fashion are most likely to be those who have been the recipients of higher experiences. But because they do not rage around, wild-eyed, people think that they are very ordinary folk and therefore not aware of anything unknown to the general run of man.
– Idries Shah
Green turtles must have the kind of mind that doesn’t think about sharks unless a shark is there. That must be how it is with them. I can’t believe they’d swim 1,400 miles thinking about sharks. […] I think of the turtles swimming steadily against the current all the way to Ascension. I think of them swimming through all that golden-green water over the dark, over the chill of the deeps and the jaws of the dark. And I think of the sun over the water, the sun through the water, the eye holding the sun, being held by it with no thought and only the rhythm of the going, the steady wing-strokes of the flippers in the water. Then it doesn’t seen hard to believe. It seems the only way to do it, the only way in fact to be: swimming, swimming, the eye held by the sun, no sharks in the mind, nothing in the mind.
– Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary
The Metropolis-like phantasmagoria of Dubai’s super-skyscrapers or the Olympic megastructures in Beijing […], the bright archipelagos of utopian luxury, map terminal, not anticipatory, stages in the history of late modernity. [They] stand as a testament to the resignation with which humanity squanders the borrowed time on which it now lives. […T]hese gilded dreamworlds have no alarm clock; they are willful, narcissistic withdrawals from the tragedies overtaking the planet. The rich will simply hide out in their castles […], desperately trying to consume all the good things of the Earth in their lifetimes. Indeed, by their very existence, the indoor ski slopes of Dubai and private bison herds of Ted Turner represent that ruse of reason by which the neoliberal order both acknowledges and dismisses the fact that the current trajectory of human existence is unsustainable.
– Mike Davis, Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism
The soul exhausts its revolts in the shady piazzas of small Italian towns, in noontimes when pigeons look for shelter, in slowness and laziness […]. Here the days revolve from the daybreak, swollen with roosters’ crowing, to this unequalled evening, sweet and tender, silky behind the cypress trees, its long hours measured by the crickets’ chirping. The inner silence that accompanies me rises from the slow pace that leads from this day to the next. What more can I long for than this room opening on the plain below, with its antique furniture and its hand-made lace. I have the whole sky on my face and I feel as if I could follow these slow, revolving days forever, spinning motionlessly with them. I breathe in the only happiness within my reach—an attentive and friendly awareness.
– Albert Camus
Great sweeps of thought, emotion, and perception are compressed to forms the mind is able to hold — into images, sentences, and stories that serve as entrance tokens to large and often slippery realms of being.
– Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry
Mother’s Words
Why look for answers, my child,
Among the people you meet?
Why believe there is fulfillment
In your narrow life of work?
Why sacrifice the gift of loneliness
To fill up the time with diversion?
Look inside every living thing you find.
Feel the energy of rocks and leaves, hummingbirds
and cactus.
Dwell for a moment in a single blade of grass.
Discover the secret of snowflakes.
In these patterns lie harmony, my child.
In harmony, the universe.
– Nancy Wood
take the one seat
and
stop trying to escape
whatever it is
that
you are trying to escape~
settle more deeply into love~
– Ari Annona
Prayer for Jackson
by Amy Gerstler
Dear Lord, fire-eating custodian of my soul,
author of hermaphrodites, radishes,
and Arizona’s rosy sandstone. Please protect this wet cheeked baby from disabling griefs.
Help him sense when to rise to his feet
and make his desires known,
and when to hit the proverbial dirt.
On nights it pleases thee to keep him sleepless,
summon crickets, frogs
and your chorus of nocturnal birds
so he won’t conclude the earth’s gone mute.
Make him astute as Egyptian labyrinths that keep the dead’s privacy inviolate.
Give him his mother’s swimming ability.
Make him so charismatic that even pigeons flirt with him, in their nervous, avian way.
Grant him the clear mindedness of a midwife
who never winces when tickled.
Let him be adventurous as a menu of ox tongue hash, lemon rind wine and pine-cone Jello.
Fill him with awe for the seasons, minaret’s
saw-toothed peaks, the breathing of cathedrals, and all that lives – for one radian day or sixty pitiful years.
Bravely, he has ventured among us, disguised as a newcomer, shedding remarkably few tears.
You can’t be on guard and let go.
– @EstherPerel
Loss is a symptom of excess. The sacrifices demanded at crossroads – the burdens that task our bodies to make new moves, to meet their stunning indebtednesses – are not transactions within a shriveled economy of conservative calculations. Those sacrifices are hyphens, harbingers of queer abundance, potentially connecting us to strange visions of our selves that exceed the familiar. When you meet the trickster at the crossroads, when he demands a pound of flesh by digging a hole in your side, it might be that this surgical operation is the loss that is needed for you to exceed the economy that made that loss possible in the first place.
– Bayo Akomolafe
MUSCULAR CONSPIRITUALITY (thread)
Studying a muscular conspiritualist who livestreams as he chews on raw meat. He’s a big advocate of the “Fear is the virus” theme. In one podcast he weighs out the lifespan of 75 years “living in a plastic bubble” vs. 50 years of adventure and meaning and love. /1
Of course he favours the latter. What really strikes me about this stuff is how consistent this black-and-white schizotypal imagination is. Like JP Sears’s bff muscle master Tim Kennedy offering devotees a choice between “dangerous freedom” and “peaceful slavery”. /2
First of all, you’re white and living in Austin. Second: you’re not 15, this isn’t Star Wars. Third:
ask yourself what combination of ableism and shame projection prompts you to make shit up about people who don’t deadlift or biohack, or whose adventure and love you cannot see. /3
These guys put such effort into fantasizing they’re on some kind of frontier. But they’re just consumers like everyone else. There are no Campbellian virtue points for raw meat bought at Whole Foods, or hurling axes from Home Depot at wooden planks. They can never be primal. /4
There is no ecofascist reconstruction of anything that will really give them the independence they dream they’re entitled to. The gospel of invulnerability will drive engagement, but lead to the most fleeting pleasures, dictated by the supply chains they imagine come from God… /5
… but really fry the earth they say they adore. A lot of these guys are into the Bible but I think they skip Ecclesiastes. “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.”
Ecclesiastes would be a great Instagram account.
/end
– Matthew Remski
…the rental rate for this gift of being allowed to flourish and reside in this continuum with the rest of the world is that we do everything possible to be indigenously beautiful, promising that we make ourselves spiritually full and delicious so as to feed the next ones to appear in the ongoing river on the occasion of our passing.
– Martin Prechtel, The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic
Whatever it takes, recognize that your mind has been hacked.
Then commit to doing the necessary work to take it back.
More love.
More understanding.
More compassion.
Less hate.
I Go Among Trees
by Wendell Berry
I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.
Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.
Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.
After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.
– Kent Burgess
CROSSING MOUNTAINS
Anyone can be a poet
It is true
For a day, or an hour
Or a moment or two
But there are some who must
Live and breathe in the word
Give rhythm to the music
That has never been heard
They will remember
When the stories are done
When all but the very last
Battle is won
They will remember
And others will cry
That some didn’t listen
And no one asked why
So when you give o’er
Your time to a rhyme
Give a thought to the height
And the breadth of the climb.
– Laurence Overmire
The island is pervaded by a subtle spiritual atmosphere. It is as strange to the mind as it is to the eye. Old songs and traditions are the spiritual analogues of old castles and burying-places and old songs and traditions you have in abundance. There is a smell of the sea in the material air and there is a ghostly something in the air of the imagination… You breathe again the air of old story-books.
– Alexander Smith, A Summer in Skye
I have a secret fear that perhaps all the writers I translate sound like me.
– Margaret Jull Costa
Gaining is delusion. Loss is realization.
– Kodo Sawaki
The rainbow has mythic roots alongside and beyond the Christian story of being “God’s promise/covenant to humanity.”
In alchemy, it is the Cauda Pavonis which symbolizes the completion of the process. The Cauda Pavonis phase of the alchemical process describes a subjective perceptual change in which the wayfarer (or experiencer) becomes aware of the dreamlike nature of existence. With half of the eyes opened [eyes on the peacock’s tail] and half of the eyes closed as if in a sleep state, the experiencer now relates to her existence as a waking dream where conditions and encounters are revelatory.”
Lizbeth Rymland
(hence revelations in the Bible is the revealing or unveiling)
In the Vedas, the rainbow represents Indra’s Bow, where each ray is an aspect of the Sun’s (Surya’s) rays and each chakra is symbolized by a different color of the rainbow. Sun Salutations in Yoga are in honor of this principle.
In Greek mythology, Iris is the personification of the Goddess of the rainbow, and the messenger who travels between the Gods and humanity. She sometimes is depicted wearing a coat of many colors, and is therefore, analogous to the story of Jacob with his coat of many colors.
for me, all of these stories are metaphors for the alchemical process which reveals an iridescence (“iris” comes from iridescence) or shimmering at a certain point in the process (which is what metal does under heat ~ I am a metalsmith so I know this process well…)
many of the World’s creation myths have to do with the “sacred smith” or craftsman who uses fire (either through pottery or metalsmithing/forging) to fashion humanity into existence~
– Ari Annona
On Being Woke vs. Being Dreamed
by Tad Hargrave
Last night, driving home to Victoria from Courtenay, I was listening to Martin Shaw and Manchan Magan speak on the work of John Moriarty. Martin had just written up a collection of John’s work in a beautiful book called A Hut At The Edge of the Village.
“He wasn’t woke. He was dreaming,” said Martin of John.
That difference struck me as worthy of sinking into.
There is such a focus on being ‘woke’ these days. I’m not against it but there’s more to the story. Being awake is half the story of being human. The other part is dreaming or, even more so, being dreamed.
The condition of being awake is a hard one. It means seeing this world with a blazing lucidity with the noon day Sun banishing all shadows. It means coming to sobering grips with the consequences that made us and that we have made. It means attending to the ‘wake’ we have left behind us and trying to discern which boat left the wake in which we find ourselves. It means regularly attending the ‘wake’ of all the endings, limits and frailties that are a part of life. There’s a lot of grief in seeing clearly. As Stephen Jenkinson puts it, “the sound of waking up is not ‘aha’. It’s a sob.” And that’s often true.
But there’s another whole side to this. It’s being on the receiving end of the deep mystery often in the form of images that appear to us. Sometimes those images come to us in the form of poetry and old folk tales. Sometimes they come to us in dreams. We didn’t generate the images any more than we generated the eggs we cook or apples we pick but they nourish us just the same.
Being awake lets us see the territory as it is, but being dreamed by forces greater than us is what allows us to navigate that territory and choose a direction.
Part of being awake must also be to wake up to the hard limits of wakefulness. Of course, the science, statistics and data matters. But, if that’s all we have, we are left directionless and overwhelmed.
Dreaming and being dreamed is the home of our intuition, of synchronicities, of the ways that the natural world speaks to us and gives us signs.
I suspect that traditional people’s understood that the little ones born to them came out of the Big Dream, from the other side, that they were a sign of something and some ones. That their appearance, the gifts, capacities, personalities and interests of this little one could tell us something of the times we were in. They were a communication from the Great Beyond.
And this matters. As Martin put it in another wonderful book of his called Scatterlings, “Of course we’re outgunned. But outnumbered? Not when you call in the myth world, not when you call to ancestors deserving of the name, not when you weft your life to the thinking of a hare or the open-shouldered stance of a midwinter beech. Make a stand for something small, specific and precious. Do it today. Amen and let it be so.”
We are being spoken to constantly. Part of that speech we hear when we are awake. Part of it is banished by our insistence on constant, vigilant, wakefulness.
Wakefulness gives us a map but dreaming gives us a compass. Maybe it’s something like that.
Statistics are like bread. The calories burn quick, man. But images? These are the full, exploding with nourishment, dripping fat left to us in our ancestral art and stories. It’s amazing any of it has survived at all.
Sleep is that hut at the edge of the village. It receives strange guests all night long. They leave gifts for you when you wake. You will need them in the times to come. The ones to come will need them more.
Most of conflicts and tensions are due to language.
Don’t pay so much attention to the words.
In Love’s country,
Language doesn’t have its place.
Love is mute.
– Shams Tabrizi
What is it like to be a forest? It is to be alive. It is to be filled with aliveness, to be ablaze with aliveness. It is to be rooted in place, like a tree, and it is to move, like bees, like bears, like spiders who throw out webs as sails and travel around the world. It is to be connected one to the others in spiderwebs of memories, parasites, nutrients, hitchhikers, neighborly and nonneighborly relationships, time, joys, sorrows, regrets, anticipations, deaths, births, hatchings, germinations, eatings, sex, dreams. It is to be living the same blazing, burning, comforting, joyful, exhilarating, calming dream. It is to carry all these lives and all these deaths and all this sun and soil and decomposition and growth and disease and all these memories in one’s bones, and in the marrow of one’s bones, and in the woody fiber of one’s bones, and in the nectar of one’s bones, and in the breath of wind of one’s bones, and the dragonfly-red pigment of one’s bones. It is the marriage of hitchhiker and hitchhiker on bone and blood and memory and wood and soil.
– Derrick Jensen, Songs of the Dead
Last night the moon
in the sky hung
like a glowing fraction
and a stranger asked me if I believed in fate.
– Paul Guest
I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again,
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
– Sylvia Plath
This moment, the zillionth, in a long parade.
A something arising from nothing.
Existing. And sinking back, again.
– Danusha Laméris
they longed to press themselves against a heartbeat.
– Philip Pullman, from Northern Light
is the broad blue sky
a keepsake left behind by the
one I love each time
a wave of longing rises
my empty eyes look upward
– Sakai no Hitozane
The more you delve into your loneliness, like that tree, the more longing takes you with motherly tenderness to its country which is made of transparent, fragile fibers. Longing has a country, a family, and an exquisite taste in arranging wildflowers. It has a time chosen with divine care, a quiet mythical time in which figs ripen slowly and the gazelle sleeps next to the wolf in the imagination of the boy who did not witness a massacre. Longing takes you around its country like a tour guide in heaven. It takes you up to a mountain where you used to take refuge to wallow in wild plants until your pores soak up the smell of sage. Longing is smell.
– Mahmoud Darwish, XIV
She will remain
like the odd-alone, small yellow sorrel—most
common of wildflowers—I pressed in the back
of this book, not the stuff of memory unless
I write the hour we sat on a bench of stone,
parrots making green screaming ribbons of the air
above us; I wanted something to remember it by,
some small memento I recall hesitating
to take from its one afternoon of pollen
and bees—color its one remaining trueness,
shape collapsed, thinned as paper—this preserve
a worse kind of withering, perhaps, and yet
you see how I again have turned to it
for its very failure to compare.
– Claudia Emerson
I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it. But this separation of consciousness is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us.
– Maurice Merleau-Ponty
I am the poet of the body,
And I am the poet of the soul.
The pleasures of heaven are with me, and
the pains of hell are with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself–
the latter I translate into a new tongue.
– Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
Like dry ground welcoming the rain, he let the solitude, silence, and loneliness soak in.
– Haruki Murakami
The elders were wise.
They knew that man’s heart
away from nature, becomes hard; they
knew that lack of respect for growing, living things,
soon led to lack of respect for humans too.
– Chief Luther Standing Bear
The universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not objects to be exploited. Everything has its own voice. Thunder and lightning and stars and planets, flowers, birds, animals, trees, — all these have voices, and they constitute a community of existence that is profoundly related.
– Thomas Berry
Gary Snyder:
Practically speaking, a life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking brings us close to the actual existing world and its wholeness.
Governments always need enemies, even when they’re not at war. If you don’t have a real enemy, you make one up and spread the word. It scares the population, and when the people are scared, they tend not to step out of line.
– Paul Auster ; Oracle Night
We do not have “perfect” politics. We do not believe in factionalism or rigid ideology. We can die having had the “correct positions” but having accomplished nothing and freed no one. The desire to be “right” or “perfect” is the highest form of cynicism.
– The Red Nation
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin:
If the world is a complex, adaptive, finite, and interconnected and the power structure assumes the opposite, eventually there’s bound to be trouble.
The world was fucked up. It was hard to say how exactly, but we could feel it. There was injustice, lots of it, we saw it as a dull shape coming into focus.
– Michelle Tea
When Spirit, Mind, Heart, and Body are aligned, the impossible, becomes probable.
– Simone Wright
I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.
– Thomas Jefferson
I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done.
– Sophia
john cassavetes was 5’7
– @HannahSeidlitz
we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future; the freedom to get beyond ourselves.
– Oliver Sacks
We all arrive by different streets,
by unequal languages, at Silence.
– Pablo Neruda
How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing?
– Christina Sharpe
First of all nobody will survive money.
– Jackie Wang, The Sunflower Cast a Spell To Save Us From The Void
Maybe what’s needed is to write with the awareness of being wrong. Can one’s wrongness be a source of compassion.
– Kate Zambreno, Appendix Project
Don’t stop until you find what anchors you, what grounds you, what helps you soothe your soul.
– Ariela
Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.
– Thomas Jefferson
The irony is, when you exercise regularly your energy actually improves.
Yet people fear the opposite.
– @TheMentalBreak
A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.
– George Orwell
I never dwelt on the dark farcical furious real life of this roaring working world, wow.
– @DailyKerouac
I do not think that boxes full of darkness are gifts. I’m getting counselling right now to learn how to get over all the boxes full of darkness people have given me. Please don’t give me any more boxes full of darkness.
– @LeahJCallen
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
– George Eliot, Middlemarch
You get more of whatever you give attention to.
– Shane Parrish
Babe are you ok, you’ve barely touched your discourse.
– @ambernoelle
sunrise
seems to wash
the summer mountains
– Issa
The man who wishes to know all things is not a sage.
– Chuang Tzu
You need people who can walk their companies into the future rather than back them into the future.
– Warren Bennis
Never fuck around with the energy you allow into your life. The people, places and things you surround yourself with really do have an effect on your emotional, energetic and mental health.
– @_Pammy_DS_
you weren’t radicalized by your college professor, you were radicalized by learning that in other countries ambulance rides are free and you don’t go to jail for incorrectly guessing your taxes
– Owl! at the Library
There is a land grab going on right now.
Outrage, that strategically important territory, is being seized as its topography is being defined and its landscapes shaped for us.
May we be be wary of surrendering these precious lands of our passion.
– Dan Leak
Critical Race Theory is a gasp of emancipatory hope that law can serve liberation rather than domination.
– Dr. Cornel West
If you want a bitter
seedless life,
just keep identifying your
self as the victim.
Just keep
blaming others
for your circumstance.
But if you want your
heart to melt into
the impeccable splendor
of the golden sun
and illuminate the earth
with courage,
take off the cloak
of your old story.
Step naked
through the portal
of the present moment
into a kingdom
where darkness sparkles
and silence sings,
because there is
no judgment,
and fear is swallowed up
in Love.
– Fred LaMotte
I really feel that if we finally came to grips with what Martin Luther King Jr. did, taught us, and what he stood for, and lived it out, then we could truly be a nation at peace with itself, and we could be a powerful moral force in the world that could bring all the discordant elements together. And then we would begin to see the beloved community emerge.
– Coretta Scott King
To love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
– Jorge Luis Borges
Latent
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Riding our bikes through the warm summer night,
the dark itself parted to let us pass;
wind in our hair, soft whir of the wheels—
and an almost irrational joy grew in me then,
such simple joy, as if joy were always here,
waiting to flourish, needing only to be noticed.
And is joy latent in everything?
I have felt it sometimes in the washing
of dishes, in mowing the lawn,
in peeling the carrots, even washing
the fishtank and scrubbing the floor.
So could it be, too, inside worried pacing?
In envy? In sighing? In the clenching of fists?
Is there joy where I can’t imagine it?
Joy—waiting to spin like a wheel,
waiting to rise like laughter
that careens through the deepening dark.
AFTER READING TU FU, I GO OUTSIDE TO THE DWARF ORCHARD
East of me, west of me, full summer.
How deeper than elsewhere the dusk is in your own yard.
Birds fly back and forth across the lawn
looking for home
As night drifts up like a little boat.Day after day, I become of less use to myself.
Like this mockingbird,
I flit from one thing to the next.
What do I have to look forward to at fifty-four?
Tomorrow is dark.
Day-after-tomorrow is darker still.
The sky dogs are whimpering.
Fireflies are dragging the hush of evening
up from the damp grass.
Into the world’s tumult, into the chaos of every day,
Go quietly, quietly.
– Charles Wright
Psychological growth comes from making decisions, wrestling with ethical and moral choices, and living the experiments of our lives. In hierarchies, responsibility for all these things is cast upward. People following orders abdicate individual responsibility, obey orders out of fear of reprisals, and set aside ethical dilemmas in the march to get the job done. In turn, those giving orders become separated from the consequences of the action, [and] when something goes wrong, can claim ignorance and blame those who actually did the deed. In addition, in the name of efficiency and order, the particular and the variable, the eccentrics and freethinkers are suppressed.
– Linda J. Shepherd
I need the sea because it teaches me.
I don’t know if I learn music or awareness,
if it’s a single wave or its vast existence,
or only its harsh voice or its shining
suggestion of fishes and ships.
The fact is that until I fall asleep,
in some magnetic way I move in
the university of the waves.
It’s not simply the shells crunched
as if some shivering planet
were giving signs of its gradual death;
no, I reconstruct the day out of a fragment,
the stalactite from the sliver of salt,
and the great god out of a spoonful.
What it taught me before, I keep. It’s air
ceaseless wind, water and sand.
It seems a small thing for a young person,
to have come here to live with his own fire;
nevertheless, the pulse that rose
and fell in its abyss,
the crackling of the blue cold,
the gradual wearing away of the star,
the soft unfolding of the wave
squandering snow with its foam,
the quiet power out there, sure
as a stone shrine in the depths,
replaced my world in which were growing
stubborn sorrow, gathering oblivion,
and my life changed suddenly:
as I became part of its pure movement.
– Pablo Neruda
…the change from the old pattern to the new one always involves chaos. For an energy field to change into a new energy field, the original energy field must disorganize and fall apart. When the new tone is introduced, the geometric pattern becomes visually disorganized and chaotic before it transforms into a new geometric pattern.
– John Beaulieu
The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.
– Paul Auster
Maybe I write because if someone, a person, a system, tries to erase me, someone will be able to read this and remember that I existed.
– E.M. Tran
My theory is that there is less indelicacy in speaking out your highest, deepest, tenderest emotions to the world at large, than to almost any individual. You may be mistaken in the individual; but you cannot be mistaken in thinking that, somewhere among your fellow-creatures, there is a heart that will receive yours into itself.
– HAWTHORNE
Moving beyond coercive traditions could be a lot easier with a better understanding of the biological foundations of democracy. Rather than aiming for complete control, agreeable communication has inspired successful coexistence from the beginning. Mutually beneficial communications are more consistent with the nature of life (and thus with human nature) than the compulsive bias of any authority, whether idealistic or materialistic. This means that democratic growth can happen more quickly and easily than we imagine, as we get the idea. Some of this can be purposefully organized, but more of it depends on sympathetic alliances encouraging healthy collaborative diversity. As evolution has repeatedly demonstrated, the most successful living systems preserve a lot of qualitative diversity. On the other hand, coercive behavior undermines the well-wrought frameworks of mutual trust that allow for as much collaborative diversity as possible. For when domineering controls become commonplace in dealing with the living, such accepted cruelties subvert the amenable networks of alliance through which the living thrive.
– George Gorman
Break the Mirror
by Nanao Sakaki
In the morning
After taking cold shower
—-what a mistake—-
I look at the mirror.
There, a funny guy,
Grey hair, white beard, wrinkled skin,
—-what a pity—-
Poor, dirty, old man,
He is not me, absolutely not.
Land and life
Fishing in the ocean
Sleeping in the desert with stars
Building a shelter in the mountains
Farming the ancient way
Singing with coyotes
Singing against nuclear war—
I’ll never be tired of life.
Now I’m seventeen years old,
Very charming young man.
I sit quietly in lotus position,
Meditating, meditating for nothing.
Suddenly a voice comes to me:
“To stay young,
To save the world,
Break the mirror.”
Very early in my life it was too late.
– Marguerite Duras, L’Amant
The cheapest and most vulgar pride on earth – is pride of a nationalist. He has no other individual qualities to be proud of except for group mentality. A person of individual talent observes defects of a group & attempts an improvement.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Happiness does not await us all. One needn’t be a prophet to say that there will be more grief and pain than serenity and money. That is why we must hang on to one another.
– Anton Chekhov
You saved me, you should remember me.
– Louise Glück
Sviatlana Alexievich: We need to stop measuring ideas with how many lives we can sacrifice for them. When a man throws himself under a tank to blow it up, it’s not a victory, it’s a failure of humanity. I don’t want our kids to admire paintings of partisans holding grenades.
Ethan Nichtern:
Every single problem we face would become more workable if powerful people could simply begin to recognize how much their actions are driven by fear of losing power.
Every. Single. One.
Some of us are being called into the deepest silence we have ever experienced.
– @Maryamhasnaa
Human nature is wise beyond words. Underestimating or even doubting instinct, intuition, body wisdom & that which cannot be intellectualized or measured by current-day tools/methods only limits us. Honouring (our+all) nature helps us learn, grow and expand our mind, heart & soul.
– @IAmMyBestToday
When you pass through, no one can pin you down, no one can call you back
– Ying An
The hallmark of a productive debate is not persuasion, but insight.
In a good argument, you’re as motivated to learn as to convince.
You can declare victory when everyone involved has deepened their understanding, broadened their knowledge, or evolved their thinking.
– Adam Grant
The world wasn’t exactly made for me.
– Jean-Jacques Beineix
[…] my only
cure for the loneliness I go through:
more.
– Franz Wright
Heartbreak can still hurt 2 years down the line, 3 years, even 4. Damn it it can even still hurt 10 years later, when you’ve got a new life in a different place surrounded by different people and you look back on who is no longer around and wonder if there’s the smallest chance they still think of you and the memories too,
It can still hurt when you thought you’d let it go long ago.
– moon dust and dreams
There is a certain tone in the things that matter, an architecture of delayed light or slow sounds from long ago. Fragments for the after-silence, the sorting of a garden. Things in their essence. Spiritual forms, an invisible geometry of objects that gives strength to us through music…Whispered petitions to show us the way or to destroy us completely. Every word a last word. Every sound a revenant.
– Herbert Pföstl, On my Sanctuary Place
The divorce between thought and life. Thought, emptied of life, dries up, shrivels, is no longer thought. For thought is an expression of life, it is identical with life. One can speak without thinking: for this we have clichés, automatic expressions. The only true thought is living thought.
– Eugène Ionesco
While you shine in the center
like a constant star,
I toss my orbit. Offer my shadow
and moonlight.
– S. J. Ghaus
We must completely revise our understanding of the earth story, the life story, the human story and the Western story; for indeed our new situation reveals the true reality of what we have been doing.
– Thomas Berry, The Ecozoic Period
We can look into the eyes of the newborn and see that they have come here with precious gifts.
We can look within and see the wise old one sharing the years of story and teachings.
A memory that has been forgotten by most cultures is ready and waiting to emerge.
Bring it home, truly home within and weave the fine threads of its value in expression within your own inner and outer world…it is simply knowledge until we make an act of creation with it.
Weaving the threads of a whole, big, beautiful life today…it is good and I am in gratitude!
– cheri lynn kittel
According to a contemporary critic, it is morbid to confess your sins. I should say the morbid thing is not to confess them. The morbid thing is to conceal your sins and let them eat your heart out, which is the happy state of most people in highly civilized societies.
– G. K. Chesterton
I am a child of the Milky Way. The night is my mother. I am made of the dust of stars. Every atom in my body was forged in a star. When the universe exploded into being, already the bird longed for the wood and the fish for the pool. When the first galaxies fell into luminous clumps, already matter was struggling toward consciousness. The star clouds of Sagittarius are a burning bush. If there is a voice in Sagittarius, I’d be a fool not to listen. If God’s voice in the night is a scrawny cry, then I’ll prick up my ears. If night’s faint lights fail to knock me off my feet, then I’ll sit back on a dark hillside and wait and watch. A hint here and a trait there. Listening and watching. Waiting, always waiting, for the tingle in the spine.
– Chet Raymond
Be good
in swirls of time
in the smell of jasmine
in the delight of a dove’s flight
Be good
on easy days
of smooth rivers flowing downstream
on hand held walks
But
when violence orders the day
like a baton against the skull
or the lash of words against the spirit
settle your goodness by a vase of flowers
marry your fist and heart
unburden yourself of censorship
and say NO MORE. THIS ENDS NOW.
– David Bedrick
MY CROW
A crow flew into the tree outside my window.
It was not Ted Hughes’s crow, or Galway’s crow.
Or Frost’s, Pasternak’s, or Lorca’s crow.
Or one of Homer’s crows, stuffed with gore,
after the battle. This was just a crow.
That never fit in anywhere in its life,
or did anything worth mentioning.
It sat there on the branch for a few minutes.
Then picked up and flew beautifully
out of my life.
– Raymond Carver
It’s one thing to develop a nostalgia for home while you’re boozing with Yankee writers in Martha’s Vineyard or being chased by the bulls in Pamplona. It’s something else to go home and visit with the folks in Reed’s drugstore on the square and actually listen to them. The reason you can’t go home again is not because the down-home folks are mad at you – they’re not, don’t flatter yourself, they couldn’t care less – but because once you’re in orbit and you return to Reed’s drugstore on the square, you can stand no more than fifteen minutes of the conversation before you head for the woods, head for the liquor store, or head back to Martha’s Vineyard, where at least you can put a tolerable and saving distance between you and home. Home may be where the heart is but it’s no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
– Walker Percy
The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under a lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known.
– Yoshida Kenkō
What a strange demented feeling it gives me when I realize that I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head.
– Yoshida Kenko
It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.
Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.
That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books—
Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life. »
– Jane Hirshfield
Waking up from a dream can be a nightmare. We cannot stop thinking about the things that were destroyed, the people who vanished, the arms that tried to hold on to a shadow. What was real rapidly becomes befogged in the uncertainty of memory. Time was stolen too quickly and one feels bewildered to see it resume its normal pace, indifferent to the lives it drowned. And life is a long, eerie dream.
– Henri Peña-Ruiz
I imagine myself in time looking back on myself—
this self, this morning,
drinking her coffee on the first day of a new year
and once again almost unable to move her pen through the iron air.
Perplexed by my life as Midas was in his world of sudden metal,
surprised that it was not as he’d expected, what he had asked.
And that other self, who watches me from the distance of decades,
what will she say? Will she look at me with hatred or with compassion,
I whose choices made her what she will be?
– Jane Hirshfield
Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection.
– Eugenio Montale
In a stable world, it’s best to be data-driven. In a changing world, it’s better to be data-informed.
Data can reveal patterns from the past. It takes judgment to predict how those patterns will evolve in the future.
Data shouldn’t guide decisions. They should inform decisions.
– Adam Grant
While many modern people might confuse the words soul and spirit to mean generally the same thing, for the alchemists they are fundamentally opposing principles. Spirit lifts us up, whereas soul pulls
us deeper into life.
– Gary P. Caton
I have lost my smile,
but don’t worry.
The dandelion has it.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Never speak harsh words For they will rebound upon you. Angry words hurt And the hurt rebounds. Like a broken gong.
– The Buddha
Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging-on of an uncompleted task.
– William James
Nowadays enthusiasm is accounted folly; truth, cynicism; dissimulation, self-control; stiffness of manners, dignity; deception, cleverness; hypocrisy, decency; selfishness, economy; freedom of thought, effrontery; and superstition, the prop of human morals.
– George Sand
game over /
all the empty seats /
turn blue
– Alan Pizzarelli
…in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his or her level of incompetence. [The Peter Principle].”
“Parkinson’s Law affirms that bureaucracy expands as long as it is possible to do so…. The reason is to be found in the simple fact that the members of a bureaucracy tend to multiply their subordinates rather than their possible rivals.”
“One of the lesser-known problems of hierarchical organizations is that they are bad for your health…. [In a number of studies it was found that] Employees at the lowest level of the hierarchy had a mortality rate three times higher than that of employees at the highest level….” [The same thing happens with the very hierarchical societies of baboons.]
“All centralized and hierarchical organizations…are inherently fragile. Hernan Cortes and Francisco Pizarro, accompanied by a few hundred men, brought down two millenarian civilizations, the Aztecs and the Incas, simply by capturing their leaders…. The Apache, much less advanced than the Aztecs and Incas but endowed with a distributed organizational structure and no centralized power, resisted the Spanish onslaught for centuries….”
“Is it possible that we cannot manage to come up with something different, as would be the case, for example, of diffuse organizations constructed like the body of a plant [and the Internet]?”
“The Nation of Plants, by utilizing diffuse, decentralized, and reiterated organizational models, has liberated itself forever from the problems of fragility, bureaucracy, distance, sclerosis, and inefficiency typical of the hierarchical and centralized organizations of the animal world.
– Stefano Mancuso, The Nation of Plants
Those who think-Let me first correct society, then get around to myself are barred from even outer gate of the mansion of God. All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable & will always be. If you really want to help this world, you will have to teach how to live in it.
– Campbell
We need the story of the past and the dream of the future. The story explains to us how we got to where we are, and the dream is our way of thinking into the future. The dream drives and guides the action.
– Thomas Berry
Good citizenship would teach accuracy of thinking and accuracy of statement.
– Mark Twain
Someone whose faith is not grounded in reason is like a stream of water that can be led anywhere.
– Tibetan Saying
There is no iron that can enter the human heart with such stupefying effect as a period placed at just the right moment.
– Isaac Babel
THE INDIAN TO HIS LOVE
THE island dreams under the dawn
And great boughs drop tranquillity;
The peahens dance on a smooth lawn,
A parrot sways upon a tree,
Raging at his own image in the enamelled sea.
Here we will moor our lonely ship
And wander ever with woven hands,
Murmuring softly lip to lip,
Along the grass, along the sands,
Murmuring how far away are the unquiet lands:
How we alone of mortals are
Hid under quiet boughs apart,
While our love grows an Indian star,
A meteor of the burning heart,
One with the tide that gleams, the wings that gleam
and dart,
The heavy boughs, the burnished dove
That moans and sighs a hundred days:
How when we die our shades will rove,
When eve has hushed the feathered ways,
With vapoury footsole by the water’s drowsy blaze.
– W B Yeats
To handle yourself, use your head;
to handle others, use your heart.
– Donald Laird
No complaining about how hard it is to write,
we are all so, so lucky to write, to sit down,
inside, and write words on paper.
There is no greater freedom,
no greater good,
nothing that brings more joy.
– Isabel Allende
Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.
– Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, A Life for a Life
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
– Wislawa Szymborska
And in every moment, I return to the remembrance that the deeper nature of love is a healing force in the soul of the world.
May your inner eye
See through the surfaces
And glean the real presence
Of everything that meets you~
– John O’Donohue
Non-attention is the greatest weapon to fight thoughts, because thoughts without our attention have no power.
– Chariji
Although tsultrim, or moral discipline, applies to body, speech, and mind, we focus on the mind, which is the ruler of the other two doors. But we can’t apply tsultrim to our mind if we’re always making excuses based on our self and its attachments. Instead, we have to apply a universal perspective. As the Buddha said, “Take yourself as an example and do not harm others.” Because we have direct experience of what makes us happy and unhappy, we can infer that the same things make others happy and unhappy. If we go against this principle mindlessly, we should acknowledge our wrong doing instead of defending our ego.
– Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
Some people are jumping from wave to wave in search of wetness.
– Joseph Campbell
Even good change is kind of exhausting.
– Honor Finnegan
A Brief For The Defense
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
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.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
– Jack Gilbert
The victim who is able to articulate
the situation of the victim
has ceased to be a victim:
he or she has become a threat.
– James Baldwin
IN PRAISE OF DREAMS
Every day we relate to ourselves, others, and the world around us.
We choose what to reveal and what to hide, protect, or hold close.
With some people we don’t share our hurt or vulnerability; with others we don’t speak of our attraction, irritation, or anger; and with yet others we don’t share our secrets, illnesses, or aspects of our spiritual life.
We do this often consciously, to good purpose and consequence.
However many of these ‘choices’ are made unconsciously—we may not even be aware of some of our deepest feelings, fantasies, needs, and experiences, making it impossible to truly consider whether, or how, to express ourselves.
What happens with the unexpressed, unfelt, or unknown?
Sometimes nothing – our ‘choices’ are deeply correct and the unexpressed material finds an easy place to rest, release, or move on.
But some of this material gets suppressed, relegated to the shadows, creating difficulties by manifesting in incongruent and confusing communication, conflicts, depressions, somatic expressions, grief, and all kinds of seemingly unexplained feelings and behavioral patterns.
There’s no need for blame or judgment about this, it’s a human characteristic — it goes with the territory.
However, as most indigenous cultures have known as well as modern-day depth psychology, there is a way of becoming more conscious of this ‘split off’ material and learning to relate to it more wisely…
– David Bedrick, By Exploring Our Nighttime Dreams.
Take care you don’t know anything in this world too quickly or easily. Everything is also a mystery, and has its own secret aura in the moonlight, its private song.
– Mary Oliver
Reduce intellectual and emotional noise
until you arrive at the silence of yourself
and listen to it.
– Richard Brautigan
In the past, jobs were about muscles, now they’re about brains, but in the future, they’ll be about the heart.
– Dame Minouche Shafik, the Director of the London School of Economics
Evolution
Not knowing how to approach
Intimacy, for understood reasons
Doesn’t make those reasons
Easily understood, or applied
The nature of who I am, not contained
By what I’ve been or done
Has not been whittled away
By what has not occurred
This being, more than a way of being
Is more than a way of waiting
For another being. Being
Not waiting for time while making it
Evolves the uncontained
Through every containment
– George Gorman
There are such things as ghosts.
People everywhere have always known that.
And we believe in them every bit
as much as Homer did.
Only now, we call them by different names.
Memory. The unconscious.
– Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Sunaksatra… according to some sources was the Buddha’s half-brother and personal attendant prior to that position being held by Ananda. Despite his personal connection to the Buddha and his extensive knowledge of his teachings, Sunaksatra had no respect for the Buddha, saying that in his twenty-four years of service to him, he saw no difference whatsoever between the Buddha and himself apart from the fact that the Buddha had a six-foot aura.
– Robert Buswell Jr. & Donald Lopez Jr., The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism
Turning words into art is unnatural. It begins with a contrary attitude. It says, I am unhappy with the way things are and desire to make things different. Rather than represent the world, I will make something wildly and savagely new. I will defy logic. I will invest in new perceptions. I will combine and recombine and fabricate and juggle until something that I have never experienced is experienced. The process is alchemical. The process is violent. It goes to the heart of creativity. It disrupts and shatters. It is splendid with provocation. It is an aggression against banality. It is sharp and loud like a janitor scraping frost from a window. The hectic bounce of steam on a street after a truck roars by. The anarchy of waters, the comedy of the face, dangerous feelings vented from a cage of skin.
– John Olson
This is not the time for illusion or evasion; it is time for transformation.
– David Orr
this is where the gods who’ve never been born live
– Iván Argüelles
they sit around and argue about
the various benefits and limitations
of Christianity, Buddhism,
Islam, Judaism, others.
they are ready to jump into skin
and dazzle the believers of any
of them as a new manifestation
of the divine, the new “thing”
as it were
but they are never given the nod
and so they spend eternity
talking, playing video games,
writing out complex commandments
that no one will ever see.
there is no Moses for them to communicate with
no Mary to impregnate
just the other boring immortals
hanging around the sports events
and the movie theaters
and writing poems and songs
in unknown languages
and unplayable scales
works that have no syntax
no meaning
no practitioners
only the endless, moving presence
of a consciousness
which cannot make up its mind
to allow them to be.
– Jack Foley
For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present , nor things to come ,
Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
– Romans 8:38
The Five Days Remaining
by Hafez
The goods produced in the factories of space and time
Are not all that great. Bring some wine,
Because the desirables of this world are not all that great.
Heart and soul are born for ecstatic conversation
With the soul of souls. That’s it. If that fails,
Heart and soul are not in the end that great.
Don’t become indebted to the Tuba and Sidra trees
Just to have some shade in heaven. When you look closely,
My flowering cypress friend, you’ll see that these trees are not all
that great.
The true kingdom comes to you without any breaking
Of bones. If that weren’t so, achieving the Garden
Through your own labors wouldn’t be all that great.
In the five days remaining to you in this rest stop
Before you go to the grave, take it easy, give
Yourself time, because time is not all that great.
You who offer wine, we are waiting on the lip
Of the ocean of ruin. Take this moment as a gift; for the distance
Between the lip and the mouth is not all that great.
The state of my being – miserable and burnt
To a crisp – is proof enough that my need
To put it into words is not all that great.
You ascetic on the cold stone, you are not safe
From the tricks of God’s zeal: the distance between the cloister
And the Zorastrian tavern is not after all that great.
The name Hafez has been well inscribed in the books,
But in our clan of disreputables, the difference
Between profit and loss is not all that great.
-Translation by Robert Bly
These days, a big part of the appeal of the conservative movement is the transgressive thrill of being a jerk, of being cruel, of mocking people and deriding them when they are in pain, or suffering, or having a problem.
Everyone in life encounters people who are jerks; it’s part of life… That is one thing. Elevating that—being a jerk, being cruel—into a defining feature of one’s political movement is another thing altogether.
– Chris Hayes
To those without a collective consciousness, every pro-social act is viewed as “performative”—because for them it would be. They have no cognitive framework to understand anything beyond their own self-interest.
– Subversive Lens
When they die we change our minds
about them. While they live we see
the plenty hard they’re trying,
to be a star, or nice, or wise,
and so we do not quite believe them.
When they die, suddenly they are
what they claimed. Turns out,
that’s what one of those looks like.
The cold war over manner of manly
or mission is over. Same person,
same facts and acts, just now
a quiet brain stem. We no longer
begrudge his or her stupid luck.
When they die we change our minds
about them. I will try to believe
while you yet breathe.
– Jennifer Michael Hecht
Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotch-potch of impulses, our perpetual miracle — for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death: let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life.
– Virginia Woolf
Difficulty itself may be a path toward concentration — expended effort weaves us into a task […]. Difficulty, whether of life or of craft, is not a hindrance to an artist. Sartre called genius “not a gift, but the way a person invents in desperate circumstances.” Just as geological pressure transforms ocean sediment into limestone, the pressure of an artist’s concentration goes into the making of any fully realized work.
Much of beauty, both in art and in life, is a balancing of the lines of forward-flowing desire with those of resistance — a gnarled tree, the flow of a statue’s draped cloth. Through such tensions, physical or mental, the world in which we exist becomes itself. Great art, we might say, is thought that has been concentrated in just this way: honed and shaped by a silky attention brought to bear on the recalcitrant matter of earth and of life.
– Jane Hirshfield
憂鬱 (yuutsu) is a word that requires a metaphorical definition, even in Japanese. The [dictionary] defines it as “気持ちがふさいで、晴れないこと,” or “the sensation that your feelings/emotions are blocked, and cannot break into sun,” invoking a persistently clouded sky to further illustrate the sensation. Other sources describe it as melancholy, gloominess, depression, a dampness of the soul. Broken down into parts, the first character, 憂 (yuu) is used to describe something sad, or difficult. The second character, 鬱 (utsu), has a wider range of meaning, stretching from blocked, smelling badly, to steaming (specifically, the kind of steaming in a hot room where air cannot freely move). When the character for utsu is added to a second character, 病, meaning illness, we get the word most commonly used nowadays to refer to clinical depression: 鬱病 (utsubyou), which literally translated becomes “blocked sickness.” […]
Recently, I learned that there exists another very uncommon “spelling” of yuutsu: 幽鬱. The second character is still utsu, the kanji that is used to denote depression and means “to block.” But the first character is no longer 憂, meaning sad or difficult, but 幽, meaning spirit or soul (frequently used to describe ghosts). Yuutsu retains the same meaning even with this spelling: an amalgam feeling of sadness, anxiety, bitterness, nostalgia, and discontent. But this alternate spelling with its use of 幽 creates a more specific implication, chalking up the emotion to a blocked or stifled spirit.
These days, I don’t see a therapist but I’ve noticed that lately I feel a certain heaviness again, as if a slow suffocation of spirit. I feel doubtful of my writing, of my claim to writing, of my claim to myself and identity. […] I am doubtful and discouraged more often than I am not. I see yuutsu edging in on my emotional periphery. And yet, in the midst of all this, the concept of manifold depression as one’s spirit getting stuck somewhere is heartening to me, somehow. It implies that, at some point, there is release. It speaks to the particular way that I feel this sadness: a heaviness of spirit, cloaking me so that the only thing to do is to wait until I can outrun the weight, setting the ghost of myself free.
– Nina Li Coomes
My job is to create better humans and to give them the tools that will allow them to be the better humans they are meant to be.
– Jack Morgan
Janus Interruptus
At some point,
you have to stop looking back.
You have to stop drinking
the poison of regret.
That slow toxin of ‘what if’s’
and ‘what might have been’
will turn your heart sour
your tongue to ash
and your feet to stone.
When next you lift
the Chalice of Regret
to your lips, stop.
Stop right there,
turn around, and declare:
With a stag’s grace,
I turn my face toward the direction of vision and new life.
I invite the honey-sweet song
of the morning lark back into my heart.
I let go of regret
and allow the past
to be a songline
that continues on without me.
– Hawk Owen
Paraphrasing John Chester:
When you have no idea what to do, cultivate beauty.
Within this tree
another tree
inhabits the same body;
within this stone
another stone rests,
its many shades of grey
the same,
its identical
surface and weight.
And within my body,
another body,
whose history, waiting,
sings; there is no other body,
it sings,
there is no other world.
– Jane Hirshfield
In the beginning was the dream. In the eternal night where no dawn broke, the dream deepened. Before anything ever was, it had to be dreamed. Everything had its beginning in possibility. Every single thing is somehow the expression and incarnation of a thought. If a thing had never been thought, it could never be. If we take Nature as the great artist of longing then all presences in the world have emerged from her mind and imagination. We are children of the earth’s dreaming. When you compare the silent, under-night of Nature with the detached and intimate intensity of the person, it is almost as if Nature is in dream and we are her children who have broken through the dawn into time and place. Fashioned in the dreaming of the clay, we are always somehow haunted by that; we are unable ever finally to decide what is dream and what is reality. Each day we live in what we call reality. Yet the more we think about it, the more life seems to resemble a dream. We rush through our days in such stress and intensity, as if we were here to stay and the serious project of the world depended on us. We worry and grow anxious; we magnify trivia until they become important enough to control our lives. Yet all the time, we have forgotten that we are but temporary sojourners on the surface of a strange planet spinning slowly in the infinite night of the cosmos. There is no protective zone around any of us. Anything can happen to anyone at any time. There is no definitive dividing line between reality and dream. What we consider real is often precariously dreamlike. One of the linguistic philosophers said that there is no evidence that could be employed to disprove this claim: The world only came into existence ten minutes ago complete with all our memories. Any evidence you could proffer could still be accounted for by the claim. Because our grip on reality is tenuous, every heart is infused with the dream of belonging.
– John O’Donohue
I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom.
I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.
– Henry Miller
We cripple ourselves by only gazing from within our caves of reflection. If we would see with the eyes of freedom, we must be as open and as unceasing as the Sea.
– Susie Motz
What a searcher searches for is like riding the oxen in search of the oxen.
It is not the flag moving, it is not the wind moving, it is your mind moving.
Wind, flag, mind, movement…
– Nichols Pierotti
Pursue not the outer entanglements; Dwell not in the inner void; Be serene in the oneness of things; And dualism vanishes by itself.
– Sengcan
No term could define Pere Teilhard’s philosophy more exactly nor provide a more precise point for comparison than the expression ‘Universal History’ which, when used in Bossuet’s sense, becomes an extension of Sacred History.
– F. G. Elliot
You’re Already Woven-In
“When you bow deeply to the universe, it bows back.The divine is not something high above us. It is in heaven, it is in earth, it is inside us.”
Morihei Ueshiba (1883-1969), Founder of Aikido
In these heavy times,
your Flowing-Cloud-Self
asks you to remember:
There is no weight
that can weigh you down.
In these times
of cutting and scarring,
slicing and scoring,
your Great-Ocean-of-Being-Self
asks you to remember:
There is no blemish or mark
being held against you.
In this time of chaos and upheaval,
uncertainty and change,
your luminous, light-as-a-feather
Heron-of-New-Horizons-Self says:
Rest assured
in your new
flightpath coordinates.
The vast sky swelled larger tonight
and willingly holds
all that you are and will be.
Forget the ‘love-naysayers’;
they’re just afraid
somehow
they won’t “make it to Heaven.”
They don’t realize
they’re already woven-in
already woven-in
by their own star-marked cells
simply from Being Here.
They don’t realize
they’re already woven-in
already woven-in
by an invisible love
they simply haven’t
come to know yet.
Love who and what you love,
says the Great Radiant Sun above,
just as her beams of love-light
permeate us all.
Love who and what you love
like brave young girls
declaring their crushes
to other young girls.
Love who and what you love
like prayers of long-gone ancestors;
long-gone
but ever-watchful,
ever-hopeful
for those coming along.
Love who and what you love
like the glorious dance
of mountains, rivers, stardust,
trees in the wind;
like hummingbirds, penguins, whales — all on pilgrimage.
Love is a way-within-The Way.
Love is a gate.
Love is a Great Sun Gate
waiting for every
star-flung traveler
to step through.
Love who and what you love,…
but start with yourself.
You’re already woven-in.
You’re already woven-in.
– Hawk Owen
They are singing a wonderful old protest song. Everybody has a right to live, and before this campaign fails, we’ll all go down to jail, everybody has a right to live.
Got some wonderful pictures, will send when I get the bandwidth.
– Jim Rigby
Buddhist thought originates in an unusual experience of the sorrows of time. No abiding reality is here, no lasting peace, no fit condition for human life. The first and final wisdom is to recognize the insubstantial nature of all things. All is caught in an endless cycle of change. There is only the coming to be of things and their passing away. Birth and death implicate each other. Nowhere else has the tragic aspect of human life formed the central theme of so vast a tradition of spiritual and philosophical thought.
– Thomas Berry
The Peruvians have a helpful notion in this department. *Ayni* (eye,nee) – sacred reciprocity. Anything created, transmitted, served, offered, provided, takes some measure of effort and energy. If we are on the receiving end of said creation, transmission, service, offering and have found value in it, according to this principle deeply-embedded within their culture (and most indigenous cultures I imagine), the onus is on us to participate in a sacred exchange of energy. I feel this applies to spiritual insights as well, so I disagree with the comment above. Several authors I respect have delved very deep in their own journey, have traveled through Shadow, simmered hard-won truths into nectars, and stepped-down energies into working maps that have been of immense service and support to me, from Michael Meade and James Hollis to Elaine Aron and Marion Woodman. I am more than happy to participate in the exchange of money for their spiritual insights.
Where all of this can go sideways is when obsession, grasping, and greed taints the pure exchange, but seeing money as part of a form of sacred energy exchange is liberating to me, not one that muddies the water.
– Frank Owen
Your Questions About Money are Often About Your Integrity
Intimately tied into the question of “Who am I to teach?” is the often unspoken ending to that sentence “. . . and get paid for it?”
It can feel very strange to many of us, this notion of being paid to do something we love that’s bringing healing to the world. There can be a guilt associated with it and this urge to just give it away for free.
We are in a strange place in this culture.
No one bats an eye at people taking jobs in industries that are destroying the world (e.g. mining, industrial forestry, fossil fuels), but when people try to make money doing something good? We suddenly feel strange about accepting money for it. Surely, if anything it should be the opposite. It’s something to wonder about.
And again, when people bring up these issues I want to worship at their feet for a while, because these concerns don’t come out of nowhere. They often have roots founded in a concern about the direction of the larger economy – both where it came from and where it’s going. As people learn more about what’s happening in the world, it’s the most natural thing to have questions about money emerge. What is money?
Where did it come from? For what kind of work should I accept it, and for what kind of work should I refuse it?
And if you work in the healing arts, this becomes an even more pressing question, as people will start bringing many things to your door to question you about making money. They’ll point out that traditional medicine people in most indigenous cultures almost never take money for their ceremonies or healings, so how on earth can you? Aren’t you just participating in the commodification of something that should never be commodified?
When I see people wrestling with this, I want to hug them and thank them for being willing to engage and grapple with something for which there are no easy answers. I want to praise the deep integrity of their political and spiritual landscape. I want to urge them to keep following those threads. Nowhere in me is there an urge to “fix” anything. I have no desire at all to do anything other than hold those people’s feet even closer to the fire so they can really feel the burn of consequence and so that anything that might be out of alignment in them can become known and felt.
Many of my colleagues would see all of this as a set of disempowering beliefs, but frankly, I think a lot of their beliefs about money are deeply toxic. I think the willingness to wrestle with these issues is, itself, a noble endeavour that deserves to be applauded. It’s a rare thing in this culture to associate anything with money other than desperation and entitlement.
I’ve been broke before (and I didn’t care) because I’d decided to spend my time enjoying my life and doing volunteer work in my community.
There’s nothing less spiritual about that. But there’s also nothing particularly spiritual about being broke and not being able to take care of yourself, and therefore being a burden on others.
Having said all of that, a few thoughts do occur to me that I offer on the off chance they might have some use to someone.
We no longer live in a tribal set-up. Were you to have been a healer in that set-up, your needs would have been met. You would have been taken care of by the village. That is no longer the case today. We no longer have a village, so we need to do something different.
And it’s worth noting that you do not need to make an income from healing. You could work a job and also do your healing work. That is an absolutely legitimate and beautiful model. You can be a healer without making a business out of it.
Offering your gifts to the world? Non-negotiable. That’s a mandatory part of being a human being. Making it a business and charging for it? Entirely optional.
– Tad Hargraves
Field Theology
As a palm tree knows its role to play
and doesn’t wait for the pine to assign it,
as a seabird plots its lonely way,
whether or not the wind is behind it,
as a songbird follows no other’s lead
in the elegant nonchalance of its singing,
and the fruit that grows on the mango doesn’t
worry what the plum or the orange is bringing,
just as such freedom fighters all
have taught for countless, ungoverned seasons
to follow the lead of a spirit call
or an inexplicable heartfelt reason,
so it’s really as clear as a quiet sea
that the mystery comes nearest to those
as playful as dolphins who spin as they leap
and as wild as the flash of a hummingbird’s throat.
– George Gorman
Now I’ve jumped
Off a cliff with no hope or fear.
Falling seems natural and free
The ground is so far from here.
And the groundlessness never left.
just a fly on guru rinpoche’s foot,
may yet become rainbow light…
– Aric Parker
It is not enough to be a saint. That was the Piscean age. In the age of
Aquarius you have to make everybody you touch, see and feel be a saint.
You become the forklift.
– Yogi Bhajan
Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.
– Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Doubt is a Part of the Creative Process
“Is minig a bha claidheamh math an droch thrill.”
(Good sword has often been in poor scabbard.)
– Scottish Gaelic Proverb
Doubt is unavoidable.
It’s a part of the creative process. Although, it’s rarely self-doubt. It’s more often imagining other people’s doubts about us and then reacting to those imaginings.
We ask ourselves, “What would others say about this?” We often ask them. But, of course, they’re not us. They don’t see things the way we do.
I’ve performed improv comedy since 1992, and during this time I had a few years where my improv was terrible. I couldn’t do a good scene to save my life. And of course, the worse I did, the more and more my self-doubt grew. The more my self-doubt grew, the worse my improv became. Eventually I got out of the funk.
It wasn’t until years later when I was able to look back and see what had happened.
Instead of jumping into scenes with my ideas, I was second guessing everything and turning to my teammates on the bench to say, “Do you think I should do this or not?” But by the time they heard my idea, processed it, and replied, the moment was gone.
I would have learned faster by just acting on my ideas. Many of them would have been terrible, but I would have learned from that.
But that’s not how it went for me. And it’s not how it goes for most of us. We have ideas and we doubt them. We make things and we doubt they’re any good.
And sometimes we’re right. It’s not that good. Sometimes those doubts are accurate assessments of the poor quality of something we’ve made. But that doesn’t mean we should stop making things. It doesn’t mean we should stop trying. If anything, it means we should keep trying. We should get off the bench and jump into as many scenes as possible. We should keep writing every day. We should keep making things and learn from the doing, knowing that doubts will be there all along the way.
Doubt doesn’t mean “stop.” Doubt means “keep learning.”
Ira Glass said it perfectly:
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
Doubt is a part of the creative process.
– Tad Hargraves
So we must continue to march when necessary. Our marching feet have caused thick walls of segregation to crumble before the battering rams of the forces of justice. Our marching feet have resurrected crucified truth and placed bright-eyed wisdom back on her sacred throne. Our marching has taken wounded justice, lying prostrate on the streets of our cities, and lifted it from this dust of shame to reign supreme in the legislative annals of our nation. Yes, our marching feet have carved tunnels of hope through the dark mountain of despair.
– Martin Luther King Jr.
If you find yourself feeling overwhelmed by personal guilt for the collective failures of a world on the brink of catastrophe, you’re not alone.
That’s actually the whole point.
None of us created this as individuals, and none of us are going to solve it that way, either.
– Ethan Nichtern
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
– Wislawa Szymborska
The number of (mostly white, mostly male) leaders who are spiritually and psychology unwell makes me think if we could just get a few more moderately dysfunctional people who are simply *trying to help people* into leadership roles, we’d be living in a damn paradise.
– Ethan Nichtern
We need to end the era of disembodied philosophy.
If everybody who agrees with your abstract philosophy looks like you and comes from the same social location as you, that needs to be taken into account when discussing your ideas.
– Ethan Nichtern
Even those of us with great spiritual wisdom and psychological development need to break down and get help sometimes.
There’s no weakness in this, just vulnerability.
Making yourself vulnerable enough to ask for help is one of the most enlightened things you can do.
– Ethan Nichtern
If you find yourself feeling overwhelmed by personal guilt for the collective failures of a world on the brink of catastrophe, you’re not alone.
That’s actually the whole point.
None of us created this as individuals, and none of us are going to solve it that way, either.
– Ethan Nichtern
Opposites can be united only in the form of compromise, or irrationally, some new thing arising between them which, though different from both, yet has the power to take up their energies in equal measure as an expression of both and of neither.
– CG Jung
This sort of simultaneous awareness that there’s nothing that really matters to us more than literature, and at the same time there’s nothing that matters less on this sad, lonely planet than literature.
– Nell Zink
We should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems, and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have the right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society.
– Einstein
You can’t dig stuff out of the Earth’s crust to save yourself from problems created by digging stuff out of the Earth’s crust.
– Dr. Elizabeth Swain
You must believe in yourself and your talents. Enough people will come along and try to stamp you out. Be on your own side. Don’t help them.
– Leah J Callen
It’s not that I was smoking hot when I was younger, it’s just that I could still remember details from books I’d read hours before.
– Maris Kreizman
Working with sentient beings is dirty work.
– Reggie Ray on the Bodhisattva Vow
In a stable world, it’s best to be data-driven. In a changing world, it’s better to be data-informed.
Data can reveal patterns from the past. It takes judgment to predict how those patterns will evolve in the future.
Data shouldn’t guide decisions. They should inform decisions.
– Adam Grant
as the moon
recedes in the west
purple dawn
– Mansei
Poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.
– Eugenio Montale
misty rain
hibiscus sky
summer weather
– Basho
Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
I don’t think we can even pretend that we are on the edge of a civilized dialogue until we grant that people’s minds – like their bodies – must be a domain free from government control.
– Terence McKenna
Promise yourself to be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind.
– Christian D. Larson
Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways.
– Pessoa
You saved me, you should remember me.
– Louise Glück
The hallmark of a productive debate is not persuasion, but insight.
In a good argument, you’re as motivated to learn as to convince.
You can declare victory when everyone involved has deepened their understanding, broadened their knowledge, or evolved their thinking.
– Adam Grant
Some of us are being called into the deepest silence we have ever experienced.
– @Maryamhasnaa
Human nature is wise beyond words. Underestimating or even doubting instinct, intuition, body wisdom & that which cannot be intellectualized or measured by current-day tools/methods only limits us. Honouring (our+all) nature helps us learn, grow and expand our mind, heart & soul.
– @IAmMyBestToday
Happiness does not await us all. One needn’t be a prophet to say that there will be more grief and pain than serenity and money. That is why we must hang on to one another.
– Anton Chekhov