screamVote
so that one day
a hundred years from now
another sister will not have to
dry her tears wondering
where in history
she lost her voice.
– jasmin kaur
All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking.
– Robert Hass
Some voted their love. Some voted their
hate. Some voted their fear. Some voted
their hope. Some voted their ignorance.
Some did not vote. And this is what we
got. All will live with what we have
been given; each in their own way.
This is where we are right now.
– Roshi Joan Halifax
When I say I am an abolitionist, I mean I am invested in building systems of robust & imaginative mental healthcare, education, living wages, housing, rent control, affordable food—a society so dynamic in care that renders prisons & police obsolete.
– Yolo Akili
Librarians. I see them as healers and magicians.
– Anne Lamott
You ask why the torrent of genius so rarely pours forth, so rarely floods and thunders and overwhelms your astonished soul? -Because, dear friends, on either bank dwell the cool, respectable gentlemen, whose summerhouses, tulip beds and cabbage patches would all be washed away, and who are therefore highly skilled in averting future dangers in good time, by damming and digging channels.
– Goethe
Wisdom, like compassion, often seems to require of us that we hold multiple realities in our consciousness at once.
– Richard Tarnas
And when you get blue, and you’ve lost all your dreams; There’s nothin’ like a campfire and a can of beans.
– Tom Waits
slow, silent circles
the kestrel watches and waits
drifting in the fall wind
– @HaikuHedgehog
You have to know that, as a highly sensitive person, you’re going to move different than everyone else. You’ll have different needs, boundaries, tolerances, desires, and capabilities. If you lose sight of this you’ll get swept away in a world that does not understand who you are.
– Nika Solé
the horses which bear me conducted me as far as desire may go […] horses and chariot straight on the high-road; for it lies far outside the beaten track. and on this path there are many proofs that being is without beginning and indestructible.
– parmenides, tr. arthur fairbanks
You never know who, what, when, or where things will enter into your life and switch everything up. But the higher order does. And it’s one of the most magical things of all.
– Nika Solé
The best you can do as a poet is to get out of the poem’s way.
– Airea D. Matthews
Once you create a self-justifying storyline, your emotional entrapment within it quadruples.
– Pema Chödrön
Every generation laughs
at the old fashions,
but follows religiously
the new.
– Thoreau
There is a lack of means of communication. The only one we have, language, is inadequate; it cannot depict the soul, and conveys no more than fragments. That is why I always have a feeling of horror when I am called upon to disclose my innermost self in words.
– Kleist
I am selling something
that cannot be bought;
I am buying something
that cannot be sold.
– Abbas Kiarostami
around the table
three generations
in the candles’ glow
– Cara Holman
One third of the food produced in the world gets wasted, while one in three people do not have sufficient food. This is not a failure of agriculture – it is a failure of the Human Heart.
– Sadhguru
We have convictions only if
we have studied nothing
thoroughly.
– Emil Cioran
soft earth
I might risk
a cartwheel
– John Stevenson
When I look for Man in European society, I see a constant denial of Man, an avalanche of murders.
– Frantz Fanon
I WONDER HOW MANY PEOPLE IN THIS CITY
I wonder how many people in this city
live in furnished rooms.
Late at night when I look out at the buildings
I swear I see a face in every window
looking back at me,
and when I turn away
I wonder how many go back to their desks
and write this down.
– Leonard Cohen
When we turn the mind inwards, God manifests as the inner consciousness.
– Sri Ramana Maharshi
first day of spring–
I keep thinking about
the end of autumn
– Matsuo Basho
baptism song
a turtle slips
into the river
– Aubrie Cox
Anger is the reaction whereas peace is a response.
– Brahma Kumaris
Björk’s Second Act
Contrary to her image, Björk isn’t pixyish, waifish, or fairy godmother- like. She sits across from me stylishly adorned in a flow of colorful silks and chiffons with soft sprays of greens, yellows, and blacks that look as if they’ve been jacked from butterfly wings. She tends to stammer when she speaks-more from trying to combine three stray thoughts into one than from any conversational anxiety. The Icelandic singer cops to some- times turning shy during interviews, not because she’s an introvert, but because she’s from a place not so accustomed to celebrity. She is self- possessed, clear about her artistic convictions and very much present
in this world.
– Greg Tate
Far and Away [excerpt]
by Fanny Howe
The rain falls on.
Acres of violets unfold.
Dandelion, mayflower
Myrtle and forsythia follow.
The cardinals call to each other.
Echoes of delicate
Breath-broken whistles.
I know something now
About subject, object, verb
And about one word that fails
For lack of substance.
Now people say, He passed on
Instead of that. Unit
Of space subtracted by one.
It almost rhymes with earth.
What is a poet but a person
Who lives on the ground
Who laughs and listens
Without pretension of knowing
Anything, driven by the lyric’s
Quest for rest that never
(God willing) will be found?
Concord, kitchen table, 1966.
Corbetts, Creeley, a grandmother
And me. Sweater, glasses,
One wet eye.
Lots of laughter
Before and after. Every meeting
Rhymed and fluttered into meter.
The beat was the message. . . .
(for Robert Creeley)
It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least.
– William Gaddis, The Recognitions
Everything you touched was phony.
Everything you read, swallowed, admired, proclaimed, refuted, defended was made up of hate-ridden myths and grinning masquerades, phony to the hilt.
The mania for telling lies and believing them is as contagious as the itch.
– Louis-Ferdinand Celine
You can’t copy skills.
You can’t copy discipline.
You can’t copy attitude.
You can’t copy mindset.
You can’t copy constancy.
You can’t copy integrity.
You can’t copy passion.
You can’t copy uniqueness…
this is why it’s called uniqueness.
– A. L. Crego
Loiter in the neighborhood of a problem. After a while, a solution strolls by.
– Harold Rosenberg on methodology, tipping his hat at flaneurs
Reprove not a scorner, lest he hate thee: rebuke a wise man, and he will love thee. Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be yet wiser: teach a just man, and he will increase in learning.
– Proverbs 9:8-9
… crazy wisdom does not occur unless there is a basic understanding of things, a knowledge of how things function as they are. There has to be a trust in the normal functioning of karmic cause and effect. Having been highly and completely trained, then there is enormous room for crazy wisdom.
According to that logic, wisdom does not exactly go crazy; but on top of the basic logic or basic norm, craziness as higher sanity, higher power, or higher magic, can exist.
One attribute of crazy wisdom is fearlessness. Having already understood the logic of how things work, fearlessness is the further power and energy to do what needs to be done, to destroy what needs to be destroyed, to nurse what should be nursed, to encourage what should be encouraged, or whatever the appropriate action is.
The fearlessness of crazy wisdom is also connected with bluntness.
Bluntness here is the notion of openness. It is a sense of improvising, being resourceful, but not in the sense of constantly trying to improvise the nature of the world.
There are two approaches to improvising. If we have a convenient accident and we capitalize on that, we improvise as we go along. That is the conventional sense of the word. For instance, we might become a famous comedian, not because of our perceptiveness, but purely because we make funny mistakes. We say the wrong things at the wrong time and people find us hilarious. Therefore we become a famous comedian. That is approaching things from the back door, or more accurately, it is like hanging out in the backyard.
The other approach to improvising, or bluntness, is seeing things as they are. We might see humor in things; we might see strength or weakness. In any case, we see what is there quite bluntly. A crazy wisdom person has this sense of improvising. If such a person sees that something needs to be destroyed rather than preserved, he strikes on the spot. Or if something needs to be preserved, although it might be decaying or becoming old hat, he will nurse it very gently.
So crazy wisdom is absolute perceptiveness, with fearlessness and bluntness. Fundamentally, it is being wise, but not holding to particular doctrines or disciplines or formats. There aren’t any books to follow. Rather, there is endless spontaneity taking place. There is room for being blunt, room for being open. That openness is created by the environment itself. In fact, at the level of crazy wisdom, all activity is created by the environment. The crazy wisdom person is just an activator, just one of the conditions that have evolved in the environment…
– Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
What I write is smarter than I am, because I can re-write it.
– Susan Sontag
The miracle of your mind isn’t that you can see the world as it is, but that you can see the world as it isn’t. We can remember the past and we can think about the future, and we can imagine what it’s like to be some other person in some other place. And we all do this differently.
– Kathryn Schulz
Feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is that we’re holding back. They teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we’d rather collapse and back away. They’re like messengers that show us, with terrifying clarity, exactly where we’re stuck. This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it’s with us wherever we are.
– Pema Chödrön
Everything is change, he said, and everything is connected.
Also everything returns, but what returns is not
what went away
– Louise Glück
All violence is the result of people
tricking themselves into believing
that their pain derives from other people
and that consequently those people deserve
to be punished.
– Marshall Rosenberg
A Poem in October
by Dylan Thomas
It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron priested shore
The morning beckoned with water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net-webbed wall
Myself to set foot that second
In the still sleeping town and set forth
My birthday began with the water birds
And the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose in a rainy autumn
And walked abroad in shower of all my days
High tide and the heron dived
When I took the road over the border
And the gates of the town closed as the town awoke
A springful of larks in a rolling cloud
And the roadside bushes brimming with whistling blackbirds
And the sun of October, summery on the hill’s shoulder
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly come in the morning
Where I wandered and listened to the rain wringing wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me
Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea-wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle brown as owls
But all the gardens of spring and summer
Were blooming in the tall tales beyond the border
And under the lark full cloud
There could I marvel my birthday away
But the weather turned around
It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples, pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning, so clearly, a child’s forgotten mornings
When he walked with his mother through the parables of sunlight
And the legends of the green chapels
And the twice-told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks, and his heart moved in mine
These were the woods the river and the sea
Where a boy in the listening summertime of the dead
Whispered the truth of his joy to the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide
And the mystery sang alive
Still in the water and singing birds
And there could I marvel my birthday away
But the weather turned around
And the true joy of the long dead child sang burning in the sun
It was my seventy-second Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood
O may my heart’s truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year’s turning.
In the subconscious fantasies that make conception look so alluring, it is often ourselves that we would like to see live forever, not someone with a personality of his own. Having anticipated the onward march of our selfish genes, many of us are unprepared for children who present unfamiliar needs. Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger, and the more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity. We depend on the guarantee in our children’s faces that we will not die. Children whose defining quality annihilates that fantasy of immortality are a particular insult; we must love them for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them, and that is a great deal harder to do. Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination. Our children are not us: they carry throwback genes and recessive traits and are subject right from the start to environmental stimuli beyond our control. And yet we are our children; the reality of being a parent never leaves those who have braved the metamorphosis.
– Andrew Solomon
Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.
– Theodore Sturgeon
I’ve never had anyone’s approval,
so I’ve learned to live without it.
– Pat Conroy
You have taken a step toward idiocy if you let yourself talk to a machine.
– Wendell Berry
To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot stop talking—
– Blanchot
My beloved October has returned —
with its brilliant colors,
cool temperatures and sunny,
cloudless, azure skies,
and I must enjoy it
before it escapes for another year.
– Peggy Toney Horton
Poor New Mexico! So far from Heaven; so close to Texas.
– Manuel Armijo
Wholly pledged to passion, and still attached to life –
I worship lightning, and lament the harvest lost.
– Ghalib
(tr. Frances W. Pritchett
& Owen T.A. Cornwall)
As far as possible one should not interfere in the affairs of others.
– Sri Ramana Maharshi
lavender tea
before and after
the first snow
– Hifsa Ashraf
Back in the early eighties, I realized that you could write a story that was really just a narration of something that had happened to you, and change it slightly, without having really to fictionalize it.
– Lydia Davis
The pattern of your speech
is the pattern of your life,
the old monk asserted.
– The Old Monk
it gets dark early, now that the end of october will soon be here. the trees turned colourful as they do every year. and still you write it down, even though it happens every year.
– Anselm Kiefer; tr. Tess Lewis
Wisdom is merely the movement from fighting life to embracing it.
– Rasheed Ogunlaru
All achievements, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea.
– Napoleon Hill
The final stage of wisdom is becoming a kid again.
– Maxime Lagacé
Even the old
monk could see
how slow he
was,
the poet said.
– The Old Monk
[…] almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of ‘psst’ that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.
– David Foster Wallace
Things happen because people make them happen.
– Soledad Francis PhD
Revelation must be terrible
knowing you can
never hide your voice again.
– David Whyte
I don’t dream at night, I dream all day; I dream for a living.
– Steven Spielberg
Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.
– Mahatma Gandhi
Life knows us not and we do not know life – we don’t even know our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever, and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit.
– Joseph Conrad
People who double down on
kindness even when life has
been rough bring a special
magic into the world.
A hard past has taught them
to be cautious and intentional
without completely closing
their heart.
They treat people gently
because they know that many
are struggling in silence.
– Yung Pueblo
Do you know that now you seem even more incomprehensibly miraculous than ever?
– Franz Kafka, 1913.
Words, the profits of a quarter-hour wrenched from the charred tree of language, between the good mornings and the good nights, doors that enter and exit and enter on a corridor that goes from noplace to nowhere.
– Octavio Paz, (tr. Eliot Weinberger)
Emptiness isn’t a realm separate from other realms, it is the Emptiness, or Transparency, of all realms.
– Ken Wilber
I can see that it might look as though you were simply pawns in a game. It can certainly be looked at like that. But think of it. You were lucky pawns. There was a certain climate and now it’s gone. You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in this world. People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.
It might be just some trend that came and went. But for us, it’s our life.
Yes, that’s true. But think of it. You were better off than many who came before you. And who knows what those who come after you will have to face.”
– Kazuo Ishiguro
It’s difficult to enter
the silence that envelops everything.
Yet, to become truly yourself,
you must rebel against
the need to know.
Meditate and see yourself with diamond eyes –
strong, sharp, and clear.
Control nothing.
Learn each inch of yourself:
flesh, bone, blood, joy,
desire, despair.
Then know others are just the same.
What turns your body into light?
What turns your life into love?
Find it and use it.
Use it unabashedly,
recklessly, radically
with your total being.
Use your life for others.
Go on.
Use it.
And then,
in place of why,
true knowing arises.
– Leza Lowitz
Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one’s capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable.
– Erich Fromm
A painting is not a picture of an experience; it is an experience.
– Mark Rothko
Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.
– Eric Hoffer
Blissful are those who worship sun and earth For there’s only love and kindness, no hostilities, no hatred. Suddenly, tears well up in my eyes I choke in my burning chest, ah! But why then can we not be this way? Come to our senses and wish to be humans.
– Fereydoon Moshiri
That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
– Erich Fromm
I could be both an I
and the world. The great eye
of the world is both gaze
and gloss. To be swallowed
by being seen. A dream.
To be made whole
by being not a witness,
but witnessed.
– Ada Limón
He slept like an animal, well and lightly, faced in the opposite direction from that of a man; for a man going to sleep is about to escape into it while animals are prepared to escape out of it.
– Theodore Sturgeon
… the emotive valences evoked by sensations of awe and curiosity stretch across time and place … these feelings are quite primal, and, like a range of other sensorial responses shared by animals, do not even appear to be unique to humans.
– Travis Zadeh, Wonders and Rarities
The ancient Greeks turned to wonder at the cosmos as the first steps in philosophy, pausing in perplexity at the hidden causes behind natural phenomena.
– Travis Zadeh, Wonders and Rarities
The dimensions of what we have fucked up in this country are beyond any coherent explanation.
– Hunter S Thompson
Meditation looks inward, poetry holds forth. One is private, the other is out in the world. One enters the moment, the other shares it. But in practice it is never entirely clear which is doing which.
– Gary Snyder
People get absolutely intolerable when they have a creative idea in their womb and can’t bring it out. They’re neurotic, aggressive, irritable, and depressed. So then one has to help them bring the child out.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
We shall be better prepared
for the future if we see how
terrible, how doomed
the present is.
– Iris Murdoch
As long as you understand the assignment, that’s all that matters. You’ll be guided and protected all the way through.
– Nika Solé
It is very simple to be happy,
but it is very difficult
to be simple.
– Rabindranath Tagore
She felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life. Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia.
– Gabriel García Márquez
The sins of the ancestors continue down the generations until one person comes to consciousness and redeems the curse.
– Sally Kester
Temporary Job
by Minnie Bruce Pratt
Leaving again. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t be
grieving. The particulars of place lodged in me,
like this room I lived in for eleven days,
how I learned the way the sun laid its palm
over the side window in the morning, heavy
light, how I’ll never be held in that hand again.
For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. I…] We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit is part of my nation.
In my own very self, I am part of my family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters. I…. What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections, especially those related to money, and re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family. Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly, slowly happen.
– D. H. Lawrence
this caterpillar
still not a butterfly
deep into autumn
– Basho
A world that’s third eye blind will tell you you’re seeing things for simply seeing through the illusion.
– Nika Solé
Every cause is tainted: and you reject this one, espouse that other one as if one were evil and the other good while the same evil you hate is in both, but disguised in different words… What you want to reform are not institutions – it is human nature. … Not that I think mankind intrinsically bad. It is only silly and cowardly. Now You know that in cowardice is every evil – especially that cowardice so
characteristic of our civilization.
– Joseph Conrad
The devil is a liar. When he comes for you, tell him this to his face. The devil’s entire shtick is to convince you that your world is a loop & no progress is possible. But you’ve seen progress in your own experience. The devil is a liar. When he comes for you, laugh in his face.
– Kenneth Folk
“You need to hate the world enough to change it, but love it enough to consider it worth changing.” Action is the offspring of dark pessimism and frenzied optimism..working in tandem.
– Chesterton
the nocturnal desire to turn around in order to see what belongs neither to the visible nor to the invisible
– Blanchot
There is no better place for hiding a secret than an unfinished novel.
– Italo Calvino
Relax a little, give life a chance to flow its own way, unassisted by your mind and effort. Stop directing the river’s flow.
– Mooji
All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.
– Walter Pater
the old, forked oak
graciously accommodates
a tired hiker
– @HaikuHedgehog
The image not only is offered to me—it assails me.
– Jacques Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word
You perceive the force of a word. He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense. I don’t say this by way of disparagement. It
is better for mankind to be impressionable than reflective. Nothing humanely great — great, I mean, as affecting a whole mass of lives — has come from reflection. On the other hand, you cannot fail to see the power of mere words; such words as Glory, for instance, or Pity. I won’t mention any more. They are not far to seek. Shouted with perseverance, with ardour, with conviction, these two by their sound alone have set whole nations in motion and upheaved
the dry, hard ground on which rests our whole social fabric.
– Joseph Conrad
Every external thing you desire becomes attainable through how you live your inner-life.
– Bryant McGill
Jung did not believe that authentic religiosity was expressed in these peak experiences. Rather he advised people to turn towards their fears, much as the mystics welcomed the dark night of the soul. This shadow is experienced as a foe, but it is really a friend because it contains clues as to what the individual lacks, rejects and distrusts.
– Mark Vernon
If celebrities start taking over the very lucrative poetry market, I’m finished.
– Andy Perrin
October Sonnet
by Adrian Matejka
—after Ted Berrigan
Even on the 13th floor of a high building, Chicago’s
wind winds its slick way through any unsecured
window on its singsong to the lake. It’s fine-tuned,
perfectly pitched in this sinister season
of cackling jack-o’-lanterns & candy corns
nobody eats unless they’re the last sweets left.
Bags of fun nonsense for all the little ninjas
& ghosts. It’s true, I weep too much when
the seasons partition: snack-sized tears dropping onto
tear-sized leaves swirling in the autumn
of my reproduction. Occasional receipts & parking
tickets, too, yellowed during their own windy migrations.
Like the rest of us gusty apparitions, every
untethered thing ends up at the lake shore seasonally.
There is this difference between the growth of some human beings and that of others: in the one case it is a continuous dying, in the other a continuous resurrection.
– George MacDonald
I recommend empathizing instead of mocking.
– Tao Lin
Write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.
– Erica Jong
Women aren’t rehabilitation centers for unstable and insecure men.
– @the_wildwoman
EVERYTHING IS ENERGY.
Your thought begins it, Your emotion amplifies it, and your action increases its momentum.
– Deborah King
For all of us there comes a time when oars fail, when there is nothing left to do but surrender to the great unknown.
– Noelle Oxenhandler
Politics is mere bread and circuses, where cabal-owned actors play hero and villain roles to distract, divide, and control the masses while both sides push the same agenda. Buying into their manipulative game only guarantees the circus continues.
– Andrea Lynn
Being loved correctly has the power to rewrite your entire brain. Just like it takes one win to make up for all your losses? Same with relationships. Keep your faith.
– @kenzsinterlude
To know and not to do
is to not yet to know.
– Zen Wisdom
So do write, don’t be afraid of words. The trick is to give the sentence an air of incompletion, of mystery, of the infinitely approximate, that entices the reader to do the work of completion without words. You will surely find
fulfillment that way.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
Not everyone
is a physician
but sooner or later everyone
fails to heal.
In Gaza, a girl and her brother
rescued their fish
from the rubble of airstrikes. A miracle
its tiny bowl
didn’t shatter.
– Fady Joudah
I speak the way I speak inside. Not with the voice intent on sounding human, but with the other one, the one that insists I’m still a creature of the forest.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
We learn poetry from the animal in the woods.
– Ernst Herbeck
A Morning in Recovery
It took twenty minutes of debate,
but I spread both butter and jam on my toast.
Outside the kitchen window,
children wait for the school bus,
puffer coats zipped up to their pink cheeks.
When I was little I thought being a grown-up
meant getting to eat whatever you want.
Glad to prove myself right-
at least for today.
– @megannn_lynne
The question which remains to us is this: what is humanity? What do we have to do to keep humanity as one thing and not another?
– Han Kang
Reading, and sauntering, and lounging, and dozing, which I call thinking, is my supreme happiness.
– David Hume
Sunlight is painting.
– Nathaniel Hawthorne
The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
– Kurt Vonnegut
A billion stars go spinning through the night
Glittering above your head
But in you is the presence that will be
When all the stars are dead
– Rainer Maria Rilke
We move forward, yes. But always in an effort to recover the past.
– Sigmund Freud
He is one cloudless night away from baying at the moon.
– David Rothkopf
The poetry that ends up mattering speaks to things we half-know but are inarticulate about. It gives us language and the music of language for what we didn’t know we knew. So a combination of insight and beauty.
– Stephen Dunn
Mastery of reading and writing requires a master. Still more so life.
– Marcus Aurelius
Don’t let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.
– Anais Nin
Even the sharpest sword cannot cut its own handle.
– Chinese proverb
If you want to change the world, change the metaphor. Change the story.
– Joseph Campbell
Friends are as companions on a journey, who ought to aid each other to persevere in the road to a happier life.
– Pythagoras
I was waiting for something extraordinary to happen, but as the years wasted on, nothing ever did unless I caused it.
– Charles Bukowski
I regret that it takes a life to know how to live.
– Johnathon Safarn Foer
Unconditional Love conquers all!
– Aimee Cabo Nikolov
The further I advance, the more I realize that the only balm, the only refuge, the true solution to the immense problem of life is in this frequent, fruitful, intimate struggle with the particular idea, the subject, the possible, the occasion.
– Henry James
Love is too precious to be ashamed of.
– Laurell K. Hamilton
A single word can brighten the face of one who knows the value of words
– Yunus Emre
If you love someone, you must be prepared to set them free.
– Paulo Coelho
The divine metabolism of the living world
– Heinrich Zimmer
There are no seven wonders of the world in the eyes of a child. There are seven million.
– Walt Streightiff
I love the Sahā world. It is stable as a rock. You can always rest here, get a coffee & a hug, and a good night’s sleep. We feel safe here & call this world home. But if you think this is the only world, or even the best, my dude you have some exciting experiences in your future.
– Kenneth Folk
Every book needs an Anti-Acknowledgements section for the people who seemed to go out of their way to make it impossible for you to finish your project.
– Drew McKevitt
Don’t try to change other people, change your relationship with them. If they are an abuser, blamer, complainer, drama queen, energy vampire, manipulator, narcissist, or taker, give them less access. If they reciprocate, support you, or give you more peace, give them more access.
– Inner Practitioner
Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble the picture.
– Iris Murdoch
You see the reflection and you want it more than the truth. You yearn to be that dream you could never get to.
– Weyes Blood
We turn and turn in the animal belly, in the mineral belly, in the belly of time. To find the way out: the poem.
– Octavio Paz, (tr. Eliot Weinberger)
in order
for there
to be love
let there
be wild-
erness
in the eyes
– Gale Nelson
Bookstores are places, too, that can interrupt the flow of publishing’s culture industry by showcasing books that customers might not otherwise see. The art of handselling is a beautiful thing.
– Dan Sinykin
Being all-victorious is not a matter of talking yourself in to believing everything is okay. Rather, if you actually look, if you take your whole being apart and examine it, you find that you are genuine and good as you are. In fact, the whole of existence is well-constructed, so that there is very little room for mishaps.
There are, of course, constant challenges. But for the true warrior, there is no warfare. You are never at war with your world.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The stages of getting into reading a philosopher:
1. Taking everything they say as gospel, as incontestably true.
2. Beginning to ever so briefly doubt certain aspects of a few
of their ideas.
3. Seeing—but internally denying— the little spaces where
they have missed the mark and shown traces of an all-too-
human bias.
4. Scoffing with self-important narcissistic distaste at their
concepts that you firmly yet falsely believe you have finally
understood and mastered.
5. Writing with fervour a counter-essay to their philosophies,
aggressively pointing out where they were horribly and
irredeemably short-sighted.
6. Seeing a fuller picture after taking a long break from
reading them and slowly but surely reconcling with their
views, taking the corn and leaving the husk.
7. Subconsciously thanking them for all they have contributed
to your development and finally diverging on your own
path, with what they taught you now ingrained gracefully in
your character.
All day I worked outside in the cold air
under a heavy sky, running a chain saw,
stacking firewood, tearing up the last bits
of garden, turning compost. Now outside
a cold wind blows, a cold rain
comes down. Inside, I lie under the quilt,
drinking sweet black tea and warm milk
and reading poems from long ago.
– David Budbill
To the dull mind, all nature is leaden. To the illuminated mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.
– Emerson
The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky—
No higher than the soul is high.
– Edna St. Vincent Millay
Look at you comforting others with the words you wish to hear.
– William Wordsworth
The plain truth is that you’d have an easier time standing in the middle of the Mississippi River and requesting that it flow backward than to expect people of different races and backgrounds to stop loving each other, stop marrying each other, stop starting families, stop enjoying the dreams that love inspires. Love is unstoppable.
– James McBride, The Color of Water
If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all.
– Billie Holiday
I tell my piano the things I used to tell you.
– Frédéric Chopin
One must have courage to see what one does see and not to deny it for convenience.
– Javier Marías
Criticism, like dreams, often involves some act of displacement, in which the writer transfers feeling from her own life to the object, or in which one object substitutes for another.
– Christine Smallwood
Hatred stirreth up strifes:
but love covereth all sins.
– Proverbs 10:12
It is so lonely to feel deeply about the world and be met with the complete failure of language to communicate it. Poetry gets us marginally (but importantly!) closer than rhetorical language, like how standing on a roof gets one a few feet closer to grabbing a star than standing in the dirt. It makes the loneliness of being here a little easier to bear.
– Kaveh Akbar
you have your life until you use it. you forfeit the only life you know or go to your grave with the song curled inside you.
– c. d. wright
Only one thing is of absolute importance and that is your connectedness with being.
– Eckhart Tolle
The body needs the mind to wander ghostlike through its corridors when pain severs it from the world; the mind needs the body to hold the book and turn the page and decant the sea with both hands.
– Christina Tudor-Sideri
You carry the most important things in you for forty or fifty years before you venture to articulate them. For this very reason, you cannot reckon what is lost with those people who die early. All people die early.
– The Human Province, Elias Canetti; tr. Joachim Neugroschel
It is the road, beyond the horizon;
it is the warmth, of home-cooked food.
The tinkling, of sand-smoothed rocks;
the anguish, of bereaved parents.
It courses, through every description;
and poems fall silent, without its flame.
– @AmericanSijo
It is, of course, always nice to be praised. But this is really not the point, it’s ever so much nicer to be understood.
– Hannah Arendt
The unconscious is the big Other’s discourse in which the subject receives his own forgotten message in the inverted form suitable for promises.
– Jacques Lacan
Of what consequence to you, reader, is my obscure individuality? I live, like you, in a century in which reason submits only to fact and to evidence. My name, like yours, is truth-seeker.
– Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Said the river… imagine all you can imagine and then “keep on going.”
– Mary Oliver
I don’t know how humanity stands it
with a painted paradise at the end of it
without a painted paradise at the end of it.
– Canto LXXIV
Sometimes the most “spiritual” thing you can do is rest. You don’t always have to pressure yourself to do an entire mindfulness / spiritual routine. At some, moments you simply just need rest to heal and connect with your soul.
– @JaviaAlvarado
I hate the first inexact, inadequate expression of things. The whole joy of writing comes from the opportunity to go over it and make it good, one way or another.
– James Salter
The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.
– Elizabeth Hardwick
This transcendental bliss, continuity, and beingness is not based on fantasies, ideas, or fears.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Real awareness cannot develop if you are trying to chop your experience into categories and put into pigeon holes.
– Chögyam Trungpa
I’ve taken my typewriter to the hospital with me for kidney infections. I have taken it on camping trips, and the sand has gotten in the keys. It is just like the most fierce habit you can imagine. It is there, and it stares at you like a conscience.
– Erma Bombeck
I don’t care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations…I don’t think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren’t there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?
– Graham Greene
They are everywhere.
The tragedy-sniffers are all
about
they get up in the morning
and begin to find things
wrong
and they fling themselves
into a rage about
it,
a rage that lasts until
bedtime,
where even there
they twist in their
insomnia,
not able to rid their
mind
of the petty obstacles
they have
encountered.
They feel set against,
it’s a plot.
And by being constantly
angry they feel that
they are constantly
right.
You see them in traffic
honking wildly
at the slightest
infraction,
cursing,
spewing their
invectives.
You feel them
in lines
at banks
at supermarkets
at movies,
they are pressing
at your back
walking on your
heels,
they are impatient to
a fury.
They are everywhere
and into
everything,
these violently
unhappy
souls.
Actually they are
frightened,
never wanting to be
wrong
they lash out
incessantly
it is a malady
an illness of
that
breed.
The first one
I saw like that
was my
father
and since then
I have seen a
thousand
fathers,
ten thousand
fathers
wasting their lives
in hatred,
tossing their lives
into the
cesspool
and
ranting
on.
– Charles Bukowski
SLOW DOWN AND MEET THE FAST GODDESS
Slip between moon into solid fragrance.
Memorize the fierce beauty written on the face of glaciers.
Keep walking.
If this is the day the ground opens,
then it is.
Bake a cake of many grains and go down.
You will lose your mother—and gain a recipe.
Follow the rules:
Eat nothing
Don’t linger
Love the fierce beauty of the taken daughter that is yourself.
Track mountain lion into the den of the invisible
become snake and vice
versa; curl & swirl, shimmer into Vendredi,
into Kali Durga, Pele, and La Diosa de Las Serpientes,
clamour of skulls around your waist.
Slip between seasons into the mythology of river.
turn as aspens do, both under and gold.
Flicker into ripe.
Rhyme with sideways, with bangle, with breathless and the first
word for chaos you can think of –
the light right now is such a good guess.
Keep going.
Learn what is good enough to say twice.
Let’s tangle with undying love –
take it on, take it on –
take on a round of immortal, burn all
the way to ash and rise as berry.
Hunter’s Moon: come find me,
I’m in full décolleté camo,
dressed as cattail and raven’s caw, braceleted in fallen grasses.
If you are first frost, let me be your early thaw.
We’ll make a supple weather out of amnesia, inscribe
remembering on clouds.
I want to dive, cirrus, into your name,
nimble one, all clues aside,
I’ll come up hooked.
Reel me in, back to this world,
from that,
I wriggle, good god, moon fish,
shining in your breathing hands.
– Judyth Hill, Writing Down the Moon
Enjoy yourself, and be happy and free, and spread the kindness back out into the universe (infinitely).
– Owen
We must unite as individuals, families, cities, and nations for discussing strategies of self-protection and survival, and, to get out of the dangerous situation we are in, practicing mindfulness must be collective.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
We can change, evolve, and transform our own conditioning. We can choose to move like water rather than be molded like clay.
– Terry Tempest Williams
My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets. He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals.
– Frank O’Hara
The novel makes itself, I make it, and it makes me.
– Claude Simon
Donald Trump
will never understand
what America is.
– Andy Perrin
We truly love only those books which are not a whole, which are chaotic, which are helpless.
– Thomas Bernhard
At first all young people are receptive to everything, hence also to art, but the teachers thoroughly drive the art out of them.
– Thomas Bernhard
Facing personal truths and purging yourself of addictions or manipulative habits require strength, courage, humility, faith, and other qualities of a soul with stamina because you are not just changing yourself; you are changing your universe. Your soul is a compass. Change one coordinate in your spiritual compass and you change your entire life’s direction.
– Caroline Myss
You know my methods. Apply them.
– Arthur Conan Doyle
Almost all the great novels have as their motif, more or less disguised, the “passage from childhood to maturity”, the clash between the thrill of expectation, and the disillusioning knowledge of the truth.
– André Maurois
October Funeral
for Ag
The world is shedding
its thousand skins.
The snake goes naked,
and the needles of the pine fall out
like the teeth of a comb I broke
upon your hair last week.
The ghosts of dead leaves
haunt no one. Impossible
to give you to the weather,
to leave you locked in a killed tree.
No metaphysic has prepared us
for the simple act of turning
and walking away.
– Linda Pastan
To have lost both eternity and time!
– Cioran
Do not leave the task of governing your heart to those affections akin to autumn whose placid demeanor and whose affable death-pangs they borrow.
– René Char (translated by Mary Ann Caws)
I was silent as a child, and silenced as a young woman; I am taking my lumps and bumps for being a big mouth, now, but usually from those whose opinion I don’t respect.
– Sandra Cisneros
The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future.
– Plato
It seems to me that life’s circumstances, being ephemeral, teach us less about durable truths than the fictions based on those truths; and that the best lessons of delicacy and self-respect are to be found in novels where the feelings are so naturally portrayed that you fancy you are witnessing real life as
you read.
– Germaine de Staël
Everything affects everything. In this universe, when one thing changes, everything changes. Hence the great power of man in changing the world by changing himself.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
job prescription
by Evie Shockley
will poetry change the world? no one asks
this about football, the thrill of watching or
playing. we get that nurses & doctors are
healers. no question that rabbis, priests, &
imams guide individuals & groups through
spiritual thickets. we don’t tell cooks to put
down their wooden spoons & go make a real
difference instead of a real soufflé. teachers
are honored for the learning they impart. so
let poets keep on exciting passion in them-
selves & others. don’t discourage us from our
efforts to diagnose the human heart or create
trail markers for those coming behind us on
this journey. trust me when i say that poetry
heals, guides, feeds, & enlivens. poetry may
not change the world, but might change you.
watched by a cold moon
third-generation angler
on the Aegean
– Roberta Beach Jacobson
The best essays come from the moment in which people really need to work something out.
– Marilynne Robinson
blue collar . . .
the way he wipes his hands
before shaking mine
– @ruralitalics
Words have always been the enemy of belief; they don’t take us into faith but away from it.
– Pico Iyer
Perform all thy actions with mind concentrated on the Divine, renouncing attachment and looking upon success and failure with an equal eye. Spirituality implies equanimity.
– Bhagavad Gita
Although it’s true that the raft of the noble eightfold path is abandoned on reaching the farther shore, you still have to hold on to it while you’re crossing the river. Otherwise, you’ll be swept downstream.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu
You belong to your place by your own knowledge of what it is that no other place is, and by your caring for it, as you care for no other place. This place that you belong to though it is not yours.
– Wendell Berry
between
night and day
dormant
lamentations
– Andy Perrin
In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves.
– Simone de Beauvoir
All the universe is ultimately nothing but meaning, the Word, pure knowledge. You yourself are pure knowledge undifferentiated, though you think you are differentiated— and from there comes the trouble, the misunderstanding of the Word. When differentiating yourself from the world, you do so as well from the meaning of the Word.
The true literary creator, or reader, is he who lives in undifferentiated silence, and worships this silence in such a way that the silence worships itself in vibratory sound. For the serious writer, this is a spiritual experience, leading him or her to the Absolute.
In the dissolution of the Word there is joy. In the dissolution of the ego, the Absolute. In that sense, all words, all literature are prayers to take you from your ego-ridden condition to the Absolute, the Truth.
– Raja Rao
Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.
– Robert Oppenheimer
COOP WITH BUFF ORPINGTONS
BY ABBIE KIEFER
When my kids were smaller and liked coloring together, I specialized in landscapes: evergreens clustered under a yellow-coin sun, untroubled clouds outlined in blue. Cumulus- the kind that dissolve by day’s end. I’d crayon them in big puffs, same way l’d draw sheep, pillowed and cuddlesome. Real clouds are only damp air and the fleece of a sheep is stuck through with hay, but my hands want to make comfort.
All lovers are in God.
– Alda Merini
Perchance, dear reader, you will then believe that nothing is stranger and madder than actual life, and that this is all that the poet can conceive, as it were in the dull reflection of a dimly polished mirror.
– E. T. A. Hoffmann
Stop wanting things to be easy and prepare for them to be hard.
– Ryan Holiday
Sometimes There Is A Day
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Sometimes there is a day you just want
to get far away from.
Feel it shrink inside you like an island,
as if you were on a boat.
I always wish to be on a boat.
Then, maybe, no more fighting
about land. I want that day to feel
as if it never happened, when Ahmad was burned,
when people were killed, when my cousin was shot.
The day someone went to jail
is not a day that shines. I want to have a clear mind
again, as a baby who stares at the light
wisping through the window and thinks,
That’s mine.
Surrender all thought, emotion, and circumstance to that which is bigger and deeper. Surrender your identity. Surrender your suffering to that which is closer than identity, deeper than suffering. Do you discover victory or defeat in this surrender?
– Gangaji
low tide
we roam the beach
and try to catch all the poems
before they go back
into the sea
– @NJBarico
Time is but a fragile thread,
Woven through the paths we tread,
In the forest’s heart, we come to find,
Eternity’s echo in the quiet mind.
– Amy Christie
LEAVES
Years do odd things to identity.
What does it mean to say
I am that child in the photograph
at Kishamish in 1935?
Might as well say I am the shadow
of a leaf of the acacia tree
felled seventy years ago
moving on the page the child reads.
Might as well say I am the words she read
or the words I wrote in other years,
flicker of shade and sunlight
as the wind moves through the leaves.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
No despair of ours can alter the reality of things,
or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there.
– Thomas Merton
It’s quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don’t do it.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
You have a picture of life within you, a faith, a challenge, and you were ready for deeds and sufferings and sacrifices, and then you became aware by degrees that the world asked no deeds and no sacrifices of you whatever, and that life is no poem of heroism with heroic parts to play and so on, but a comfortable room where people are quite content with eating and drinking, coffee and knitting, cards and wireless. And whoever wants more and has got it in him—the heroic and the beautiful, and the reverence for the great poets or for the saints—is a fool and a Don Quixote.
– Hermann Hesse
There is no way out of the spiritual battle
There is no way to avoid taking sides
There is no way you can not have a poetics
no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher
you do it in the consciousness of making
or not making yr world
you have a poetics: you step into the world
like a suit of readymade clothes
or you etch in light your
firmament spills into the shape of your room
the shape of the poem, of yr body, of yr loves
A woman’s life / a man’s life is an allegory
Dig it
There is no way out of the spiritual battle
the war is the war against the imagination
you can’t sign up as a conscientious objector
the war of the worlds hangs here, right now, in the balance
it is a war for this world, to keep it
a vale of soul-making
the taste in all our mouths is the taste of our power
and it is bitter as death
bring yr self home to yrself, enter the garden
the guy at the gate w/ the flaming sword is yrself
the war is the war for the human imagination
and no one can fight it but you/ & no one can fight it for you
The imagination is not only holy, it is precise
it is not only fierce, it is practical
men die everyday for the lack of it,
it is vast & elegant
intellectus means “light of the mind”
it is not discourse it is not even language
the inner sun the
polis is constellated around the sun
the fire is central
– Diane di Prima
She went stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot, staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime, and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky blights which, though snow-white on the apple-tree trunks, made madder stains on her skin…
– Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. Each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow.
– Gustave Flaubert
The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person’s nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.
– Truman Capote
And let the days go by, and let the time pass, and huddle beneath your impenetrable integument, and wait, and wait, and every once in a long while you will have that moment of lonely consciousness when there is no one around to see; and then it may burst from you and you may dance, or cry, or twist the hair on your head till your eyeballs blaze, or do any of the other things your so unfashionable nature thirstily demands.
– Theodore Sturgeon
The struggle to exist, to not disappear in this moment, is the advancing root of the struggle to exist throughout the whole passage of time. We need to help each other in this struggle. You by asking, I by struggling to respond. This is the law of love, which rules the universe.
– Jacob Needleman
I love unmade beds. I love when people are drunk and crying and cannot be anything but honest in that moment. I love the look in people’s eyes when they realize they’re in love. I love the way people look when they first wake up and they’ve forgotten their surroundings. I love the gasp people take when their favourite character dies. I love when people close their eyes and drift to somewhere in the clouds. I fall in love with people and their honest moments all the time. I fall in love with their breakdowns and their smeared makeup and their daydreams. Honesty is just too beautiful to ever put into words.
– Jamie Campbell Bower
AGAIN WE INTERRUPT THE DISHES
by Robert Wood Lynn
The rinsing of one another’s spoons. In this path worn
by all lesser chores, we will trace our scamper
to the park. The bedroom. Bars dark enough
for friends to hold us unembarrassed
by the shoulders. We will make records
of affection, rare things as necessary
as they are unreachable if asked for. And again
they’ll sing, our friends, straight into our mouths.
And again, we’ll let summer draw us
a field precisely for tossing an apple
back and forth, forth and back, until perfect-
far too bruised to eat. The way we did the day
I learned I loved you. Your joy is an airship
tied to earth by the prospect of its absence. And you
discovered mine ballasted by the dead
weight of the past. Faithful, how morning
will return us to these foamy cups, our plates
half scrubbed. Their ring around the sink.
And even that, a language written for us.
Even that, a way of holding
Fierce compassion knows how to say no with love and how to leverage the kind of strength it takes to pop the balloon of arrogance.
– Ethan Nichtern
Everything that visits awareness is a guest – a warmly
welcomed, vivid, and intriguing guest.
– Ethan Nichtern
To realize that
the critic is just a voice,
rather than an objective
reality, is a massive
step forward.
– Ethan Nichtern
so round and simple
the autumn moon like the fool
who survived it all
– Clark Strand
All things are primordial echoes of a never-spoken love-Word breaking into the present moment as though from a very great distance . . .
– Stephen Hatch, Wilderness Mysticism
How hard to realize that every camp of men or beast has this glorious starry firmament for a roof! In such places standing alone on the mountain-top, it is easy to realize that whatever special nests we make – leaves and moss-like the marmots and birds, or tents or piled stone – we all dwell in a house of one room – the world with the firmament for its roof – and are sailing the celestial spaces without leaving any track.
– John Muir
Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows.
– C.S. Lewis, Equality
As I understand it, into the heart of every Christian, Christ comes, and Christ goes. When, by his Grace, the landscape of the heart becomes vast and deep and limitless, then Christ makes His abode in that graceful heart, and His Will prevails. The experience is recognized as Peace. In the absence of this experience much activity arises, divisions of every sort. Outside of the organizational enterprise, which some applaud and some mistrust, stands the figure of Jesus, nailed to a human predicament, summoning the heart to comprehend its own suffering by dissolving itself in a radical confession of hospitality.
– Leonard Cohen
I was aware at an early age that this country is rotten to the core, but it took years to begin to understand why it was rotten, what produces the rot.
– Gary Indiana
i’m not much of a hacker techie type now (i used to be ish) — but the particular patient ethos of “okay that didn’t work, what should i try next?” is something that would be so valuable for so many
– @hOmmelette
speak across borders
even if borders pass through every word.
– Ingeborg Bachmann
Shift your pace.
Try slow motion.
Let your healing catch up to you.
– Dr. Thema
Can thought ever be at peace? It can think about peace and attempt to be peaceful, forcing itself to be still, but can thought in itself be tranquil? Is not thought in its very nature restless?
– Krishnamurti
When you go through the kind of excruciatingly difficult journey that is almost beyond words, you find out who cares about you. But, even more importantly, you have to decide how much you care about you. You have to decide it again and again, particularly when you are in a situation where the game is to belittle, gaslight, defame and frighten you. Self-love becomes the ultimate test. You either think you’re worth it, or you don’t. It helps to remember your soul in moments like those. It holds no illusions about your perfection, but it loves you without fail. And if it’s been around long enough, it’s built for crucibles of epic proportions.
– Jeff Brown
You have everything in you that Buddha has, that Christ has. But only when you start to acknowledge your own beauty.
– Ram Dass
Most successful people move with this mindset:
Entitled to nothing, willing to earn everything.
– Codie Sanchez
We are perpetually frustrated because the verbal and abstract thinking of the brain gives the false impression of being able to cut loose from all finite limitations.
It forgets that an infinity of anything is not a reality but an abstract concept, and persuades us that we desire this fantasy as a real goal of living.
The externalized symbol of this way of thinking is that almost entirely rational and inorganic object, the machine, which gives us the sense of being able to approach infinity.
For the machine can submit to strains far beyond the capacity of the body, and to monotonous rhythms which the human being could never stand.
Useful as it would be as a tool and a servant, we worship its rationality, its efficiency, and its power to abolish limitations of time and space, and thus permit it to regulate our lives.
– Alan Watts
Boy and Top
Each time he spins it,
it lands, precisely,
at the center of the world.
– Octavio Paz (tr. Muriel Rukeyser)
Not everyone was meant to evolve. Instead, they’re here to remind you what it looks like if you don’t.
– Vida Rz
There are those for whom autumn is a season of sadness. They cling desperately to the green and the flowering. And then there are those of us who are autumn’s children. Those for whom the ever crisper weather portends a turning inward toward story, toward poetry, toward reflection and candlelight. We listen to the patter of falling leaves like arcane music and rejoice at the bare branches against the long red sunset skies. Autumn children can tell you where the crows are flying. We listen in the dark for the return of the owl with all her secrets.
– Erin Coughlin Hollowell
May you forget, once for all, all ideas of doing anything to win the love of God.
– Charles Spurgeon
I call on the law of forgiveness. I am free from mistakes and the consequences of mistakes. I am under grace and not under karmic law.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
You cannot use someone else’s map to find yourself.
– Michaela Angemeer
No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.
– Karl Popper
The same pride that makes us criticize the faults we think we do not have, also leads us to feel disdain for the good qualities we do not have.
– François de La Rochefoucauld
No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.
– Gabriel García Márquez
October is a hallelujah! reverberating in my body year-round…
– John Nichols
A walk is like a conversation: it puts distance between oneself and the other, a close distance, a distance made of a closeness that transforms the landscape of the soul into a murmur, a noising abroad.
– Paul Celan; tr. Rosmarie Waldrop
Silence is an ocean. Speech is a river. When the ocean is searching for you, don’t walk into the river. Listen to the ocean.
– Rumi
Yes, all of this is sorrow. But leave a little love burning always like the small bulb in the room of a sleeping baby that gives him a bit of security and quiet love though he doesn’t know what light is or where it comes from.
– Yehuda Amichai
Why do I live in the desert? Because the desert is the locus Dei – the place of God.
– Edward Abbey
Arise and drink your bliss, for every thing that lives is holy!
– William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion
A library is a second home for those who love to read. Within its walls, ignorance is healed. Books are to the mind what bandages are to wounds. Libraries should be as common as pharmacies.
– Gloria Fuertes
The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.
– Sydney J. Harris
Here’s the thing about making art: like love, it’s inconvenient. It’s messy, and it wants to be made at all the wrong times. Like when you’ve got a plan, a failproof plan, to do nothing, to look good, to turn off your brain, to escape. Here comes an idea, demanding to be heard. Here come the tears. You’re gonna let them out, or you’re gonna lose the moment, and you know from experience: if the universe is gifting this idea to you, you better grab it, because the universe has plenty of other souls it will move onto if you are too busy looking cool. So here you are: weeping, strumming, making a mess of your perfectly made up face. Probably staining the guitar someone lent you. But when the fever passes and you’ve ridden that idea as far as it can go, you get to rest deeply. Not in escapism but in having created something you could die feeling good aobut. And that’s the real gift. It’s bathes your soul. You’re clean now. Until the next idea comes knocking. Heed the muse y’all. She’s fiery but she wants to save you, and she wants your work to save the folks who witness what you’ve made. It’s a gift in the form of a punishment. It’s life, and it’s beautiful.
– Jess Klein
true love doesn’t chain you, it frees you. it doesn’t shackle your growth out of intimidation—it celebrates you, it doesn’t shrink your self esteem out of insecurity—it elevates you, it doesn’t keep a tight grip on you—it gives you enough room for expansion.
– @iambrillyant
The best ideas explain the most while saying the least.
– @naval
We are pre-Newtonian with regard to consciousness. All going well, this is the century that changes.
– @WystanTBS
Ardor complains, even in the heart, about the narrowness of space.
In a pearl was absorbed the restlessness of the sea.
– Ghalib
(tr. Frances W. Pritchett
& Owen T.A. Cornwall)
In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be’s and with-it nonparticipants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering.
– John Updike
Stay small until you figured out what’s working.
– @naval
your debts forgiven
your wounds healed
your apologies accepted
your generosity expanded
your love educated
your desires clarified
your uniqueness unleashed
your untold stories heard
your insight heightened
your load lightened
your wildness rejuvenated
your leaks plugged
your courage stoked
your fears dissolved
your imagination fed
your creativity uncorked
– Rob Brezsny
Sports is human life in microcosm.
– Howard Cosell
We can only hope that all our friends and families can live long lives, looking at the moon together, across a thousand miles.
– Su Dongpo
Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
– Bertrand Russell
Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.
– Kurt Vonnegut
It is the phantom of our own self whose deep affinity and profound influence on our state of mind either damns us to hell or uplifts us into heaven.
– E.T.A. Hoffmann
In a love relation, as Jung once put it, you risk everything. You put yourself on a table, you stop the power game and the trying to dominate or conquer the other person. If you succeed in really loving the other person, if you really relate, then all sorts of miracles happen. But in the beginning stages a general state of blindness possesses you, illusions or wrong expectations, disappointments, recriminations. You have to work through all that first. And that’s how you become more conscious. I didn’t say it is agreeable. So if you don’t love the other, you run away after a while.
– Marie Louise Von Franz
Rich people buy TIME.
Poor people buy STUFF.
Ambitious people buy SKILLS.
Lazy people buy DISTRACTION.
Rich people plan for three generations.
Poor people plan for Saturday night.
You need 3 daily wins:
A physical win.
Walking, running, lifting, swimming..
A mental win.
Reading, writing, creating, learning..
A spiritual win.
Praying, meditating, studying, growing..
Be a complete winner!
Remember you asked for growth.
Don’t be surprised when life challenges you.
Excuses make today easy, but tomorrow hard.
Discipline makes today hard, but tomorrow easy.
– @paulhilse
End of the Season
by George Witte
Low twilight gilds still laden maple boughs
above cool shadowed space, an undercroft
made ready with incinerated slough.
The funerary rose enkindles late until
October frost annihilates.
All rush to gather, store, provision loft
and burrow, rise in keen geometries
of flight or whirl untethered, driven off.
The black lake drags itself, disgorging hides.
Infectious fox stands quivering, abides.
Screens pulled, windows locked, hoses rolled to drain.
Garage doors drawn against off-season theft.
And where a welcome mat or rug remains
the wind folds back one frayed and faded edge,
a page abandoned, never to be read.
Following wonder’s wake requires an almost impossible voyage past the Scylla of pure reason and the Charybdis of benighted superstition.
– Travis Zadeh
a place called love
that hearts survive in
a land called ours
where dreams don’t die.
– Will Watters
“The Auld Wey of Knowe-ing”
auld (old), wey (way), knowe (hill), from the Scots language
In the auld wey of knowe-ing,
hills themselves are a form of religion.
Their slope and rise
their gathering in
their receiving of feet
their rhythm meeting our rhythm.
Guiding us, slowly,
through pearlescent air,
back to old root and shore,
amber ripple and woodland wave,
an old wayfarer’s song tapped out
hill staff upon stony path.
Just this morning,
dipping down into cold water,
talon upon trout,
eagle could be heard
singing praises to the high hills at dawn.
“Praise Song”
In the old country,
it used to be that Celtic families
would not praise their children out loud
for fear the faery people would get jealous
and whisk their child away.
A stag bellowed last night:
What you do not praise ceases to be seen.
What you do not praise loses the thread of blessing.
What you do not praise becomes a ghost before its time.
“Dubh-glas” (Dark Water)
In amang the middlin’
bleary eyes lose their light.
No leash on providence or plenty.
No spark.
No sight.
Like a cloak
hiding months o’ moons,
the mirky holds sway sometimes.
A bundle-up of splinters
does not make a tree.
Clinging to all the outworn bits
will not make us free.
Naething to do but take a leuk-see in the thrashel.
Naething to do but trust the dark
like a dragon entering the water in ancient times.
– Frank Owen
Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
– Willa Cather
Wings of Desire – Wim Wenders 1987
The Dying Man:
[thinking to himself while lying on the side of a road after a motorcycle accident] You never saw anyone die? I stink of gasoline. I saw it all clearly – the Mercedes, the pool of oil. Karin, I should have told you. It can’t be that simple. I’ve still so much to do.
Damiel:
[placing his hands on the Dying Man’s head] As I came up the mountain, out of the misty valley into the sun. The fire on the cattle range, the potatoes in the ashes, the boathouse floating in the lake. The Southern Cross.
The Dying Man:
The Far East. The Great North. The Wild West. The Great Bear Lake. Tristan da Cunha. The Mississippi Delta. Stromboli. The old houses of Charlottenburg. Albert Camus. The morning light. The child’s eyes. The swim in the waterfall. The spots of the first drops of rain. The sun. The bread and wine. Hopping. Easter. The veins of leaves. The blowing grass. The color of stones. The pebbles on the stream’s bed. The white tablecloth outdoors. The dream of the house in the house. The dear one asleep in the next room. The peaceful Sundays. The horizon. The light from the room in the garden. The night flight. Riding a bicycle with no hands. The beautiful stranger. My father. My mother. My wife. My child.
Do you think you can clear your mind by sitting constantly in silent meditation? This makes your mind narrow, not clear. Integral awareness is fluid and adaptable, present in all places and at all times. That is true meditation. Who can attain clarity and simplicity by avoiding the world . . ?
– Lao Tzu
All the great changes in the life of one man or in the life of the whole of humanity begin and are achieved in thought only. No matter what external changes may take place in the lives of men, no matter how men may preach the necessity of changing their sentiments and acts, the lives of men will not change, unless a change takes place in their thoughts. But let a change take place in thought, and sooner or later, according to the importance of the change, it will take place in the feelings and actions and’ lives of men, and just as inevitably as the ship changes its direction after the turn of the rudder.
– Tolstoy, In Thought Only
Nothing ever really ends. That’s the horrible part of being in the short-story business—you have to be a real expert on ends. Nothing in real life ends. ‘Millicent at last understands.’ Nobody ever understands.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Being Recklessly
Kind to those
who may never
show an ounce
of it in return
Is the Way
– John Roedel
God spoke today in flowers,
and I, who was waiting on words,
almost missed the conversation.
– Ingrid Goff-Maidoff
The more you write, the more you breathe life into another I, and little by little, the one who writes is no longer the one who has written—the text, once it becomes text-in-the-world, belongs to the other more than it belongs to you, though wholly to neither. A peculiar feeling.
– Christina Tudor-Sideri
The act of writing begins with Orpheus’ gaze. […] In order to write one must already be writing.
– Blanchot
Illiterate
I raised my face to the sky,
that huge stone of worn-out letters,
but the stars told me nothing.
– Octavio Paz
(tr. Eliot Weinberger)
The sun has no distant sorrow: it shows gold.
– Paul Celan; tr. Rosmarie Waldrop
To take a view at once distinct and comprehensive of human life, with all its intricacies of combination, and varieties of connexion, is beyond the power of mortal intelligences.
– Samuel Johnson
Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is
why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such
infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture
of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may
be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of.
– C. S. Lewis
The collapse of western civilization is being done completely by design.. there’s nothing organic about it.
– @TheMarcitect
Dostoevsky read by the light of two candles. He didn’t like lamps.
He smoked a lot while he worked and occasionally drank strong tea. He led a monotonous life, starting off in Staraya Russya (the prototype of the town where Karamazov lived). His favourite colour-the waves of the sea. He often dresses his heroines in that colour.
– Time within Time, Andrei Tarkovsky; tr. Kitty Hunter-Blair
Jackfruit
I swell like a late summer jackfruit.
My skin roughens, the pulp of my body so thick.
I wait to be speared and wanted.
If squeezed, I’ll leave my colour on your hands.
– Hồ Xuân Hương, (tr. Natalie Linh Bolderston)
Have you wandered in a woodland
When the lights begin to glow
From the tents and noisy lodges;
Did your wistful footsteps go
Astray from beaten pathways
Through the bushes and young trees
Till the lights were far behind you
And men’s voices like to bees
That murmur in a clearing
And their laughter so remote
That it faded in the gloaming
Where the silent shadows float
Round the tree-boles and tree-hollows.
For I’ve often crept alone
Just at moonlight, just at bedtime
On a journey of my own.
For men’s laughter grows so empty
While the stately woods at eve
Are full of unknown whispers
For the hearts of those that grieve
– Tolkien
the paths are many and dark, and we are ardent and cruel in our journey
– Leonard Cohen
Self awareness is actually what gives you more bandwidth to consider others.
– Nika Solé
I ascribe to Mark Twain’s theory that the last person who should be President is the one who wants it the most. The one who should be picked is the one who should be dragged kicking and screaming into the White House.
– Bill Hicks
Archetypes are like riverbeds which dry up when the water deserts them, but which it can find again at any time.
– C.G. Jung
IN FEAR OF HARVESTS
It has happened
Before: nearby,
The nostrils of slow horses
Breathe evenly,
And the brown bees drag their high garlands,
Heavily,
Toward hives of snow.
– James Wright
Some are made of more earthly elements, and those people are thick, sensual, and non-creative. They are only good for listening. Others live with their hearts, their emotions, in bursts of the soul, and others still have contact with the highest spirit, distant from the body, free from affects, spacious inside. It is to this final group that God has access.
– Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob
Reality is always kinder than your thinking.
– Byron Katie
The most important thing I learnt on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When any Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.
– Kurt Vonnegut
This is the answer!
The answer is not in getting and keeping, but in getting and giving. The answer is not in saving and preserving, but in growing and changing.
The answer is not in making things stop, but in making things go. The answer is not in covering and hiding, but in touching and sharing.
The answer is not in thinking, but in feeling.
The answer is not in death, but love.
Not death, but life.
Not death!
– Theodore Sturgeon
The road must be trod, but it will be very hard. And neither strength nor wisdom will carry us far upon it. This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet it is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: Small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
When you meet someone in deep grief
Slip off your shoes
and set them by the door
Enter barefoot,
this darkened chapel
hollowed by loss,
hallowed by sorrow.
its grey stone walls
and floor
You, congregation
of one
Are here to listen,
not to sing.
Kneel in the back pew,
make no sound,
let the candles
speak.
– Patricia McKernon Runkle
That not all men are piggy, only some; that not all men belittle me, only some; that not all men get mad if you won’t let them play Chivalry, only some; that not all men write books in which women are idiots, only most; that not all men pull rank on me, only some; that not all men pinch their secretaries’ asses, only some; that not all men make obscene remarks to me in the street, only some; that not all men make more money than I do, only some; that not all men make more money than all women, only most; that not all men are rapists, only some; that not all men are promiscuous killers, only some; that not all men control Congress, the Presidency, the police, the army, industry, agriculture, law, science, medicine, architecture, and local government, only some.
I sat down on the lawn and wept.
– Joanna Russ, On Strike Against God
Anxiety is the emotional cost you pay for a lack of action.
It’s your body telling you to release excess energy in the direction of your goals.
It cannot be solved by thinking.
It must be solved by doing.
– @TaylinSimmonds
We live for books.
– Umberto Eco
academia is just making mental notes on how you don’t want to behave when you become a professor and then never becoming a professor.
– Hadas Weiss
My Weariness of Epic Proportions
by Charles Simic
I like it when
Achilles
Gets killed
And even his buddy Patroclus-
And that hothead Hector-
And the whole Greek and Trojan
Jeunesse dorée
Are more or less
Expertly slaughtered
So there’s finally
Peace and quiet
(The gods having momentarily)
Shut up)
One can hear
A bird sing
And a daughter ask her mother
Whether she can go to the well
And of course she can
By that lovely little path
That winds through
The olive orchard
Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt.
– Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Only when you grow old do you see the rarity of beauty, and what a wonder it really is when flowers bloom between factories and cannons, and poetry still lives between newspapers and stock-market reports.
– Hermann Hesse
No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.
– Ernest Hemingway
Spirituality doesn’t look one way. That’s the whole point, and what separates it from religion. The spiritual path is different for everyone. Devotion is staying true to your own journey and to your spiritual practices, as guided by the divine.
– Nika Solé
Nothing happens but the disorder and immobility of their undone bodies with the exception of that word that he says to her once again, which has no end.
– The Man Sitting in the Corridor, Marguerite Duras
One cannot avoid the shadow unless one remains neurotic, and as long as one is neurotic one has omitted the shadow. The shadow is the block which separates us most effectively from the divine voice.
– CG Jung
All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.
– Anatole France
The problem of psychotherapy is: people have problems. Why? Because they don’t know how to listen to themselves & their own impulses, their own truth, their own myth. Why don’t people all follow their inner passion? Because the outside world overwhelms them.
– R. Hill and E. Rossi
The parts of yourself you hate, the parts that frustrate you, the parts you wish you could unmake,
They all love you so fucking much and have tried so fucking hard to do what’s best for you
– River Kenna
At the Door
People, words, people.
I hesitated:
up there the moon, alone.
– Octavio Paz
(tr. Muriel Rukeyser)
Leave metaphor, and walk with me.
– Mahmoud Darwish
Academics have accepted the idea that the value/worth of a discipline or field of study should be measured by how many undergraduates decide to major in it. This is actually a horrible way to think about knowledge, reducing it a popularity contest.
– @AsheeshKSi
I love that an Oxford scholar like Tolkien pictured a house under a hill in a peaceful neighborhood, with a magnificent tree as its gathering place, as the ideal in worldly comforts. And I love that generations of folks after him still agree.
– Emily Grandy
People say that things like this happen in slow motion, as though you suddenly become an astronaut in the antigravity chamber of your own life. This wasn’t true for me. Things were speeding up instead, and I did my best to slow them down in my mind.
– Edwidge Danticat, Untwine
Poetry was simply a detour: through it I escaped the world of discourse, which had become the natural world for me; with poetry I entered a kind of grave where the infinity of the possible was born from the death of the logical world.
– Georges Bataille
He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
I’m the kind of person who when it comes to, something like language, I feel like I’m trying to put an ocean through a straw.
– Björk
Who so loves believes the impossible.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning
A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
– Herbert A. Simon
Only the ability to speak of boring beauty will lead you into victory.
– Lee Seong-bok, (trans. Anton Hur)
The worst thing in the world can happen, but the next day the sun will come up. And you will eat your toast. And you will drink your tea.
– Rhian Ellis, After Life
the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.
– Cassandra Clare
He plunged ahead solely on the basis of his ear, his stamina, his conviction, his talent and his need to create.
– John McClure on Charles Ives
there’s a time in autumn when the
trees change their nature, and
wake up beyond
matter; then one sees them come back to
their ordinary selves
– Etel Adnan
The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year.
– William Cullen Bryant
Much Madness is divinest Sense —
To a discerning Eye—
Much Sense-the starkest Madness—
‘Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail-
Assent—and you are sane—
Demur-you’re straightway dangerous—
And handled with a Chain—
– Emily Dickinson
Karma is a Medicine which is Given for Our Own Good. Karma is a Law of Compensation, not Vengeance.
– Samael Aun Weor
Remember that there is meaning beyond absurdity. Know that every deed counts, that every word is power…Above all, remember that you must build your life as if it were a work of art.
– Abraham Heschel
Surely meaning will be found not by the ego’s triumphant conquest of fate, but by its interaction with, enlargement through, and sometimes defeat by, fate. … Meaning is not something abstract, something sought …. It is an experiential byproduct of a life lived in the way it is supposed to be lived-as defined by forces transcendent to consciousness. Such a life will seldom arise from the design of ego, for ego’s gratification is evanescent at best. Meaning arises even out of the places of great suffering, because it is the epiphenomenon of amor fati. Loving one’s fate, in the end, means living the life one is summoned to, not the life envisioned by the ego, by one’s parents or by societal expectations. The love of one’s fate is not fatalism, resignation, defeat or passivity. It is an heroic submission to the gods-not my will but Thine-which leads to the blessing of a life lived as it was meant to be lived.
– James Hollis
But I am tired today// of history, its patina’d clichés/ of endless evil.
– Robert Hayden
You know, just like mountains stick out of the Earth and there’s a fundamental Earth underneath them, so all of us, as different things, we stick out of reality and there’s a continuity underneath.
– Alan Watts
There is nothing sacred whatsoever about thought. Thinking is materialistic, a process of matter.
– Krishnamurti
Every poem is a dream
that is trying to be.
Showing how
something is, was
or could be meaningful
beyond the service of memory.
The seeming direction of time
is far from control
because of love.
The infinitely extensible connections
are not measurable.
Any moment of love
is a deeper dream
than any old poem.
– George Gorman
Craving Quiet
Some days I want to live like a spider
in a quiet corner of the house
where few people step, intricate web
woven where no hands reach, and no one
asks a thing of me. I can’t imagine
waiting for food to fall through the roof,
the constant fear of broom and vacuum,
starting over from scratch after each dusting.
But wouldn’t it be worth it sometimes?
Not to see another soul for days or weeks,
spinning my own world out of the silk
of stillness-to know the makings of home
are always within me, right here inside the body.
– James Crews
BUTTER
I think it was Marie who first taught me the art
of spreading flattery on people
then smearing it around like marmalade on slabs of whole wheat bread,
or how to spray them lightly with a mist of unexpected praise
from one of those special nozzles
you attach to the end of your garden hose.
Walking around with her that year, I watched how she would
lubricate the world
—nuns and firemen, nannies and human resource managers,
nine-year-old kids in city playgrounds,
and widows selling flags in Central Park.
Pretty soon I started doing it myself,
telling this person and that how good they looked today;
how rare it is to see a job well done;
how excellent their taste in clothes.
I liked the way even the most crusty and resistant
at first would startle under the assault
then start to flourish under the effect.
I liked to watch the moisture trickle down to their roots
and then roll back up again
to all four corners of the leaf.
Why did I ever think that approval was gratuitous?
Why did it take me so long to see that the power of sweetness
is as great as the power of the river and the sun?
If I can’t improve the world by scorching it with truth,
if I can’t conquer it by twisting its arm behind its back,
then give me some adjectives like lipstick and gloss,
give me some language like mint and honey for the heart.
I will lavish the world with the power of butter.
I will force it to feel good about itself.
First I will make it blush—
then I will step back, and watch it shine.
– Tony Hoagland
The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. No big laboratory is needed in which to think. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born. That is why many of the earthly miracles have had their genesis in humble surroundings.
– Nikola Tesla
To me, a witch is a woman that is capable of letting her intuition take hold of her actions, that communes with her environment, that isn’t afraid of facing challenges.
– Paulo Coelho
Civilized life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.
– J.G. Ballard
As we inhabit our body with increasing sensitivity, we learn its unspoken language and patterns, which gives us tremendous freedom to make choices. The practice of cutting thoughts and dispersing negative repetitive patterns can be simplified by attending to the patterns in the body first, before they begin to be spun around in the mind.
– Jill Satterfield
Age has many hardships-but it also has its gifts of grace, and one of them is the protective layer of forgetting, of weariness, of submission which allows things to grow between us and our problems and sufferings. There may be inertia, calcification, hideous apathy, but there can also be-illuminated a little differently by the moment-serenity, patience, humour, deep wisdom and Tao.
– Herman Hesse
One of the qualities that you can develop, particularly in your older years, is a sense of great compassion for yourself. When you visit the wounds within the temple of memory, you should not blame yourself for making bad mistakes that you greatly regret. Sometimes you have grown unexpectedly through these mistakes. Frequently, in a journey of the soul, the most precious moments are the mistakes. They have brought you to a place that you would otherwise have always avoided. You should bring a compassionate mindfulness to your mistakes and wounds. Endeavor to inhabit the rhythm you were in at that time. If you visit this configuration of your soul with forgiveness in your heart, it will fall into place itself. When you forgive yourself, the inner wounds begin to heal. You come in out of the exile of hurt into the joy of inner belonging.
– John O’Donohue
Crimson gleams of Matter, gliding imperceptibly into the gold of Spirit, ultimately to become transformed into the incandescence of a universe that is person- and through all of this there blows, animating it and spreading over it a fragrant balm, a zephyr of union- and of the Feminine.
The diaphany of the Divine at the heart of a glowing universe, as I have experienced it through contact with the earth- the divine radiating from depths of blazing matter.
– Teilhard de Chardin
The whole process of getting old – it could have been better arranged. But you do learn some things just by doing them over and over and by getting old doing them. And one of them is, you really need less. And I’m not talking minimalism, which is a highly self-conscious mannerist style I can’t write and don’t want to. I’m perfectly ready to describe a lot and be flowery and emotive, but you can do that briefly and it works better.
My model for this is late Beethoven. He moves so strangely and quite suddenly sometimes from place to place in his music, in the late quartets. He knows where he’s going and he just doesn’t want to waste all that time getting there. But if you listen, if you’re with it, he takes you with him. I think sometimes about old painters – they get so simple in their means. Just so plain and simple. Because they know they haven’t got time. One is aware of this as one gets older. You can’t waste time.
– Ursula LeGuin
The search for patterns without critical analysis, and rigid skepticism without a search for patterns, are the antipodes of incomplete science. The effective pursuit of knowledge requires both functions…
Without these experimental tests, very few physicists would have accepted general relativity. There are many hypotheses in physics of almost comparable brilliance and elegance that have been rejected because they did not survive such a confrontation with experiment. In my view, the human condition would be greatly improved if such confrontations and willingness to reject hypotheses were a regular part of our social, political, economic, religious and cultural lives.
– Carl Sagan
For us to speak with the young becomes ever more diffi- cult. We see it as a duty and, at the same time, as a risk: the risk of appearing anachronistic, of not being listened to. We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experi- ences, we have collectively witnessed a fundamental, unex- pected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone. It took place in the teeth of all forecasts; it happened in Europe; incredibly, it happened that an entire civilized people, just issued from the fervid cultural flowering of Weimar, followed a buffoon whose figure today inspires laughter, and yet Adolf Hitler was obeyed and his praises were sung right up to the catas- trophe. It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say.
– Primo Levi
Are you righteous? Kind? Does your confidence lie in this? Are you loved by all? Know that I was, too. Do you imagine your suffering will be any less because you loved goodness and truth?
– Thin Red Line, 1998
We are presently dealing with the accumulation of a whole society that has worshiped its light side and refused the dark, and this residue appears as war, economic chaos, strikes, racial intolerance. The front page of any newspaper hurls the collective shadow at us.
– Robert A. Johnson
Jung, Christ and Gurdjieff on projection:
When we allow ourselves to be irritated out of our wits by something, let us not suppose that the cause of our irritation lies simply and solely outside us, in the irritating thing or person. In that way, we simply endow them with the power to put us into the state of irritation, and possibly into one of insomnia or indigestion. We then turn around and unhesitatingly condemn the object of offense, while all the time we are raging against an unconscious aspect of ourselves which is projected into the exasperating object.
– Jung
And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.
– Jesus
…from the very moment when each and every one of
them acquires the capacity of distinguishing between
‘wet’ and ‘dry’, then, carried away by this attainment,
he ceases forever to see and observe his own
abnormalities and defects, but sees and observes
those same abnormalities and defects in others.
– Gurdjieff
In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar. I will tell you about it because I am here and you are distant.
– Richard Brautigan
Spinning like a ghost on the bottom of a top, I’m haunted by all the space that I will live without you.
– Brautigan
Don’t tell the poets but I learned today that birds sing in their sleep, dreaming the notes of their birdsongs.
– Natalie Eilbert
People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
– Doris Lessing
We come into the world as strangers, wander as seekers, and leave as whispers in the wind; only love allows us to feel truly alive.
– Fida Hussain
Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.
– Zadie Smith
Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.
– W. Somerset Maugham
Only incredibly boring people have lives that go the way they expect.
– Catherine Lacey
Explanation is falsity; mystery is truth.
– M. Scott Peck
The greater the outward show; the greater the inner poverty.
– Krishnamurti
If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creatures could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet?
– Cormac McCarthy
In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
– Tolstoy
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
– Erich Fromm
Small things amuse small minds.
– Doris Lessing
Language is, among other things, a device which men use for suppressing and distorting the truth… We protect our minds by an elaborate system of abstractions, ambiguities, metaphors and similes from the reality we do not wish to know too clearly.
– Aldous Huxley
A story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.
– Lorrie Moore
There is nothing but this
moment of purple October
with its fertile dusks.
– Jordan Pérez
As a writer, I also see sentence-making as the ultimate test of authorial ego. As soon as a sentence calls attention to itself, demonstrates how clever the author is, how astute, how talented, I know something’s gone wrong.
– Alice McDermott
You would have to be a glutton indeed to ask for more good luck and fortune than I had at the beginning of my career.
– Truman Capote
Being aware of your rascality doesn’t excuse it.
– Janet Malcolm
Chinese Dream 61
by Timothy Yu
Cartoons. Computer-generated smiles
and fixed eyes fill my daughter’s screen, show her
form is content, content form.
She’s over unicorns. Now she plays a child
who always knows best. There’s nothing to fear
except when we near
an evening when the moon’s not giving light,
turning away. It’s late for attitude,
but it’s now that rude
words are a parent’s heritance. Is she white?
Race is something her father has, a way
of arresting play
away from her, in Timothy’s long trail
of ancestors, immigrants, grasping arms
out of elsewhere, of whom she’ll be one. The child is real.
In the bedtime story she tells herself she’s charmed,
just like her own father.
I try to do at least three pages a day. Without some kind of quota, I think you’re fooling yourself.
– Robert Caro
Fall
by Edward Hirsch
Fall, falling, fallen. That’s the way the season
Changes its tense in the long-haired maples
That dot the road; the veiny hand-shaped leaves
Redden on their branches (in a fiery competition
With the final remaining cardinals) and then
Begin to sidle and float through the air, at last
Settling into colorful layers carpeting the ground.
At twilight the light, too, is layered in the trees
In a season of odd, dusky congruences—a scarlet tanager
And the odor of burning leaves, a golden retriever
Loping down the center of a wide street and the sun
Setting behind smoke-filled trees in the distance,
A gap opening up in the treetops and a bruised cloud
Blamelessly filling the space with purples. Everything
Changes and moves in the split second between summer’s
Sprawling past and winter’s hard revision, one moment
Pulling out of the station according to schedule,
Another moment arriving on the next platform. It
Happens almost like clockwork: the leaves drift away
From their branches and gather slowly at our feet,
Sliding over our ankles, and the season begins moving
Around us even as its colorful weather moves us,
Even as it pulls us into its dusty, twilit pockets.
And every year there is a brief, startling moment
When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and
Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless
Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:
It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies;
It is the changing light of fall falling on us.
Rabbits
by Lindsay Turner
In the mornings the rabbits scatter from the yard
They run off or they freeze not even shaking
A little brown eye unblinking, a round still back
Ready to arc away but for now not—
Look how steady now in this my neighborhood
I planted a rosebush, I planted some daisies
I planted some yarrow, I planted the vines
And I’ll wait till they take over
Mercilessly not watering the lawn
Since in this life it’s stupid to do anything
To prolong this life
Fake path, fake heaven
The heat now rising from the pavements
It is for others to water their lawns
Swim in their blue pools, wanting to live
Forever just thinking of green
Shade perfectly surfaced
The heat rising early from the pavements
The tall pines on the ridge, a little dead bird beneath—
Do they want justice because there isn’t any god
Or god because there isn’t any justice—
& the interstate is clogged with cars vibrating and hot all the way along the river
The sun is nowhere and right overhead
I’ll want for the roses to grow over the doorway
& the fox eats the rabbits or the hawks do—
Yesterday one dropped a minnow onto the sidewalk
It dried in the heat
In my sleep I scatter like rabbits after all the wants I want
They scatter like rabbits or freeze solid in my dreaming gaze
I can’t be more lost than anyone else
The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic, failed musician, short-sighted, color-blind.
– Anthony Burgess
Ars Poetica 3
by Joseph Millar
Your friends tell you the writing
is good but you’re not actually buying it—
so much idle conversation, you think,
overheard through a hotel window
by a cab driver half asleep in the sun
instead of an ode or a psalm—
and waiting near the ER for your wife
who has just broken her arm,
reading a translation of Hafez or Tagore
can make you feel godless and small
since you’re not Neil Young or Francois Villon
though on such a day or night as this
you hear the footsteps along the sidewalk
and here comes the old shadow again
like the promise of late-season rain
which you hope will keep falling
into the earth, its rivers and deserts,
its alleys and streets
and the wild and wastrel ocean.
Like Superman, Sylvia Plath haunts the American cultural landscape to the point of myth.
– Leah Mandel
This was the farewell:
Many friends came with us
and whoever did not come was no longer a friend.
– Hannah Arendt, translated by Samantha Rose Hill
A miracle is only something happening that we cannot explain. And who are we to think we can explain everything?
– Daniel Taylor
Dammit, it was the ‘twenties’ and we had to be smart. I wanted to be cute. That’s the terrible thing. I should have had more sense.
– Dorothy Parker
The Escape
by Alessandra Carati
Translated from the Italian by Laura Masini and Linda Worrell
The one memory from my childhood that stands out, unimpaired, is
a forewarning of what would later happen.
Our life was simple, ending where the village ended, framed by the
woods, the road leading into town, and the orchards climbing up the
mountain. Beyond those boundaries, there was no other world where
we could imagine living.
Mirko and I were six; we played where we pleased and were insep-
arable, two peas in a pod. One day, while sitting outside my house,
Mirko said, “The war is coming and we’ll have to leave.”
We didn’t know what war was. Just a word murmured in hushed
tones that had the power to make the grown-ups jittery and mean.
There is only so much you can tell your children about the reality of the world. So, to navigate that necessary withholding, we tell stories.
– Lauren C. Johnson
Trying to write something of permanent value is a full-time job even though only a few hours a day are spent on the actual writing.
– Ernest Hemingway
Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.
– Jack Kerouac
Use a reader’s leisure time in such a way that the reader will not feel his time has been wasted.
– Kurt Vonnegut
No need for radio: / We are the news.
– Mosab Abu Toha
She would eat fried eggs
for dinner and smell grease on her hands
all evening as she read to her father.
– James Reiss, Millie
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them.
– John Updike
On poetry
I know a little poetry. It frightens me. The way it breaks, the way experience breaks in. Or it breaks out: like mold on plums, a ring of rash around the mouth, or wilderness – bluestem blanketing the earth, then breaking down to dirt. I know a little poetry. I’ve broken down. I’ve wept into the zenith of a rose. “Each tear […] A globe.” The way John Donne rhymes ” ‘wind” and “find” in the
final stanza of OF WEEPING. I’ve come that close.
– Jane Huffman
THE SKY AT HOME
by Mary Ann Samyn
Presently, I am living inside a tenderness.
Time was, I had called it suffering.
What makes something so?
Timeworn narratives do the work of a god.
One can’t know how one is loved.
The feather you brought back is a mystery.
This is August, still and all.
Sometimes, a familiar song drifts over the treetops.
I know just what you mean, I want to say.
Life is poignant like that, little by little.
Music is the object of my strongest desire, and yet at the same time it remains completely forbidden. I don’t have the competence, I don’t have any truly presentable musical culture. Thus, my desire remains completely paralyzed.
– Derrida, Deconstruction and the Visual Arts
The most effective deconstruction is one that deals with the non-discursive or with discursive institutions that don’t have the form of a written discourse.
– Derrida
NEW HAVEN
No caress is entirely unmechanical.
Days are never getting any longer.
Thus I am cracked, terribly,
as if a moon had crashed
into a steeple chuckling in darkness.
Archaically I wander
the forest of academic buildings
night and I have made huge
towards the lamp that glows on my desk,
frail as something imagined.
– Matthew Zapruder
“Weird” would be the fate that you have as the Anglo-Saxon hero of a saga, a numinous or mystical attribute. But then it changed to have a threatening aspect or a strangeness, something uncanny…
– @Geo_Liminal
Even utter senselessness ultimately is always this sense made of the negation of all the others.
– Georges Bataille
Two English Poems
I
The useless dawn finds me in a deserted street-
corner; I have outlived the night.
Nights are proud waves; darkblue topheavy waves
laden with all the hues of deep spoil, laden with
things unlikely and desirable.
Nights have a habit of mysterious gifts and refusals,
of things half given away, half withheld,
of joys with a dark hemisphere. Nights act
that way, I tell you.
The surge, that night, left me the customary shreds
and odd ends: some hated friends to chat
with, music for dreams, and the smoking of
bitter ashes. The things my hungry heart
has no use for.
The big wave brought you.
Words, any words, your laughter; and you so lazily
and incessantly beautiful. We talked and you
have forgotten the words.
The shattering dawn finds me in a deserted street
of my city.
Your profile turned away, the sounds that go to
make your name, the lilt of your laughter:
these are the illustrious toys you have left me.
I turn them over in the dawn, I lose them, I find
them; I tell them to the few stray dogs and
to the few stray stars of the dawn.
Your dark rich life …
I must get at you, somehow; I put away those
illustrious toys you have left me, I want your
hidden look, your real smile — that lonely,
mocking smile your cool mirror knows.
II
What can I hold you with?
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the
moon of the jagged suburbs.
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked
long and long at the lonely moon.
I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts
that living men have honoured in bronze:
my father’s father killed in the frontier of
Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs,
bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in
the hide of a cow; my mother’s grandfather
–just twentyfour– heading a charge of
three hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on
vanished horses.
I offer you whatever insight my books may hold,
whatever manliness or humour my life.
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never
been loyal.
I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved,
somehow –the central heart that deals not
in words, traffics not with dreams, and is
untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at
sunset, years before you were born.
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about
yourself, authentic and surprising news of
yourself.
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the
hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you
with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
– Jorge Luis Borges (1934)
it’s not that the future is going to happen so fast, it’s that the past happened so slow.
– Sam Altman
It is salutary that in a world rocked by greed, misunderstanding and fear, with the imminence of collapse into unbelievable horrors, it is still possible and justifiable to find important the exact placing of two pebbles.
– Jim Ede
Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start here.
– Cheryl Strayed
In revealing oneself, the images, colors, sounds, and gestures of each individual are conveying the innate character of that being. The question of character is as interesting philosophically as it is psychologically. Every center of biological experience is limited or committed to a particular style and repertoire of character. There is always some undetermined leeway in the strictness of one’s character boundaries, especially in youth (as well as in times of crisis and in connection with psychoactive drugs like LSD). Yet the strength of the motivations and constraints of real character are remarkable, though physically intangible.
The signs and gestures of the real character of things, whether animate or not, are in evidence everywhere. The mountains and the trees, the seas and the skies, the winds and the storms, and all of the greater and the lesser faces of life keep performing themselves to the hilt. Any part of life’s theater of distinctive characters becoming thoroughly embodied in their roles and dramas can become quite significant to a living mind, even as it remains beyond the ken of science. So the practice of relevant philosophy and psychology will always remain an art rather than a science. And these two are grounded in the same artfulness of self-expression, because philosophy aims to “Know thyself,” which depends on the psyche expressing itself through each process of its own experience.
– George Gorman
The incandescence of desirable coexistence
is magical enough for me.
Whaddya think?
Reshaping the world’s attention
is a walk in the park?
Like any wild thing
watch for surprises,
dance with the best.
Real love transforms us.
– George Gorman
It is a wonder
how a simple stretch
deepens breath,
and an elegantly held pose
grows to touch the
whole of me.
Like sugar stirred into tea,
the potency
of yoga spreads
from body into mind
and heart, revealing
an ocean of energy
that heals and opens,
holds me close
and sets me free
all in the same moment.
– Danna Faulds
No one can love God & practice injustice…
– Gustavo Gutierrez
…the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality. `He sees too deep and too much,’ and what he sees is essentially chaos…he is the one man who knows he is sick in a civilization that doesn’t know it is sick.
– Colin Wilson
The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.
– E. O. Wilson
Here’s my message to young people: you wouldn’t let a bunch of old people decide what music you’re going to listen to or what clothes you’re going to wear – so don’t let them decide your future.
– Barack Obama
People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing—refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.
– Tolstoy
In the long haul, grace will win out over everything, over the misery, the stupidity, the dishonesty.
– Anne Lamott
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.
– George Bernard Shaw
Sometimes your body is buzzing like something’s going to happen, but you don’t know if it’s the buzz before a magical moment or a disaster. And that’s the thing: even when you feel something magical, you can’t always tell if it’s actually magic. You might think something’s great, only to watch it later and realize, ‘Eh, it wasn’t that special.’ Then there are times when you feel like a scene was nothing, just filler, and you watch it back and see all this depth you didn’t feel at the time. Those moments are humbling because they remind you that you don’t always know when the magic is happening.
– Joaquin Phoenix
Night becomes a verb. I night.
– Hélène Cixous; tr. Eric Prenowitz
The enemy of a love is never outside,
it’s not a man or a woman,
it’s what we lack in ourselves.
– Anais Nin
A hermit once told me,
‘I’ve renounced the whole
world, but one thing
still haunts me—
the beauty of the sky.
after Yoshida Kenko
– Kim Dorman
As Toni Morrison said, about 20 years ago, “How could a nation put the financial burden of improving the level of its own citizens’ education in the marketplace?”
She condemned medical debt too.
– @tamaranopper
Broken hearts and dirty windows
Make life difficult to see
That’s why last night and this morning
Always look the same to me
– John Prine
It is ironic and paradoxical, that the genuine acceptance of the unchangeable is often one of the keys for true and deep change within the psyche. But this little piece of irony… does not appear to be learnable in any school but life’s fires.
– Liz Greene
In the spring of 1978, I was seduced by a river.
– The Seine, Elaine Sciolino
By the mouth for the ear, that’s the way I’d like to write.
– William Gass
There is nothing disastrous in the temporary nature of our ideas. They are always that. But there may very easily be a train of evil in the self-deception which regards them as final. I think God will forgive us our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions.
– Walter Lippmann
Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. This was one of the advantages of living in a walkable city.
– John Attridge
Archetypally, to untangle something requires a descent, the following of a labyrinth down into the underworld or to the place where matters are revealed in entirely new ways.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés
People who lie to themselves will eventually need you to lie to them too so that they can keep their delusion in tact.
– Nika Solé
We read far too much that is trivial, that merely passes the time, without further profit. We ought really to read only what we admire.
– Goethe
What I have, whole,
Whom I know, loved.
I, who was half-defined,
Came to another mind.
The pure final repose
Of the widening rose.
– Theodore Roethke
Man can turn into an animal in no time. All he needs is permission. As soon as permission is given from higher-ups, from the government, it accelerates.
– Holocaust survivor Irene Weiss
By following the obverse of social convention one is still letting it determine one’s pattern of behavior.
– Alan Watts
When you see that your consciousness is the consciousness of the rest of mankind, then you realize that you are both the guru and the disciple, the teacher as well as the pupil, that is a tremendous realization.
– Krishnamurti
Lucky
by Kirsten Dierking
All this time,
the life you were
supposed to live
has been rising around you
like the walls of a house
designed with warm
harmonious lines.
As if you had actually
planned it that way.
As if you had
stacked up bricks
at random,
and built by mistake
a lucky star.
The cosmic dynamism of which we ourselves are minute manifestations cannot be fitted to the dimensions of our brain, any more than to the brains of ants; for the universe is the holy revelation of an absolutely transcendent essence.
– Heinrich Zimmer
Book I
The first book is made of birchbark,
on which a borer with no thought
but for nourishment insinuates
a wriggling, intermittent cuneiform.
The bark curls back, dried and peeled,
like a folded page, and thereafter
the marks become unread secrets,
a story in itself, meaningless
but for an illiterate wind that pores
over it, pausing at the pictures.
– Jeffery Donaldson
The solution is already blooming before the problem even arises. Life is solutionary like that.
– Nika Solé
If you don’t feel stupid doing research you’re not researching hard enough.
– Neil Renic
I think that self-forgetfulness, self-entrancement, is part of the action of writing, certainly of writing verse. To dwell silently on something within yourself, to forget that you are there watching yourself in action, that’s the achievement & that’s the desire.
– Seamus Heaney
Begin to spend more time diving within yourself, watching, witnessing. When thoughts pop up, simply ask yourself, ‘To whom do these thoughts come? To me. I think them. Who am I? What is the source of the ‘I’?
– Robert Adams
One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counter-statements to the reigning pieties. Even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness.
– Susan Sontag
We’re taking in information through our senses. That information is being translated in our minds, instantaneously. And our mind is taking that information, translating it, and creating an image. The image is what you see every time you open your eyes.
– Adyashanti
and the tendrils of dreams
strangle policemen running by
too slowly to escape you
– Frank O’Hara
Indeterminacy
by J. Mae Barzio
How many times I tried to record the Goldberg Variations
Once in Iceland another time in California
It was Mercury in retrograde I didn’t get the chords right
You see I wanted a different kind of music
One that felt like a foreign city or ice cracking
A prediction of snow and then the snow itself endless
I wanted the blue stripes on your shirt the paleness of your underarm
The whiteout of a spring blizzard, everything unexpected
See I didn’t do well with indeterminacy-the blank sides of a dice
The piano chord I recognized but couldn’t name
A different kind of intimacy because I was tired of being unsurprised
Behind me in the photo the black river unraveled
Like a list of the dead children or the ones I never had
The field split open like a lip
I asked the river for answers but heard nothing
The path was obscured by another person’s tracks in the snow
Snow falling so slowly that no one noticed it.
a second moon, eclipses, aurora, comets — shakespeare would be absolutely LOSING HIS MIND right now.
– Emma Bolden
Genocide begins with the silence of the world, the complicity of the intelligentsia, and the propaganda work of the media operatives in the press.
– Zeeshan Joonam
The Book of Resemblances
Do we read a book through its resemblance to a lost book? Is every book a book of resemblances? Is resemblance the un- masked place of the book? Are we only our resemblance, a thousand times baffled, to ourselves? A book is to be read. It “resembles a book that was itself not a book, but the image of an attempt.”
We encounter “characters who resemble characters we have known, but who were themselves only heroes of fiction.” A new Book of Questions, presented as both its own arbitrary double and tyrannical opposite, sees the light. This light makes us tackle a reality till now hidden behind its precarious appearance and, in turn, reopens a totally committed questioning.
– Edmond Jabes
WORDS FOR THE ROAD
Know, now, there is no one
who can guide you.
Know there will be nothing
to return to.
Know, now, that the trial
will be long.
Come, then. You were called to this,
this wild life.
Go in
and lie down in the darkness.
Hear them now, the wild flocks
in the starlight,
thrashing in the vastness of their passing?
If you cannot have a home, become a song.
– Joseph Fasano
Using the representational power of imagination in the virtual space of our minds, we construct all of the recognizable patterns of experience. If we couldn’t construct mental simulations of reality we couldn’t begin to perceive what’s happening in the immediate environment. We imaginatively string fragments of data and feeling together to make meaningful sequences of experience in time, much like a melody. So we are all artists when it comes to creating experiences in time, cocreations composed not of associations of atoms but of stories.
– George Gorman
The term shunyata, which I translate throughout ‘absence of being in things’ snakes its way through all Madhyamaka thinking, arousing puzzlement, wonder, insight, and despair in those who try to follow its tortuous path.
It has often been called the void, sometimes emptiness and at times, after its mathematical meaning, zero. It has been more recently understood as openness, and, in some usages at least, merits the translation ‘the truth of things’.
It is so utterly novel that we must exercise some patience in attempting to grasp its full significance for Nagarjuna and Candraklrti.
– Mervyn Sprung
The pain of knowledge is a tonic, an antidote to the pall of possession. But there is an element of death in knowledge… Knowledge is what remains to the human mind once the possession has been lost. It is the reliquary of the vanished object. Its presence is painful, because it signifies that what was known is no longer there.
– Rachel Cusk, The Last Supper
The power of finding beauty in the humblest things makes home happy and life lovely.
– Louisa May Alcott
A man can only rise, conquer, and achieve by lifting up his thoughts.
– James Allen
There is no loss of memory in Divine Mind, therefore, I recollect everything I should remember and I forget all that is not for my good.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
Judging your early artistic efforts is artistic abuse.
– Julia Cameron
Work on the accent, it will enliven the whole.
– Pierre Bonnard
There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.
– Freya Stark
Make room for new truths that are more potent than the ones we think we know.
– Jeannine Ouellette
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
– Mary Oliver
It doesn’t interest me if there is one God
or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned;
if you know despair
or can see it in others.
I want to know
if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need to change you;
if you can look back with firm eyes
saying “This is where I stand.”
I want to know if you know how to melt
into that fierce heat of living
falling toward the center of your longing.
I want to know if you are willing
to live day by day
with the consequence of love
and the bitter unwanted passion
of your sure defeat.
I have been told
in that fierce embrace
even the gods
speak of God.
– David Whyte
For some, autumn comes early, stays late through life where October follows September and November touches October and then instead of December and Christ’s birth, there is no Bethlehem Star, no rejoicing, but September comes again and old October and so on down the years, with no winter, spring, or revivifying summer. For these beings, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond.
Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars.
They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts, they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters.
The spider-web hears them, trembles – breaks. Such are the autumn people. Beware of them.
– Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal spectres, not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room, or disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world.
– Dylan O’Sullivan
When I speak of depression, I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse. I’m happy to report that, by imperceptible degrees and by the grace of good teachers and good luck, that depression slowly dissolved and has never returned with the same ferocity that prevailed for most of my life.
– Leonard Cohen
All day I have been reading about the invisible world, the one that’s always trying to reach us. What if we could hear the small round o’s of dirt, the chant of stars and plants, carbon and sulphur, calling to each other, innumerable to innumerable, a throat at every blade of grass.
– Ellery Akers
All houses are dark until the mother wakes up.
– Khalil Gibran
Love
Love is talent, the world loves metaphor.
Aflame, October’s leaves adore the wind,
its urgent breath, whirl to their own death.
Not here, you’re everywhere.
The evening sky
worships the ground, bears down, the land
yearns back in darkening hills. The night
is empathy, stars in its eyes for tears. Not here,
you’re where I stand, hearing the sea, crazy
for the shore, seeing the moon ache and fret
for the earth. When morning comes, the sun, ardent,
covers the trees in gold, you walk
towards me,
out of the season, out of the light love reasons.
– Carol Ann Duffy
In the Upanishads they talk about the path of the sun and the path of the moon. The path of the moon is rebirth. The path of the sun leads to self-knowledge, from which there is no return.
– Frederick Lenz
You ruin your life by tolerating it. At the end of the day you should be excited to be alive. When you settle for anything less than what you innately desire, you destroy the possibility that lives inside of you, and in that way you cheat both yourself and the world of your potential. The next Michelangelo could be sitting behind a Macbook right now writing an invoice for paperclips, because it pays the bills, or because it is comfortable, or because he can tolerate it. Do not let this happen to you. Do not ruin your life this way. Life and work, and life and love, are not irrespective of each other. They are intrinsically linked. We have to strive to do extraordinary work, we have to strive to find extraordinary love. Only then will we tap into an extraordinarily blissful life.
– Bianca Sparacino
Understand that ‘imagination’ is not some miraculous quality of children’s books or simply an attractive fantasy theme. Imagination is conception; it’s where consciousness models and prepares for possible outcomes. Imagination is the ability to render in the mind an image of immaterial reality! In our minds, we can create that which does not yet exist: thus do all our works, stories, and inventions arise ‘from nothing.’ At its simplest, we can use this ability to guess at outcomes, create new tools, and plan for the future. At its most complex, we use this ability to worry, fantasize, delude ourselves, find meaning, create, and problem-solve. Each of these happen in the imaginative mind, and we can only do one at a time.
– Dee Lucas
There’s a terror in knowing what the world is about
– David Bowie
As only fleeting rapture sometimes lifts
us over the abysses of beginning,
you can construct extraordinary bridges
through your own seductive arts extending.
Wonder isn’t merely in the mystery
of the met and mastered difficult.
Only in the fluid ecstasies of
reaching are the wonders wonder-full.
Cooperation isn’t supervision
of the indescribably conjunct.
Ever inward grows the webbed concision.
To be dragged along is not enough.
Take your bulging powers and extend them
till they interweave between the two
ends of opposition – for the spirit winds
desire to discover more through you!
– Rilke
Reading the very best writers – let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy – is not going to make us better citizens.
– Harold Bloom
Genocide is biblical.
Loving your enemy is biblical.
But only one is Christlike.
Slavery is biblical.
Chainbreaking is biblical.
But only one is Christlike.
Patriarchy is biblical.
Counter-cultural elevation of women
is biblical.
But only one is Christlike.
Retributive violence is biblical.
Grace-filled restoration is biblical.
But only one is Christlike.
Segregation is biblical.
Unity is biblical.
But only one is Christlike.
Christ transforms, not the Bible. Be wary of
those who know one but not the other.
– Jordan Harrell
Let me fall if I must.
The one I will become
will catch me.
Whenever feeling downcast, each person should vitally remember, For my sake, the entire world was created.
God is your shadow.
– Baal Shem Tov
A Blasphemy
by Maurice Manning
You wouldn’t have believed it, how
the man, a little touched perhaps,
set his hands together and prayed
for happiness, yet not his own;
he meant his people, by which he meant
not people really, but trees and cows,
the dirty horses, dogs, the fox
who lived at the back of his place with her kits,
and the very night who settled down
to rock his place to sleep, the place
he tried so hard to tend he found
he mended fences in his sleep.
He said to the you above, who, let’s
be honest, doesn’t say too much,
I need you now up there to give
my people happiness, you let
them smile and know the reason; hear
my prayer, Old Yam. The you who’s you
might laugh at that, and I agree,
it’s funny to make a prayer like that,
the down-home words and yonder reach
of what he said; and calling God
the Elder Sweet Potato, shucks,
that’s pretty funny, and kind of sad.
Night Mirror
by Li-Young Lee
Li-Young, don’t feel lonely
when you look up
into great night and find
yourself the far face peering
hugely out from between
a star and a star. All that space
the nighthawk plunges through,
homing, all that distance beyond embrace,
what is it but your own infinity.
And don’t be afraid
when, eyes closed, you look inside you
and find night is both
the silence tolling after stars
and the final word
that founds all beginning, find night,
abyss and shuttle,
a finished cloth
frayed by the years, then gathered
in the songs and games
mothers teach their children.
Look again
and find yourself changed
and changing, now the bewildered honey
fallen into your own hands,
now the immaculate fruit born of hunger.
Now the unequaled perfume of your dying.
And time? Time is the salty wake
of your stunned entrance upon
no name.
The more billionaires you have, the more homeless people you have.
– Mark Bittner
It’s a real moron who waits for the world—and the people in it—to inform him or her what life holds. Come on! We are the authors of our life; we are the architects, the designers. Build the life you think you deserve, and then deserve it. Work your ass off. It’s great fun. I pity the person who looks to the stars or cards or so-called wise men or fashion or anything but their own heart to tell them how to think or live or be. Do what only you can do and do it well and do it now. Right now! Time’s wasting, and time needs you.
– Ruth Gordon
If people are quiet, they can be quiet anywhere. If people aren’t quiet, they won’t be quiet here. Everything depends on you. Life is transient, like a flash of lightening or a dream. Eighty years pass like a cloud. We’re born, and then we die. But before we receive this form, we had another face, our original face. We can’t see it with our eyes. We can only know it with our wisdom. The sutras say, “That which is beyond form is the buddha.” We all have the buddha nature. We’re all destined to become buddhas. But buddhahood isn’t something that can be achieved in a couple of days. You have to practice before you can become aware of your original nature, your original face.
– Chi-ch’eng, Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits by Bill Porter. Counterpoint Books, 1993.
I spend nights stitching up the loose threads of my soul
And in the morning I’m bullet proof
In the morning I’m bullet proof.
– Noah Kahan, Young Blood
Bohm believes that our almost universal tendency to fragment the world and ignore the dynamic interconnectedness of all things is responsible for many of our problems, not only in science but in our lives and our society as well. For instance, we believe we can extract the valuable parts of the earth without affecting the whole. We believe it is possible to treat parts of our body and not be concerned with the whole. We believe we can deal with various problems in our society, such as crime, poverty, and drug addiction, without addressing the problems in our society as a whole, and so on. In his writings Bohm argues passionately that our current way of fragmenting the world into parts not only doesn’t work, but may even lead to our extinction.
– Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe
Man’s happiness today consists in “having fun.” Having fun lies in the satisfaction of consuming and “taking in” commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies—all are consumed, swallowed. The world is one great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast; we are the sucklers, the eternally expectant ones, the hopeful ones—and the eternally disappointed ones.
– Erich Fromm
Mine ear is open, and my heart prepared. The worst is worldly loss thou canst unfold. Say, is my kingdom lost?
– Richard II by William Shakespeare
When we awaken to a new possibility in our lives, we often see it first in another person. A part of us that has been hidden is about to emerge, but it doesn’t go in a straight line from our unconscious to becoming conscious. It travels by way of an intermediary, a host. We project our gold onto someone, and suddenly we’re consumed with that person. The first inkling of this is when the other person appears to be so luminous that he (or she) glows in the dark. That’s a sure sign that something is changing in us and we are projecting our gold onto the other person.
When we observe the things we attribute to the other person, we see our own depth and meaning. Our gold goes first from us to them. Eventually it will come back to us. Projecting our inner gold offers us the best chance for an
advance in consciousness.
– Robert A. Johnson
I asked him, “Why don’t you write here in the fresh air in these beautiful surroundings?” I gestured toward the rose garden, the goldfish pond and the rows of sycamore trees in front of us.
Gurdjieff replied, “I always work in the cafes, dance halls, places where I see people how they are; where I see those most drunk, most abnormal. Seeing them I can produce impulse of love in me. From that I write my books.”
– Louise March
No, we don’t need more sleep. It’s our souls that are tired, not our bodies. We need nature. We need magic. We need adventure. We need freedom. We need truth. We need stillness. We don’t need more sleep, we need to wake up and live.
– Brooke Hampton
Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.
– Dorothy Allison
From the ground up, that’s a good description of civilization. From the ground in, that’s culture. Civilization and culture head in different directions.
– Stephen Jenkinson
I never understand
why ‘easy reading’ is
sometimes used as
an insult. It is quite
hard to write a novel
that is easy to read.
Imagine criticizing
an architect because
a house was easy to
live in.
– Matt Haig
The Spirit of Poetry
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
There is a quiet spirit in these woods,
That dwells where’er the gentle southwind blows;
Where, underneath the white-thorn, in the glade,
The wild flowers bloom, or, kissing the soft air,
The leaves above their sunny palms outspread.
With what a tender and impassioned voice
It fills the nice and delicate ear of thought,
When the fast ushering star of morning comes
O’er-riding the gray hills with golden scarf;
Or when the cowled and dusky-sandaled Eve
In mourning weeds, from out the western gate,
Departs with silent pace! That spirit moves
In the green valley, where the silver brook,
From its full laver, pours the white cascade;
And, babbling low amid the tangled woods,
Slips down through moss-grown stones with endless laughter.
And frequent, on the everlasting hills,
Its feet go forth, when it doth wrap itself
In all the dark embroidery of the storm,
And shouts the stern, strong wind. And here, amid
The silent majesty of these deep woods,
Its presence shall uplift thy thoughts from earth,
As to the sunshine and the pure, bright air
Their tops the green trees lift. Hence gifted bards
Have ever loved the calm and quiet shades.
For them there was an eloquent voice in all
The sylvan pomp of woods, the golden sun,
The flowers, the leaves, the river on its way,
Blue skies, and silver clouds, and gentle winds,
The swelling upland, where the sidelong sun
Aslant the wooded slope, at evening, goes,
Groves, through whose broken roof the sky looks in,
Mountain, and shattered cliff, and sunnyvale,
The distant lake, fountains, and mighty trees,
In many a lazy syllable, repeating
Their old poetic legends to the wind.
And this is the sweet spirit, that doth fill
The world; and, in these wayward days of youth,
My busy fancy oft embodies it,
As a bright image of the light and beauty
That dwell in nature; of the heavenly forms
We worship in our dreams, and the soft hues
That stain the wild bird’s wing and flush the clouds
When the sun sets. Within her tender eye
The heaven of April, with its changing light,
And when it wears the blue of May, is hung,
And on her lip the rich, red rose. Her hair
Is like the summer tresses of the trees,
When twilight makes them brown, and on her cheek
Blushes the richness of an autumn sky,
With ever-shifting beauty. Then her breath,
It is so like the gentle air of Spring,
As, from the morning’s dewy flowers, it comes
Full of their fragrance, that it is a joy
To have it round us, and her silver voice
Is the rich music of a summer bird,
Heard in the till night, with its passionate cadence.
He who is rooted in the soil endures. Alienation from the unconscious and from its historical conditions spells rootlessness. That is the danger that lies in wait for the conqueror of foreign lands, and for every individual who, through one-sided allegiance to any kind of -ism, looses touch with the dark, maternal, earthy, side of his being.
– Jung, Civilisation in Transition
You don’t need to know a thing about quantum entanglement, wherein one atom can affect another even though they are separated by tremendous distance, to have some sense that our lives are always larger than the physical limitations within which they occur. We exist apart from our existences, you might say, are connected to the world and to other people in ways we will never be able to fully articulate or understand—and we assert our iron wills and ravenous hungers at our own peril. There is such a thing as a collective unconscious. There is such a thing as a spirit of place, and it reaches beyond geography. And poetry, which is a kind of quantum entanglement in language, is not simply a way of helping us to recognize the relations we have with people and places, but a means of preserving and protecting those relations.
– Christian Wiman
When asked how fascism starts, Bertrand Russell replied: “First they fascinate the fools. Then they muzzle the intelligent.”
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind. Nor hath love’s mind of any judgment taste; Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste: And therefore is love said to be a child, Because in choice he is so oft beguil’d.
– William Shakespeare
The losing candidate always gets thrown under the bus. But it’s been up to us, for a decade, to stop the bus of authoritarianism and nativism barreling down the highway. If that bus completes its dark journey ten days from now, we’ll all be to blame.
– Bill Kristol
The moon came to the brink
With his nerd cop
The boy look at her look
The boy is watching her
In the air moved by
Move your arms around the moon
And teach, lubricate and pure
Her hard tin breasts
Huye luna, luna, luna
If the gypsies came
They would with your heart
White necklaces and rings
Baby, let me dance.
When the gypsies come
They will find you on the yunque
With the eyes closed
Huye luna, luna
Luna, I already feel your horses
Kid, let me go
Don’t step on my starch whiteness
The rider was getting closer
Playing the drum of the plain
Inside the box, the child
He has his eyes closed
For the olivar they came
bronze and sleep the gypsies
The heads held high
And the eyes are rolling
How the Zumaya sings!
Aww, how he sings in the tree!
Through the sky goes the moon
With a child in the hand
Inside the pot they cry
Shouting out to the gypsies
The air the sail, sail
The air is watching over her.
Her poems her drawings
– Federico Garcia Lorca
The first inspiration I ever had was the cosmos, the planetary system.
The simplest forms in the universe are the sphere and the circle. I represent them by disks and then I vary them… spheres of different sizes, densities, colours and volumes, floating in space, traversing clouds, sprays of water, currents of air, viscosities and odours – of the greatest variety and disparity.
A mobile is an abstract sculpture made chiefly out of sheet metal, steel rods, wire and wood. Some or all of these elements move, propelled by electric motors, wind, water or by hand.
– Alexander Calder
Most of us aren’t where the big decisions are made. We do our jobs, and we take pride in them, and we hope that our little contribution is going to be used well.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
I’m living in fear that a day will come when there won’t be any ribbons left to buy—and I’ll have to go digital and join the twenty-first century.
– Paul Auster
Beside You on Main Street
by The Cyborg Jillian Weise
We were stepping out of a reading
in October, the first cold night,
and we were following this couple,
were they at the reading? and because
we were lost, I called out to them,
“Are you going to the after party?”
The woman laughed and said no
and the man kept walking, and she
was holding his hand like I hold yours,
though not exactly, she did not
need him for balance. Then what
got into me? I said, “How long
have you been married?” and she said
“Almost 30 years” and because
we were walking in public, no secret,
tell everyone now it’s official,
I said, “How’s marriage?” The man
kept walking. The woman said,
“It gets better but then it gets different.”
The man kept walking.
What is a line? It’s not that borders aren’t real—they’re just imaginary.
– @DanielPoppick
I only have a certain bag of tricks. And that’s why little things, like punctuation, make such a big difference. The dash I’ve always relied on hugely.
– Ann Beattie
The Function of a Wing
by Emma Trelles
They arrive as red masked druids, ghost
The edge of the desolate golf course, sandhill
Cranes poised between the tall grass and oaks
Lathered in moss, a fading, this pocket of homes
Long past afternoons of stickball and smoking grills,
Hearts alert to the rhythm of clouds
Despite how loneliness drifts beside us all.
Each day’s arc is a wing, a wish hurling
Across the sky, and also time, because what is the clock
But a ship of travel we must board upon our first breath?
I have read about a girl who pinned her healing to the making
Of cranes, and how they navigate by starlight, instinct, the ancient
Maps scored inside the lace of their bones. They know how to dance.
They arrive as themselves. A newborn will curl around her mother’s
Temples in peace, a place where no harm will descend
in its poisonous light, its cell-stripping forms,
A place of quiet, and journey that is a kind of returning to love.
Rainfall
With acknowledgments to “Rain” by Cynthia Barnett
Whether the rain on Mars was delicate or brutal
whether it was blue or gray
whether it fell on bare rocks
that remained bare
or on fertile ground
that raised large forests of leafing trees
it could not last.
Mars froze eventually
in the same duration
that Venus by contrast
bowed her burning head
in noxious vapors and gas clouds.
•
On planet Earth meanwhile
after half a billion years
of continuous volcano-havoc
meteor storms
earthquakes and lightning strikes
vapor stored in the atmosphere
eventually began falling.
It soothed the fires.
When the fires died
it fell silently on the first outcrops of moss.
On the tender grass with a sizzle.
With more strenuous drumming
on the resilient fronds of ferns.
It became an orchestra of millions
across the luxurious expanse of the tree canopy.
•
Then the sun wiped its forehead
with long filmy fingers
and beamed afresh.
It worked through to creatures
flourishing beneath the canopy
and persuaded them to
interrupt their work
of scouring on all fours
for delectable roots and berries.
In the clarified light
they stared at their hands.
They saw the wrinkled fingertips
that gave them a firm grip
on slippery branches and vines
gradually smooth and soften.
They rose in amazement
onto their hind legs
and crept from shelter
across the dazzling savannah.
•
After a summer of twelve thousand years
after the interruptions of ice
after one particular inundation
and the shadow of an ark
darkening fish-shoals
as they scooted over hills and valleys
after the blaze of one civilization
then another
after the destruction of several experiments
with law and order
after the extinction
of many beautiful languages
rain by and large
found its place in the scheme of things.
It began to defeat its purpose
on the private sky of umbrellas.
It babbled through long green fields
and melted into the seams of poetry.
It larked in the puddle of its many names.
Cobblers and chair legs and pipe stems.
Frogs and jugs and beards.
Cats and dogs.
Men.
•
Although they are shaped like a parachute
thanks to the air pressure beneath them
raindrops explode on landing.
Then the sun bears down again
fitting his monocle into his eye.
The glass flashes and burns.
The rain sweats
and evaporates into the ocean of its air.
The ocean continues on its way
continually overflowing here and there
in quick little splashes
or reckless floods and drenching.
It is delicate or brutal.
It is blue sometimes and sometimes gray.
Sometimes it falls on bare rocks
at others it raises
large forests of leafing trees.
– Andrew Motion
This Flight
by Pat Schneider
This flight, then, before the last.
Distance won,
centering in.
There were wild birds,
were there not? Feeding
from my fingers?
Or were they children?
This feathering is not down
bedding of ducks
wintering
on the pond, wings folded,
feeding from the fingers of my children,
their bright faces bending
toward reflection.
This feathering is for flight.
I might think this
to be that other time,
mistake the wild bird for its image,
but for pinions.
I am still a long way from home
but turning now,
banking on air,
coming in.
That’s the anguish of it. Do this book, or die.
– James Baldwin
Goodbye Dirt
Help help help me I hear
in the fan vaults on Sundays me
and my friends read the bible
and worry about drugs doctoral
programs brain injuries revert!
Help help help me lend me
your thick beautiful river
you know the one! I’m a worm it’s true
I have to get under the rock or I’ll die
I’ll see you at the high table you and me
in the beautiful soil you and me
in the brambles I forget everything
I’ve ever learned about poetry how amazing
I look for you and there you are
– Talin Tahajian
There were many times as a child when I tried to face the fact that I was going to be roasted in hell for all eternity.
– Sharon Olds
Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
– John Updike
Maybe it’s like the time I got off the boat by mistake,
the wrong island in Greece at twenty-two. Tinos. Midnight.
An empty harbor café. Also afraid.
– Jim Moore
It was a testament to the vastness of his appetite that he still insisted through his eighth decade of life on doing what he did, which was—between making books and essays—hanging out deep into the night.
– Joshua Cohen on Gary Indiana
Gone with the Swallows
by Ameen Rihani
Must I convey at last the news to thee?
Must I now mourn the love that lived in me?
Gone with the autumn, with the dying year.
Gone with the kisses that are yet so near!
Gone with the swallows somewhere o’er the sea!
But with the Spring will he again
Return, will he with me remain?
Must I till then, remembering naught,
Forgetting all that love had brought,
Grope in the shadows of the slain?
Must I forget the day
That took my love away,
And all the happy hours
That reared for him their towers
And crowned him with the flowers
Of all the queens of May?
Must I alone
My once my own,
In my retreat
The new year greet,
And winter meet,
And winds hear moan?
Not yet
Can I
Forget;
But why
One clings
And sings
To things
That die?
Shouldn’t a writer be trained to pay attention to what they notice about life, what they think life is, and come up with ways of highlighting those things?”
– Sheila Heti
I think what confuses me so much about those who have prescriptions for how to write is that they assume all humans experience the world the same way.
– Sheila Heti
I learned to understand people through things beyond the words they were saying. That was very, very good for me as a writer, because I was tuned in to that kind of detail.
– Mary Gaitskill
One doesn’t write poems because one has something to say, but rather because one has something one doesn’t know how to say.
– Rebecca Lindenberg
English has an extraordinary vocabulary overall, but it’s not like Portuguese when it comes to sex.
– John Keene
I’m always glad of anybody that says anything awful. I can use it.
– Robert Frost
With the Lark
by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Night is for sorrow and dawn is for joy,
Chasing the troubles that fret and annoy;
Darkness for sighing and daylight for song,—
Cheery and chaste the strain, heartfelt and strong.
All the night through, though I moan in the dark,
I wake in the morning to sing with the lark.
Deep in the midnight the rain whips the leaves,
Softly and sadly the wood-spirit grieves.
But when the first hue of dawn tints the sky,
I shall shake out my wings like the birds and be dry;
And though, like the rain-drops, I grieved through the dark,
I shall wake in the morning to sing with the lark.
On the high hills of heaven, some morning to be,
Where the rain shall not grieve thro’ the leaves of the tree,
There my heart will be glad for the pain I have known,
For my hand will be clasped in the hand of mine own;
And though life has been hard and death’s pathway been dark,
I shall wake in the morning to sing with the lark
Snakes won’t grow
from women’s heads
no matter what is done to them.
– Rae Armantrout
People often tell me my work is ‘difficult.’ I have the sinking feeling they mean ‘difficult’ as in ‘hopeless.’
– Susan Howe
Who is original? Everything that we are doing, everything that we think, exists already, and we are only intermediaries, that’s all, who make use of what is in the air.
– Henry Miller
People in the West are way too comfortable with an intolerable reality… they’re fine with the fact that their cell phones work because some 6 year old is mining cobalt for them in Congo… Where does this power come from? Who gets to decide what peoples lives can and can’t be?
– Tarik Endale
Where they would teach her to swallow
this dust
She will kiss with her mouth
my homeland
and stay
with the song of Soweto.
– June Jordan
Why Wake up Happy
by Quincy Scott Jones
when i can creep into our 3 am bed
slink into the sliver of mattress
you saved for me watch the streetlight
slice through the curtain leaving a streak
of fluorescence in your hair stare
at the ceiling and wait maybe
you’ll steal back the covers maybe
you’ll offer me your leg maybe
you’ll beg for quiet then in a whisper
so not to stir the monster masquerading
as jeans on a chair you’ll ask get any
writing done? no, read two articles though.
they say love is no different than large amounts of chocolate.
also, the cocoa bean will soon be no more.
The Metier of Blossoming
by Denise Levertov
Fully occupied with growing—that’s
the amaryllis. Growing especially
at night: it would take
only a bit more patience than I’ve got
to sit keeping watch with it till daylight;
the naked eye could register every hour’s
increase in height. Like a child against a barn door,
proudly topping each year’s achievement,
steadily up
goes each green stem, smooth, matte,
traces of reddish purple at the base, and almost
imperceptible vertical ridges
running the length of them:
Two robust stems from each bulb,
sometimes with sturdy leaves for company,
elegant sweeps of blade with rounded points.
Aloft, the gravid buds, shiny with fullness.
One morning—and so soon!—the first flower
has opened when you wake. Or you catch it poised
in a single, brief
moment of hesitation.
Next day, another,
shy at first like a foal,
even a third, a fourth,
carried triumphantly at the summit
of those strong columns, and each
a Juno, calm in brilliance,
a maiden giantess in modest splendor.
If humans could be
that intensely whole, undistracted, unhurried,
swift from sheer
unswerving impetus! If we could blossom
out of ourselves, giving
nothing imperfect, withholding nothing!
In California During the Gulf War
by Denise Levertov
Among the blight-killed eucalypts, among
trees and bushes rusted by Christmas frosts,
the yards and hillsides exhausted by five years of drought,
certain airy white blossoms punctually
reappeared, and dense clusters of pale pink, dark pink—
a delicate abundance. They seemed
like guests arriving joyfully on the accustomed
festival day, unaware of the year’s events, not perceiving
the sackcloth others were wearing.
To some of us, the dejected landscape consorted well
with our shame and bitterness. Skies ever-blue,
daily sunshine, disgusted us like smile-buttons.
Yet the blossoms, clinging to thin branches
more lightly than birds alert for flight,
lifted the sunken heart
even against its will.
But not
as symbols of hope: they were flimsy
as our resistance to the crimes committed
—again, again—in our name; and yes, they return,
year after year, and yes, they briefly shone with serene joy
over against the dark glare
of evil days. They are, and their presence
is quietness ineffable—and the bombings are, were,
no doubt will be; that quiet, that huge cacophany
simultaneous. No promise was being accorded, the blossoms
were not doves, there was no rainbow. And when it was claimed
the war had ended, it had not ended.
Untitled [To see this evil from its core]
by Philip Lamantia
To see this evil from its core
He spent himself on margins
Crystal edges umbra-ed and broke,
Splintering by measured denials,
Waiting for the hour patience intersected:
The giver capsuled whole the spending parts.
O Mad Love where untempered
You remain, tunneling trains of art—
Deflecting horizonless
depthless
Light
on this voice—these sounds—
A heart whose wails you dream
Into actuality swims halfway
To your always perilous obliqued and
Always
vanished
shore.
There is nothing typical about Poe; he’s from the moon.
– E. B. White
I really resist what seems a human impulse toward what everyone has agreed on as normal.
– Carl Phillips
Celestial Estrangement
by Philip Lamantia
We have been carried here against our will
Burnt stars
Oceanic gardens
where the clouds are soaked into my eyes
How much sand floats in the teacup of your dreams
The rivers you perceive are those of horses
they carry red water
the odor of imperishable sweat
putrescent human bellies stuffed with revolvers and nuns
At the top of the tower
where hounds part with a pool of water
where one comes only with a flaming lance
where there is no escaping the pain of a horse’s kick
where toy dolls are nailed to the beds
where lovers suck their bodies dry
as harp strings are plucked away
in this hermit world of old gunny sacks and broken heads
we encounter tons of wingless birds
The poem allowed me to waver. I remembered the Northern landscapes and sonatas of my childhood, the performance of desire moving through infinite variations.
– J. Mae Barizo
Knockout Rose
by Jordan Pérez
There is nothing but this
moment of purple October
with its fertile dusks.
The thrips have paused
to watch the oaks wetten.
The larkspurs have come
into their roundness. Can you
feel the pines flirt with the light?
Would you brush a little onto my face?
I arch against your palm
until you cannot look away.
Somehow, this has become
our normal. A young girl
might do anything
for a hint of light on her face.
Tear down the mosque,
the temple, everything in sight.
But don’t break a human heart.
For that is where God resides.
– Bulleh Shah
i never did learn
how to properly handle a vessel
as mighty as a woman
– Rhian Elizabeth, i am the captain
CONNOISSEURS
For Marianne Moore
Certain sunsets are purple lights kissing
snow-covered rooftops. Or taking a sheet
of paper to compose a love letter
in purple-colored ink—but I have seen something
more desirable, a simple image
of a child’s wrist. Or far better, moving
pictures of the world I inhabit—
I am transported to a parallel
universe I have sought all my life. We
stand in the street as a car idles and
moths crowd into the light. It is late. Steam
from our mouths conjures smoke signals; night feels
colder than it is. In a few days, snowfall is likely.
The air fills with the smell
of birch. Mirrors enlighten and delight.
Humans are wondrous. Poets are wondrous.
This I like best.
– Ruben Quesada
Ideology may appear clear to its proponents as long as it remains abstract, but when it is put into practice it takes the shape of a crime.
– Mahmoud Darwish
THE NEW LANGUAGE
After the fires, the plague, the long summers
of green rain, we wanted so badly to touch each other.
Each word was a different arrangement of bodies:
a human body together with an animal body,
or a human body together with a body of water,
or a heavenly body together with a body cavity,
or the body of Christ together with a body bag.
This language was heavier, was more like earthworks—
could, in some cases, be seen from space.
For tornado, one body blew on another’s pinwheeling hand
Drought required one human body to backstroke across
another, which pretended to be a desert body’s
generous sand
The cost of words was volatile.
Though they were always happening, we rarely spoke
of earthquakes (a stack of ten bodies lying on
a writhing eleventh). Hypercane took every body
we could find. Gore only required pieces.
We needed the sun to shine for exposure, needed
the alignment of at least three stars for fortune.
For debris, three people had to be the glitter,
the toothbrush, and the outlet cover, and one
had to be the baby albatross stomach. We fought
dumbly, grabbing at each other’s mouths,
grunting eat eat eat.
– Claire Wahmanholm
If you live long enough, you even get fond of people you thought you hated.
– Gary Indiana
It is our ability to create connections—and the power of these connections—that makes writers a target for repression, and why it’s critical to withstand it. Our belonging is not contingent on our silence; our humanity is contingent on breaking it.
– Lisa Ko
If revolution is tied to dependence on the inscrutabilities of ‘long range politics’, it cannot be made relevant to the person who expects to die tomorrow.
– George Jackson
What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle-age.
– Sylvia Plath
The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.
– Marshall McLuhan
Without doubt, the most common weakness of all human beings is the habit of leaving their minds open to the negative influence of other people.
– Napoleon Hill
Odin gave his eye to acquire knowledge..but I would give far more.
– Ragnar
My half-moon,
my cathedral dome,
my grin of a Cheshire Cat;
my slice of lemon in the gin,
my D for don’t-ever-look-back.
My shining penny pressed into
the arcade slot, ready to drop
beyond the star-pinned sky.
My tunnel to tomorrow
through the hillside
of the night.
– Laura Webb
This is all to let the mind retain control; to do that I must avoid certain temptations so they do not destroy me: the image of the Mother and the image of the Lover. I’m trying hard not to be forever thinking of you both.
– Roland Barthes
Wise sayings often fall on barren ground but a kind word is never thrown away.
– Arthur Helps
We think the most important job in the world is the visible work, but our invisible work to the improvement of the soul is the most important job in the world, and all other forms are only useful when they materialize.
– Leo Tolstoy
We live in a time of no room, which is the time of the end. The time when everyone is obsessed with lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quantity, speed, number, price, power, and acceleration.
– Thomas Merton
When practicing the Dharma there are seven types of corruption.
If your faith is small while your intelligence is great, you become corrupted by considering yourself a teacher.
If you have many listeners while your self-regard is high, you become corrupted by considering yourself a spiritual friend.
If you assume superior qualities while not having taken the Dharma to heart, you become corrupted by considering yourself a leader.
If you give oral instructions while not practicing them yourself, you become corrupted by being an insensitive “Dharma expert.”
If you are fond of senseless babble while lacking the Dharma in your heart, you become corrupted by being a craving, charlatan yogi.
If you have little learning while lacking the oral instructions, you become corrupted by being a commoner, though your faith may be great.
A genuine practitioner who acts in accordance with the true teachings should liberate his being with intelligence, tame his mind with faith, cut misconceptions with listening to teachings, cast away social concerns, mingle his mind with the Dharma, perfect his knowledge with learning and reflecting, resolve his mind with the oral instructions, and gain final certainty through the view and meditation.
That, however, is difficult.
– Padmasambhava
When I Wrote A Little
poem in the ancient mode for you
that was musical and had old words
in it such as would never do in
the academies you loved it and you
said you did not know how to thank
me and in truth this is a problem
for who can ever be grateful enough
for poetry but i said you thank me
every day and every night wordlessly
which you really do although again
in truth it is a problem for how can
life ever be consonant with spirit
yet we are human and are naturally
hungry for gratitude yes we need it
and never have enough oh my dear i
think these problems are always with
us and in reality have no solutions
except when we wash them away on
salty tides of loving as we rock in
the dark sure sea of our existence
– Hayden Carruth
There are people who have the sun inside them. It’s hard to explain. Their presence simply lights up your world. It’s not about pretty smiles They have an inner being that shines bright and feels like the sun in winter. It’s a quiet energy, an inner peace. But most importantly, they don’t want anything in return… like the sun.
– Serdar Özkan
Hear me out here, what if we refuse to call large language models “artificial intelligence” and consistently refer to them as “computerized pattern recognition”?
– Irina Dumitrescu
skies filled with uncertainty
northern weather
harvest moon
– Basho
The further we advance, the more the purpose of our technical means fades out of sight.
– Jacques Ellul
The newly-renamed Eavan Boland Library at Trinity College Dublin will be the first building on Trinity’s campus to be named after a woman. It took 432 years. 432!
– Christine Bohan
The more complex, the more fragile. Complexity goes against the second law of thermodynamics, that all complex entities tend to fall apart, and it takes more and more energy for complex systems to function.
– Robert N. Bellah
The poetry of the earth is never dead.
– John Keats
I can’t hide the truth: I will end my life unhappy, cantankerous and alone, and I will have deserved it.
– Michel Houellebecq
In old days men had the rack. Now they have the press.
– Oscar Wilde
“People,” Jung observed, “live on only one or two floors of a large apartment building which is our minds, forgetting the rest.” The individuation process puts us in touch with “the rest.”
– Claire Dunne
The growing influence of women is the one reassuring thing in our political life.
– Oscar Wilde
That we are utopians is well known. So utopian are we that we go the length of believing that the revolution can and ought to assure shelter, food, and clothes to all — an idea extremely displeasing to middle-class citizens, whatever their party color, for they are quite alive to the fact that it is not easy to keep the upper hand of a people whose hunger is satisfied.
– Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread
a fine line
by Courtney Edwards
At the Time of Your Calving
the Tasman Glacier
Even if you build a wall
of ice and fortify your pain
in a moat of clouds. Even if you
cling to the coldest pinnacle of your
grief until you are scarred and chapped
even if you recede slowly into the fog and
throw snow at those who dare wander by and
even if you hold it all in until you’re blue on the face.
You can never escape your place in the order
of things. What I mean to say is, your sharp edges
will smooth this valley. Your rich silt will turn to milk
and feed the plankton which will feed the air that will sustain
my breath, which I will lose at the sight of your beauty. And even
though I shake at everything your shrinking represents,
I can’t help but marvel at the sound of your
breaking.
The human mind is a wonderful thing.
It starts working before you’re even
born and doesn’t stop again until you
sit down to write a song.
– Roger Miller
The Honey Alone
by Li-Young Lee
Bees come
from out of the sun,
God’s fevered eye.
Any simple child can see.
Tears are gifts
from the mother of God,
as are memory and imagination,
as are seeing, hearing, breathing, thinking, and feeling.
There’s nothing but gifts on this poor earth.
But only the wise child realizes,
after drowsing among the flowers, wasting
an entire summer of his best hours, the bees
are his earliest ancestors,
and he is their honey-loving,
venom-bearing, six-sided-dreaming, I Ching–reciting
descendant and fellow minion of the sun,
he with his pollen-dusted eyelashes and skullcap,
he with his maps
legible only to other
murmuring, winged, round-bellied alchemists.
As for the wicked child who can’t remember
what Virgil said about the vanishing of the bees,
he may have to witness sweetness
disappear from the earth in his lifetime
and never know why.
And what about the child
who doesn’t even know what questions to ask?
Tell him
bees feed on sweat
running down the ribs
and inner arms and thighs
of the mother of God,
and on Her tears,
to make the honey which alone
satisfies the daily hunger of God.
Tell him,
Her tears
are for us to cry.
Almost Awake: Spring Morning Gratitude
by Li-Young Lee
Open window.
Blue sun.
Green sun.
Last night
light rain fell
off and on. Thunder
rumbling nudged me
how many times almost awake?
Windowsill wet.
Blue and green shadows on the garden wall.
Flowers fallen
into the birdbath. Wings,
sparrows and finches, splashing
in the pool. The bathers’ cries
of pleasure make a sound
like tiny anklets ringing
or little sacks of coins being shook.
Those little pipers know
how to pipe
and never grow hoarse.
But I know in silence
something raucous birds don’t know:
everything in the garden belongs to Death.
Everything is alive and thriving in Death’s garden.
Even the gardener, Life,
is Death in disguise.
In order to learn the secret
words of Life, the little flowers
recite Death’s calculus in school.
It’s Death’s cursive they read and copy.
It takes them years to make the letters of Life
as flawlessly as Death makes the letters.
It takes them years more to make the words of Life
as clearly as Death makes the words.
Love is the tutor this morning
in Death’s garden.
Love is the tutor
every morning in Death’s garden.
The birds at their bath know none of this.
They proclaim things we learned in kindergarten:
All flowers are born betrothed.
All flowers fall in love with butterflies.
Betrothed to whom? They don’t know.
And they don’t know the butterflies
are my elder brothers.
The birds think it makes me jealous or lonely
when the flowers throng the paths
and stretch their necks for a glimpse
of my brothers passing. Look,
shining in the wind,
bearing our ancestors’ eyes on their wings,
there go my brothers now:
Jacob, Jonathan, and Joseph.
That leaves me all by myself
to wait for Hummingbird.
The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
– George Eliot
The task of liberated people is not to scold the world and preach to it, but to delight it back to its senses.
– Alan Watts
Everything is connected. The wing of the corn beetle affects the direction of the wind, the way the sand drifts, the way the light reflects into the eye of man beholding his reality. All is part of totality, and in this totality man finds his hozro, his way of walking in harmony, with beauty all around him.
– Tony Hillerman
… the path that leads from beauty to immorality is tortuous but certain. Plunged deep in beauty, the mind feeds off nothingness. When a man faces landscapes whose grandeur clutches him by the throat, each movement of his mind is a scratch on his perfection. And soon, crossed out, scarred and rescarred by so many overwhelming certainties, man ceases to be anything at all in face of the world but a formless stain knowing only passive truths, the world’s color or its sun. Landscapes as pure as this dry up the soul and their beauty is unbearable. The message of these gospels of stone, sky, and water is that there are no resurrections.
– Albert Camus
The swans are gone. Still the river
Remembers how white they were.
It strives after them with its lights.
It finds their shapes in a cloud
What is that bird that cries
With such sorrow in its voice?
I am young as ever, it says. What is it I miss?
– Sylvia Plath
The educated citizen knows how much more there is to know. He knows that “knowledge is power,” more so today than ever before. He knows that only an educated and informed people will be a free people, that the ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all, and that if we can, as Jefferson put it, “enlighten the people generally … tyranny and the oppressions of mind and body will vanish, like evil spirits at the dawn of day.” And, therefore, the educated citizen has a special obligation to encourage the pursuit of learning, to promote exploration of the unknown, to preserve the freedom of inquiry, to support the advancement of research, and to assist at every level of government the improvement of education for all Americans, from grade school to graduate school.
– John F Kennedy
WALK
Every day at about the same time, you take the same walk
with the sun coming up.
Through a gap in the fence you disappear.
I’ve seen how your boot-prints go up the slope
where they have worn a path by repetition.
And I assume each day that what you see is different.
The frost like dust on the juniper trees.
A toppled pine with its roots yanked up.
The coyote that runs, then stops on the ridge to look back.
Most of all, I suppose, it’s the distance and the light
that you appreciate – the mountains changing
their appearance minute by minute,
from melon-rose to copper to grayish-green to blue.
I know the walks are part of your secret life.
I know there are a hundred things that you will never tell,
things that are not meant to be put into words.
Your walk is like a coin pushed into a slot.
I see you every morning slip through,
then drop like a wish into a well,
the wish being yourself, and the being alive that you’ve got.
– Tony Hoagland
My friends are not normal. As a matter of fact, many are bat shit crazy. They dress in black, wear costumes, and have too many tattoos. They are writers, artists, directors, photographers, reenactors, and people who play with dead things. Eternal monster kids who drive hearses, hang out in cemeteries, or sit on lonely mountain tops gazing at the heavens. Some rarely speak, but when they do their voices carry the sounds of bat wings and autumn leaves rustling down deserted cobblestone streets. And they smell of pumpkin spice, candy apples, and ancient volumes of forgotten lore. My friends care nothing at all about the stock market, real estate investing, or the Kardashians, and many would probably burst into flames if exposed to direct sunlight. They are October people and carry in their hearts the magic of Halloween. They are special people, and my life has been so much better because of them.
– Owl Goingback
When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
– Virginia Woolf
It’s one thing to be brain-washed, quite another to be heart-washed. Our difficult, taboo, shunned emotions are where freedom, power, and wisdom reside. Yet, none of this brilliance is obvious to the naked eye. The dark emotions must be entered to enact and reveal their transformative light.
– Jack Adam Weber
As you evolve, you understand the value of a harmonious nervous system. And you seek to actively help maintain that for others too, rather than disrupting their peace.
– Nika Solé
Everyone is always looking towards what comes next, when the mastery is being able to be where you are.
– Nika Solé
Here, once again, this evergreen poem by
an ancient (and anonymous) Japanese writer:
The traitor
Has the best
Patriot costume.
I’m sorry to inform you that you’ve read enough to start writing.
– Neil Renic
I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
– Robert A. Heinlein
with words
I was healed
hands towards heaven
– Ogawa
Perhaps you also will one day understand that it is only the man who is really capable of being alone, and without bitterness, who attracts other people.
– CG Jung
Once you realize that there’s only one of you, and that you can’t be duplicated, remade, or replaced, you start to see the world totally different.
– Nika Solé
The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not–which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams.
– CG Jung
the color of wind
planted carelessly
an autumn garden
– Basho
URGENT MESSAGE TO A FRIEND IN PAIN
I have to tell you
a little thing about living,
(I know, I know, but listen),
a little thing I’ve carried
in the dark:
Remember when you saw the stars of childhood,
when you knelt alone and thought
that they were there for you,
lamps that something held
to prove your beauty?
They are they are they are they
are they are.
– Joseph Fasano
When a society breaks stuff faster than it heals stuff you get the world we’ve got.
When a society heals more than it breaks, well…that is a world we could have, with discernment, mindfulness (and a wholly different economic system).
– Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
It’s impossible to do without love altogether. Even if words are all that’s left, it’s still real.
– Marguerite Duras
Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.
– Edna O’Brien
To be with her is to
sit in autumn sunlight;
– Virginia Woolf
The troubadours of rejected love,
Have all seen blanch, within one summer,
Their dear kingdom of hopelessness.
– René Char (translated by Jonathan Griffin)
I know that my plainness of speech makes them
hate me, and what is their hatred but a proof that I
am speaking the truth?
– Socrates
When God is going to do something wonderful, He or She always starts with a hardship; when God is going to do something amazing, He or She starts with an impossibility.
– Anne Lamott
Whenever you become anxious or stressed, outer purpose has taken over, and you lost sight of your inner purpose. You have forgotten that your state of consciousness is primary, all else secondary.
– Eckhart Tolle
This only confirms that, as Nathalie Sarraute said, writing is trying to find out what we would write if we wrote. Because writing, real writing, is something we will never do.
– Enrique Vila-Matas, Mac’s Problem
Dawkins is more annoying than Peterson. “I’m not interested in symbols I’m interested in reality”… Dawkins doesn’t know that reality is subordinate to its narrativization. Dawkins thinks he can access some True world without fantasy.
– @nakfourium
There is a road and it’s gone now.
There is a sea and you can’t drink its water.
– Hala Alyan, Palestinian-American Poet
Omg Vancouver is so beautiful
Why didn’t anyone tell me (everyone told me)
– Jane Huffman
Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely brilliant with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving.
– Ray Bradbury
Your eyes must be on the larger trends that govern events, on that which is not immediately visible. Never lose sight of your long-term goals. With an elevated perspective, you will have the patience and clarity to reach almost any objective.
– Robert Greene
In the springs of your eyes
a hanged man strangles the rope.
– Celan, Praise of Distance, (tr. by John Felstiner)
A woman who shows you the music she’s listening to every day is baring her mind and soul to you if you even care.
– Normie Macdonald
The remarkable result of some sixty years of popular education has been that practically no illiterates are left, and that practically no literates are left either; nearly everyone is semiliterate, as the suburb has superseded the town and the country.
– Robert Graves
In a Free Commonwealth it should be lawful
for every Man to think what he will, and speak
what he thinks.
– Baruch Spinoza
On my walks I carried a large, beautiful marble that had belonged to my father; sometimes I took it out of my pocket and held it up in the sun as if it might function as a conduit for his soul.
– Mary Gaitskill
If you want to be rewarded, you have to be irreplaceable.
If you want to be irreplaceable, you have to be unique.
If you want to be unique, you have to be authentic.
If you want to be authentic, stop listening to everyone and everything else.
It’s drowning “you” out.
– Naval Ravikant
If you want to make the wrong decision, ask everyone.
– Naval Ravikant
It takes everyone a different amount of time to realize:
Most people aren’t worth meeting.
Most places aren’t worth going to.
Most projects aren’t worth working on.
Saying no – is how you show the people, places, and things that are worth it, that you mean it.
– Alex Hormozi
Look at your habits: Are they the product of
innumerable little cowardices and lazinesses…or of
your courage and inventive reason?
– Nietzsche
The exchange of international thought is the only possible salvation for the world.
– Thomas Hardy in a letter to John Galsworthy
The most fatal imposition of school is that it places anything of relevance into the far future. This means that nothing a student does really matters in the present, and so to a young person, basically nothing matters at all.
– @altweltaffe
When you strip the spiritual trappings from it, meditation is just time out for adults. You go sit in the corner until you can behave yourself.
– @VividVoid_
Notes from the Other Side
by Jane Kenyon
I divested myself of despair
and fear when I came here.
Now there is no more catching
one’s own eye in the mirror,
there are no bad books, no plastic,
no insurance premiums, and of course
no illness. Contrition
does not exist, nor gnashing
of teeth. No one howls as the first
clod of earth hits the casket.
The poor we no longer have with us.
Our calm hearts strike only the hour,
and God, as promised, proves
to be mercy clothed in light.
They want to punish you for your speech because they can’t punish you for your thoughts.
– @naval
Tell me which infinity attracts you, and I will know the meaning of your world.
– Bachelard
Poems are always attempting to wrestle into words that which is large and which seems to defy language itself. It’s poetry’s fundamental conundrum.
– Tracy K. Smith
People who are possessed, be it by some religious or political fanaticism or something else, are often physically pale. It is as though they literally have no blood. And they certainly have no blood in the sense of having no warm feelings, no normal human affects. You cannot make such people laugh, you can’t even make friendly contact with them. Their vitality is drained by their fanaticism. Therefore, they can’t enjoy life. They have no private life, no moments of joy, and because of that they lack the enjoyment of life.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
windmill cancer
the quixotic fight against
alternative facts
– @hegelincanada
All the issues in the world people could pick and they chose “anti-wokeness” — it’s truly something.
– Lisa Lucas
killing frost
I finish my coffee
way too fast
– @pauldavidmena
so I quickly threw
a few tangerines into my overnight bag,
straightened my eyelids and shoulders, and
headed straight for the door.
– Frank O’Hara
On the Internet, individuals replace institutions.
– @naval
The person who
carefully designs their
daily routine goes
further than the person
that negotiates with
themselves every day.
– Shane Parrish
Apple is the most successful Design House in the world.
– @naval
Rejoicing in others’ success is a sign of evolution.
– Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
I think poetry is a way of carrying grief, but it’s also a way of putting it somewhere so I don’t always have to heave it onto my back or in my body. The more I put grief in a poem, the more I am able to move freely through the world because I have named it, spoken it, and thrown it out into the sky.
– Ada Limón
We must purify ourselves and make ourselves beautiful. We must place ourselves, I say, first in the intellectual heaven which is within us, and then in this sensible and corporeal heaven which presents itself to our eyes.
– Giordano Bruno
sparse snowflakes
the loneliness
of galaxies
– @haikuforlife
To force oneself to believe and to accept a thing without understanding is political, and not spiritual or intellectual.
– Siddhārtha Gautama
Think for yourself, not of yourself.
Think of others, not for others.
– @naval
You have to realize that when you die, you’re not alone. You’re not going to some strange place. You’re going home.
– Phil Lesh
There are twenty difficult things which are hard for human beings:
1. It is hard to practice charity when one is poor.
2. It is hard to study the Way when occupying a position of great authority.
3. It is hard to surrender life at the approach of inevitable death.
4. It is hard to get an opportunity of reading the sutras.
5. It is hard to be born directly into Buddhist surroundings.
6. It is hard to bear lust and desire without yielding to them.
7. It is hard to see something attractive without desiring it.
8. It is hard to bear insult without making an angry reply.
9. It is hard to have power and not pay regard to it.
10. It is hard to come in contact with things and yet remain unaffected by them.
11. It is hard to study widely and investigate everything thoroughly.
12. It is hard to overcome selfishness and sloth.
13. It is hard to avoid making light without having studied the Way enough.
14. It is hard to keep the mind evenly balanced.
15. It is hard to refrain from defining things as being something or not being something.
16. It is hard to come into contact with clear perception of the Way.
17. It is hard to perceive one’s own nature and through such perception to study the Way.
18. It is hard to help others towards Enlightenment according to their various needs.
19. It is hard to see the end of the Way without being moved.
20. It is hard to discard successfully the shackles that bind us to the wheel of life and death as opportunities present themselves.
– attributed to the Buddha
It is a highly significant, though generally neglected, fact that those creations of the human mind which have borne preeminently the stamp of originality and greatness, have not come from within the region of consciousness. They have come from beyond consciousness, knocking at its door for admittance: they have flowed into it, sometimes slowly as if by seepage, but often with a burst of overwhelming power.
– G.N.M. Tyrell
What is creativity? People think it’s just another psychological process – but there is a sense of profound mystery; unpredictability, and what philosopher G.N.M. Tyrell calls the burst of overwhelming power from some source beyond the individual, beyond consciousness, that is a key to true creativity. It’s an experience beyond the boundaries of normal consciousness.
Why is it that true creativity seems to appear from beyond the threshold of consciousness, as if the mind is suddenly tuned in to some inconceivable other – dimensional broadcasting system unheard by ordinary people? Perhaps it is because in the act of creation, our mind physically reorganizes itself in a new way that is impossible to predict beforehand.
Our brain/mind is what physicists call an open system – a structure through which is flowing or passing a constant stream of matter and energy, such as blood, oxygen, nutrients, thoughts, and information. This influx of energy and matter causes the brain to vibrate or fluctuate. Ordinarily, in normal states of consciousness, our brain is able to absorb these fluctuations and still maintain its structure or internal organization, that is, our ego/reality continues to make sense.
However, as more and more energy flows through the system (as the creative thinker absorbs more and more information, has more and more thoughts, feels more and more emotion), the fluctuations increase, until they are too turbulent to be absorbed by the system. The structure becomes increasingly unstable until it reaches a critical point, like a complex machine thrashing around on the verge of flying apart. Finally, the turbulence grows so great that the system can no longer maintain its organization or structure. At this point, it has the potential to move in an almost infinite number of unpredictable directions.
Now, even a small fluctuation can be sufficient to push the system over the edge. When that happens, the entire system seems to shudder and fall into chaos. Things stop making sense. In some cases the system may be destroyed. Or it may survive by emerging from this chaos into a new structure, a new pattern, a new organization that is characterized by a higher level of coherence – a structure that can pass more energy through it without turbulence. Things now make sense again, but in a whole new way we could never have imagined. The system has taken a leap into the unknown and escaped into a higher order.
It has had a creative insight. This happens not just for creative individuals, but for everyone who experiences personal growth. It’s not an accident that major upsets, personal crises, an experience of chaos, and a disintegrating ego can lead to the most growth.
Since the breakthrough to a higher order and higher coherence can happen only when the existing structure – the conscious mind, or our normal state of consciousness – breaks down (into what the creative thinker often experiences as a tumult of ideas, teeming images, confusion, uncertainty, disorder), then the reorganization at a higher level must by definition appear out of chaos or disorder, must appear to emerge from beyond consciousness. Research has proven that the reorganization that takes place after collapse is not related in any causal or linear way with the structure that existed before. There’s no way it could have been predicted from prior conditions. In that sense, it’s a true quantum leap, a death that leads to a rebirth.
This, of course, explains why, traditionally, creative individuals have been thought to be a little nuts. A number of recent psychological studies have concluded that there is a very strong connection between creativity and mental turmoil or disorder. Seen from another angle, this means that creative people are not afraid to open themselves up to new ideas and experiences, not afraid to let go of their ego and their sense of what makes sense, and plunge into the unknown. Creative people have faith: they stake their lives on the belief that as they plunge ahead into the unknown, they will emerge with a higher sense, a new vision.
People tend to be reluctant to go through the fluctuations, and destabilization necessary to escape to a higher order, preferring to retain their usual rigid reality, determined to hang on to their present structure. It’s a natural tendency to resist the unknown and to want to protect the established structure/ego.
Not only do we hang on to our psychopathology, but we tend to evade personal growth because it brings fear, awe, feelings of weakness and inadequacy. We resist, we deny our best side, our talents, our finest impulses, our highest potentialities, our creativeness.
– Abraham Maslow
Be greeted psychoneurotics!
For you see sensitivity in the insensitivity of the world, uncertainty among the world’s certainties.
For you often feel others as you feel yourselves.
For you feel the anxiety of the world, and its bottomless narrowness and self-assurance.
For your phobia of washing your hands from the dirt of the world, for your fear of being locked in the world’s limitations. for your fear of the absurdity of existence.
For your subtlety in not telling others what you see in them.
For your awkwardness in dealing with practical things, and for your practicalness in dealing with unknown things, for your transcendental realism and lack of everyday realism,
for your exclusiveness and fear of losing close friends, for your creativity and ecstasy,
for your maladjustment to that “which is” and adjustment to that which “ought to be”, for your great but unutilized abilities.
For the belated appreciation of the real value of your greatness which never allows the appreciation of the greatness of those who will come after you.
For your being treated instead of treating others, for your heavenly power being forever pushed down by brutal force; for that which is prescient, unsaid, infinite in you.
For the loneliness and strangeness of your ways. Be greeted!
– Kazimierz Dabrowski
The propensity for changing one’s internal environment and the ability to influence positively the external environment indicate the capacity of the individual to develop.
Almost as a rule, these factors are related to increased mental excitability, depressions, dissatisfaction with oneself, feelings of inferiority and guilt, states of anxiety, inhibitions, and ambivalences – all symptoms which the psychiatrist tends to label psychoneurotic.
Given a definition of mental health as the development of the personality, we can say that all individuals who present active development in the direction of a higher level of personality (including most psychoneurotic patients) are mentally healthy.
– Kazimierz Dabrowski
To arouse such a mind one must be deeply aware
of the impermanence of the world.
This realization is not achieved
by some temporary method of contemplation.
The truth is not some method you can take up.
You stand alone,
raw and dying under heaven and earth.
What do you make of it?
Don’t wait for the teachings from others,
the words of the scriptures,
the principles of enlightenment.
We are born in the morning
and die in the evening.
The man who you saw yesterday is no longer
with us today.
These are facts we see with our own eyes
and hear with our own ears.
But do we really notice it?
Do we let it touch us in the midst
of being bored, or tired, or incapable?
We were born this morning,
we will die this evening:
how will we give life to this moment?
To realize our potential
we only need arouse and invite
that reality,
to notice and appreciate it.
– Sensei Bonnie Myotai Treace
The old monk sat by the side of the road. With his eyes closed, his legs crossed and his hands folded in his lap, he sat. In deep meditation, he sat.
Suddenly his zazen was interrupted by the harsh and demanding voice of a samurai warrior. “Old man! Teach me about heaven and hell!”
At first, as though he had not heard, there was no perceptible response from the monk. But gradually he began to open his eyes, the faintest hint of a smile playing around the corners of his mouth as the samurai stood there, waiting impatiently, growing more and more agitated with each passing second.
“You wish to know the secrets of heaven and hell?” replied the monk at last. “You who are so unkempt. You whose hands and feet are covered with dirt. You whose hair is uncombed, whose breath is foul, whose sword is all rusty and neglected. You who are ugly and whose mother dresses you funny. You would ask me of heaven and hell?”
The samurai uttered a vile curse. He drew his sword and raised it high above his head. His face turned to crimson and the veins on his neck stood out in bold relief as he prepared to sever the monk’s head from its shoulders.
“That is hell,” said the old monk gently, just as the sword began its descent.
In that fraction of a second, the samurai was overcome with amazement, awe, compassion and love for this gentle being who had dared to risk his very life to give him such a teaching. He stopped his sword in mid-flight and his eyes filled with grateful tears.
“And that,” said the monk, “is heaven.”
Making the simple complicated is commonplace;
making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.
– Charles Mingus
I caught this insight on the way and quickly seized the rather poor words
that were closest to hand to pin it down lest it fly away again.
And now it has died of these arid words and shakes and flaps in them –
and I hardly know any more when I look at it
how I could ever have felt so happy when I caught this bird.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
I feel as if I am an ad
for the sale of a haunted house:
18 rooms
$37,000
I’m yours
ghosts and all.
– Richard Brautigan
Wrong as a squirrel with feathers, or a wolf with wooden teeth; not injustice, not unfairness—just a wrongness that, under the sky, could not exist.
– Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human
What You Do With What You’ve Got
by Dick Gaughan
You must know someone like him
He was tall and strong and lean
With a body like a greyhound
And a mind so sharp and keen
But his heart, just like a laurel
Grew twisted around itself
Till almost everything he did
Brought pain to someone else
It’s not just what you’re born with
It’s what you choose to bear
It’s not how big your share is
But how much you can share
And it’s not the fights you dreamed of
But those you really fought
It’s not just what you’re given
It’s what you do with what you’ve got
And what’s the use of two good legs
If you only run away?
And what use is the finest voice
If you’ve nothing good to say?
And what good is strength and musclе
If you only push and shove?
And what’s the use of two good ears
If you can’t hear those you love?
It’s not just what you’re born with
It’s what you choose to bear
It’s not how big your share is
But how much you can share
And it’s not the fights you dreamed of
But those you really fought
It’s not just what you’re given
It’s what you do with what you’ve got
Between those who use their neighbours
And those who use a cane
Between those in constant power
And those in constant pain
Between those who run to evil
And those who cannot run
Tell me which ones are the cripples
And which ones touch the sun
It’s not just what you’re born with
It’s what you choose to bear
It’s not how big your share is
But how much you can share
And it’s not the fights you dreamed of
But those you really fought
It’s not just what you’re given
It’s what you do with what you’ve got
And what’s the use of two good legs
If you only run away?
And what use is the finest voice
If you’ve nothing good to say?
And what good is strength and muscle
If you only push and shove?
And what’s the use of two good ears
If you can’t hear those you love?
It’s not just what you’re born with
It’s what you choose to bear
It’s not how big your share is
But how much you can share
And it’s not the fights you dreamed of
But those you really fought
It’s not just what you’re given
It’s what you do with what you’ve got
MILTON,
the poet
not the hurricane,
attempted
to tell the truth
in terms
of a fable.
but are not
truth
and
fable
opposites?
consider the title
of Milton’s
masterwork:
paradise
lost.
are not
paradise
and lost
oppositions?
“fallen”
creatures,
are we not
simultaneously
cursed
and
blessed?
and is it not the task
of the Christ
to put an end
to oppositions?
this morning
I wrote to a friend
that we shared
the desire to know
(analytical)
and the desire
not to know
(intuitive, creative)
and that both manifested
in an endless
war
in our work.
may the divine,
whatever it may be
(even if it is only
compassionate Death),
silence their cries.
– Jack Foley
I like to experience the universe as one harmonious whole. Every cell has life. Matter, too, has life; it is energy solidified. Our bodies are like prisons, and I look forward to be free, but I don’t speculate on what will happen to me. I live here now, and my responsibility is in this world now.
– Albert Einstein
Love is Light, that enlightens those who give and receive it. Love is gravity, because it makes some people feel attracted to others. Love is power, because it multiplies the best we have, and allows humanity not to be extinguished in their blind selfishness. Love unfolds and reveals. For love we live and die. Love is God and God is Love.
– Albert Einstein
…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
ALREADY WHOLE
So firm is the conviction that we are not good enough—that we don’t have enough or know enough—that the idea that you are whole and entire is almost impossible to fathom. However jumbled and messy the circumstances of life, what is required is a switch of mind and heart. What is needed is radical acceptance, embracing this wondrous gift we are given. As Zen master Haquin once said, “This very body is the Buddha body. This very land is the Buddha land.”
Doubt, mistrust and an attitude of lack keeps you from belonging to the world. So you have to catch yourself pecking, needling and picking at yourself, antsy to set yourself right. Always hankering to make yourself better is to live with a restless soul. The celebrated composer John Cage put it this way, “It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.”
So try putting this into practice. Sit in deep relaxation with a full and open heart. Calm your spirit and be right where you are, and know that way down deep, you need nothing more, or less.
– Tias Little
It would be Halloween. It’s always Halloween in my imaginary life. Even in my earliest years, the ones I never technically experienced but only heard about from my biographers, it was Halloween—Halloween a metaphor for donning a mask of “reality” and becoming a spy in order to expose the “real” world’s fictitious underbelly.
– Sol Luckman
THURSDAY
by James Longenbach
Because the most difficult part about making something, also the best,
Is existing in the middle,
Sustaining an act of radical imagination,
I simmered a broth: onion, lemon, a big handful of mint.
The phone rang. So with my left
Hand I answered it,
Sautéing the rice, then adding the broth
Slowly, one ladle at a time, with my right. What’s up?
The miracle of risotto, it’s easy to miss, is the moment when the husks dissolve,
Each grain of rice releasing its tiny explosion of starch.
If you take it off the heat just then, let it sit
While you shave the parmesan into paper-thin curls,
It will be perfectly creamy,
But will still have a bite.
There will be dishes to do,
The moon will rise,
And everyone you love will be safe.
When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.
– Neil Postman
For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. I…] We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters. I…] What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections, especially those related to money, and re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family. Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly, slowly happen.
– D. H. Lawrence
We know that it is the people who do not know enough about their own shadow and their own dark side who are most likely to fall victims to evil influences.
If one knows the evil possibilities within oneself, then one develops a kind of second sight or capacity for getting a whiff of the same thing in other people. A jealous woman who has realized her own jealousy will always recognize jealousy in the eyes of another woman. The only way, therefore, not to walk through the world like an innocent well-brought-up fool, protected by father and mother from the evils of this world, and therefore cheated and lied to and stolen from at every corner, is to go down into the depths of one’s own evil, which enables one usually to develop the instinctual recognition of corresponding elements in other people.
– Marie-Louise Von Franz
Usually if you pray from the heart, you get an answer—the phone rings or the mail comes, and light gets in through the cracks, so you can see the next right thing to do.
– Anne Lamott
In eternity, each moment is equal to every other, and by this equivalence, all moments are reduced to one: to the instantaneousness of lightning, the “heart of the eternal [René Char].”
– Andrew Joron
the infant first sees, not objects, but being
– George Oppen
Don’t look for “smart,” look for “clear thinker.”
– Naval Ravikant
all alone
an orphan bird sings
autumn dusk
– Issa
Goals are for people who care about winning once. Systems are for people who care about winning repeatedly.
– James Clear
Meditation is turning off society and listening to yourself.
It only “works” when done for its own sake.
Hiking is walking meditation.
Journaling is writing meditation.
Praying is gratitude meditation.
Showering is accidental meditation.
Sitting quietly is direct meditation.
– Naval Ravikant
Now I tell kids who are in workshops, It’s not your teachers you want to please, it’s your peers—they’re the ones who are going to be your readers. Your teachers are all going to die off within the next fifteen years, forget them.
– Jane Smiley
I always wrote in English since I wanted my friends and the girls I was in love with to understand my poems.
– Charles Simic
Don’t worry about what motivates you to write. If you want to impress your girlfriend, that’s okay. Once you start, the writing takes over.
– Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
I’m constantly revising my thinking—I now say, Start where you are, and then connect to the world.
– Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
The ideal circumstances would be to have no responsibilities to anyone or anything. Just to think, just to read. I suspect that I became a writer to support my reading habit.
– Jamaica Kincaid
If we’re completely honest, not sentimental or nostalgic, we have no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is one unending thread, not a life chopped up into sections out of touch with one another.
– P. L. Travers
If you don’t do it, nobody can live with you. You can’t live with you! People talk a lot about the pleasures of the creative life. They never tried it!
– W. D. Snodgrass
The novelist must work with ambiguity, with irony. What is irony? Look at Don Quixote. He’s mad as a goat, but he’s the most lucid man in the world.
– Javier Cercas
My body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.
– James Joyce, Araby
I realized, of course, that other people used these roads; but that night, it seemed to me these dark byways of the country existed just for the likes of us, while the big glittering motorways with their huge signs and super cafes were for everyone else.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
Our shadow may contain the best of ourselves.
– Marion Woodman
getting old multiplies the shadows that cross the eye or is it the blackbird?
– Karin Lessing
In a small room to fall asleep and wake, what a feeling!
– Ema Saikō, (tr. Hiroaki Sato)
The entire end-of-October night was beating with a single pulse, its own strange rhythm sounding through trees and rain and mud in a manner beyond words or vision: a vision present in the low light, in the slow passage of darkness, in the blurred shadows, in the working of tired muscles; in the silence, in its human subjects, in the undulating surface of the metaled road; in the hair moving to a different beat than do the dissolving fibers of the body; growth and decay on their divergent paths; all these thousands of echoing rhythms, this confusing clatter of night noises, all parts of an apparently common stream, that is the attempt to forget despair; though behind things other things appear as if by mischief, and once beyond the power of the eye they no longer hang together. So with the door left open as if forever, with the lock that will never open.
– László Krasznahorkai
She let go.
She let go. Without a thought or a word, she let go. She let go of the fear. She let go of the judgments. She let go of the confluence of opinions swarming around her head. She let go of the committee of indecision within her. She let go of all the ‘right’ reasons. Wholly and completely, without hesitation or worry, she just let go.
She didn’t ask anyone for advice. She didn’t read a book on how to let go. She didn’t search the scriptures. She just let go. She let go of all of the memories that held her back. She let go of all of the anxiety that kept her from moving forward. She let go of the planning and all of the calculations about how to do it just right.
She didn’t promise to let go. She didn’t journal about it. She didn’t write the projected date in her Day-Timer. She made no public announcement and put no ad in the paper. She didn’t check the weather report or read her daily horoscope. She just let go.
She didn’t analyze whether she should let go. She didn’t call her friends to discuss the matter. She didn’t do a five-step Spiritual Mind Treatment. She didn’t call the prayer line. She didn’t utter one word. She just let go.
No one was around when it happened. There was no applause or congratulations. No one thanked her or praised her. No one noticed a thing. Like a leaf falling from a tree, she just let go.
There was no effort. There was no struggle. It wasn’t good and it wasn’t bad. It was what it was, and it is just that. In the space of letting go, she let it all be.
A small smile came over her face. A light breeze blew through her. And the sun and the moon shone forevermore…
– Safire Rose
Forget about enlightenment.
Sit down wherever you are and listen to the wind that is singing in your veins.
Feel the love, the longing, and the fear in your bones.
Open your heart to who you are,
right now,
not who you would like to be.
Not the saint you’re striving to become.
But the being right here before you,
inside you, around you.
All of you is holy.
You’re already more and less than whatever you can know.
Breathe out, look in, let go.
– John Welwood
What can poor mortals say about clouds? While a description of their huge glowing domes and ridges, shadowy gulfs and canyons, and feather-edged ravines is being tried, they vanish, leaving no visible ruins. Nevertheless, these fleeting sky mountains are as substantial and significant as the more lasting upheavals of granite beneath them. Both alike are built up and die, and in God’s calendar difference of duration is nothing. We can only dream about them in wondering, worshiping admiration, happier than we dare tell even to friends who see farthest in sympathy, glad to know that not a crystal or vapor particle of them, hard or sot, is lost; that they sink and vanish only to rise again and again in higher and higher beauty.
– John Muir
You want to know what it was like? It was like my whole life had a fever. Whole acres of me were on fire. The sun talked dirty in my ear all night. I couldn’t drive past a wheat field without doing it violence. I couldn’t even look at a bridge. I used to go out in the brush sometimes, so far out there no one could hear me, and just burn. I felt all right then. I couldn’t hurt anyone else. I was just a pillar of fire. It wasn’t the burning so much as the loneliness. It wasn’t the loneliness so much as the fear of being alone. Christ look at you pouring from the rocks. You’re so cold you’re boiling over. You’ve got stars in your hair. I don’t want to be around you. I don’t want to drink you in. I want to walk into the heart of you and never walk back out.
– Nico Alvarado
Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation, but their seductive quality often comes from the way they are part of the much larger temptation to self-rejection. When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions.
The real trap, however, is self-rejection. As soon as someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned, I find myself thinking, “Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody.” … [My dark side says,] I am no good… I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected, and abandoned. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the “Beloved.” Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.
– Henri J.M. Nouwen
In a love relation, as Jung once put it, you risk everything. You put yourself on a table, you stop the power game and the trying to dominate or conquer the other person. If you succeed in really loving the other person, if you really relate, then all sorts of miracles happen. But in the beginning stages a general state of blindness possesses you, illusions or wrong expectations, disappointments, recriminations. You have to work through all that first. And that’s how you become more conscious. I didn’t say it is agreeable. So if you don’t love the other, you run away after a while.
– Marie Louise Von Franz
People who have been away from God tend to come back by one of two ways: extreme lack or extreme love, an overmastering sorrow or a strangely disabling joy. Either the world is not enough for the hole that has opened in you, or it is too much. The two impulses are intimately related and it may be that the most authentic spiritual existence inheres in being able to perceive one state when you are squarely in the midst of the other. The mortal sorrow that shadows even the most intense joy. The immortal joy that can give even the darkest sorrow a fugitive gleam.
– Christian Wiman
Feel free to ignore your mind.
It has a virus that
causes it to lie.
– Viktor Frankl
Why do humans so often presume that shaming voices are always from God, and grace voices are always the imagination? If something comes toward us with grace and can pass through us and toward others with grace, we can trust it as the voice of God.
– Richard Rohr
What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul
– Victor Hugo
It’s hard to discount what every nerve in your body is telling you, even if it’s incorrect. Again, there’s that dilemma—you may know there’s not an emergency, but your feelings say that there is. It seems that, as developing infants, we need a pretty high proportion of good stuff to bad. Negative states are inevitable and normal, but if they outweigh the positive states, there’s going to be trouble ahead. Putting together ‘‘bonds’’ and ‘‘brains,’’ it seems that we need a secure attachment, with plenty of positive feelings, comfort, and stability, in order for our brains and minds to develop as they should. So this is not just about having a nice childhood with pleasant memories or the opposite, it’s literally about how well the brain develops and what working models, or templates, the infant brain is constructing in the midst of all these experiences.
– Susan Nathiel
One of the great purposes of the American nation is to shelter and guard the rights of all men and women to seek the conditions and the companions necessary for the inner search.
– Jacob Needleman
We are born to overcome ourselves. We are born for that – we are not yet that. We are searchers; that is the essence of our humanness.
– Jacob Needleman
Dreams gather in black books: Coiled spaces, mixed up parables out of which looks the soul as it reads time. I travel the whole world with an uncomplicated rhyme. I feast in dreams, and fast in life; it seems that dreams transfigure strife.
– Ben Okri
I’ve often thought there ought to be a manual to hand to little kids, telling them what kind of planet they’re on, why they don’t fall off it, how much time they’ve probably got here, how to avoid poison ivy, and so on. I tried to write one once. It was called Welcome to Earth. But I got stuck on explaining why we don’t fall off the planet. Gravity is just a word. It doesn’t explain anything. If I could get past gravity, I’d tell them how we reproduce, how long we’ve been here, apparently, and a little bit about evolution. I didn’t learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn’t a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativity is defensible and attractive. It’s also a source of hope. It means we don’t have to continue this way if we don’t like it.
– Kurt Vonnegut
The soul demands your folly; not your wisdom.
– Carl Jung
My advice, for what it’s worth: try not to be distracted by the faintly discourteous, the mildly incompetent, the harmlessly obnoxious. Roll with the delayed trains, dropped litter and misused apostrophes. Save your powder for the truly malevolent creatures now stalking the land.
– Hugh Laurie
The basis for friendship, relationship, partnership – isn’t proximity or time spent together – it’s values.
– @naval
I need a father, I need a mother, I need some old, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God but the sky is empty.
– Sylvia Plath
Let us make our education brave and preventive. Politics is an after-work, a poor patching. We are always a little late. The evil is done, the law is passed, and we begin the up-hill agitation for repeal of that of which we ought to have prevented the enacting. We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education. What we call our root- and-branch reforms of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms. We must begin higher up, namely, in Education.
– Emerson
But books are good only as far as a boy is ready for them. He sometimes gets ready very slowly. You send your child to the schoolmaster, but ’tis the schoolboys who educate him. You send him to the Latin class, but much of his tuition comes, on his way to school, from the shop-windows. You like the strict rules and the long terms; and he finds his best leading in a by-way of his own, and refuses any companions but of his choosing. He hates the grammar and Gradus, and loves guns, fishing-rods, horses, and boats. Well, the boy is right; and you are not fit to direct his bringing up, if your theory leaves out his gymnastic training.
– Emerson
The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadows.
– Theodore Roethke
I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night.
– H.P. Lovecraft
the only thing more embarrassing than having an mfa is being embarrassed of your mfa. and the only thing more embarrassing than being embarrassed of your mfa is being proud of your mfa.
– jane feinsod
In the end, here and now, your own gaze touches the same traces of characters as mine, and you read me, and I write you.
– Jean-Luc Nancy
The spirit is the life of the body seen from within, and the body the outward manifestation of the life of the spirit — the two being really one.
– Carl Jung
Akashic records of you and me in every way that we can be. A love that lasts eternally.
– Nika Solé
For this soul needs to be honored with a new dress woven from green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.
– Canal Bank Walk
Whilst we want cities as the centres where the best things are found, cities degrade us by magnifying trifles. The countryman finds the town a chop-house, a barber’s shop. He has lost the lines of grandeur of the horizon, hills and plains, and with them, sobriety and elevation. He has come among a supple, glib-tongued tribe, who live for show, servile to public opinion. Life is dragged down to a fracas of
pitiful cares and disasters. You say the gods ought to respect a life whose objects are their own; but in cities they have betrayed you to a cloud of insignificant annoyances: He has lost the lines of grandeur of the horizon, hills and plains, and with them, sobriety and elevation.
– Emerson
What’s on your mind?
Renaissance. Revolution. The reverberation of truth. Alchemy. Morality. Reverse engineering back to God.
– Nika Solé
For knowledge work, time spent has little to do with value created and the forty hour workweek is anachronistic nonsense.
– @naval
This is how we make important changes—barely, poorly, slowly.
– Anne Lamott
Looking for God is like a thirsty fish looking for water. What you seek is all around you, but you don’t realize it.
– Deepak Chopra
The Internet shifts the balance of credibility from institutions to individuals.
Institutions are revealed as insatiable and corrupt, even as a billion potential leaders step onto the stage.
– @naval
You thought the leaden winter
Would bring you down forever
But you rode upon a steamer
To the violence of the sun
– Pat Thomas
Weeble: Why not rewrite Buddhism according to my cultural values?
Zen Master Pink: Because if your culture were aligned with the Dharma, everyone you know would already be enlightened.
– Kenneth Folk
If you could only keep quiet, clear of memories and expectations, you would be able to discern the beautiful pattern of events. It’s your restlessness that causes chaos.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
The average lifespan of an American is 79 years.
This means midlife is 39.
If your goal is to get your body healthy, you need to do it sooner than later.
– Dan Go
sleep, in summary, now possessed all things, / all things were now by silence overtaken.
– sor juana, first i dream
Ultimately, what people have to offer each other is the stories they have lived, the adventures they have had, and the tragedies they have survived. Mythic tales offer a specifically shaped vessel into which people can pour their personal stories in order to learn how we each inhabit the eternal drama. The first piece of learning in this kind of shared story-telling involves opening our ears and hearts to the stories of others. It can be quite encouraging to hear a painfully familiar theme spoken from another person’s life, and it can be startling to learn how different another’s life can be. Listening carefully leads to hearing with the ‘inner ear’ and learning to respect what others might carry inside. Often the inner story stands in great contrast to the outer person. An African proverb suggests: A person is like a pepper—until you’ve tasted what’s inside you don’t know how hot it is.
– Michael Meade, The Water of Life
When you encounter something positive and healing, pause with it, lighting the lamp of your mindfulness to savor and appreciate it.
– Thomas Bien
If you look for evidence that people are conspiring to hold you back and the world is working against you, then it will take you no time at all to find precisely that.
If you expect to encounter helpful people and experience a world that is working with you, then you find plenty of evidence to support that view as well.
The raw material for a sweet life or a bitter life is always there. The story you emphasize is the one you notice.
– James Clear
The universe is a solitary space, and all its creatures do nothing but reinforce its solitude. In it, I have never met anyone, I have only stumbled across ghosts.
– E. M. Cioran; tr. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston
filling tiny ovals
with ink, a haiku poet
votes
– Therese Sellers
I am the kind of writer who rewrites and rewrites. I am very eager to correct everything.
– Kenzaburo Oe
The opposite of pain is pain—a searing, water-chapped cold.
– Morgan Thomas
An idea you have might not be original—Aristotle will always have thought of it before you.
– Umberto Eco
After I won the Pulitzer … My parents were stunned, and extremely proud, but I remember my father said, ‘You should always have a backup plan. You’re like a politician now, and you will go in and out of favor.’
– Jhumpa Lahiri
You make the tender parts
of me sing.
– Athena Nassar
So the world turned
its one good eye
to watch the bees
take most of metaphor
with them.
One has met so many people who announce that they’re poets and one’s thinking, My God, get me out of here.
– Paul Muldoon
Ideals are for greeting cards. I am trying to change consciousness.
– Harold Brodkey
If You Knew a Moment of Wordless Silence
If your mind could truly quiet,
what would you hear—
the stars whistling from
the beginning of endless time?
The earthly pipes of St. Paul’s
ringing out Auld Lang Syne
after another troubled American son
looked down the barrel of a rifle
and fired, fired, fired?
Had he not heard
the tender moon
whispering peace
in his dreams
nor the gentle rustling
of the trees telling him
he was safe and loved?
Had he not been soothed
by the soft hum of a streetlamp
nor watched its congregation
of moths lazily circling
their incandescent cage
on a summer night?
Had he not sat on his porch
and shared a companionable
silence with his mother, father,
sister, brother
nor been lulled by the drone
of the far-off highway
wafting over the river
like high-pitched mosquitoes
without the bite?
What if he’d always feared
the roar of silence,
never knowing its great love
could be a refuge?
– Lynn Palumbo
October
by John Haines
from Winter News
In the quiet house
a lamp is burning
where the book of autumn
lies open on a table.
There is tea with milk
in heavy mugs,
brown raisin cake, and thoughts
that stir the heart
with the promises of death.
We sit without words,
gazing past the limit
of fire into the towering
darkness….
There are silences so deep
you can hear
the journeys of the soul,
enormous footsteps
downward in a freezing earth.
Mandinka
by Sinéad O’Connor
I’m dancing the seven veils
Want you to pick up my scarf
See how the black moon fades
Soon I can give you my heart
I don’t know no shame
I feel no pain
I can’t see the flame
But I do know Man-din-ka
I do know Mandinka
I do know Mandinka
I do
They’re throwing it all this way
Dragging it back to the start
And they say, “See how the glass is raised?”
I have refused to take part
I told them, “Drink something new”
Please let me pull something through
I don’t know no shame
I feel no pain
I can’t
I don’t know no shame
I feel no pain
I can’t see the flame
But I do know Man-din-ka
I do know Mandinka
I do know Mandinka
I do
I do
I do
I said I do
Soon I can give you my heart
I swear I do
Soon I can give you my heart
I do
Mandinka
Soon I can give you my heart
Soon I can give you my heart
I don’t believe that ghosts are “spirits of the dead” because I don’t believe in death. In the multiverse, once you’re possible, you exist. And once you exist, you exist forever one way or another. Besides, death is the absence of life, and the ghosts I’ve met are very much alive. What we call ghosts are lifeforms just as you and I are.
– Paul F. Eno
Stories with weight to them have what C.G. Jung terms ‘the lament of the dead’, which in our frenetic culture we can no longer have time to hear. Most indigenous cultures will tell you that this world belongs to the dead, that’s where we’re headed. So mythology for me involves a conversation with the dead, with what you might call ancestors.Whatever we are facing now we need to have a root system embedded in weather patterns, the presences of animals, our dreams, and the ones who came before us. Myth is insistent that when there is a crisis, genius lives on the margins not the centre. If we are constantly using the language of politics to combat the language of politics at some point the soul grows weary and turns its head away because we are not allowing it into the conversation, and by denying soul we are ignoring what the Mexicans call the river beneath the river. We’re not listening to the thoughts of the world. We’re only listening to our own neurosis and our own anxiety.
– Martin Shaw
The idea of pared down, unadorned manly sentences was really big when Hemingway was king, but I prefer the sentences that are sinuous, intricate, evocative, sentences rising more like smoke from incense on the altar than plopping down like a fist on the table.
– Rebecca Solnit
The simple act of being completely
attentive and present to another person
is an act of love, and it fosters unshakable
well-being. It is happiness that isn’t
bound to a particular situation,
happiness that can withstand change.
– Sharon Salzberg
He had developed a superstitious fear of the instant, that tiny hole through which all the time available to human beings must pass.
– César Aira
Where am I? What does it mean to say: the world?… Who tricked me into this whole thing and leaves me standing here?.. Why was I not asked about it, why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought from a peddling shanghaier of human beings? How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality? … Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint?
– Kiekergaard, Is there no manager?
The age we live in … is an age in which every positive attitude has turned out a failure. Creeds, parties, programmes of every description have simply flopped, one after another. The only “ism” that has justified itself is pessimism.
– George Orwell
The higher your vibration, the higher of a reality you live in.
– Nika Solé
Mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe.
– Galileo Galilei
It is style that makes us believe in a thing–nothing but style. Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.
– Oscar Wilde
He who wants to ignore or neglect ecstasy is a being whose thought has been reduced to analysis. Existence is not only an agitated void: it is a dance that forces us to dance fanatically.
– Bataille
Whatever we fight about in the outside world is also a battle in our inner selves. Anyone who can admit this will first seek the solution in himself, and this in fact is the way all the great solutions begin.
– CG Jung
This November there seems to be nothing to say.
– Anne Sexton
The world has become lovelier. I am alone, and I don’t suffer from my loneliness. I don’t want life to be anything other than what it is. I am ready to let myself be baked in the sun till I am done. I am eager to ripen. I am ready to die, ready to be born again. The world has become lovelier.
– Herman Hesse
Because Of Us
This morning I learned
the English word gauze
(finely woven medical cloth)
comes from the Arabic word غزة or Ghazza
because Gazans have been skilled weavers for centuries
I wondered then
how many of our wounds
have been dressed
because of them
and how many of theirs
have been left open
because of us
– Emily Berry is an English poet and writer, born in London in
1981. She has published several collections of her work.
We have no symbolic life, and we are all badly in need of the symbolic life. Life is too rational; there is no symbolic existence in which I am something else, in which I am fulfilling my role, my role as one of the actors in the divine drama of life.
– CG Jung
One press account said I was an overnight success. I thought that was the longest night I’ve ever spent.
– Sandra Cisneros
I have done no work. My heart had stopped like a clock, the pendulum had somewhere bumped against the hand of misery and stood still.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
You drank the darkness
and became visible.
– Tomas Tranströmer
The flowers burst into beauty: it was their idea.
– Northrop Frye
From the wreckage I’ve reserved a thousand words in a pitiable state. All the verbs have died.
– Sam Beckett
Grace means you’re in a different universe from where you had been stuck, when you had absolutely no way to get there on your own.
– Anne Lamott
We are more closely united with the invisible, than with the visible.
– Novalis
Don’t ever leave your meditation thinking, ‘I’m going to do it next weekend, next month, or next year.’ Do it now. Anyway, you’re only doing it for about forty-five seconds, if you’re a beginner. It’s easy. You can do it anywhere. It only requires this: to sit straight.
– Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche
The body and mind are lifelong companions, evolving together through every experience.
– Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
Finding is the first Act
The second, loss, Third,
Expedition for the ‘Golden Fleece’
Fourth, no Discovery –
Fifth, no Crew –
Finally, no Golden Fleece –
Jason, sham, too –
– Emily Dickinson
Weeble: What is an arahat?
Zen Master Pink: An arahat is a broken buddha. He does not know his name. He does not know his father. He does not know his mother. He has no brothers and no sisters. He builds a monument to himself. He suffers. He is rootless. He seeks only attention.
– Kenneth Folk
Jealousy is the shadow of desire. Desire always compares and, because of comparison, there is suffering. People waste their lives in desiring, in being jealous, in comparing, and the precious time is simply lost.
– Osho
We understand the world better if we tremble with it.
– Édouard Glissant
Therapy is so extremely odd.
I was arguing with my therapist yesterday when something clicked, and it suddenly felt like my brain started untangling, and has continued to untangle today, and I can’t even remember what it was that triggered the untangling.
– @eatnik
Life offers its wisdom generously. Everything teaches. Not everyone learns.
– Rachel Naomi Remen
We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out.
– Heidi Periebe
You can change your business in 1 month.
You can change your body in 3 months.
You can change your life in 6 months.
We severely underestimate intensity + consistency.
– Codie Sanchez
Books, flowers, and trees. The trinity of inner contentment.
– @Kulambq
Wonder why some people “take off” and others don’t. I’m old enough to have seen large groups of people go through bigly traumatic situations and some truly reinvent and transcend themselves while others keep playing the games they used to be successful at.
– @nosilverv
The street conducts the flâneur into a vanished time … downward into a past that can be all the more spellbinding because it is not his own, not private. Nevertheless, it always remains the time of a childhood.
– Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project
In every difficult situation is potential value. Believe this, then begin looking for it.
– Norman Vincent Peale
Your letters are tied up, together with all correspondence worth saving, in a trunk of letters which I packed along with other trunks and boxes (who knows now for how long)…. Just think, we might have seen each other again here for a brief moment! I don’t know whether I should think of it or whether the mere imagining of it does not already conjure up too much that is irrevocable, for how could we see each other without Paris at least within reach? The painful longing would perhaps be stronger than all actuality, and I should get in addition an unbearable yearning for myself, for my heart of those days, feeling so much and
creating and for an instant so moved towards you, and so tender towards you, Lisawetta. Tender with an infinite shadow and on which you stood waiting, obstinate and gentle at the same time, like a child on its inexplicable favorite spot. Could it ever be like that again —?
What have we since become? The years, alas, have cramped my spirit badly and made me much less susceptible to people— and then came the war and did this and that to hamper me, lock me in, confute me.
And you too have long been another— your hand must have become more accurate and sure, your personality itself, dominating the gait and behavior of such strong and willful animals, must have grown less yielding, grown more masterly and determined, quite confirmed indeed by tests of daring, resoluteness, presence of mind, which for years you were able to give yourself.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Everything falls, already you wander in the ruins of tomorrow.
– Michaux
It is absurd to think that we can enter heaven without first entering our own souls. Without getting to know ourselves.
– St. Teresa de Avila
Sometimes disengagement
is the best way to engage.
– Rick Rubin
This is a beautiful place inside of us that knows exactly what we need. The journey to it is through our conscious breaths.
– Rachael Wolff
if creative writing programs tend toward aesthetic conservatism, competence, it has little to do with pedagogy and everything to do with how, as a whole, they have professionalized the field over the last 40 years, made writing literature into a career.
– Dan Sinykin
O house builder, you have been seen;
You shall not build the house again.
Your rafters have been broken up,
Your ridgepole is demolished too.
When you see through this stupidity,
you may enter the Mahayana
and build a home
on the other shore.
– Kenneth Folk
Our destination is our vow to do good, to do no harm, and to seek awakening for ourselves and others. Our starting point is accepting and embracing all of our qualities, good, bad, and neutral.
– Mark Herrick
There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else. Porpoises risen in a green sea, the wind at nightfall bending the rose- red grasses and you- in your apron hurrying to catch- say it seems to you to be your son. How ridiculous! You will pass up into a cloud and look back at me, not count the scribbling foolish that put wings at your heels, at your knees.
– William Carlos Williams
He was not the centre of my world. That was the old composition and I had walked out of that world.
I had literally walked off the stage.
– Deborah Levy
When it comes to a Green New Deal people ask: “How will you pay for it?”
As though we’re not paying for it now in loss of life & billions of dollars in destruction.
The Green New Deal isn’t radical.
Transforming our energy system saves lives, saves money & saves the planet.
– Bernie Sanders
Be as simple as you can be; you will be astonished to see how uncomplicated and happy your life can become.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good.
– Tolkien
As a dharma teacher, sometimes I encourage people to realize that there’s more to realize.
At other times I encourage people to realize that *this is it*.
The difference between these two has everything to do with who I’m speaking with, and where they are in their practice.
– @VinceFHorn
If a person hates half the country, they don’t deserve to lead it.
– Pastor John Pavlovitz
I am a prisoner of a strange idea, the burden of my work, which is the eternal suspicion that what goes on beneath our skins – a rich life of imagination, the bovine migrations of thought, the murky and neurotic swampworlds of feelings in all their terrifying variability, and the metallurgical alchemies of consciousness – is no more interesting than what goes on between them. Between skin and rock. Between skin and sky. Between sky and rock. Between sky and sky.
I have to trust that ecologies also grieve; that the grand concerns of what to do with ourselves, with our histories, with our lot, is not exclusively or capably held by ourselves; that whether we close our eyes or keep them open, there are others that lurk and spill and whisper and scream. Not human others. Not familiars.
I have to believe that I am not a soul occupying human flesh, but that I am flesh participating in a radically incomplete worlding and unworlding process we summarily call soul.
– Bayo Akomolafe
What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors. It’s astounding to me, for example, that so many people really appear to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn’t stay there any longer and had to go someplace else to make it. That’s all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower. That’s how the country was settled. Not by Gary Cooper. Yet we have a whole race of people, a whole republic, who believe the myths to the point where even today they select political representatives, as far as I can tell, by how closely they resemble Gary Cooper. Now this is dangerously infantile, and it shows in every level of national life.
– James Baldwin
I think the public library system is one of the most amazing American institutions. Free for everybody. If you ever get the blues about the status of American culture, there are still more public libraries than there are McDonald’s. During the worst of the Depression, not one public library closed their doors.
– David McCullough
My November Guest
by Robert Frost
My sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted grey
Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.
I find men victims of illusion in all parts of life. Children, youths, adults, and old men, all are led by one bawble or another. Yoganidra, the goddess of illusion, Proteus, or Momus, or Gylfi’s Mocking, is stronger than the Titans, stronger than Apollo.
– Emerson
Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy
And the dogs that talk revolution,
Drunk with talk, liars and believers.
I believe in my tusks.
Long live freedom and damn the ideologies.
– Robinson Jeffers
I don’t think enough people understand that it’s not just roads, bridges, housing, and water systems that aren’t designed to current climate conditions – it’s mental health systems, insurance systems, emergency response systems, agricultural systems, medical education systems,
supply chains, conflict resolution systems, collective governance systems, and more. Culture too – films, books, and movies aren’t yet speaking fully to what people are experiencing.
What most Americans are taught is the purpose of life – security, consumption, climbing a ladder – all of that is less and less obtainable (and some of it more and more harmful) as we get deeper into climate change.
But the culture as a whole hasn’t landed on more consistent purposes yet though there are so many purposes waiting to be claimed: healing, repairing, connecting, collaborating, purposes that while hard to pursue provide a deep sense of meaning to people’s lives.
– Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Formerly we used to canonize our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarize them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable.
– Oscar Wilde
More or less, I say, will Christian tragedy correspond to this – a fall and a rising again; not a rising only, but a victory; not a victory merely, but a triumph.
– George MacDonald, The Broken Swords
It is simple: depending on others is misery; depending on yourself is power.
– Robert Greene
And the writing is still : to you,
with you, about you, because of you
and for you.
– Nizar Qabbani
The fears we don’t face become our limits.
– Robin Sharma
The potflower on the windowsill says to me
In words that are green-edged red leaves :
Flower flower flower flower
Today for the sake of all the dead Burst into flower.
– Muriel Rukeyser
The internet is so vast and so diffuse. You can’t compare that to the record business and the way it worked. And digital cyberspace doesn’t provide a shared experience. I used to go see Pete Seeger, and within minutes he’d have an entire audience singing. When people sing together, they feel the same thing, they feel kinship. And by the end of the song, they’ve learned something and they can be moved forward. It’s hard to have this kind of experience now; that feeling of solidarity.
– Ry Cooder
Yes, there is a place
where someone loves you both before
and after they learn what you are.
– Neil Hilborn
REJECT THE AMERICAN JESUS
While the real Jesus was something of an anarchist, internationalist and even socialist, the American Jesus is more like a mascot for Western capitalism and imperialism.
The golden crown and the white skin should be giveaways that this Jesus is counterfeit. That flag by the pulpit should be all it takes to spot that a particular church is a vassal to the wealth and violent power of its own national culture, not to any universal ethic that could encompass us all.
When Jesus asked people to follow him there wasn’t an institutional church to join, nor a creed to parrot. To “follow Jesus” does not mean to join an institution, it means to share our world with those who have less and to serve the universal love for which Jesus lived and died.
As I’ve said so many times before, a kind Atheist is much closer to the example of Jesus than any religionist who teaches cruelty and superstition under the label of “Christianity.”
To “follow Jesus” does not meant to bend one’s knee to the imperialism of one’s nation nor theocratic institutions. To “follow Jesus” means to find the mustard seed of love within oneself and to let it grow into a fierce and tender justice that gives shelter to all.
– Jim Rigby
The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd; the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.
– Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
If we cannot find a way to make our wounds into sacred wounds, we invariably become cynical, negative, or bitter. This is the storyline of many of the greatest novels, myths, and stories of every culture. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it—usually to those closest to us: our family, our neighbors, our co-workers, and, invariably, the most vulnerable, our children.
– Richard Rohr
If at eighty you’re not a cripple or an invalid, if you have your health, if you still enjoy a good walk, a good meal (with all the trimmings), if you can sleep without first taking a pill, if birds and flowers, mountains and sea still inspire you, you are a most fortunate individual and you should get down on your knees morning and night and thank the good Lord for his savin’ and keepin’ power…. If you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical – man you’ve got it half licked.
– Henry Miller
Atrophy of form follows
hypertrophy of information.
– Kenneth Burke
My dream elf wears a peaked cap
Peeking out at me to laugh
Living in my cave of heart
Knowing love is daft.
In this cave, the fool is king
Scorning every pattern.
Newness come from broken things.
No wonder love is tattered.
– Bobbie Gorman
…(The) Celtic peoples perceive that eternity and this world are woven together. Just as the famous Celtic knots demonstrate, heavenly life and earthly life are linked and form a unified whole. A family dinner is an occasion for welcoming the saints; a family tragedy is occasion for imploring their intercession, presence, and support as members of the extended family of Christ.
Following the proclamation of the author of the letter to the Hebrews (“Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses”, Heb. 12:1) the Welsh poet Waldo Williams observed that we are “keeping house in a cloud of witnesses.” The rounds of daily life are lived out with this company. As we go through our regular chores and work, the saints are with us. These saints, alive in the eternal life of the Risen Christ, are not ghosts. Nor are they merely the product of our imaginations. The communion of saints is the astoundingly diverse and rich family of the Christ “in whom all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:17)
The Celtic saints are perceived to be anamchairde or “soul friends.” In the Celtic tradition, it is understood that a soul friend is a spiritual necessity. Every person needs someone with whom to be completely undefended, to be vulnerable and honest. A soul friend is the person whose presence allows us to be real and transparent, to seek continual transformation and growth in faith, hope and love. In the presence of your anamchara (singular form of the noun) you know the safety and assurance of one who will do no harm and one who will call forth your truest self. The tradition is emphatic that this work of formation cannot be done alone. While soul friends are usually earthly friends, they may also be particular saints whose lives speak to us, challenge us, evoke in us a desire to participate in Christ’s work of making the creation new….
In the Welsh tradition, there is to this day an awareness of the presence of St. David, patron saint of that nation, with those who labor and those who farm, with those in politics and those guiding the life of the church. St. David is an anamchara for the Welsh people. St. David was known for his personal strength and intelligence, and in the sixth century he founded a monastic community renowned for learning. His example and life continue to stir the hearts and imaginations of Welsh poets, writers and bards.
The Celtic tradition is marked by a great love of “kith and kin”—and that love includes the saints. They keep house with us, work with us, walk with us, pray for us. Their company is vast and their intercession is steady.
Bright, bright
the fellowship of the saints in light,
Far, far beyond all earthly sight.
No plague can blight, no foe destroy.
United here they live in love:
O then, above how deep their joy!”
– Mary Earle, All Saints Day
PLEASURE
by Rick Barot
You are told to believe in one paradise
and then there is the paradise you come to know.
The shoes lined up in pairs by the door
and the herd moving with its mysterious intent
across a dark plain. The blue of the sky
which is the zenith of all colors
and the love of the man in the next room,
strong and rough as a hog’s back.
My mind has a slow metabolism, it is slow
to understand what anything means,
but it understands that if you look at something
long enough, it will have something
to say to you. The sun that is strangely bright
on some days, a poisoned canary,
and the crop of winter rocks in a meadow
in April. Learning decades later
the name of the hospital where you were born
and watching the child eat a mango
as though it is time he is eating, time shining
on his lips. On fewer days I agree
with the poet’s dread of being
the wrong person in the right world, and believe
in adhesion, in never showing up
empty-handed, even if the pleasure I know best
is fused with the abject. There is always
the other side of the heart, its coaxing:
You are here. You can begin again. You can rise.
The idea that the world is made by objects, it’s wrong, according to contemporary physics. The world is made by relations. The world is a network of relation.
– Carlo Rovelli
a study of the soul – in moments – the only way the soul is seen.
– Ilya Kaminsky, scrap of conversation, overheard in the airport
for an instant
just above my pillow
billowing clouds
– Issa
Nonsense and mystery are not substitutes for truth; they are its consorts, engaged with it in perpetual dialogue.
– Louise Glück
Women didn’t fight for the right to vote to double their husband’s voting power.
Women, vote your conscience.
– Cortney McKee
I used the word care, but let me clarify: what we care about is what we love. And
we love so much more than the narrow version of who we are acknowledges: we
love justice, love truth, love freedom, love equality, love the confidence that comes
with secure human rights; we love places, love rivers and valleys and forests, love
seasons and the pattern and order they imply, love wildlife from hummingbirds to
great blue herons, butterflies to bears. This always was a love story.
– Rebecca Solnit
No one person can experience everything or understand everything, which is why we have stories and why we need to listen to each other.
– Mark Nepo
Mastery is the best goal because the rich can’t buy it, the impatient can’t rush it, the privileged can’t inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery is the ultimate status.
– David Sivers
Action produces information. Just keep doing stuff.
– Brian Armstrong
I despise politics wholeheartedly…even in my own country, I am uninterested in politics because I am convinced that 99% of politics are mere symptoms and anything but a cure for social evils. About 50% of politics is definitely obnoxious inasmuch as it poisons the utterly incompetent mind of the masses.
– Carl Jung
People who siphon the energy of others in order to increase in power are energy vampires. Those who collaborate with the grandiosity of the energy of the universe, are alchemists.
– Nika Solé
This is one of Jung’s greatest insights: that the ego and the shadow come from the same source and exactly balance each other. To make light is to make shadow; one cannot exist without the other.
– Robert A. Johnson
One secret of life is that the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day.
– Anne Lamott
The spiritual path will weed almost everything out. To the point where you feel like you have nothing left. Which is the whole point. Because from that very place you realize that even with almost nothing, you still have everything you need.
– Nika Solé
Zero-sum games tend towards conflict. Positive-sum games tend towards cooperation.
– @naval
In an age of abundance, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake leads to addiction.
– @naval
A Rilkean afternoon: to walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours.
– Christina Tudor-Sideri
I agree that the idea of poetry being therapy is preposterous, as Eliot Weinberger says “Poetry does not close wounds or answer questions; it opens them” But I also think therapy doesn’t close wounds, it too opens them. We spend a life dealing w the inchoate meaning of closing.
– Bianca Stone
Loving your life is an act of defiance in a world that thrives on doom, gloom, and lies.
– Nika Solé
Meanwhile
by Jack Gilbert
It waits. While I am walking through the pine trees
along the river, it is waiting. It has waited a long time.
In southern France, in Belgium, and even Alabama.
Now it waits in New England while I say grace over
almost everything: for a possum dead on someone’s lawn,
the sing light on a levee while Northampton sleeps,
and because the lanes between houses in Greek hamlets
are exactly the width of a donkey loaded on each side
with barley. Loneliness is the mother’s milk of America.
The heart is a foreign country whose language none
of us is good at. Winter lingers on in the woods,
but already it looks discarded as the birds return
and sing carelessly; as though there never was the power
or size of December. For nine years in me it has waited.
My life is pleasant, as usual. My body is a blessing
and my spirit clear. But the waiting does not let up.
I don’t want my piece of the pie. I don’t even like the pie. It’s a rotten pie made with expired ingredients. I want a shared buffet, a smorgasbord teeming with diversity. A table that keeps expanding to welcome every facet of the wild and unruly soul.
– McCall Erickson
If you know even a small amount about the fragile state of our ecosystem, you can recognize Donald Trump as an extinction level event.
– Mary Annaïse Heglar
Failed at
everything else
so I could
be me.
– McCall Erickson
Let us say, the present is where we live, while the past is where we dream. Yet if it is a dream, it is substantial, and sustaining.
– John Banville
My lifelong Republican father — whom I used to have shouting matches at the dinner table with over Obama and democrats supposedly socialist policies and so on — voted for Kamala Harris today.
In Colorado.
Please clap.
– Scott Leger
In this exact measurement of time, in this precision training of muscular actions, and in the principle of the ‘record,’ we find repeated in sport one of the essential elements of industrial life. Here too the human being becomes a kind of machine.
– Jacques Ellul
In the end, you will not have had the time to begin, but this you knew in advance.
– Hélène Cixous
He that refuseth instruction despiseth his own soul: but he that heareth reproof getteth understanding. The fear of the Lord is the instruction of wisdom; and before honour is humility.
– Proverbs 15:32-33
let’s try to breathe deeply, let our thoughts slide into an immense white space, eyelids closed, hands on stomach, let’s mimic death before it comes.
– Compass, Mathias Énard; tr. Charlotte Mandell
If we realize that on the whole the basic masculine attitude to life is that of focus, division and change; and the feminine (in either sex) is more nearly an attitude of acceptance, an awareness of the unity of all life and a readiness for relationship, then we can accept a rough division of the psyche into masculine and feminine. But today, when masculine and feminine characteristics are so interwoven in people of both sexes, it may be clearer to speak of ‘focused consciousness’ on the one hand and ‘diffuse awareness’ on the other, knowing that these qualities belong to both men and women in varying degrees.
– Irene Claremont de Castillejo
A day will come when men will discover an alphabet in the eyes of chalcedonies, in the markings of the moth, and will learn in astonishment that every spotted snail has always been a poem.
– Alejo Carpentier
As you see, I had yet to learn the art of compromise, I still thought that to get something to had to go straight for your goal, whereas it is only distractions, uncertainty, distance that bring us closer to our targets, and then it is the target which strikes us.
– Fleur Jaeggy
November 2: Día de los muertos
by Alberto Ríos
It is not simply the Day of the Dead—loud, and parties.
More quietly, it is the day of my dead. The day of your dead.
These days, the neon of it all, the big-teeth, laughing skulls,
The posed calacas and Catrinas and happy dead people doing funny things—
It’s all in good humor, and sometimes I can’t help myself: I laugh out loud, too.
But I miss my father. My grandmother has been gone
Almost so long I can’t grab hold of her voice with my ears anymore,
Not easily. My mother-in-law, she’s still here, still in things packed
In boxes, her laughter on videotape, and in conversations.
Our dog died several years ago and I try to say his name
Whenever I leave the house—You take care of this house now,
I say to him, the way I always have, the way he knows.
I grew up with the trips to the cemetery and pan de muerto,
The prayers and the favorite foods, the carne asada, the beer.
But that was in the small town where my memory still lives.
Today, I’m in the big city, and that small town feels far away.
2
The Day of the Dead—it’s really the days of the dead. All Saints’ Day,
The first of November, also called the día de los angelitos—
Everybody thinks it’s Day of the Dead—but it’s not, not exactly.
This first day is for those who have died a saint
And for the small innocents—the criaturas—the tender creatures
Who have been taken from us all, sometimes without a name.
To die a saint deserves its day, to die a child. The following day,
The second of November, this is for everybody else who has died
And there are so many,
A grandmother, a father, a distant uncle or lost cousin.
It is hard enough to keep track even within one’s own family.
But the day belongs to everyone, so many home altars,
So many parents gone, so many husbands, so many
Aunt Normas, so many Connies and Matildes. Countless friends.
Still, by the end of the day, we all ask ourselves the same thing:
Isn’t this all over yet?
3
All these dead coming after—and so close to—Halloween,
The days all start to blend,
The goblins and princesses of the miniature world
Not so different from the ways in which we imagine
Those who are gone, their memories smaller, their clothes brighter.
We want to feed them only candy, too—so much candy
That our own mouths will get hypnotized by the sweetness,
Our own eyes dazzled by the color, our noses by the smells
The first cool breath of fall makes, a fire always burning
Somewhere out there. We feed our memories
And then, humans that we are, we just want to move quickly away
From it all, happy for the richness of everything
If unsettled by the cut pumpkins and gourds,
The howling decorations. The marigolds—cempasúchiles—
If it rains, they stink, these fussy flowers of the dead.
Bread of the dead, day of the dead—it’s hard to keep saying the word.
4
The dead:
They take over the town like beach vacationers, returning tourists getting into everything:
I had my honeymoon here, they say, and are always full of contagious nostalgia.
But it’s all right. They go away, after a while.
They go, and you miss them all over again.
The papel picado, the cut blue and red and green paper decorations,
The empanadas and coconut candy, the boxes of cajeta, saladitos,
Which make your tongue white like a ghost’s—
You miss all of it soon enough,
Pictures of people smiling, news stories, all the fiestas, all this exhaustion.
The coming night, the sweet breads, the bone tiredness of too much—
Loud noise, loud colors, loud food, mariachis, even just talking.
It’s all a lot of noise, but it belongs here. The loud is to help us not think,
To make us confuse the day and our feelings with happiness.
Because, you know, if we do think about our dead,
Wherever they are, we’ll get sad, and begin to look across at each other.
My Desires Have Invented New Desires
by Joshua Zeitler
My Desires Have Invented New Desires
from a line by Hélène Cixous
I believe in a God who does not exist
as a discrete entity, but as a collective
yearning.
The only way to be Godless
is to be satisfied.
Once I added sugar
grain by grain to tea, sipping in-between
to test.
By the time I tasted sweetness
there was no tea left.
What have I become?
I asked my empty cup.
Once I dropped
a teacup because it lied to me.
The break
was singular,
clean;
I studied it
like a holy text, cutting my tongue
on the sharp edge.
The only way to tell
a story is to begin with desire
or blood,
drop by drop.
Once I wanted to plant a pill in my body
like a seed.
Once I wanted to tell a story
about how I became the thing that grows
rather than the dirt.
The only way to dig
is with your hands,
on your knees.
In this way, digging is like a prayer.
In this way, the prayer becomes God.
The only way to name a thing
is to interrogate its desires.
To cover
their mouths and let the years pass.
The only way to pass the years is to want
time to stand still.
The only way
to make time stand still is to name its desires.
In this way, every name is a lie
born of yearning.
In this way, every lie
is its own holy proof.
Once I learned
my name was the only true part of me left,
I cupped it in my false hands.
What shall I become?
I asked,
wondering
if I should let it drop.
The Teller of Tales
by Gabriela Mistral
translated by Ursula K. Le Guin
When I’m walking, everything
on earth gets up
and stops me and whispers to me,
and what they tell me is their story.
And the people walking
on the road leave me their stories,
I pick them up where they fell
in cocoons of silken thread.
Stories run through my body
or sit purring in my lap.
So many they take my breath away,
buzzing, boiling, humming.
Uncalled they come to me,
and told, they still won’t leave me.
The ones that come down through the trees
weave and unweave themselves,
and knit me up and wind me round
until the sea drives them away.
But the sea that’s always telling stories,
the wearier I am the more it tells me…
The people who cut trees,
the people who break stones,
want stories before they go to sleep.
Women looking for children
who got lost and don’t come home,
women who think they’re alive
and don’t know they’re dead,
every night they ask for stories,
and I return tale for tale.
In the middle of the road, I stand
between rivers that won’t let me go,
and the circle keeps closing
and I’m caught in the wheel.
The riverside people tell me
of the drowned woman sunk in grasses
and her gaze tells her story,
and I graft the tales into my open hands.
To the thumb come stories of animals,
to the index fingers, stories of my dead.
There are so many tales of children
they swarm on my palms like ants.
When my arms held
the one I had, the stories
all ran as a blood-gift
in my arms, all through the night.
Now, turned to the East,
I’m giving them away because I forget them.
Old folks want them to be lies.
Children want them to be true.
All of them want to hear my own story,
which, on my living tongue, is dead.
I’m seeking someone who remembers it
leaf by leaf, thread by thread.
I lend her my breath, I give her my legs,
so that hearing it may waken it for me.
God, I love a gray, chilly sea. is it possible to be a sea person and not a beach person?
– @jpbrammer
I love the phrase “doing the work.” What is “the work?” Reading a book? Putting up a yard sign? Seeing a therapist? And how did “doing the work” become doing politics? And what are you working toward? Absolution? Good luck. Also: not politics.
– gal debored
A cloud is a spell against indifference, an emblem of the water cycle that makes this planet a living world capable of trees and tenderness, a great cosmic gasp at the improbability that such a world exists, that across the cold expanse of spacetime strewn with billions upon billions of other star systems, there is nothing like it as far as we yet know.
– Maria Popova, On Something About the Sky
This work of finding our [internal compass and attending to it involves a measure of discipline, to be sure. Every day we need to check in with our own souls, to pull out of the melee of our journey, the noisy distractions, the necessary duties, and to say, “What’s going on here?”
My friend and colleague Marion Woodman once asked people before they began therapy with her, to agree to devote one full hour every day to working with a journal, practicing active imagination, and working with dreams. She said, many people said, “But I don’t have that kind of time. I can’t cut that out of my schedule”, which she respectfully responded, “Then you’re not serious about this work. What could be more important than this kind of encounter with the
magnitude of your own soul’s journey?
– James Hollis
I have my master’s degree in writing and I have to say… if you don’t understand that her speech at the Ellipse was sterling then you are illiterate.
– Leah Callen
America will breathe
its last breath
in a political
spasm.
– Andy Perrin
I’ve almost decided on a candidate. I’m just waiting to see which one gets that critical endorsement from Zizek.
– Jonathan Fine
Glitch art is where art meets science. I harness digital & analog errors, manipulating data to create intentional, unexpected visuals. It’s the alchemy of imperfection, transforming flaws into complex, expressive works. It’s also a real-time digital painting process, akin to traditional large-scale painting—immersive, with blind spots that pull you deep into the act of creation.
– Laura Kerr
Never have the Amish been more certain they’ve made the right decisions about life.
– Walter Kirn
I wish you well.
I wish you love affairs and plenty of hot water,
and women kinder than I treated you.
I forget the reason, but I loved you once, remember?
Maybe in this season, drunk and sentimental,
I’m willing to admit a part of me,
crazed and kamikaze, ripe for anarchy, loves still.
– Sandra Cisneros
I was desperate to write a novel, but I didn’t have a story. Whenever I tried to write fiction it was all about my own inner bullshit.
– Gary Indiana
I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had. The thread led nowhere, except into ever expanding wastes of anonymity. I could swim out into the sea as far as l liked, if what I wanted was to drown. Yet this impulse, this desire to be free, was still compelling to me: I still, somehow, believed in it, despite having proved that everything about it was illusory.
– Rachel Cusk, Outline
I like the paper. Writing, like every art, is a sensual art.
– Aharon Appelfeld
Aligned people rendezvous with aligned people.
– Andy Wang
States of glory and moments of sacredness surpass results intentionally sought.
– Bataille
The more you write, the bigger the imagined world gets. And the other life stays on the chair, quiet, where the body is still.
– Yu Hua
Never contaminate fiction with a message. On the contrary, I believe fiction is a search shared with the reader.
– Luisa Valenzuela
If your candidate of choice only appears every four years, that’s not the leader of a movement. That’s a cicada.
– Ravi Mangla
Silence comes after everything. Everything is enclosed in silence. Everything is extinguished there, or falls asleep there.
– Compass, Mathias Énard; tr. Charlotte Mandell
QuintessEnce: Questions of a Just-opened Pomegranate
You. Yes, you. How long has it been
since you’ve felt, since you’ve held the terrifying
fruit of an inner October moon? How long
since a moon’s moved, since a song’s swooned
to you? Yes. You.
– Chen Chen
Even when I’m stretched out in my coffin they may find me tinkering with some poem.
– Charles Simic
Whenever I put a pen to paper, I lose the world.
– Mark Helprin
Observation and empathy are quite enough for you to be able to create a deep, convincing character, man or woman.
– Pat Barker
The Greeks learned that whenever an assembly is filled by untried men without experience or knowledge, the results are always the same: useless wars are undertaken and agitators seize the reins of power.
– Cicero
Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love – that makes life and nature harmonize.
– George Eliot
Shall I go into my whole riff about line breaks, and about how angry I get with young poets who break lines like sawing kindling, so that it looks nice on the page and violates the integrity of phrase?
– Carolyn Kizer
trampled acorn
how loud it has cracked!
another fall day
– Mueder Krieger
I came in from the wild, hurt
In the hollow of your hand
you held me, kept me safe
Then
with a kiss
soft and sweet
as an evening breeze
you set me free
to find my way again
– @Banquozghost
My people keep getting wiped out. I’ve had survivor guilt for all the deaths I’ve survived. I keep surviving. I’ve survived deaths, and I’ve survived illnesses.
– Alice Notley
Writing helps.
Write the cold away.
Write the fog away.
Write the fucking smog away.
– john zbigniew Guzowski
Know all the theories.
Master all the techniques.
But as you touch another human soul,
Be just another human being.
– Carl Jung
People have all these problems. The problems are different – violence, jealousy, misery, anxiety – but the medicine for all these illnesses is only one, and it is meditation.
– Osho
It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.
– Carl Gustav Jung
People who are arguing that there can be a technological solution to climate change that doesn’t involve a change to the way our economy is organized should consider the price of life-saving emergency drugs.
– Ryan Ruby
When a society depends ever so fervently on spectacle, bombast, and scale to promulgate its thesis of choice, to announce itself free, it is very highly probable that the freedom it sells has become its chiefest means of control.
– Bayo Akomolafe
May all the sounds of lament and war as well as the poisonous winds in the environment be dispelled.
May these words of love and compassion blend with the innate goodness of every single being and coalesce into one powerful force.
Like the light of the sun, moon and stars, may love, compassion and wisdom shine forth.
May they strike every single living being and dispel the darkness of ignorance, attachment and hatred that has lurked for ages in their being.
When any living being meets another, may it be like the reunion of a mother and child after a long separation.
In a harmonious world such as this, may I see everyone sleep peacefully to the music of non-violence.
This is my dream.
– The 17th Gyalwang Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje
I think the publishing world has nothing to do with literature and I think that’s a fact you have to face immediately. The publishing world is not really interested in literature.
– Grace Paley
And here I am, high on
mountains,
Peering and peering, but I can’t
even see the sky.
– Gary Snyder
They tell you to speak the truth, but don’t speak it in a way that disrupts the comforts of the illusion. And that’s just not gonna work for me.
– Nika Solé
The body is communicating through its universal language: pain. Your psyche is communicating through its universal language: fear. Self-consciousness, jealousy, insecurity, anxiety–they are all fear.
– Michael Singer
Discernment is how you save your soul in this wild world.
– Nika Solé
today, the blackbird flew out of the corner of my eye
– Karin Lessing
The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.
– P. J. O’Rourke
Per utter seriousness: to never feel life and the body crumble so completely that laughter is the single response. To die in that monument of unlaughingness, a petrified parody, a self-sanctifying stone. My ideal death: to be struck by lightning while laughing at the sky.
– Alina Stefanescu
The eye learns love from light
– Mark Kirschen
I don’t trust society to protect us, I have no intention of placing my fate in the hands of men whose only qualification is that they managed to con a block of people to vote for them.
– Mario Puzo
The world might change, but not because you’re trying to change it.
– Alan Watts
True religion is rejecting all teachings and thinking for yourself.
– @naval
If this essential core of the person is denied or suppressed, he gets sick, sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes immediately, sometimes later. … Every falling away [from our core], every crime against one’s own nature records itself in our unconscious and makes us despise ourselves.
– Abraham Maslow
We live in time—it holds us and molds us—but I never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing—until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.
– Julian Barnes
Soul work is not a high road. It is a deep fall into an unforgiving darkness that won’t let you go until you find the song that sings you home.
– McCall Erickson
We will disrupt through witness, remembrance, and the courtship of the imagination. We will escort children past the darkest warrens of the forest. We will build kites that stay aloft in the rain. “We will champion what is beautiful, and so finally make our opponents irrelevant.
– Owen Daniels
Deep in my body my green heart turns, and thinks of you. Deep in the pond, under the thick trap door of ice, the water moves, the carp hangs like a sun, its scarlet heart visible in its side.
– Sharon Olds
Brother stand the pain;
Escape the poison of your impulses.
The sky will bow to your beauty, if you do.
Learn to light the candle.
Rise with the sun.
Turn away from the cave of your sleeping.
That way a thorn expands to a rose.
A particular glows with the universal.
– Rumi
Saints
by Louis Jenkins
As soon as the snow melts the grass begins to grow. Even
though the daytime high is barely above freezing, even
though May is very like November, marsh marigolds bloom
in the swamp and the popple trees produce a faint green
that hangs under the low clouds like a haze over the valley.
This is the way the saints live, no complaints, no suspicion,
no surprise. If it rains, carry an umbrella, if it’s cold, wear
a jacket.
No science, nor any art can give us what darkness gives. It is true, in our young days when all was new, light brought us great happiness and joy. Let us, therefore, remember it with gratitude, as a benefactor we no longer need. Do after all let us dispense with gratitude, for it belongs to the calculating, bourgeois virtues. Let us forget light, and gratitude, and the qualms of self-important idealism, let us go bravely to meet the coming night. “She promises us great power over reality.”
– Lev Shestov
Tonight, something bows
that should not bend. Something stiffens that should
slide. Something, loose and not right,
rakes or forges itself all night.
– Li-Young Lee
You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
– G.K.Chesterton
The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
– Adrienne Rich
Love is frequently equated with good feelings toward others, with benevolence or nonviolence or service. But these things in themselves are not love. Love springs from awareness. It is only inasmuch as you see someone as he or she really is here and now and not as they are in your memory or your desire or in your imagination or projection that you can truly love them.
– Anthony De Mello
It Passes Away
What is the purpose of reacting to something when it is changing so quickly? What is the purpose of reacting with craving or clinging? It passes away. Or hatred: it passes away.
– S.N. Goenka, Superscience
Well, what does ‘free’ mean? Free means being, for one thing. It means being able to outgrow that knee-jerk reflection of what your human society around you wants you to think – and so ‘free’ means thinking for yourself and not accepting every piece of information or opinion heedlessly.
– Gary Snyder
The best time of all to come down to Connemara is in winter!
Summer after summer, I heard the same words when leaving the little Connemara village perched along the wild Atlantic shore. Just before Christmas, when it was good and truly winter, I went down again.
It was miserable going out in the bus from Galway. Not a trace of the distant purple and gold clad hills of Clare, not a trace of the Aran Island’s glow under the setting sun, as I had seen a few months ago; instead, the grey cold mist of winter mantled all.
It was disappointing, or so I thought.
A great welcome awaited me, however. Leaping shadows from a huge turf fire fell on eager faces, and how wonderful to hear again the softly spoken Connemara Irish! After tea (and here the tea is really good!) a circle formed around the fire.
Fear a’tí (the man of the house) as usual in his favourite corner, smoking a little of the tobacco I had remembered to bring him.
Quietly, the door opened every now and then, and a neighbour joined us. Conversation began – events of the day; the war; the scarcity of candles, paraffin and tobacco, but delight all around at the white bread.
The night wore on and the wind seemed louder, until it almost seemed to shriek.
And still I waited patiently, because I felt that soon now the sean-chaí (storyteller) would start. And he did.
In a very little while, the windswept, white, thatched cottage was left many leagues behind and our journey began. We were wafted on the magic carpet of imagination, and followed the wild, stirring adventures of Mac Ri Eireann as he combatted with two, three and four-headed giants, and outwitted cunning wizards, and so on to the rescue of the fair and beautiful princess from Kingdom of the Western World.
Breathlessly, we listened as the tale ended, and then once more we were off again.
This time on board a magical ship, sailing through uncharted seas, and visiting fairy islands, wherein lived beautiful sea maidens whose haunting music lured men to their doom. Finally, back once more to Ireland, to an Éire of long age, to a country of forests and woods, teeming with game and deer.
When the seanchaí had ended his storytelling there was silence – a tribute to the artistry of a man who had us enthralled for four hours; even the wind outside had ceased to rage and the night was still. He left, promising to return early the following night.
When I looked out of my window next morning, the sun was shining and I could see the Clare Hills, and stretching far out into Galway Bay nestled the Aran Islands.
Walking an hour later across the brown-tinged moorland, and breathing in the cold clear breeze that swept down from the distant Twelve Bens.
Returning home later, I found a delicious hot meal awaiting me, after which I watched the afternoon’s work in the kitchen, bread being made and baked in the pot-oven over the highly-banked fire, while fear a’ tí busily mended nets in preparation for the next fishing trip in the currach; so many jobs indeed had to be finished before night fell once more.
Here in this corner of Connemara one heard no complaints of gas restrictions; there were no bus queues, no queues for anything; everything was just, as it had been before the shadow of war had ever loomed – at least so it seemed to me.
Then when night came we had our seanchaí and our wonder journeys started once more to the lands of make-believe in the sky, to long submerged countries and islands, through gigantic forests and caves where man has seldom trod, through plains of sweet, perfumed flowers.
As I listened I really envied that seanchaí, for he had a wealth far richer than any gold or jewels; his, indeed, was the wondrous treasure of the mind and heart- he was a storyteller.
– Máire Ní Cheallacháin, Irish Press (1944)
When I want something with my whole being, and the universe withholds it from me, I hope the universe thinks to herself, ‘Silly girl. She thinks this is what she wants, but she does not understand how it will hurt.’
– Blythe Baird
Surely, of all the wonders of the world, the horizon is the greatest.
– Freya Stark
Faring Well
To communicate better we have to get back to feeling-speech. This begins with caring about and talking about feeling-speech, which means allowing ourselves to believe that feelings exist, that they matter, and that they are communicationally fundamental to the qualitative coexistence of everything. The trees, the hills, the sky and all are concerts of feeling-tones marrying in action through feeling-speech. But those who cannot see this are not excluded from the symposium. If they can only agree to feel and to recognize what they are feeling, along with what others are feeling, there is still hope for this world of ours. It feels better to work together in ways that contribute to the common welfare. “Welfare” is not about paying poor people. It is about “faring well.” Which means feeling well through attending to how our communications are succeeding or failing through the feelings they express.
– George Gorman
There is no hope but us.
There is no mercy but us.
There is no justice.
There is just us…
All things that are, are ours.
But we must care.
For if we do not care, we do not exist.
– Terry Pratchett
Art is not a thing.
It is a way.
– Elbert Hubbard
Trump has a super power, but so do we.
His Super Power: He stands for, represents, and provides a projection screen for a fundamental root of the U.S.
This root does not get healed; this root does not get transformed. It is who we are as a country (the U.S.).
We are blinded by thinking we can vote it out, march it out, petition it out, shadow-work it out.
We easily misplace our precious hope if we tie it to an election.
Why do I call it a superpower? First, because he represents that root so damn well. Second, because the denial system of those who stand against him keeps us just innocent enough, or naive enough, to think this is not really the United States of America.
Given that, how do we proceed? If we can’t change it, vote it out, heal it away, then what?
We must commit to making more love. This is our superpower.
That love could be made with:
– Our bodies
– A subgroup of people
– A musical instrument
– Our voices that sing or ring out (whether they change the world or not)
– The words that we write
– A rock, a river, a tree… the Earth
– An animal, be it 4 legged, 6 legged, winged, or gilled
– Another human
– A craft or something we dream of mastering
– And any other thing that your heart imagines and dreams of.
In short, we must make love to our callings.
And in that love, there is more than hope, more than any outcome.
In that love we find what we were always looking for – OURSELVES.
– David Bedrick
And who among them will gradually shed, year by year, every vestige or hope of a place in the world, becoming increasingly familiar with the taste of fear? This is no occupation for an adult who can look other adults in the eye, carry his own weight, and count himself one of them.
– Franz Wright
Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic ‘feeling’ about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes ‘pick up’ accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things.
– Colin Wilson
I believe good art, good poetry, and true mythology communicates, without our knowing it, that life is not just a series of insulated, unrelated events. The great truths—when they can be visualized in images—reveal deep patterns, and reveal that we are a part of them. That deeply heals us, and it largely happens beneath our conscious awareness. A great story pulls us inside of a cosmic story.
– Richard Rohr
Boredom is the simplest way to abolish time, ecstasy is the most complex. The more bored one is, the more self-conscious. Illnesses affect specific places in the body, which can be isolated and cured. But boredom spreads over entire body like cancer, seeps into our organs and carves out holes that resemble a system of underground caves. Life is our solution to boredom. Melancholy, sadness, despair, terror, and ecstasy grow out of boredom’s thick trunk. There are flowers of melancholy and of sadness, but only boredom has roots. The secret is to know how to be bored in an essential way. Most people, however, never even scratch the surface of boredom. To live real boredom, one must have style.
– Emil Cioran
The true mind is natural and does not come from outside. It is not confined to cultivation in past, present, or future. The dearest and most intimate thing there could be is to preserve the mind yourself. If you know the mind, you will reach transcendence by preserving it. If you are confused about the mind and ignore it, you will fall into miserable states. Thus we know that the Buddhas of all times consider the inherent mind to be the basic teacher.
– Chan Master Hongren
It is always difficult to give oneself up; few persons anywhere ever succeed in doing so, and even fewer transcend the possessive stage to know love for what it actually is: a perpetual discovery, and immersion in the waters of reality, an unending re-creation.
– Octavio Paz
Heaven and Earth give themselves. Air, water, plants, animals, and humans give themselves to each other. It is in this giving-themselves-to-each-other that we actually live. Whether you appreciate it or not, it is true.
– Kodo Sawaki
It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course—for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him.
– C.G. Jung
Danger, when it is always imminent, does harm. It doesn’t need to actually arrive. You exhaust yourself in the act of forever looking over your shoulder. Your body readies itself to fight and never quite discharges that chemical cocktail. You channel it instead into anger and self-pity and anxiety and hopelessness. You divert it into work. But really what you do, with every fibre of your being, is watch. You are incessantly, exhaustingly alert. You don’t dare ever let up, just in case the danger takes advantage of your inattention. I’ve forgotten what it feels like to have space in my brain for anything other than watching. For a long time I kept working teaching, pitching articles, writing editorial reports and for a while, that felt like a life raft. But then, incrementally, it became impossible. I was aware of a fog descending, a seizing of the gears, but it seemed diffuse until now.
– Katherine May
Our popular Government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it our people have already settled — the successful establishing and the successful administering of it. One still remains — its successful maintenance against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it. It is now for them to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an election can also suppress a rebellion; that ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets, and that when ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided there can be no successful appeal back to bullets; that there can be no successful appeal except to ballots themselves at succeeding elections. Such will be a great lesson of peace, teaching men that what they can not take by an election neither can they take it by a war; teaching all the folly of being the beginners of a war.
– Abraham Lincoln
For in everything that men do the body is useful; and in all uses of the body it is of great importance to be in as high a state of physical efficiency as possible.
– Xenophon
For my kind of composition, it is essential that the disharmonies (profane imponderables, defects or roughnesses) in the values be brought back into equilibrium by counterweights, and that the harmony regained in this way not be wanly beautiful but strong.
– Paul Klee
People over forty can seldom be permanently convinced of anything. At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
There was no end to the
American sadness
and the American
madness.
– Jack Kerouac
first frost
the birds that stay
the birds that go
– Beverley George
Truth always rests with the minority… because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion.
– Søren Kierkegaard
Choose the non-emotional response to any given situation and see how much easier your life becomes.
– @naval
All people who claim to be spiritual try to get away from the fact of the body; they want to destroy it in order to be something imaginary, but they never will be that, because the body denies them; the body says otherwise.
– CG Jung
rivers to the sea
bending with the songs
of meadow larks
– Jane Reichhold
Modern man craves the tribe.
– @naval
How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do.
– Schopenhauer
Unresolved thoughts, prematurely pushed out of the mind, pile up in an internal landfill – which eventually pokes out of the subconscious and manifests as chronic, nonspecific anxiety.
– @naval
One of the functions of art is to give people the words to know their own experience… Storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
I am a being of manuscripts.
– Hélène Cixous
Between living and dreaming
is a third thing.
Guess.
– Antonio Machado
Those who are determined to be ‘offended’ will discover a provocation somewhere. We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.
– Christopher Hitchens
it’s possible to reach very deep meditative attainments at basically any stage of development,,
and right now we’re kind of awash in semi-enlightened adolescents
– River Kenna
east or west
the beauty is the same
autumn winds
– Basho
If I am still alive after the war, what I want to do the most is drink water.
– Ayah Wakil from Gaza
When you meditate seriously for years you discover that for your whole adult life your mind has been wearing tight shoes, the pain that seemed necessary isn’t, and you’re like “wow that’s it I’m enlightened, it couldn’t be better than this”
Then that happens like 7 more times
– Sasha Chapin
Sleep has never really wanted me, it abandons me very quickly, around midnight, after pestering me all evening.
– Compass, Mathias Énard; tr. Charlotte Mandell
In waiting rooms, the body motionless, the mind lost in the pages of the récit: “She is nestled against the wall, turned toward the one who is firmly holding her.”
– Christina Tudor-Sideri
Capitalism relentlessly shaves every product down to its platonic ideal.
– @naval
Mind lives in discontent. Mind lives in more. Mind lives in that which is not, mind lives in illusions. Mind itself is illusion. As said by Buddha:” The dissatisfied nature of mind itself is suffering”.
– Osho
in my inbox
another ad
for living abroad
– @pauldavidmena
A tariff is both a consumption tax and a production subsidy.
– @naval
That things ‘just go on’ is the catastrophe.
– Walter Benjamin
Many of us believe that what happens to us gives rise to the feelings we experience. The truth is, it’s the other way around.
– Iyanla Vanzant
The state of realization, complete enlightenment, means that no cloud cover can ever return; its causes are utterly and permanently eliminated. When the clouds vanish, what else can cover the sun?
– Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche
Keep learning. Keep challenging what you think you know. Keep asking questions. Keep expanding. And never lose sight of the fact that there is so much more that’s possible, and the only way to figure out what that means is through your own evolution.
– Nika Solé
Live long enough, and you’ll become a philosopher.
– @naval
What the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And it’s like we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore. Let’s all get up and move around a bit right now…or at least dance.
– Kurt Vonnegut
I’m confident that the women of this great nation will protect all of us.
– George Conway
The teacher serves as a mirror but also encourages your ability to trust in yourself. You begin to trust in your basic goodness instead of identifying with your neurosis.
– Pema Chödrön
For Girls Who Run
Through Storms like Buffalos,
Knowing It’s the Quickest Way Through
by Tanaya Winder
We were never ones to avoid pain
even if we found him in another person.
And when we do (find him again)—
let him have not been born in the rain
and grown up to become a storm.
His kisses lightning that scorches the earth.
As young girls, our grandmothers warned us
When there is lightning, cover all the mirrors.
But, one night thunder snapped;
its rumble shattering the vanity.
We’ve chased cloudbursts ever since.
Committed ourselves to flood and flight.
For girls like us who pray to the Sky Beings—
Protect us whenever we go
where we were never meant to be.
Put tobacco down
for the ones
with Creator-shaped holes in our hearts.
We spend lifetimes trying to fill,
to feel. What is the medicine for this?
Our mothers tell us (as they taught)
Send them love. Send them love. Send [say it] love—
So, praise our fathers who left in the night,
mapping us into unlovable.
They made us tough as nails. Now we know
how to hold ourselves together.
Praise the ones who listened
when girls like us asked them to leave.
Praise the lovers who never returned.
You helped us no longer be afraid of ghosts.
For girls like us,
the wound never fully heals.
The gentle rhythm of its pulse, a reminder to
praise our mothers for teaching us words are seeds.
We plant, bloom ourselves anew.
Praise the lightning. Praise the storms
we run through
because girls like us know—
this is where
our medicine comes from.
The leader of a country is a human being, not simply a collection of policies.
Background, behavior, honesty, integrity, decency; these are more basic than ideas, plans, professed beliefs, or promises.
Heraclitus: Character is fate.
– Kim Dorman
The art of living in the eternal now is not taught in our educational system. And it’s not taught because it’s thought of as being feckless, irresponsible. It isn’t irresponsible at all. It is everybody’s duty—I can put it that way—to enjoy themselves. Because if you don’t do that, you become a nuisance. You become aggressive, you become a robber, you become a thief, you become somebody who’s trying to organize the rest of the world—that is to say, a power maniac—simply because you haven’t learned the very simple, inexpensive art of living in the present moment.
– Alan Watts
Happiness is not something to be pursued, it is something met, an encounter. Happiness is what pierces grief.
– John Berger
The path isn’t a straight line; it’s a spiral. You continually come back to things you thought you understood and see deeper truths.
– Barry H. Gillespie
We’re all equal in our infinite ignorance.
– @naval
The Trace
My friendships with one or two, yes, three
men for whom once I felt
the wildest, most painful longing,
still retain, in their enduring transformation,
some fragrance of those times,
like a box where once
the leaves of an exotic herb were kept,
an herb of varied properties, useful and dangerous,
long since consumed.
– Levertov
Eating a little pulse, who are you?
How old? The hands of all are clean.
Why first pour wine into the cup?
Water first and the wine above.
– Louis Zukofsky
The kindest people are not born that way, they are made. They are the ones who have dug themselves out of the dark, who have fought to turn every loss into a lesson.
– Bianca Sparacino
Ego is just overdressed insecurity.
– Quincy Jones
I love your silences…….they are like mine.
– Anaïs Nin
You have a self. A soul. A spirit. You do! And also: If you look closely enough, you will find it, like everything in the universe, is made up of everything else.
The unity is the reality. The illusion is the separation, the absence, the feeling of loss and alienation.
– @VividVoid_
one river
carves the mountains
two skies
– @JamesWelsh35
I do not believe that things will turn out well, but the idea that they might is of decisive importance.
– Max Horkheimer
This was the life assigned to me
I don’t know why
I was pushed into a seat
Beside books and brick yards
Pale adults stood all the way
My elbows had burns from leaning and climbing
Though trees were always new
The pleasure of watching doubled over me
Until it was all I was able to do
And I was no longer free
– Fanny Howe
Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.
– John Berger
Hope is not a form of guarantee; it’s a form of energy, and very frequently that energy is strongest in circumstances that are very dark.
– John Berger
To remain innocent may also be to be to remain ignorant.
– John Berger
fresh snow on old
our argument
resumes
– Ann K. Schwader
Every novel I’ve written contains everything I know, so that by the time I’m finished I’m completely out of gas. I’m a moron when I finish a novel.
– Martin Amis
Never think you’ve seen the last of anything.
– Eudora Welty
The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation.
– Margaret Atwood
You have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.
– Flannery O’Connor
WE ARE OF A TRIBE
We plant seeds in the ground
And dreams in the sky,
Hoping that, someday, the roots of one
Will meet the upstretched limbs of the other.
It has not happened yet.
We share the sky, all of us, the whole world:
Together, we are a tribe of eyes that look upward,
Even as we stand on uncertain ground.
The earth beneath us moves, quiet and wild,
Its boundaries shifting, its muscles wavering.
The dream of sky is indifferent to all this,
Impervious to borders, fences, reservations.
The sky is our common home, the place we all live.
There we are in the world together.
The dream of sky requires no passport.
Blue will not be fenced. Blue will not be a crime.
Look up. Stay awhile. Let your breathing slow.
Know that you always have a home here.
– Alberto Rios
Angels, I read, belong to nine different orders. Seraphs are the highest; they are aflame with love for God; cherubs, they are second, possess perfect knowledge of him. So love is greater than knowledge; how could I have forgotten? The seraphs are born of a stream of fire issuing from under God’s throne. They are, according to Dionysius the Areopagite, “all wings,” having, as Isaiah noted, six wings apiece, two of which they fold over their eyes. Moving perpetually toward God, they perpetually praise him, crying Holy Holy, Holy…But, according to some rabbinic writings, they can sing only the first “Holy” before the intensity of their love ignites them and dissolves them again, perpetually, into flames.
“Abandon everything,” Dionysius told his disciple. “God despises ideas.”
– Annie Dillard
This mere existence, that is, all that which is mysteriously given to us by birth and which includes the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, ‘Volo ut sis (I want you to be),’ without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation.
– Hannah Arendt
Being a realized immortal for a breath’ is an interesting expression. Usually one considers immortals to be permanently immortal. When one`s original spirit awakens, even if only for a breath, that moment is out of time and can be called immortal. At one time when I had an experience like this about 15 years ago, a connection with an experience I had when I was 5 or 6 years old occurred. I had completely forgotten about this experience and suddenly it returned and felt very vivid and alive, and I understood that this experience had been a deep moment of awakening. These moments are eternal moments that time cannot erase, although one can become disconnected from them.
Forever is composed of Nows.
– Emily Dickinson
You are the traveler, you are the path and you are the destination. Be careful never to lose the way to yourself.
– Shihab al-Din Yahya Suhrawardi
Every single eye is a tiny scrap of the divine mystery. Sight is the precise meeting place of object and thought, it is the pearl that allows the mind to unfurl in the light of the sun.
– Jostein Gaarder
There is a tendency–unfortunate, and one of which I am guilty–to be right, to be in control of all things. This is folly in life; it is destructive in art. This desire to be in control, to be correct, to nail all things down is not representative of life. Life is frightening and mysterious and beautiful and out of our control. It is better I think–now, after many mistakes–to be honest, to be open in one’s fear, and to ask a reader or a friend or an audience or a loved one to simply walk along with you and figure things out. It’s okay to not know.
– Arthur Miller
The angel is free because of his knowledge, the beast because of his ignorance.
Between the two remains the son of man to struggle.
– Rumi
You can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials with god, or you can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials without god. But you cannot live outside the welter of colliding materials.
– Annie Dillard
The sea is a mirror, not only to the clouds, the sun, the moon, and the stars, but to all one’s dreams, to all one’s speculations… . The sea tells us that everything is changing and that nothing ever changes, that tides go out and return, that all existence is a rhythm.
– Arthur Symons, In a Northern Bay
In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. […] In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore.
– Yuval Noah Harari
It’s a sign of wisdom to avoid believing every thought that enters your mind. It’s a mark of emotional intelligence to avoid internalizing every feeling that enters your heart.
– Adam M. Grant
Optimism: It is a dear and lovely disposition, and a most valuable one, that can brush away indignities and discourtesies and seek and find the pleasanter features of an experience.
– Mark Twain
And the question for me was ‘Invisible to whom?’ Not to me.
– Toni Morrison
What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.
– W. H. Auden
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
– Maya Angelou
If you do not have a mystic dimension you do not have a mythology, you have an ideology.
– Joseph Campbell
Broke: Sent metta to yourself
Woke: Send metta to your selves
Bespoke: Send metta through the network
of selves, both internally & externally
– @VinceFHorn
So arduous is the task of the poet—being skinned alive in order to sing.
– Giorgio Agamben
I’ll read anything. In fact, I’ll read while I’m doing other things, which is not a good idea.
– Jamaica Kincaid
We need thoughts to keep the emotion rolling. So if we wonder why we lock into painful emotional states such as anxiety, depression, or rage, we need look no further than our own endless stream of inner dialogue.
– Tara Brach
Professional training, once the work of a lifetime, is now no more than knowing how to adapt to devices that are temporary and constantly changing.
– Jacques Ellul
The spiritual journey does not consist of arriving at a new destination where a person gains what he did not have, or becomes what he is not. It consists in the dissipation of one’s own ignorance concerning oneself and life.
– Aldous Huxley
The eloquence of an adequacy is richly comforting, entoiling the futile man in beglamoring postulations of the impossible.
– Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: TS Eliot
“Life is the finest secret,” Emily Dickinson noticed. “So long as that remains, we must all whisper.” Her whispers, of course, were more affecting and resounding than anyone else’s shouts.
– Pico Iyer
No creative or constructive action can come to pass without one’s first realizing that every willful effort to improve the world or oneself is futile, and so long as one can be beguiled by any political or spiritual scheme for molding things nearer to the heart’s desire one will be frustrated, angry, or depressed—that is, unless the first step in any such scheme is to see that nothing can be done.
This is not because you are a victim of fate, but because there is no “you” to be fated, no observing self apart from the stream. For when the illusion of the “you” outside and apart from the stream is dissipated, you are in a position of power to work with the stream and not against it. It is as if you had restored your balance in dancing or judo.
Real freedom cannot exist alongside false freedom, but the abandonment of false freedom looks as if it would leave you as good as dead. But this is the secret of Goethe’s Stirb und werde, “Die and come to life.” For the job of compassion in a sick society only the dead need apply.
– Alan Watts
I come to you America, scrubbed almost clean,
but infected with memory and the bellow of broiling spices
in a long-ago kitchen.
– Patricia Smith
Remember to be kind…
Endeavor to remain aware
Of the quiet world
That lives behind each face
– John O’Donohue
I have a million nightingales
On the branches of my heart
Singing the song of liberation.
– Mahmoud Darwish
Sometimes the scary sickening voices seem louder than truth and beauty, but they aren’t really. Democracy, the great good thing, one person one vote, is the loudest voice in the land.
– Anne Lamott
Certainly
Certainly, she is a bracelet
hanging from the wrist of a god;
she is calmer near evening
although she is never not moving.
She glows most completely in the moon
when the god raises his wrist
to hurl a brown swan
with a silver beak.
The god is invisible. Unseen
if not for her, at the ankle of his hand,
hammering my eyes in the green
and black sky like a nail.
– Nichita Stanescu
The spiritual growth’s an oscillatory thing: we move by shivers in the world’s tumultuous spine.
– Theodore Roethke
Unelectable
Unelectable, that’s what you are
It’s regrettable you’ve got this far
Like a bad odor, lies cling to you
The prison yard bell will ring for you
Never before has someone been more …
Unelectable in every way
Incomprehensible in all that you say
That’s why I find it’s incredible
To side with someone so reprehensible
He’d mount an un-Congressional coup
Unacceptable, that’s what you are
As delectable as fresh catarrh
That’s why I hope it’s still credible
Most people find you quite contemptible
And declare you’re unelectable, too
– Brian Bilston
YET NO LESS GRATEFUL
Woke feeling like a Minotaur: hot, torn,
not so much undecided as undecided upon, and badly:
what can I possibly do now about what I am, if I’m what I am?
Like mistaking death for what’s finally just proof of death-
the latest stubbornly unvanished body beside the road that the wide,
now sightless eye unstares across-
to rewrite what’s been given is not refusal is no one walking away.
Between trust and what trust equals, between that and everything
I say it does, why not do whatever?
They say the difficulty with nothing-but-light,
as with utter darkness, is not so much that we cannot see,
but that we’re stripped of context: we’re as near
as far; all the waves stand frozen. I can’t stop thinking of the future
as the past, imitating a god.
– Carl Phillips
Ironically enough, when you make peace with the fact that the purpose of life is not happiness, but rather experience and growth, happiness comes as a natural byproduct. When you are not seeking it as the objective, it will find its way to you.
– Unknown
If we listened to each other as if we were a poem—if we listened to our Nation as if it were a poem—we would hear no singular story, but a multitude.
– Jennifer Elise Foerster (Mvskoke)
In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties.
As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.
– George Orwell
On A Painting by Wang The Clerk of Yen Ling
by Su Tung P’O
The slender bamboo is like a hermit.
The simple flower is like a maiden.
The sparrow tilts on the branch.
A gust of rain sprinkles the flowers.
He spreads his wings to fly
and shakes all the leaves.
The bees gathering honey
Are trapped in the nectar.
What a wonderful talent
Can create an entire Spring
With a brush and a sheet of paper.
If he would try poetry
I know he would be a master of words
Parable of the Talents
Choose your leaders
with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward
is to be controlled
by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool
is to be led by the opportunists
who control the fool.
To be led by a thief is to offer up
your most precious treasures
to be stolen.
To be led by a liar is to ask
to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant
is to sell yourself
and those you love
into slavery.
– Octavia Butler
The future belongs
to those who give the
next generation reason
for hope.
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
ANGLES AND ACCENTS
With nod to Inez and Charlie Foxx
With an acute
with an obtuse
with a right
angle I size
up your accent
If that pot won’t melt
I will surely
use it for cooking
If the mix blends well
I will surely
serve some plates full
Do you, do I
accent the right spices
the right syllable
use the correct word
play the correct notes
intensify the correct beat?
Or does it change with the recipe
the climate
the altitude
the atmospheric pressure?
Does it change with
the score
content of the conversation
the mood?
Do you, do I
shade the village portrait
the correct hues?
Or does it change
each time we look around?
Should we add an instrument?
expand a phrase?
Slow, or accelerate
the rhythm?
If the mix blends well
I will surely
study the portrait
listen, dance, talk with you
awhile longer
– Jerry Pendergast
Filling in the Bubble on the Ballot
I imagine the small oval
is the center of a flower
that I link through black ink
to the life of my daughter
and her daughter and her daughter
and their bodies and their voices,
and their choices and their power;
it’s a pool I fill with hope,
it’s a note in a rising tune,
a pupil widening in the dark,
a moon that I make new.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Each person carries a hidden poetic unity that reflects the mysterious continuity of the Soul of the World. In the depths of the soul, we are each an old soul able to survive the troubles of the world and contribute to its healing and renewal. The key to what we miss and secretly long for is hidden within us. Medicine men and healers of all kinds from cultures around the world have used various techniques to not only “heal” the soul, but also to restore individuals to their proper place in the world and in their culture. To heal means to “make whole,” and when we feel whole we are in touch with the whole world. When in touch with our underlying soul, we are naturally in touch with nature and the Soul of the World. We are the missing ingredient in the solutions needed for all that ails us, if we but awaken to the nature of our own souls.
– Michael Meade
searching for myself
be yourself
so the people
looking for you
can find you
– Arlan Hamilton
In the dark of the moon,
in flying snow,
in the dead of winter,
war spreading,
families dying,
the world in danger,
I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.
– Wendell Berry
Thucydides knew in a dive bar on 52nd Street
W.H. Auden knew in a dive bar on 52nd Street
Josephine Baker knew in Paris
Paul Robeson knew in London
Vidal Sassoon knew in the East End
Chekhov knew on Sakkhalin
Chet Baker knew in Amsterdam
Oscar Wilde knew in Reading Gaol
Taylor Swift knew in Nashville
Walter Benjamin knew in Portbou
Thucydides knew in a dive bar on 52nd Street
The old rubbish they talk
The wounded dictators
Mismanagement and pain
Must we suffer them again
Must we suffer them again
She knew
They knew
We knew
You knew
She knew
The habit-forming pain
Must we suffer his again?
We must
Love one another or die.
– Wystan Hugh
Emotional volatility shows you where you are not yet free.
– Nika Solé
And out of this worldwide festival of death, this ugly rutting fever that inflames the rainy evening sky all around—will love someday rise up out of this, too?
– Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent.
– Toni Morrison
So many trauma survivors have spent years treating our everyday functioning like short burst, High Intensity Interval Training– because we were never had the safety, support, or guidance to learn how to properly pace ourselves for the marathon that is life.
Not your fault.
– Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle
The deepest part of our separateness from creation lies in our forgetfulness of it’s sacred nature.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Beware of the so-called great leaders and the collective euphoria they excite.
– Charles Simic
In each of us is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves.
– C.G. Jung
Selfless ideas spread the furthest.
– @naval
Drinking water in the morning gives me so much energy that coffee becomes optional.
– Dan Go
Limit yourself to the present.
– Marcus Aurelius
A RESOUNDING ZERO
It all came down to nothing
& of the nothing, there is very little left
– Nicanor Parra
Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.
– Alexis Carrel
Our apparatniks will continue making
the usual squalid mess called History:
all we can pray for is that artists,
chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.
– W. H. Auden
sand falling
through an hourglass
counting the vote
– @hegelincanada
Intelligence is the ability to make more complicated mistakes
– Joscha Bach
My most effective mental health hack is letting my phone die.
– Eman Abdelhadi
Jesus knew that the old eye-for-an-eye philosophy would leave everyone blind. He did not seek to overcome evil with evil. He overcame evil with good. Although crucified by hate, he responded with forceful love.
– Martin Luther King Jr.
Voting is a powerful spiritual act. It’s an act of renewal to say, ‘We’re going to set the direction again, and these are my values.’
– Jack Kornfield
Poem
Sleep kept snowing down while she was talking,
and when she left I slept. The snow came,
boxing the houses like jewelry in cotton.
I look down at the street, chewing biscuits.
I nearly asked her to guess about the sapling,
what it truly was: something with a root
to worry over, bendable and alone.
There are white goats in the alleys, bushes
honey-white in the grass-preserve,
there are drooling clappers inside bells,
fundamental diaphanous memories.
From autumn on, eat nothing shaped like a heart.
What is once is again, the clear sky peals.
So I ride uphill, as the sun is setting.
So I ride uphill, as the winter is less severe.
– Laura Jensen
They’re eating the ballots!
They’re eating the pens!
They’re eating the votes
of the people who live there!
– Andy Perrin
Don’t be afraid. There are exquisite things in store for you. This is merely the beginning.
– Oscar Wilde
I thank my parents for force feeding me Hot Club De France as a child. Django is a lifetime teacher.
– Peter Frampton
My guitar is my best friend.
– Django Reinhardt
As the lotus rises on its stalk unsoiled by the mud, so the wise one speaks of peace and is unstained by the opinions of the world.
– Buddha
Continue practicing until you see yourself in the cruelest person on Earth, in the child starving, in the political prisoner. Practice until you recognize yourself in everyone in the supermarket, on the street corner, in a concentration camp, on a leaf, in a dewdrop.
Meditate until you see yourself in a speck of dust in a distant galaxy. See and listen with the whole of your being.
If you are fully present, the rain of Dharma will water the deepest seeds in your consciousness, and tomorrow, while you are washing the dishes or looking at the blue sky, that seed will spring forth, and love and understanding will appear as a beautiful flower.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
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
…all those voices were right
And still are; this land is not
the sweet home that it looks,
Nor its peace the historical calm of a site
Where something was settled once and for all…
– W. H. Auden, The U.S. Civil War never ended. It was merely deferred and the political parties switched sides.
The main idea is to maintain the heart-mind pure and purposeful during practice.
You don’t have to strive for results and results will come naturally*.
This is a fundamental rule and key to success in Cultivation. If you want something too much, then you are less likely to get it. It happens because your strong desire will be the obstacle on your way to that thing. As soon as you put that desire away, there will be no obstacle anymore and you will get it naturally. This is also called “Desire without desire.” But if you have no desire at all, you will never achieve it, which is another side of this mistake. Neither “desire” nor “not desire,”this is the key.
– Excerpt from the book “Daoist Cultivation, Book 12: The Secret of the Golden Flower” Translation and Commentary by Vitaly Filbert.
There must be something strangely sacred in salt. It is in our tears and in the sea.
– Khalil Gibran
Early on in the process, the bereaved, like the alchemist, can’t see the potentiality hidden within the crisis. There is a sense of being adrift at sea, directionless, far from port. The disorienting voyage deals a blow that shatters the ego’s illusions and false identities. Familiar routines, sense of belonging, and certainty of purpose disappear. But not everything is lost. Dry land returns to view once we shine a light on our innermost selves and begin the work of uncovering who we are at the very core.
– Mary A. Osborne
It is not our diversity which divides us; it is not our ethnicity, or religion or culture that divides us. Since we have achieved our freedom, there can only be one division amongst us: between those who cherish democracy and those who do not.
– Nelson Mandela
Four-thousand years later, we are still building walls, still building empires, still rejecting the goddess – and we are still rejecting and repressing the wild person inside ourselves. Our walls are both literal and figurative. We live, today, in lonely screen-worlds of individualized consumerism, each of us is a little Uruk unto ourselves.
– Theodore Richards, Gilgamesh, Where Are You Hurrying To?
There is a certain
clinical satisfaction in
seeing just how bad
things can get.
– Sylvia Plath
It is quite impossible to find the Buddha anywhere
other than in one’s own mind.
A person who is ignorant of this may seek
externally, but how is it possible to find oneself
through seeking anywhere other than in oneself!
Someone who seeks their own nature externally is
like a fool who, giving a performance in the middle
of a crowd, forgets who he is and then seeks
everywhere else to find himself.
– Guru Padmasambhava
Move with all that is happening, quietly and peacefully, without any strain, for all is very, very well.
– Eileen Caddy
No matter how big or soft or warm your bed is, you still have to get out of it.
In school, I learned about artists and how they were free to express themselves. I was allergic to conformity, and the lifestyle attracted me. I wanted to express myself in a way that slammed people up against the wall.
Through literacy you can begin to see the universe. Through music, you can reach anybody. Between the two, there is you, unstoppable.
It takes a little work to be a vegan, but now it’s really possible to have tasty stuff and it’s better for you. I say the best test is go as far as you can and see how you feel. Personally, I feel great.
I was appalled that the San Francisco ethic didn’t mushroom and envelop the whole world into this loving community of acid freaks. I was very naive.
– Grace Slick
To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing
Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors’ eyes;
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.
– W.B. Yeats
Yield and overcome. Empty and be full. Have little and gain. Have much and be confused.
– Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching
There is something insane about a lack of doubt. Doubt – to me, anyway – is what makes you human, and without doubt, even the righteous lose their grip, not only on reality but also on their humanity.
– Tilda Swinton
A person becomes ten times more attractive not by the clothes they wear, how much money they make or the latest mobile phone they own. Only for his deeds of humility, respect, honesty and love that he has to give…
– Keanu Reeves
The ‘hood’ never went without talent. Their gifted were everywhere. They were deprived of resources and opportunities. Those gifted children went unrecognized.
– Thaddeus Howze
I have gone into the Tibet of my mind.
– Nicholas Pierotti
Nobody can push back an ocean.
its gonna rise back up in waves.
And nobody can stop the wind from blowin’,
stop a mind from growin’.
You can’t kill the spirit,
it’s like a mountain
Old and strong;
it lives on and on.
Nobody can stop a woman from feeling
She’s gonna rise up like the sun
Somebody may change the words we’re saying
but the truth will live on and on
You can’t kill the spirit,
it’s like a mountain
Old and strong;
it lives on and on.
– Naomi Littelbear Morena, Like a Mountain
…Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave…
– W.H. Auden
EACH SUNRISE
I fell in love with you
the moment
you brushed my cheek with
dawn’s waning starlight.
Never before have I been
gifted this morning serenade
by these formless crickets –
all beautifully singing to their death
at the hand of the first frost.
Nor have I ever been greeted
at the threshold of home and Home
by these three Sufi crows
and this flock of Zen chickadees
all reminding me that self-expression
is a righteous act of courting
the air we breathe.
The witch hazel leaves are damp
with raindrops that lived only
to take their place
in the soil at my feet
an hour ago.
Today, this day,
you are my
Beloved.
May there be noted in whatever
part of me is eternal
a reminder that the
faithful meet with open hearts
each sunrise.
– Jamie K. Reaser
From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.
– Will Durant
Look to the Future
To you born into violence,
the wars of the red ant are nothing;
you, in the heart of the eruption.
I am speaking from immeasurable grass blades.
You, there on the rubble,
what is the river of vapor to you?
You who are helpless as small birds
drowned on the ice pack.
You who are spoiled as
commercial fruit by the medfly.
To you the machine guns.
To you the semen of fire,
the birth of the maggot in the corpse.
You, to whom we send these gifts;
at the heart of light we are crushed together.
When the sun dies we will become one.
– Ruth Stone
In the past, pilgrims walking El Camino greeted each other in Latin with the salutation: Ultreia, meaning, ‘keep going, go beyond.’ The reply in Latin was Et Suseia, meaning, go higher…. This is our path forward… Ultreia, Et Suseia… Gate Gate Para Gate Para Sam Gate Bodhi Svaha! Gate Gate Para Gate Para Sam Gate Bodhi Svaha!
– Joan Halifax
At the end of Candide, after all the terrible occurrences and misfortunes, wars and earthquakes, betrayals and loss, Candide looks at Cunégonde and says “We must go and work in the garden.”
– Bill Lantry
I only know that I will never again trust my life,
my future, to the whims of men.
– Toni Morrison
If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.
– Che Guevara
We can only approach this edge with an honest unknowing—to pretend otherwise is to court the hubris that has brought with it so much trouble in the first place. But we must also do so with a sense of genuine power. Not the power of false and shrunken egos that need to own a world that they cannot feel a part of, but the power of people who bring with them an entire cosmos of wisdom, the power of a people who come from the stars and can make worlds with their words, their minds, their hands. At the edge of the world, we must find also the courage to leap into the abyss, knowing that there is no alternative but to be reborn.
– Theodore Richards, The Great Reimagining
Do not let your mind fall.
– Robert Moss
we have to behave, and work, as though there is hope, if only because despair is unchic.
– Noreen Masud
Shadows make the light show. Without shadows, we’d see only what a friend of mine refers to as ‘all that goddamn light.’
– Anne Lamott
I encourage you to be a part of the group that continues to win no matter what the matrix is doing.
– Nika Solé
Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.
– Edward Abbey
Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.
– Bertolt Brecht, Galileo
Totalitarian movements use and abuse democratic freedoms in order to abolish them.
– Hannah Arendt
It falls upon us to be the center of the flower field, to be the place where the plums hang freely, suggestively, belonging to the world of the poem. We must make more worlds to disappear into…
– D. A. Powell
Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
– Madeleine L’Engle
Once you realize that a lot of what you believe to be true has been fed to you by an agenda that is actively trying to disempower you, you start to see things differently.
– Nika Solé
We need to have a paradigm shift in our consciousness. If we don’t get our act together and come in commonality and understanding with the organisms that sustain us today, not only will we destroy those organisms, but we will destroy ourselves.
– Paul Stamets
“They’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs” proved a more effective message than “Let me help you buy your first house.”
– Gary Shteyngart
America is a failed Democracy.
Our media failed us, our institutions failed us, our people failed us.
Worst of all, we now pose a major threat to the planet.
– Prof Michael E. Mann
We just have to keep doing our work —
trusting how the alchemy of grief
and the sorcery of love
lead us toward fearlessness.
Hands on the Earth, we remember
how the holy ordinary breathes
us back to life.
This is the Open Space of Democracy.
– Terry Tempest Williams
Kamala Harris was the perfect candidate and she ran a beautiful campaign of joy, empathy, and unity.
She just happened to run in a nation that is addicted to nihilism, cruelty, and division.
– John Pavlovitz
Hey, fuck all billionaires. Fuck these rich piles of turd that both parties rely on for elections. Fuck every single one of them and their partners. I’ll never stop saying: it’s the billionaires or humanity. The future can’t handle both.
– Alina Stefanescu
I Know You Want to Lie by The Roadside but
The Wolves Are Coming, Sweetheart.
by Leslie J. Anderson
I’m here with you.
Our feet are bare at the beginning of a long walk.
I know the field looks empty now.
It’s not. The seeds are still growing.
Do not learn the lessons of heartbreak.
The wisdom of sorrow is a lie.
It will tell you wolves are a mercy,
that a bare field is acceptable.
If you need to rest let’s do it now.
Drink water, sleep, hold yourself.
Save your voice for when it’s time to scream.
I won’t lie to you, though.
The wolves are coming.
In your heart is a knife
but also a harvest.
When it’s time,
use one to protect
the other.
To make no mistakes is not in the power of man; but from their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future.
– Plutarch
We don’t prepare much for the narrowing of life; it is always the (untimely) end that haunts the mind. When you pick up a call and a voice says, from here on, you only get these few daily acts of living, how do you know what to let go of and what to fill the altered time with?
– Christina Tudor-Sideri
Dear America
by Suzanne Frischkorn
It’s time to teach my daughter how to shoot an arrow
How to use a knife
How to hit the center of a target
It’s bloody work, but she should know
It’s time to teach her how to win a debate
While applying lipstick without a mirror
And how to hold her keys between her fingers in a parking lot
It’s time for her to hit the weight room
Join the cross-country team
Cast a spell, literally and figuratively
And it’s time for her to develop telekinesis and clairvoyance
It’s time she knows to never leave her drink unattended
Never drink on an empty stomach
Never drink before her period
And maybe what I mean to say is never drink alcohol period
It’s time to learn that one day she might switch grocery stores
Because a guy on staff there gives her the creeps
And even if it’s less convenient to travel across town
It’s always best to trust her intuition
It’s time to teach her that when a grown man stares at her
New breasts, she is not the one who should feel ashamed
America, she’s her mother’s daughter
She’s got this
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge. Although both love and knowledge are necessary, love is in a sense more fundamental, since it will lead intelligent people to seek knowledge, in order to find out how to benefit those whom they love. But if people are not intelligent, they will be content to believe what they have been told, and may do harm in spite of the most genuine benevolence.
– Bertrand Russell
Stand up for what you believe in even if you are standing alone.
– Sophie Scholl
Certainly
Certainly, she is a bracelet
hanging from the wrist of a god;
she is calmer near evening
although she is never not moving.
She glows most completely in the moon
when the god raises his wrist
to hurl a brown swan
with a silver beak.
The god is invisible. Unseen
if not for her, at the ankle of his hand,
hammering my eyes in the green
and black sky like a nail.
– Nichita Stanescu
Humanity has been sustained in the past, is sustained in the present, and will be sustained in the future by bodhicitta and altruism. It will sustained by the good hearts of good men and women.
– Dzigar Kongtrul
Highly organized technologies of the modern age have a tendency to enlarge their boundaries so that variables which were previously external become working parts of the system’s internal structure.
– Langdon Winner
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts…The experts who are leading you may be wrong… I think we live in an unscientific age in which almost all the buffeting of communications and television — words, books, and so on — are unscientific. As a result, there is a considerable amount of intellectual tyranny in the name of science.
– Richard Feynman
We have to accept that millions of Americans are misogynistic, climate change denying, racist fucking lunatics who don’t give a single fuck about anything apart from the price of gas in their tanks.
Having done that we need to stop caring about America and build a better Europe.
– Otto English
Tomorrow there will still be poetry.
– Katie Dozier
What is purification of the mind? No thought. This thoughtless mind, sattvic mind, no mind, can be called Consciousness itself. Self itself.
– Papaji
i actually hate being told as a queer person that existence is resistance. 1) i need a politics beyond catchphrases and this bare minimum. 2) i want a life that is more than bare existence.
– @chenchenwrites
The mind is desperate to fix the river [of events] in place: Possessed by ideas of the past, preoccupied with images of the future, it overlooks the plain truth of the moment.
– Lao Tzu
The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.
– W. Somerset Maugham
We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks men take a long time to accomplish, that’s all.
– Alfred Camus
But what’s an honest soul to do? I don’t know. I can say this: Be loyal to what you love, be true to the earth, fight your enemies with passion and laughter.
– Ed Abbey
Nothing is forgot by lovers
except who they are.
– Mary Ruefle
A destruction, an annihilation that only man can provoke, only man can prevent.
– Elie Wiesel
Doubtless a great anguish may do the work of years, and we may come out from that baptism of fire with a soul full of new awe and new pity.
– George Eliot
The Nature of Secrecy: Ask you must and answer well to be called clever. One may know your secret never a second. If three, a thousand will know.
– Hávamál
I wait and ache. I think I am healing.
– Sylvia Plath
The difficulty comes from our lack of confidence.
– Seneca
In every act of kindness, there is a silent rebellion against the cruelty of the world.
– Fida Hussain
The maker of the stars is at the same time the physician for broken hearts and wounded spirits.
– Charles Spurgeon
Solitude and Company: When I was young and walked alone, alone I lost my way. I felt rich when I found company. Man delights in man.
– Hávamál
Quietude, which some men cannot abide, because it reveals their inward poverty, is a palace of cedar wise, for along its hallowed courts the King in his beauty deigns to walk.
– Charles Spurgeon
America, are you okay, babe.
– Nikita Gill
The sky, vast and grand, is not as glorious as you. The ocean, daring and deep, is not as soulful as you.
– Frederick Phoenix
My love for you is immeasurable, and darling, this is why I write poetry, this is why I became a poet.
– Frederick Phoenix
Society with its morality says that you can be greedy; that you can kill another in the name of God, in the name of your country, in the name of an ideal. Such morality is no morality at all.
– Krishnamurti
Quantum mechanics describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And yet it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is – absurd.
– Richard Feynman
May we always run the risk of overemphasizing grace, for it is a risk that will never be realized.
– Robert Farrar Capon
And who could really come close to hosting the glory that you carry? Nobody, my darling, nobody. You are the sun, and the sun is forever an unmatchable force.
– Frederick Phoenix
I’m going to do what feeds my soul.
– Elijah Cummings
No one can truly love me because this requires the precondition that a person knows who I am.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
And we shall write a new story about what love is supposed to mean, all of us, my loves. All of us.
– Frederick Phoenix
The sum total of all human knowledge is but as a drop of the bucket compared with the wisdom of God.
– Charles Spurgeon
I was quiet but I was not blind.
– Jane Austen
We don’t really want the truth; we want reassurance.
– James Hollis
I BURY MY GIRL FRIEND
You ask me how I write. This is how I write. I get rid of the lizard. I eschew the philosopher’s stone. I bury my girl friend. I remove my personality from the line so that I am permitted to use the first person as often as I wish without offending my appetite for modesty. Then I resign. I do errands for my mother, or someone like her. I eat too much. I blame those closest to me for ruining my talent. Then you come to me. The joyous news is mine.
– Leonard Cohen
Though lads are making pikes again & rascals rage, I spit into the face of Time!
– Yeats
While looking for the light, you may suddenly be devoured by the darkness and find the true light.
– Jack Kerouac
For most people to be happy, there has to be a person, place, or thing involved in their happiness. In true happiness, there are no things involved. It’s a natural state. You will abide in that state forever.
– Robert Adams
What could soften the edges of a country
When its parcels are moving
with breathlike accuracy?
– Karen Weiser
Assignment for
today, the next four
years, and forever.
Take radically good
care of yourself,
others, and the planet.
– Tara Stiles
We can no longer count on anything – this is the situation.
– Jean-Luc Nancy
You don’t have to go looking for love when it’s where you come from.
– Werner Erhard
Do not carry the world upon your shoulders. You do not have that responsibility. It is your responsibility to find and be your Being. No one can save this world. Leave everything to God.
– Mooji
The thing to do is to concentrate on the seer and not on the seen, not on the objects, but on the Light which reveals them.
– Ramana Maharshi
I work at three different desks, with a different project open on each, let’s say, so one is academic, one writerly, and one art. I go at these erratically, sometimes to all three desks within an hour. They cross-pollinate one another.
– Anne Carson
If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they probably will not survive […] This is what mothers teach — love, survival.
– Audre Lorde
I love you, love you, love you, / sad as you are, O world.
– Adelia Prado
in the midst of horror
we fed on beauty—and that,
my love,
is what sustained us
– Rita Dove
When your heart is broken,
you plant seeds in the cracks
and you pray for rain.
– Andrea Gibson
Maintain a pure heart even if people can’t understand its depth.
– unknown
Not exalting the gifted
prevents quarreling.
Not collecting treasures
prevents stealing.
Not seeing desirable things
prevents confusion of the heart.
The wise therefore rule by
emptying hearts and stuffing
bellies, by weakening ambitions
and strengthening bones.
If men lack knowledge
and desire, then clever
people will not
try to interfere.
If nothing is done,
then all will be well.
– Tao Te Ching
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
– William Ernest Henley
We have to create so many queer books,
they can’t possibly burn them all.
– J.M. Redmann
What happens if you soften and slow, just a little bit? Feel how that changes your experience.
– Martin Aylward
This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.
– Ursula K. LeGuin
I have to say I personally have never drawn such a sharp line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as you. For me: that line is often false. The two are never disconnected. One can’t exist without the other. As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how. But you — wrapped up in judgment, always regretting the past, cursing yourself, blaming yourself, asking ‘what if,’ ‘what if.’ ‘Life is cruel.’ ‘I wish I had died instead of.’ Well — think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no — hang on — this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can’t get there any other way?
– Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
In a war of ego, the
loser always wins.
– Buddha
where will my star
rest tonight in
the river of heaven
– Issa
Misty
And sometimes when I move
at the edge of a greatness—
a lake or a sea or a mountainside—
my insignificance thrills me
and the largest of my sadnesses
dwindles smaller than the space
between grains of sand
and in that moment,
knowing my place,
comes a love so enormous
I can love anyone, anyone,
even myself.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
The soul loves to meditate, for in contact with the Spirit lies its greatest joy. If, then, you experience mental resistance during meditation, remember that reluctance to meditate comes from the ego; it doesn’t belong to the soul.
– Paramhansa Yogananda
Billionaires did this. Billionaires hated the idea of people having power.
They built a brainwashing machine called Fox News.
They bought the Supreme Court.
They bought Congress.
They bought presidential elections.
They took out a hit on our democracy.
– Mark Jacob
Black men voting against a
black woman. Unbelievable.
Hispanics voting to round
up and deport other
Hispanics. Insane. White
women voting to take rights
away from their daughters
and granddaughters.
Seriously, what the actual
fuck America
– I DISSENT
What keeps us going, ultimately, is our love for each other, and our refusal to bow our heads, to accept the verdict, however all-powerful it seems. It’s what ordinary people have to do. You have to love each other. You have to defend each other. You have to fight.
– Mike Davis
Faith allows things to happen. It is the power that comes from a fearless heart. And when a fearless heart believes, miracles happen.
– Rebecca Baldwin
Fascists are ignorant, they don’t read, they only read newspapers, pragmatism is the ideological basis of fascism, they don’t like culture.
– Pier Paolo Pasolini
Head up, standing in a field,
an egret
surrounded by dragonflies
– Kim Dorman
A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.
– Amiri Baraka
This hand that smacks you down and flattens you into dirt and shits on your face and grinds you into dust, is it my hand?
I am not a thing. There is only dharma.
Ask the buddhas for guidance.
– Kenneth Folk
People get it —
you don’t have to
keep telling them,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
I’ve never
been less sure
of tomorrow.
– Andy Perrin
You may ask yourself why the profound entities who rule the world would tolerate any guff from your smart mouth.
(They won’t. Shut the fuck up. Start again with respect and humility. Make offerings to your teachers and the buddhas. Ask for guidance. This is the path to freedom.)
– Kenneth Folk
Build a library that centers truth in all its form. Invite people to study resistance and to prepare strategies to engage with work that inspires you.
– D. A. Powell
Would you fight with the buddhas?
Be smashed.
You will have infinite opportunities to awaken.
– Kenneth Folk
How much damn
wisdom do you
need, the old monk
sometimes wondered.
– The Old Monk
If enlightened, I will show up with open heart and willing hands. If apocalypse, I will show with open heart and willing hands.
– Ram Dass
Inseparable from right speech is good listening.
– Mudita Nisker
The only group of voters I’m angry at and disgusted by is white Christians who continue to support a man whose actions have publicly trashed every single one of their core beliefs.
– Amy Stuber
But if I return to your shores
and, in song, a soft voice calls,
fearful, from the road—
I know not whether childhood or love,
longing for other skies turns me,
and I hide in the forgotten things.
– Salvatore Quasimodo, (trans. Allen Mandelbaum)
one acorn
a small token
for tomorrow
– James Beth Welsh
You build a novel. You have to build it like a building
so that it stays standing when you’re not in it.
– Rachel Cusk
impact of iceberg
knocks on Poseidon’s portal
submerging in sea
– @SheilaBDuncan
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” Everyone is quoting Gramsci on the interregnum, but that assumes that something new will be or could be born. I doubt it. I think what we must diagnose instead is a ruling class brain tumor: a growing inability to achieve any coherent understanding of global change as a basis for defining common interests and formulating large-scale strategies.
– Mike Davis
I continue to believe that liberation is predicated on something fundamentally wholesome. It cannot come about by hideous hatred. It must be the product of love for other humans, for the ecology; a belief in their potential, a dogged fight to protect what is good and beautiful.
– Daniel Baryon
Throwing your hands up and going “I guess people are just really fascist!” is total baby-brain nonsense when we live in a catroonishly corrupt country structured to produce these outcomes. This is by no means an easy fix but “guess everyone except me is evil” is stupid hogwash
– Jerry Iannelli
Any work of art quickly reveals itself to be a linked system of problems.
– George Saunders
Bloody Country, Bloody Country, Bloody Country
by Katie Manning
I whisper my country’s name in the mirror three times
and hope it might come back from the dead.
This hasn’t worked yet. Tomorrow
I’ll stare again at my own pale face, my
dark almond eyes that some people mistake
for an invitation to ask about my family’s origins,
my blood. On Wednesdays I walk for miles back
and forth along the coastline and wish
I could let my feet root beneath the waves. I can’t
plant myself in this shifting place. Meanwhile,
my country tries to save its own life
by bloodletting, a leech
latched to itself.
People rub shoulders without meeting; isolation accumulates but is never totalized; emptiness pervades people as their density increases. The crowd drags me out of myself and allows thousand of tiny surrenders to colonize my empty presence.
– Vaneigem
You begin with a gimmick, but if you believe in its literary and moral seriousness, in the end it turns into serious literary invention. It becomes a literary statement.
– Orhan Pamuk
…do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.
– Gandalf, (Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring)
Today and henceforth, to turn one’s back on the impossible is to limit oneself to repeating old, superstitious mantras. Our superstition was salvation.
– Jean-Luc Nancy on Bataille and the elsewhere (ibid.)
I love a good quote but our quotes won’t save us.
– @tamaranopper
To the world: I am so sorry I didn’t find a way to stop this.
– Marci Shore
THE EXHIBIT
by Lisel Mueller
My uncle in East Germany
points to the unicorn in the painting
and explains it is now extinct.
We correct him, say such a creature
never existed. He does not argue,
but we know he does not believe us.
He is certain power and gentleness
must have gone hand in hand
once. A prisoner of war
even after the war was over,
my uncle needs to believe in something
that could not be captured except by love,
whose single luminous horn
redeemed the murderous forest
and, dipped into foul water,
would turn it pure. This world,
this terrible world we live in,
is not the only possible one,
his eighty-year-old eyes insist,
dry wells that fill so easily now.
in folk medicine it’s often said that too much exposure to wind and water – for example, living by the ocean – can bring about tempestuous moodiness in people
& now I’m wondering if social media is analogous. digital winds, digital waters – the ocean of the internet
– Elena Lake
The act of reading a poem—even silently—must be bodily before it’s intellectual.
– Donald Hall
November Evening
by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Come, for the dusk is our own; let us fare forth together,
With a quiet delight in our hearts for the ripe, still, autumn weather,
Through the rustling valley and wood and over the crisping meadow,
Under a high-sprung sky, winnowed of mist and shadow.
Sharp is the frosty air, and through the far hill-gaps showing
Lucent sunset lakes of crocus and green are glowing;
‘Tis the hour to walk at will in a wayward, unfettered roaming,
Caring for naught save the charm, elusive and swift, of the gloaming.
Watchful and stirless the fields as if not unkindly holding
Harvested joys in their clasp, and to their broad bosoms folding
Baby hopes of a Spring, trusted to motherly keeping,
Thus to be cherished and happed through the long months of their sleeping.
Silent the woods are and gray; but the firs than ever are greener,
Nipped by the frost till the tang of their loosened balsam is keener;
And one little wind in their boughs, eerily swaying and swinging,
Very soft and low, like a wandering minstrel is singing.
Beautiful is the year, but not as the springlike maiden
Garlanded with her hopes rather the woman laden
With wealth of joy and grief, worthily won through living,
Wearing her sorrow now like a garment of praise and thanksgiving.
Gently the dark comes down over the wild, fair places,
The whispering glens in the hills, the open, starry spaces;
Rich with the gifts of the night, sated with questing and dreaming,
We turn to the dearest of paths where the star of the homelight is gleaming.
There is always more brass than brains in an aristocracy.
– Oscar Wilde
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time–when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
– Carl Sagan
SMALL STEPS
My grandmother once gave me a tip:
In difficult times, you move forward in small steps.
Do what you have to do, but little by little.
Don’t think about the future, or what may happen tomorrow.
Wash the dishes.
Remove the dust.
Write a letter.
Make a soup.
You see?
You are advancing step by step.
Take a step and stop.
Rest a little.
Praise yourself.
Take another step.
Then another.
You won’t notice, but your steps will grow more and more.
And the time will come when you can think about the future without crying.
– Elena Mikhalkova
KEEP MOVING
The spiritual journey involves going beyond hope and fear,
stepping into unknown territory, continually moving forward.
The most important aspect of being on the spiritual path
may be to just keep moving.
– Pema Chodron
…The waters of the fountains of inspiration dispensed to artists by the Muses, the liquor in the little pails of the guides and guardians of the mysteries, the drink of the gods, and the distillate of love are the same, in various strengths, to wit, ambrosia (Sanskrit, ‘amrta,’ ‘immortality’), the potion of deathless life experienced here and now. It is milk, it is wine, it is tea, it is coffee, it is anything you like, when drunk with a certain insight–life itself, when experienced from a certain depth and height.
– Joseph Campbell
Well, we sense that there is a will that is behind all things, and we’re also aware of our own will, and it’s the distance between those two wills that creates the mystery that we call religion. It is the attempt to reconcile our will with another will that we can’t quite put our finger on, but we feel is powerful and existent. It’s the space between those two wills that creates our predicament.
[…]
Somehow, in some way, we have to be a reflection of the will that is behind the whole mess. When you describe the outer husk of that will which is yours, which is your own tiny will – in all things mostly to succeed, to dominate, to influence, to be the king – when that will under certain conditions destroys itself, we come into contact with another will which seems to be much more authentic. But to reach that authentic will, our little will has to undergo a lot of battering. And it’s not appropriate that our little will should be destroyed too often because we need it to interact with all the other little wills.
From time to time things arrange themselves in such a way that that tiny will is annihilated, and then you’re thrown back into a kind of silence until you can make contact with another authentic thrust of your being. And we call that prayer when we can affirm it. It happens rarely, but it happens in Book of Mercy, and that’s why I feel it’s kind of to one side, because I don’t have any ambitions towards leading a religious life or a saintly life or a life of prayer. It’s not my nature. I’m out on the street hustling with all the other wills.
But from time to time you’re thrown back to the point where you can’t locate your tiny will, where it isn’t functioning, and then you’re invited to find another source of energy.
– Leonard Cohen
One day when they are alone Robert Mapplethorpe say to her: ”Patti i’m dying. It’s so painful”. Patti helps him to the couch and sits with him until he falls asleep. As she thinks of how unendurable his life has become, she thinks: “The light poured through the windows upon his photographs and the poem of us sitting together a last time. Robert dying: creating silence. Myself, destined to live, listening closely to a silence that would take a lifetime to express…
– Patti Smith, Just Kids
Whenever some great work is to be accomplished, before which a man recoils, doubtful of his strength, his libido [life-creating energy] streams back to the fountainhead – and that is the dangerous moment when the issue hangs between annihilation and new life. For if the libido gets stuck in the wonderland of this inner world, then for the upper world man is nothing but a shadow, he is already moribund or at least seriously ill. But if the libido manages to tear itself loose and force its way up again, something like a miracle happens: the journey to the underworld was a plunge into the fountain of youth, and the libido, apparently dead, wakes to renewed fruitfulness.
– C.G. Jung
The experience of the underworld is overwhelming and must be made. This style of the underworld experience is overwhelming, it comes as violation [as does rape], dragging one out of life and into the Kingdom that the Orphic Hymn to Pluto describes as “void of day.” So it often says on Greek epitaphs that entering Hades [the kingdom of the dead] is “leaving the sweet sunlight.” Aspects of the psychological mystery [secret initiation] of Eleusis still take place in the soul today. The Persephone [whose name means “bringer of destruction”] experience occurs to us each in sudden depressions, when we feel ourselves caught in hatefulness, cold, numbed, and drawn downward out of life by a force we cannot see, against which we would flee, distractedly thrashing about for naturalistic explanations and comforts for what is happening so darkly. We feel invaded from below.
– James Hillman
Most heroic journeys involve going through a dark place – through mountain caverns, the underworld, or labyrinthine passages to emerge, finally, into the light. Or they may involve traveling through a desolate wasteland or desert to a green land. This journey is analogous to passing through a depression. In the myths as in life, the traveler needs to keep on moving, to keep on functioning, to do what has to be done, to stay in touch with her companions or manage alone, to not stop and give up (even when she feels lost), to maintain hope in darkness. The darkness may represent those dark, repressed feelings (of anger, despair, resentment, blame, vengeance, betrayal, fear, and guilt) through which people must pass if they are to get out of a depression. It helps to realize that death and rebirth, in myth and dreams, are metaphors for loss, depression, and recovery. Many such dark periods turn out to be rites of passage, a time of suffering through which a woman has learned something of value, and has grown. Or she may have been, for a while, like Persephone in the underworld, a temporary captive who later becomes a guide for others.
– Jean Shinoda Bolen
Myths include the phenomena that are discredited in normative psychology, where they are called abnormal, bizarre, absurd, self destructive, and sick. If we pursue this difference between usual psychology and mythology, we see clearly how ‘mythology saves the phenomena of psychopathology. Psychology finds place for these phenomena of the soul only by discrediting them; mythology credits them just as they are, finding them necessary to its account. It is not the myth that is wrong but our ignorance of its workings in us. Archetypal psychology looks to myth for its base, it too regards the pathologized phenomena of the psyche as necessary to a complete account of any psychic complexity. Without psychopathology there is no wholeness; in fact, psychopathology is a differentiation of that wholeness.
– James Hillman
Our world, so we see and hear on all sides, is drowning in materialism, commercialism, consumerism. But the problem is not really there. What we ordinarily speak of as materialism is a result, not a cause. The root of materialism is a poverty of ideas about the inner and the outer world. Less and less does our contemporary culture have, or even seek, commerce with great ideas, and it is that lack that is weakening the human spirit. This is the essence of materialism. Materialism is a disease of the mind starved for ideas.
– Jacob Needleman
The soul selects her own society. Then shuts the door.
– Emily Dickenson
In my own effort towards concentration, help is also offered through nature itself, life itself—whenever I can remain permeable to the deeply revealing impressions that it never ceases to provide. Therefore, my only concern should be to try and stay attentive to the wordless call from that which is always there, waiting for recognition.
– Henri Tracol
How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.
– R. Buckminster Fuller
The Milky Way, Łees’áán yílzhódí. Bernie smiled as the old name came to her. The Navajo term translated to “cake that is dragged along.” It conjured an image of the cosmic star cloud as a trail that would be created by pushing a cake through the sky, leaving a path of tasty crumbs behind as it moved among the celestial bodies. She had marveled at the starry cloud as a girl sleeping outside in the summer. The swath of twinkling light against the dark night still delighted her.
– Anne Hillerman
It’s a sign of wisdom to avoid believing every thought that enters your mind. It’s a mark of emotional intelligence to avoid internalizing every feeling that enters your heart.
– Adam M. Grant
There are a lot of people in the world who are not loved, and we must make an inconspicuous dash to them to save them, to help them. To live a life and not be loved is a terrible thing. And we can spare them that if we are attentive.
– Quentin Crisp
What everybody sees in a movie is such a private emotion. I mean in the cinema I think that when you go to see a movie we all enter into a kind of a special light. There is this amniotic darkness, and we are going all together to dream the same dream. And this is the great thing of cinema; it is something that happens in a community, we are all together. We start dreaming the same dream because there is… It let’s us think that the movie is projected not only by the projector, which is behind everybody, but is also projected by our own eyes. So we participate in our own personal, private way to this kind of ballet of ghosts that we have on the screen.
– Bernardo Bertolucci
One might characterize the whole first half of life as a gigantic mistake, as necessary as it is unavoidable. The task of the second half of life is to recover from that mistake, to move from the adapted self to the authentic self.
– James Hollis
When the psychological self – the adult imago – is constituted and fully realized in the second half of life, a person acquires with it the freedom to expand and deploy the expression of psychic energy in a distinctive and highly creative way. The imago opens new vistas, while it also defines the individual’s psychological style. It brings this capacity to the personality because it draws together the most important opposites in the individual psyche – the high and the low, the sacred and the profane, the conscious and the unconscious – into a singular pattern. The formation of the imago is the precondition for full adult freedom to be oneself.
– Murray Stein
Here’s all I’m trying to say: The planet on which our civilization evolved no longer exists. The stability that produced that civilization has vanished; epic changes have begun. (My favorite bleak headline, from USA Today in May 2009, describes a new study from the American Meteorological Society: “Global Warming May Be Twice as Bad as Previously Expected.)
We may, with commitment and luck, yet be able to maintain a planet that will sustain some kind of civilization, but it won’t be the same planet, and hence it can’t be the same civilization. The earth that we knew—the only earth that we ever knew—is gone.
– Bill McKibben
From the wind, I learned a syntax for forwardness, how to move through obstacles by wrapping myself around them. You can make it home this way.
– Ocean Vuong
When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud
And goes down burning into the gulf below,
No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud
At what has happened. Birds, at least, must know
It is the change to darkness in the sky.
Murmuring something quiet in its breast,
One bird begins to close a faded eye;
Or overtaken too far from its nest,
Hurrying low above the grove, some waif
Swoops just in time to his remembered tree.
At most he thinks or twitters softly, “Safe!
Now let the night be dark for all of me.
Let the night be too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be be.”
– Robert Frost
“But remember,” Mrs Who said, “ἄελπτον οὐδέν, πάντα δ᾿ ἐλπίζειν χρεών. Euripides. Nothing is hopeless; we must hope for everything.”
– Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
I have a small grain of hope—
one small crystal that gleams
clear colors out of transparency.
I need more.
I break off a fragment
to send you.
Please take
this grain of a grain of hope
so that mine won’t shrink.
Please share your fragment
so that yours will grow.
Only so, by division,
will hope increase,
like a clump of irises, which will cease to flower
unless you distribute
the clustered roots, unlikely source—
clumsy and earth-covered—
of grace.
– Denise Levertov
Truth and love have been smacked down, so many more times in history before today. Truth, because it’s often inconvenient, and love because it is vulnerable.
But truth is like gravity, and carbon, and the sun behind an eclipse: it’s still there. And love stays alive if you tend it like a flame. If you feel crushed by unkindness today, it’s a time for grieving, reaching out to loved ones, noticing one bright color somewhere in the day.
Remembering what there is to love. Starting with the immediate, the place and people we can tend ourselves, and make safe. We can’t save everything all at once, but it’s still worth saving something. Because there are so many of us to do it.
And we are all still here today, exactly as we were yesterday. Like gravity, and carbon, and the sun behind an eclipse.
– Barbara Kingsolver
And I cried… for all of the women who stretched their bodies for
civilizations, only to find ruins.
– Sonia Sanchez
…awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
– Carl Sagan
He knows that you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.
– Ken Kesey
I don’t have a lot to say, but I want to say something. The worst people you know, the worst people you can imagine, won. That does not make them right, and it never will. I’ve spent the morning sending loving texts to friends and family. I urge all people of good conscience to spend time in similar love rather than looking for blame among other people of good conscience. Today, I struggle to see a path forward. But I will never stop speaking out or give up fighting for the people I care about. That includes you. And you can continue also. In the long run, I have to believe that matters.
– Dylan Garity
They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving. You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love.
The Wobblies used to say don’t mourn, organize, but you can do both at once and you don’t have to organize right away in this moment of furious mourning. You can be heartbroken or furious or both at once; you can scream in your car or on a cliff; you can also get up tomorrow and water the flowerpots and call someone who’s upset and check your equipment for going onward.
A lot of us are going to come under direct attack, and a lot of us are going to resist by building solidarity and sanctuary. Gather up your resources, the metaphysical ones that are heart and soul and care, as well as the practical ones.
People kept the faith in the dictatorships of South America in the 1970s and 1980s, in the East Bloc countries and the USSR, women are protesting right now in Iran and people there are writing poetry. There is no alternative to persevering, and that does not require you to feel good. You can keep walking whether it’s sunny or raining. Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.
– Rebecca Solnit
When will hate be exhausted? Or is it hate that’s the issue in all this? When will the practice cease of entrusting the destiny of nations to people who see humanity as a way of furthering their careers?
– Claude Debussy
…I remember an evening when the sky was underworld-dark at four, when ice had seized every part of the city and we sat talking— the air making a wreath for our cups of tea. And I was listening to you. As if to music, as if to peace.
– Eavan Boland
Dear Artists,
Remember That
The Opposite Of
Depression Is Not
Joy — It’s Expression
So Create, Create
Create. For It Is
The Soul’s Medicine
– @okuntakinte
If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin.
– Søren Kierkegaard
There’s nothing to be learned
from the second kick of a mule.
– Mark Twain
What’s really odd, and very sad, is
that everyone lost yesterday but only
half of us know it.
– Bob Thorne
People walking around in the sun
Laughing and talking into their cell phones
as though nothing at all had happened.
The calm before the shit storm.
– Mark Bittner
the duty of the writer … is to remind us that we will die. And that we aren’t dead yet.
– Solmaz Sharif
A people that elect corrupt politicians, aren’t victims, but accomplices.
– George Orwell
Mosses may lose up to 98% of their moisture & still survive to restore themselves when water is replenished. Even after forty years of dehydration mosses can be revived after a drink. Mosses have a covenant with change; they give me faith.
– Robin Wall Kimmel, Gathering Moss
once again, really urging people to get a library card if you haven’t already – and not just that, i’m begging you to USE your library resources. show up. though they’re important, we do way more than just books. libraries are spaces that allow community building and care.
– Kristen Arnett
November 7.
What horrifies me most is the idea
of being useless: well-educated,
brilliantly promising, and fading out
into an indifferent middle-age.
– Sylvia Plath
those who escape hell
however
never talk about
it
and nothing much
bothers them
after
that
.
– Charles Bukowski
A relationship where she respects his genius and he respects her oracle, is powerful in every dimension.
– Nika Solé
Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.
– Aldous Huxley
the urge to hide
inside a flower
late autumn
– Basho
i stand up
through your destruction
i stand up
– Lucille Clifton
The greatest illusion is that we are in control. The truth is, life is unfolding as it should. Surrender to this unfolding. Let go of the need to control, to manipulate, to dictate.
– Adyashanti
The less a man is satisfied with himself or with his inner life, the more he manifests himself in the external, in the public life.
– Leo Tolstoy
It’s all designed to improve and progress you spiritually. To what degree that happens is up to your willingness to evolve.
– Nika Solé
The most dangerous competitor is the one with a single goal.
– Shane Parrish
And the heart does not die when one thinks it should
– Milosz
stopping the postman—
each day fewer leaves
on the cherry tree
– Caroline Gourlay
The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time
bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you
did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets.
When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will
presently come to love him. If you injure someone you
dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do
him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.
– C. S. Lewis
We have no right to tell our children how to build their future, since we have proved unfit to build our own…We cannot hope to build independent human characters if education is in the hands of politicians.
– Wilhelm Reich
Faith is not knowledge of an object but communion with it.
– Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Everything that human beings are doing to make it easier to operate computer networks is at the same time, but for different reasons, making it easier for computer networks to operate human beings.
– George Dyson
The older I get, the surer I am that I’m not running the show.
– Leonard Cohen
A golden heaven
Sings by itself
A song to nobody.
– Thomas Merton
distant thunder—
overhead a satellite
moves in the dark
– Penny Harter
Poetry saved my life when I was a misbegotten, self-destructive kid, and the way of poetry has determined the course of my life. It has saved, can save, and will save many others..
– Sam Hamill
One doesn’t really want to say anything but that up there through the trees the sky is visible, that’s all.
– Franz Kafka, 1920.
I would have loved you in this mossy place,
In days gone by, because of your sweet face.
But now I smile, as I my pipe begin,
The dreams I had were like magpies that spin.
– Francis Jammes (translated by Jethro Bithell)
Be the gap in the literature that you want to see in the world.
– John Attridge
All words are adult. Only the space in which they reverberate—a space infinitely empty, like a garden where, even after the children have disappeared, their joyful cries continue to be heard-leads them back towards the perpetual
death in which they seem to keep being born.
– Blanchot
Love has never been a popular movement. And no one’s ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people.
– James Baldwin
Democrats aren’t going to win elections again until they build a well-oiled information ecosystem that extends to podcasts and every social media platform and can pierce the right-wing propaganda bubble . It doesn’t matter if you delivered on the economy or we are actually safer if people are being pummeled by domestic and foreign disinformation that crime and inflation are up. It’s an information war at this point.
– Asha Rangappa
Without your story, who would you be?
– @naval
I guard the evening hours
and the gray foliage above me.
The autumn sky is my shelter.
I don’t remember my own dreams;
I’m unworthy of your late tears.
An epoch has passed since the iron bar
invisibly locked the door.
– Arseny Tarkovsky
(trans. Philip Metres & Dimitri Psurtsev)
I will still be making poems for you
out of silence;
silence will be falling into that silence,
it is building music.
– Muriel Rukeyser
This other kingdom, other world,
Drifts as though its sails are furled
Down tides of spring that run so far
We see the axles of our star ;
Why else should almonds have two kinds
Unless to let us change our minds ?
– Sacheverell Sitwell
A regulated nervous system is the new status symbol.
– Kimia Nora
Names set off phonologic sparks and echoes can be seen as rungs on a veil ladder.
…
Go to a ladder that leads to free air. All things serve when the psalm sings instead of the singer.
– Susan Howe
We will only understand the miracle of life fully
when we allow the unexpected to happen.
– Paulo Coelho
The three big decisions – what you do, where you live, and who you’re with.
– @naval
Once you’re into a story everything seems to apply—what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you’re writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.
– Eudora Welty
Setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable.
– President Biden
PRIMER
For mending, use an umbrella or like contraption wherever
possible.
Form the habit of fencing in with certainty.
Collect your thoughts in spools. Follow with sharps.
Life is not free from forms. Work each to learn.
Count most cautiously.
Risk the invisible.
– Ashley McWaters
raking leaves…
after all of it somehow
hope springs
– @coffeeandhaiku
We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.
– Emily Dickinson
Good-morning, Revolution: You’re the very best friend I ever had.
– Langston Hughes
You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.
– Pablo Neruda
Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – – always darker, emptier and simpler.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
– Franz Kafka
There is nothing so stable as change.
– Bob Dylan
The corrupt and blood-smeared fingerprints of the past must be wiped away to create a clean space for the morally pure generation that is surely about to arrive. Such is the theory.
– Margaret Atwood
Tell me who your heroes are and I’ll tell you how you’ll turn out to be.
– Warren Buffett
The game is not about becoming somebody, it’s about becoming nobody.
– Ram Dass
Charlie Chaplin said it best—”I don’t shake hands with Nazis.”
I live in my dreams—that’s what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That’s the difference.
– Hermann Hesse
The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.
– Nikola Tesla
To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Offline is the new peace of mind.
– Thinking Minds
The shadow reminds you that what you value the most may be badly shaken if you let it in. The repugnance usually hides a very deep fear, a fear of being annihilated as the person you know yourself to be. I think that the older you get, the harder it is to face this threat.
– Liz Greene
A man is in bondage to whatever he cannot part with that is less than himself.
– George MacDonald
Following your own star means isolation, not knowing where to go, having to find out a completely new way for yourself instead of just going on the trodden path everybody else runs along. That’s why there’s always been a tendency in humans to project the uniqueness and the greatness of their own inner self onto outer personalities and become the servants, the devoted servants, admirers, and imitators of outer personalities.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
Everyone has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some meaning seems distinct almost within reach, but is elusive; it refuses to condense into definite form; the attaching of a word somehow (just how, it is almost impossible to say) puts limits around the meaning, draws it out from the void, makes it stand out as an entity on its own account.
– John Dewey, How We Think
Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail.
– John Donne
Know how to live within yourself; there in your soul lives a whole world of mysterious and enchanted thoughts; they will be drowned by noise of this world. Be still and listen to their singing and be silent.
– Fyodor Tyutchev
“A man is driving up a winding mountain road. A woman is driving down the road. When she passes the man, she yells out the window, ‘PIG’. And the man yells back, ‘BITCH’. Then the man makes a hairpin turn, and there in the middle of the road is a huge pig. He crashes into the pig, has a huge accident, and dies.” … The moral of the story is… listen to women more.
– Greg Boyle
When Lilith stood up against Yahweh,
the Earth trembled…
not out of fear, but out of solidarity.
As if it was waiting
for this moment
to finally arrive.
– Jenna Rivera, Sovereign
When one lives in a society where people can no longer rely on the institutions to tell them the truth, the truth must come from culture and art.
– John Trudell
The world and your life is a blank canvas.
Your actions, behaviours, and language paint the picture.
What kind of art are you creating for yourself?
– innervibetherapy@
To sleep till spring you’d have to have a trust in things the way animals do. Been a long time, I reckon, since people felt safe enough to sleep more than a night.
– Wendell Berry
God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature. They won’t even whore. They’re all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they’re all camp-followers.
– Hemingway
If You Have Had Your Midnights
if you have had
your midnights
and they have drenched
your barren guts
with tears
I sing you sunrise
and love
and someone to touch
– Mari Evans
slowly
one by one
the wildflowers scatter
– Ogawa
There are fires that will not go out, fires that sing with invisible mouths, touchable fires in the hearts of beings that are singing the long and the short of it, telling the why and wherefore of it, laughing and crying till no one knows which, birthing and dying till no one knows which, making the evidence and eating the evidence, making the conflicts and resolving them, gnawing with doubt in the hearts of some, roaring with gladness in the hearts of others. Fires whispering bright seductions, murmurings of what is too far to run to, feelings of what is too close to hold. All from the fires that will not go out in the hearts of the living.
– George Gorman
Detachment – Health – The Healing Arts
Living minds preserve themselves through the conceptual storage of worthwhile knowledge while they also have to detach from overworked or unfulfilling focuses (whether physical, emotional, or conceptual). Each creature has its ways of pursuing particular goals and when such purposes are achieved, it detaches from physically trying to accomplish something.
It makes sense that the living need to psychologically detach from particular focuses when finished, or when they long for relief from some busy-ness, or when resting from a difficult worry, habit, or wound. So knowing what to remember is not more important than knowing what to let go of. We endure more effectively when we can feel when and how to detach from particular focuses.
As the natural instinct for releasing and renewing certain aspects of one’s body of experience (which also happens through sleeping and dying), the healthiness of a good sense of detachment doesn’t just come from drugs but from timing your own ways of letting go. Every creature has its ways of pursuing particular goals for a time, after which satisfaction or disinterest may lead to detachment – not only for the sake of rest but also when it’s no longer worth the effort or something else matters more.
– George Gorman
We do not talk – we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests. Talk is personal and if of any value must be creative.
– Henry Miller
Without committing the slightest harmful act, apply yourself perfectly to the good and fully master your mind, this is the teaching of the Buddha.
– Matthew Ricard
She’s in between worlds right now.
A part of her is leaving.
But it’s not like before.
She’s holding space this time.
Not sweating it, but breathing beyond her skin.
She’s good.
She’s even shape-shifting.
The raven.
The owl.
She’s unafraid of the bird’s-eye view.
And unlike all those other times,
she isn’t scared of the unknown.
She’s present and neither timid nor bold.
It feels beautiful like the song of a blackbird.
And powerful like the rumble of an avalanche.
– Tanya Markul
Faced with the precarious existence of tribal life – drought, sickness, evil influences – the shaman responded by ridding his body of weight and flying to another world, another level of perception, where he could find the strength to change the face of reality…
Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don’t mean escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification. The images of lightness that I seek should not
fade away like dreams dissolved by the realities of present and
future…
– Italo Calvino
Men who think deeply appear to be comedians in their dealings with others because they always have to feign superficiality in order to be understood.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
I slept and dreamt that life was joy.
I awoke and saw that life was service.
I acted and, behold, service was joy.
– Rabindranath Tagore
A Prayer To Be of Benefit
To those who wish me harm,
Intentionally or not,
Or those I perceive as causing me harm, I make this aspiration so my heart remains open.
I offer this so I am not tempted to hate, Nor to justify aggressive acts, But to act from love.
I offer this to generate merit
And be of benefit to all humanity,
Regardless of embodiment,
So we might take care of each other.
May we see that happiness
Is not to be found in material gains,
Nor the accumulation of wealth, power or adulation.
For the sake of all beings,
May we find cause for kindness,
Generosity, and compassion.
May we have a profound realization
Of the emptiness of all things,
Thereby dedicating this and all future lives to benefiting only others.
May we see how attachment and ignorance Are at the root of human misery and suffering.
May we see that happiness is found
In caring for the most vulnerable,
And by giving our materials gains
to those in the greatest need.
May we become the embodiment of love, Bestowing our wealth on those around us to generate merit and create a just societyThat honors the value of a human being as a human being.
May our clenched and closed hearts and minds See the value and necessity of compassion, generosity, self-reflection, study, and application.
Like the murderer Angulimala, who encountered the Buddha, May we realize the root of happiness,
True happiness free of attachment,
and renounce all evil we have done.
May we seek forgiveness through positive action, Through diligent and gracious conduct With the aim to benefit all beings.
May we see our frailty And let it connect us to all humanity Since beginningless time.
May we be humbled by our own impermanence. Knowing the only thing we can take with us Upon death will be our state of mind, Cultivate a mind of lovingkindness, Free of greed, hatred, desire, and enmity.
May we appreciate the multiplicity in Oneness And have respect for the many embodiments of all sentient beings.
May we become fully aware
of the inaccurate and harmful perversions Surrounding our various embodiments And let go of discriminatory thought and action.
May we be fearful for our future lifetimes Knowing the full gravity our actions will have Due to karmic law.
And may all this come to fruition post-haste, So we might still have a habitable planet And safe communities And better distribution of precious resources.”
For the benefit of all beings.
– Red Pine (Bill Porter)
Waking the Sleepers
Woe to the coward that ever he was born;
That did not draw the sword before he blew the horn
– Traditional Scots Rhyme
There are many stories concerning giants (or King Arthur and his knights) sleeping under a hill. The sleepers are really guardians who should not be woken until there is a great and national need. A fool-hardy man discovers their sleeping place, usually when seeking buried treasure that is supposed to be lying with the sleepers. Greed takes him in, but at sight of the awesome warriors and their gear, confusion grips him. He blows the horn to wake them but fails to draw the sword that lies nearby to indicate the real urgency of his need. The sleepers stir and ask, “Is it time?” The foolish man has nothing to say for himself, and is indicted with the rhyme above. He is never able to find the cavern again.
In every country, there is a similar tale of sleepers whose purpose is to be the vanguard of defense in national crisis – ancestral or otherworldly sleepers who are contracted to be guardians and protectors of the land. They should not be woken unless we really need them. Those who invoke the sleepers out of greed or curiosity get neither gold nor knowledge. This applies also to those whose spiritual practice is entirely self-serving, who undergo a kind of metaphysical assault course wherein all traditions are ransacked for their spiritual treasures in order to provide soul-credits at the finish line.
There are many aspects of ancient traditions that are in a period of sleep, retreat, or transformation – aspects that are best left sleeping now. Not only atavistic and barbarous practices that are no longer a part of our world, but also deep and abiding truths that will one day awaken and come to aid of those in centuries yet to dawn.
Who are the abiding sleepers in your tradition? Meditate upon the purpose of their sleep.
– Caitlin Matthews, The Celtic Tradition
That’s how it is sometimes when we plunge into the depths of our lives. No one can accompany us, not even those who would give up their hearts for our happiness.
– Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Sister of My Heart
“My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer”, he boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky.
“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.”
– Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
Migration
The high room is dark now
summer is faded its window
open to a night sky teaching
itself to deepen draws in
scents of cut fields and contact
calls of birds leaving now leaving
stipple down to anyone
lingering late by a window what
journey what species of bird
matters little those flight-notes
intended only for each other –
if they reach us are we released?
It doesn’t
matter
to me
if
poems mean
nothing:
there’s no
floor
to the
universe
and yet
one
walks the
floor.
– A. R. Ammons
Desiring to live in a cold place, a place that snows, is the mark of a noble bearing.
The people have wood-stove hearts.
Walking hearth fires.
– @OldHollowTree
It was a coup by the billionaires. The fact that so many Americans didn’t realize they were being scammed by oligarchs is a testament to the collective stupidity of our country.
– Bill Madden, 2024 Election
Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat.
Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded.
– John Berger
As a young person, I began as a profoundly apolitical writer, but as I grew, I began to do what all poets do: I began to describe the world around me.
– Atwood
Having good energy changes everything. People want to help you. Abundance attracts to you. Life bends to you.
– Nika Solé
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
– Seamus Heaney
All our best men
are laughed at
in this nightmare
land…
– Jack Kerouac
I slept because it was the only
thing I could do. I even dreamed.
I couldn’t stop myself.
– Rita Dove
the smiling face
of a tea maker
first frost
– Issa
Words’ meanings count, aside from what they weigh:
poetry, like music, is not just song.
I do not always understand what you say.
– James Schuyler
What is wanted is to discover the now nameless feelings that men have in common. All the powerful motives which will not go into words and which are a cause of constant lying and misunderstanding, could be tracked down, given visible form, agreed upon, and named.
– George Orwell
the rhythm is an unconscious result of the poetic mood. if one should stop to consider it mechanically, when about to write a poem, one would become bewildered and accomplish nothing of real poetical value.
– Goethe
Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face.
– C.G. Jung
Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance … till we come to a hard bottom of rocks in place, which we can call reality.
– Henry David Thoreau
there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock.
people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.
people just are not good to each other
one on one.
the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor.
we are afraid.
– Bukowski
cold autumn rain
makes the mountain
more beautiful
– Basho
This Country
In this country? Yes, I stayed in this country.
Exile comes in many shapes
and places.
– Ryszard Krynicki
If we analyze our processes of living, we find that, I imagine, at least 50 percent of our life is spent in the universe of language. We are like icebergs, floating in a sea of immediate experience but projecting into the air of language.
– Aldous Huxley
My poetry is to be read together as one single poem. I don’t want to make the comparison with The Divine Comedy, but I consider my three books as three canticles, three phases of a human life.
– Eugenio Montale
Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.
– Leo Tolstoy
I teach one thing, and one thing only: Wackness and the end of wackness.
– Da Buddha
If you insist on having a destination when you come into a library, you’re shortchanging yourself.
– Anne Lamott
When we live in a world that is very unjust, you have to be a dissident.
– Nawal El Saadawi
Most people live a quietly anxious life because they know they should be doing something other than what they’re doing, but they don’t do anything about it because they don’t know what to do, so they keep doing the same thing to numb the pain that comes with change.
– Dan Koe
Literacy rate in United States:
21% of adults are illiterate
54% of adults have a literacy level below 6th grade
Illiteracy has become such a serious problem in our country that 130 million adults are now unable to read a simple story to their children.
45 million adults are functionally illiterate and read below a 5th grade level
44% of American adults do not read a book in a year
But let’s do away with the Department of Education, sure.
– Jorie Graham
The vajra is the hardest substance, harder than diamond. You can wield the vajra. It destroys everything it touches. But you must wield the vajra with a pure heart. If not, the vajra is a boomerang.
– Bill Hamilton
the ivy owl’s call
disappears to dark silence…
leaves fall, susurrate
– James Gilbert
Reality was the keener for being fugitive, concealed, and doubtful.
– Guy Davenport
The nameless waters know all of my secrets. The same memory flows from all fountains.
– Esther Kinsky, River
Finishing the dharma is not a thing that happens outside the fantasies of young men.
– Kenneth Folk
Treat others as if they already are the shining light they are capable of becoming.”
– Mary Davis
Chopin
Not very forthcoming in conversation,
opinions were not his forte,
opinions don’t get to the center;
when Delacroix expounded a theory
he became restive, he for his part was unable
to explicate his Nocturnes.
– Gottfried Benn
(tr. Michael Hamburger)
Let a second
generation full of courage issue forth; let a people
loving freedom come to growth.
– Margaret Walker
Drag was looked down upon
for decades, not just by mainstream
traight culture but by queer
culture as well.
– Elyssa Goodman, All in Good Taste
You shouldn’t get disillusioned when you get knocked back. All you’ve discovered is that the search is difficult, and you still have a duty to keep on searching.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
Practice
by Ellen Bryant Voigt
To weep unbidden, to wake
at night in order to weep, to wait
for the whisker on the face of the clock
to twitch again, moving
the dumb day forward—
is this merely practice?
Some believe in heaven,
some in rest. We’ll float,
you said. Afterward
we’ll float between two worlds—
five bronze beetles
stacked like spoons in one
peony blossom, drugged by lust:
if I came back as a bird
I’d remember that—
until everyone we love
is safe is what you said.
Not light but language shocks us out of sleep
ideas of doom transformed to meteors
we translate back to portents of the wars
looming above the nervous watch we keep.
– Rachel Hadas
When I was very little, say five or six, I became aware of the fact that people wrote books. Before that, I thought that God wrote books. I thought a book was a manifestation of nature, like a tree.
– Fran Lebowitz
The poem was inspired by my oral history project, Following the Manito Trail, [while] documenting the diaspora of northern New Mexico Manito culture in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
the cherry end of your cigarette against the pale sky
by Levi Romero
outside the prickling air burned hot
against what we’d left behind
and all that we scraped and cupped
ourselves for while trying to catch
the last vestiges of someone’s history
their life here and back and somewhere
in that hummed and whistled journey
across the plains and valleys and state lines
invisible to hunger and thirst
and the pursuit of want and need
tomorrow the railroad tracks
will shimmer in the heat
of the summer that arrived
as we were heading out of town
because as in those things past
we too have someplace we need to go
what does it matter
that there are no words
to compensate for the longing
and emptiness of the evening’s solitude
brought in by the winds
of our own stormy reluctance
unwilling to settle for anything less
than what we give in our taking
our own words muted by a laughter-less language
rattling bucket-empty like a windmill
spinning against a prairie horizon
that does not distinguish between
yesterday or tomorrow
them or us
his or hers
yours or mine
it was what you didn’t say
that caught my attention
and how you pressed your lips to the wind
your eyes blazing in the moonless night
Call it precious and go to hell, I believe a story can be wrecked by a faulty rhythm in a sentence.
– Truman Capote
I waited for the snow but it never snowed
it just got colder & colder
– Josh English
A lot of people stopped reading me at some point. To them I’m still the writer they thought I was in 1976. I got flash frozen by some people and that’s just the way it’s going to be.
– Ann Beattie
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
– Langston Hughes
If you’re lost in the dark, doesn’t any light seem like salvation?
– Chloe N. Clark
Alphabet Song – Linda Pastan
Like a train made up of 26 boxcars,
the alphabet drags such a heavy cargo
down the tracks, such strange,
compelling combinations
that we are left breathless, admiring
a world constructed of words
and sentences as much
as the sunsets and snowfalls
which perform their mysteries
before our distracted eyes.
Now we learn how alphabets of genes
produce jellyfish and roses
and the intricate brain
that invented language—then wrote
a poem which like a brief breeze
wafts over us and is gone.
Vermeer by Howard Nemerov
Taking what is, and seeing it as it is,
Pretending to no heroic stances or gestures,
Keeping it simple; being in love with light
And the marvelous things that light is able to do,
How beautiful a modesty which is
Seductive extremely, the care for daily things.
At one for once with sunlight falling through
A leaded window, the holy mathematic
Plays out the cat’s cradle of relation
Endlessly; even the inexorable
Domesticates itself and becomes charm.
If I could say to you, and make it stick,
A girl in a red hat, a woman in blue
Reading a letter, a lady weighing gold . . .
If I could say this to you so you saw,
And knew, and agreed that this was how it was
In a lost city across the sea of years,
I think we should be for one moment happy
In the great reckoning of those little rooms
Where the weight of life has been lifted and made light,
Or standing invisible on the shore opposed,
Watching the water in the foreground dream
Reflectively, taking a view of Delft
As it was, under a wide and darkening sky.
True Love by Wislawa Szymborska
Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.
True love. Is it normal
is it serious, is it practical?
What does the world get from two people
who exist in a world of their own?
Placed on the same pedestal for no good reason,
drawn randomly from millions but convinced
it had to happen this way – in reward for what?
For nothing.
The light descends from nowhere.
Why on these two and not on others?
Doesn’t this outrage justice? Yes it does.
Doesn’t it disrupt our painstakingly erected principles,
and cast the moral from the peak? Yes on both accounts.
Look at the happy couple.
Couldn’t they at least try to hide it,
fake a little depression for their friends’ sake?
Listen to them laughing – its an insult.
The language they use – deceptively clear.
And their little celebrations, rituals,
the elaborate mutual routines –
it’s obviously a plot behind the human race’s back!
It’s hard even to guess how far things might go
if people start to follow their example.
What could religion and poetry count on?
What would be remembered? What renounced?
Who’d want to stay within bounds?
True love. Is it really necessary?
Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,
like a scandal in Life’s highest circles.
Perfectly good children are born without its help.
It couldn’t populate the planet in a million years,
it comes along so rarely.
Let the people who never find true love
keep saying that there’s no such thing.
Lost Friends
by Rui Pires Cabral
Translated fro the Portuguese by Alexis Levitin
Friends carried off by life
are the most difficult to appease, the most
tyrannical. Barbarians of an unknown land,
they sip the poison of silence and they grow
beyond all limits in the distance, a blind eye
to our loneliness. And to think that we were
brothers in arms, that we dug up buried treasure
from the same islands, from the most
barren of books. How things turn out.
Could all have been in vain? It seemed
that we were destined for the same
songs, for a more certain kind of love.
Well, well. And we cannot even understand
what happened.
Myrtle by John Ashbery
How funny your name would be
if you could follow if back to where
the first person thought of saying it,
naming himself that, or maybe
some other persons thought of it
and named that person. It would
be like following a river to its source,
which would be impossible. Rivers have no source.
They just automatically appear at a place
where they get wider, and soon a real
river comes along, with fish and debris,
regal as you please, and someone
has already given it a name: St. Benno
(saints are popular for this purpose) or, or
some other name, the name of his
long-lost girlfriend, who comes
at longlast to impersonate that river,
on a stage, her voice clanking
like its bed, her clothing of sand
and pasted paper, a piece of real technology,
while all along she is thinking, I can
do what I want to do. But I want to stay here.
Drift by Linda Pastan
Lying in bed this morning
you read to me of continental drift,
how Africa and South America
sleeping once side by side
slowly slid apart;
how California even now
pushes off like a swimmer
from the country’s edge, along
the San Andreas Fault.
And I thought about you and me
who move in sleep each night
to the far reaches of the bed,
ranges of blankets between us.
It is a natural law this drift
and though we break it
as we break bread
over and over again, you remain
Africa with your deep shade,
your heat. And I, like California,
push off from your side
my two feet cold
against your back, dreaming
of Asia Minor.
In the beginning, love.
In the end, love.
In the middle,
we have to cultivate virtues.
– Swami Chidvilasananda
I’ve been asked many times whether this is the aquarian age and it’s all just beginning, or if this is armageddon and this is the end, and I have to admit I don’t know. Whichever way it goes, my work is the same. My work is to quiet my mind and open my heart and relieve suffering wherever I find it.
– Ram Dass
Readers want the person who is talking to them to sound genuine. Therefore a fundamental rule is: be yourself.
– William Zinsser
Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.
– Aldous Huxley
When one is in a good sound rage, it is astonishing how calm one can be.
– George Earle Lytton
You and I who still enjoy fairy tales have less reason to wish actual childhood back. We have kept its pleasures and added some grown-up ones as well.
– C.S. Lewis
I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.
– Immanuel Kant
Though the grease burns out of the torch, the fire passes on, and no one knows where it ends.
– Zhuangzi
I thought everything would change for me here in the land of luxury and freedom and opportunity, that nothing could possibly thwart me. I promised myself that. But it turned out to be untrue. It was a lie I was forcing on myself because I had no choice. It seemed I did not have the strength and hardness for it.
– Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart
In every society, in every collectivity, exists — must exist — a channel, an outlet through which the forces accumulated in the form of aggression can be released.
– Frantz Fanon
Injustice never rules forever.
– Seneca the Younger
Some people have a sense of unearthly things, just as others have an excellent sense of smell or hearing or taste. They can feel the subtle shifts in the great and complicated body of the world. And some of these have so honed that inner sight that they can even tell where a holy spark has fallen, notice its glow in the very place you would least expect it.
– Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob
Long is the way, and hard, that out of hell leads up to light.
– John Milton
The earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal.
– Camille Paglia
A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer.
– J. R. R. Tolkien
Results are important, but the way they are achieved, the process, is equally important.
– Robert Greene
Patience draws its breath
in the paths beginning.
Needing only dreams
and resiliency to further
its trek in to the unknown
– J. Scott
Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.
– Simone de Beauvoir
It is possible to be wild and kind at the same time. It is possible to be both alone and be loved. I have known this to be true. In others. In me.
– Anis Mojgani, In the Pockets of Small Gods
If it entertains you now but will bore you someday, it’s a distraction. Keep looking.
– Naval Ravikant
Every day, stand guard at the door of your mind.
– Jim Rohn
It is a real weakness to want to be liked.
– Elon Musk
It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.
– George Eliot
Extravagance: Load no man with lavish gifts. Small presents often win great praise. With a loaf cut and a cup shared I found fellowship.
– Hávamál
Thought is the only power which can produce tangible riches from the Formless Substance.
– Wallace D. Wattles
Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.
– Françoise Sagan
We can either spiral or read.
OK technically we can do both but let’s just read, k?
– @barnesandnoble
Love is Not All
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.
I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.
– Hermann Hesse
Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.
– Tennessee Williams
I had a client who suffered from mental health issues for years. We had him get some sun, lift weights, get 10k steps a day, while dropping 25 lbs of fat. Brain fog was eliminated. Intrusive thoughts disappeared. It turns out he wasn’t mentally unhealthy. He was metabolically unhealthy.
– Dan Go
Every man is at war with himself, except a Buddha.
– @naval
Writers are curators of the language. Our work helps keep language from collapsing in on itself, from becoming merely colloquial or ordinary or, like the language of business and politics, sterile and largely unmeaning.
– Verlyn Klinkenborg
But I speak softer, every year a little softer.
– Samuel Beckett
As a poet, I’m too informal for the formalists, and too formal for everybody else. I’m part of a special school of style we call Minnesota Awkward.
– Henry Gould
The extent of your realization will be known when you encounter difficult circumstances. You will not know the extent of your realization when things go well.
When you find yourself in a troublesome situation, when you are in great pain, when an intense emotion arises, only then will you know where you are at with practice.
– Garchen Rinpoche
There comes a point in everyone’s life that we have to take the time to simply find ourselves…
– April Peerless
I love reggie ray’s meditation programs, cuz it starts out like “have you tried feeling your toes? that’s nifty, huh?”
and by the end its like “after breathing in through the whole body at once, then expelling stale qi from the lower dan tien, then drawing awareness to the soft palate, then opening awareness behind your head, then dropping all limits on that open awareness again and again and again, then noticing the qualities of that vast open space, then imagining pulling that space aside like a veil and falling into the vaster space that underlies it, then doing the same with that space, and the next one, and the next one… then you’ve gotten where we want to be, and you can spend 40 minutes or so resting in the vibrant stillness of ultimate boddhicitta. Have fun, see you on the next one where we’ll practice breathing in the fire that lies in the depths of the earth.
– River Kenna
Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow.
– Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The paradox of tolerance is a philosophical concept suggesting that if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance, thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance. This paradox was articulated by philosopher Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), where he argued that a truly tolerant society must not tolerate those who promote intolerance. Popper posited that if intolerant ideologies are allowed unchecked expression, they could exploit open society values to erode or destroy tolerance itself through authoritarian or oppressive practices.
I look for energy in a picture
Whether of a person
A place Or thing
Look for the energy
– Marian Haddad
oh my troubled lovely,
oh my weeping daisy,
oh my fading candle,
oh my broken beauty,
oh my crumbling stronghold,
stay with us
here on Earth
don’t rapture yourself;
~ we need you – we need you
– we need you – we need you
before you decide to leave,
sit with me here in your unmade self
at the edge of your unmade bed
and listen to me
tell you one last secret
oh my tearful songbird,
if you can find
a way to
survive long
enough
someday you’ll become
the answer to somebody
else’s most desperate prayer
by just being there in
the same room that they are in
~ as they gently fall apart
and in that moment
you won’t need to say anything
you’ll just need drape your hands
over theirs like a Good Friday altar cloth
until they believe in resurrection again
~ that’s why you can’t give up
your life will someday be the rainbow
at the end of someone else’s storm
if you aren’t still here
when they fall off
the bridge
then who will be there to catch them?
I know it’s not quite fair
~ but your life isn’t just yours
it also belongs to that person
who is going to need you
to be alive later
you are part of the community
of unintended angels
who has a sacred calling
of surviving your darkest night
so someday you can be the
sunrise for somebody else who
will need you to prove to them
that daybreak always returns
oh my clouding diamond,
oh my shaking sunflower,
oh my doubting saint,
oh my disappearing moon,
oh my quieting symphony
stay here
with us
on Earth
because if you do
you will save a dozen lives
by first saving your own
it’s the great pyramid scheme
of hope
you must persist
so they can watch how you persist
turn this riptide you
are drowning under
into a ripple
of hope
that stretches
through time
that you can ride until
you reach that one moment
in your life where you’ll find yourself
in a quiet room with somebody
who wants to become a shadow
and you’ll be able to say to them
with authority the same thing
I am saying to you right now:
“oh my troubled lovely,
oh my weeping daisy,
oh my fading candle,
oh my broken beauty,
oh my crumbling stronghold
stay with us
here on Earth
don’t rapture yourself
we need you…
– john roedel
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
– Leonardo da Vinci
If you want to do extraordinary things, it shouldn’t be easy.
– Jensen Huang
Our period has destroyed the interior hierarchy.
– Simone Weil
delicate branches snapping
from crimson leaves
autumn wind
– Basho
We may have more in common that unites us than divides us, but how will we ever know if we don’t stop and ask each other the question:
What’s it like to be you?
– McCall Erickson
The whole world can love you, but that love will not make you happy. What will make you happy is the love coming out of you.
– don Miguel Ruiz
I started to pick up negatives thrown on the darkroom floor––thinking, why are these on the floor? Let’s use them too. These are also images of the world. That simple thought was the starting point … photographs are inherently ambiguous.
– Daidō Moriyama
The men of classical antiquity could not have found a solution to our present determinisms, and it is useless to look into the works of Plato or Aristotle for an answer to the problem of freedom.
– Jacques Ellul
This is what the Hebrew prophets said: if the sacred is not nurtured, the underworld will erupt, contaminating the world with the wrong kind of spirits, leading to a perilous situation. ‘Our times have demonstrated what it means when the gates of the psychic underworld are thrown open’
– David Tacey
Colonization involves epistemicide: the systematic destruction of knowledge, history, & collective memory.
– Jairo Funez-Flores
Distorting the past is a way to minimize resistance in the present. Epistemicides are the killing of non-Western knowledges, which destroy alternative approaches to life.
– Jairo Funez-Flores
A novelist is essentially a person who covers distance through his patience, slowly, like an ant. A novelist impresses us not by his demonic and romantic vision, but by his patience.
– Orhan Pamuk
You will never fully convince someone that he is wrong; only reality can.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The best time for you to hold your tongue is the time you feel you must say something or bust.
– Josh Billings
I ASKED GOD FOR THE MOON
by Natasha Oladokun
I think it would probably kill God to give a direct answer to anything.
And it would probably kill me to hear the direct answer.
In this way God and I spare each other the awkward conversation,
with both our arms shaking under this ashy rock that won’t fit through my door-
this thing he brought me because, drunk, I asked him to.
You can’t expect to draw people into your life who are kind, confident, and generous if you’re thinking and acting in cruel, weak, and selfish ways. You must be what it is that you’re seeking–that is, you need to put forth what you want to attract.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
How do you increase your capacity in paying attention? By eliminating all choice. One posture. One object. Rest right there. No choice. And, as all of us know, it’s not easy.
– Ken McLeod
there is nothing that
distracts me music is
only a crossword puzzle
– Frank O’Hara
Art, like death, is brief: life and friendship long.
– James Schuyler
Therefore I hold you. But life holds us, and is unknowable.
– John Ashbery
mother-tongue: the land of nod
true, this isn’t paradise
but we come at last to love it
for the sweet hay and the flowers rising,
for the corn lining up row on row,
for the mourning doves who
open the darkness with song,
for warm rains
and forgiving fields,
and for how, each day,
something that loves us
tries to save us.
– Lucille Clifton
I like it when somebody gets excited about something. It’s nice.
– J. D. Salinger
In our time, when such threatening forces of cleavage are at work, splitting peoples, individuals, and atoms, it is doubly necessary that those which unite and hold together should become effective; for life is founded on the harmonious interplay of masculine and feminine forces within the individual human being as well as without. Bringing these opposites into union is one of the most important tasks of present–day psychotherapy.
– Emma Jung
Use your intellect to guide you and you will end up putting people off. Rely on your emotions and you will forever be pushed around. Force your will on others and you will live in constant tension. There is no getting around it―people are hard to live with.
– Soseki Natsume
When you’re worrying, you are planning. When you’re appreciating, you are planning.
– Abraham Hicks
When you were doing an undergrad, you wanted to do a masters. When you did a masters, you wanted to do a PhD. Now you’re doing a PhD, you want to be a cat.
– @ThePhDPlace
The capacity to embrace true paradoxes is more than an intellectual skill for holding complex thoughts. It is a life skill for holding complex experiences.
– Parker J Palmer
I came into poetry feeling as though, on some level, these words were not just mine but my grandparents’, their parents’.
– Joy Harjo
Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living . What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
When you stand in front of me and look
at me, what do you know of the griefs
that are in me and what do I know of yours?
– Franz Kafka
Humans – who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals – have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and ‘animals’ is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them – without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us.
– Carl Sagan
People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.
– Blaise Pascal
Nautilus 1
A quotation mark in space around the hollow
bones of the universe. A carousel spinning out of control.
You’re flung off to the bottom of a scroll
of dark where nobody can follow.
These metaphors for all that is outside you –
the vortices of the scary-beautiful –
look, they are inside you. You feel the pull
of your own heart as the universe rides you.
Those yellow flowers in that earthenware jug.
The spill of wind under eaves. Where are we?
Where are our co-ordinates? A fly dances
on a skim of air. It’s as if life were a drug
in the system. The universe spins free
of us. Here’s where we are. Here’s where we take our chances.
– George Szirtes
Hope is the knowledge that the evil we bear within us is finite, that the slightest turning of the will towards good, though it should last bit an instant, destroys a little of it…
– Simone Weil, tr. by Emma Crawford & Mario Von der Ruhr
So we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping
our mouths shut? as if we’d been pierced by a glance!
– Frank O’Hara
In the light of eternity, we’re here for a very short time, really. We’re here for one thing, ultimately: to learn how to love, because God is love. Love is our origin, love is our ground, and love is our destiny.
– James Finley
“But the system works for me!” Yes, you are part of the problem.
– Ryan Ruby
Who exactly do the existentialists think they are, wonders the philosopher, with their black polo necks, their bicycles, their slim volumes of difficult verse, their almond croissants and their beautiful, beautiful girlfriends?
– Tom Jenks
“When will you return?” I asked.
“Never,” the beloved replied.
My watch stopped.
– Abbas Kiarostami
My past it haunts it manifests
It burns my hopes to build a nest
I wish to live a life that’s best
For now I jump for jolly jest
One day I see a future bright
Not in life but in the light
I know my time is but my sight
Until I fight my present plight
– @Kanealii_
I had no connections, no writing circle. I typed everything single-spaced so it would look as though it were already published.
– Joy Williams
…No matter what the future brings, man’s capacity to rise to the occasion will remain unaltered. Our potential for tenacity and optimism continues…
– Rod Serling
Eating Together
by Li-Young Lee
In the steamer is the trout
seasoned with slivers of ginger,
two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil.
We shall eat it with rice for lunch,
brothers, sister, my mother who will
taste the sweetest meat of the head,
holding it between her fingers
deftly, the way my father did
weeks ago. Then he lay down
to sleep like a snow-covered road
winding through pines older than him,
without any travelers, and lonely for no one.
The passion for revenge should never blind you to the pragmatics of the situation. There are some people who are so blighted by their past, so warped by experience and the pull of that silken cord, that they never free themselves of the shadows that live in the time machine.
And if there is a kind thought due them, it may be found contained in the words of the late Gerald Kersh, who wrote: “There are men whom one hates until a certain moment when one sees, through a chink in their armour, the writhing of something nailed down and in torment.
– Harlan Ellison
They tell me to be discreet
for all intended purposes.
They tell me revenge is sweet
and from where they stand, I’m sure it is.
But I feel nothing for their game
where beauty goes unrecognized.
All I feel is heat and flame
and all I see are dark eyes.
– Bob Dylan
And since the masters
Make the rules
For the wise men
And the fools,
I’ve got nothing, Ma,
To live-up to….
– Dylan
Everybody Know
by Leonard Cohen
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long-stem rose
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that you’ve been faithful
Ah, give or take a night or two
Everybody knows you’ve been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes
And everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
And everybody knows that it’s now or never
Everybody knows that it’s me or you
And everybody knows that you live forever
Ah, when you’ve done a line or two
Everybody knows the deal is rotten
Old Black Joe’s still pickin’ cotton
For your ribbons and bows
And everybody knows
And everybody knows that the Plague is coming
Everybody knows that it’s moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past
Everybody knows the scene is dead
But there’s gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows
And everybody knows that you’re in trouble
Everybody knows what you’ve been through
From the bloody cross on top of Calvary
To the beach of Malibu
Everybody knows it’s coming apart
Take one last look at this Sacred Heart
Before it blows
And everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
– Frank Herbert
When a loved one dies, many of us fall very suddenly into a disorienting new reality, stripped of markers and routines that we once relied on to navigate our days. […] Just as puzzling, though, is the way in which, over time, the feeling of profound destabilisation slowly transforms. The other person’s absence stays with us forever, but we can find new ways of being in the world even as we continue to carry our grief.
To understand how this process unfolds […] we must consider what it means to adapt to the impossible new world one enters after losing a loved one.
[Every day, your brain] compiles a lifespan’s worth of data into predictions about the world, and continually fine-tunes those predictions based on the feedback it receives. And if you wake up alone in bed after thousands of days of waking up next to your beloved, the best prediction is not that they have died. In a sense, for your brain, their death hasn’t really happened until many days, weeks and months pass. Only then does the brain begin to predict their absence more readily than their presence.
Autobiographical memory consists of two types of long-term memory: semantic and episodic. Episodic memory includes the ‘Remember the time…?’ kind of memories, with the details anchored in a specific time and space. Semantic memory is how you remember and understand the gist of things […]: you might predict the likely ending of a movie, for instance, based on what you know from watching many movies.
In the ‘grieving as learning’ model, we hypothesize that the neural architecture of a bond supports the persistence of semantic knowledge (or implicit belief) that a deceased loved one continues to exist, despite new episodic memories providing evidence to the contrary. After the death, a bereaved person has two fundamental facts about the late loved one encoded in semantic memory: that the loved one is a part of them, and that any absence is just a temporary state. Yet there are also recent episodic memories of experiences such as saying goodbye, funeral rituals, mourning with others, waking up alone […].
These mutually exclusive streams of well-established knowledge about the bond and memories of loss help to explain why it is normal for grieving people to see the face of the loved one in a crowd, to automatically reach for the phone to call them upon hearing good news, or to have the sense that they will walk through the door at any moment.
These experiences are not delusions, but rather the brain using well-founded predictions as it tries to make sense of the world as it is now. […] It takes time and experience for the brain to integrate new episodic memories of the person’s death with the semantic belief in their everlasting presence. Through experience, the brain can develop new predictions. They no longer come home from work at 6 o’clock; their clothes stop showing up in the laundry […]. Eventually, the brain comes to more fully understand that the loved one’s absence is not a temporary state.
Learning might be the central task of the grieving brain, which has long based its calculations on the assumption that a loved one will be there. [W]hen those predictions that used to be perfectly calibrated to reality are suddenly hopelessly wrong, […] grieving people [need to] ‘relearn the world’, as the philosopher Thomas Attig described it. The learning process will likely look different for everyone. But understanding the broad strokes of what is happening in the brain could help us to feel more normal in our grieving – and to better appreciate why our grieving processes, and those of the people we care for, require time and experience.
– Saren H. Seeley
You can’t create experience, you undergo it.
– Albert Camus
A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn’t the world being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn’t flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.
– Dresden James
I think that where you go wrong is that you imagine that your reasons for living ought to fall on you, ready-made from heaven, whereas we have to find them for ourselves.
– Simone de Beauvoir
If there is a soul, it is a mistake to believe that it is given to us fully created. It is created here, throughout a whole life. And living is nothing else but that long and painful bringing forth.
– Albert Camus
Good does not become better by being exaggerated, but worse, and a small evil becomes a big one through being disregarded and repressed. The Shadow is very much a part of human nature, and it is only at night that no shadows exist.
– Jung
Despair is a claustrophobic feeling. It’s the emotion that says,
“Nothing will ever change.” It’s different than anger or sadness or grief.
Despair is twinged with hopelessness.
People who subscribe to power-over leadership often weaponize despair. They count on people giving up on themselves, their work, and each other. I get it. I’m looking at people I know with suspicion. I’m questioning the value of my work. I’m wondering if courage, kindness, and caring for each other simply don’t matter anymore. I’m desperate for someone to blame because blame is an effective way to discharge pain and it gives us a sense of counterfeit control.
The research shows that hope is a powerful antidote to despair. What’s interesting, however, is that hope is not an emotion (C. R. Snyder). Hope is a cognitive-behavioral process. It’s about having a goal, a pathway to achieve that goal, and a sense of agency or “I can do this.”
Right now, the thing that is helping the most is micro-dosing hope. I have no access to big hope right now, however, I am asking myself how I can support the people around me. The people on my team, in my community. How can I make sure that, in the maelstrom of my emotions, I stay committed to courage, kindness, and caring for others regardless of the choices made by others? Doing the smallest next right thing is hard AF, but sometimes it’s all we’ve got.
– Brené Brown
The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal. It is a belief that dominates this culture. It is what makes the poor whites of the South so determinedly racist and the middle class so contemptuous of the poor. It is a myth that allows some to imagine that they build their lives on the ruin of others, a secret core of shame for the middle class, a goad and a spur to the marginal working class, and cause enough for the homeless and poor to feel no constraints on hatred or violence.
– Dorothy Allison
In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. There is a tendency, too, to fall into being weakened by dwelling on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails.
We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resistance, we more so will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us, and we will know them when they appear. Didn’t you say you were a believer? Didn’t you say you pledged to listen to a voice greater? Didn’t you ask for grace? Don’t you remember that to be in grace means to submit to the voice greater?
Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good.
What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take everyone on Earth to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.
One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul.
Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times.
The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these – to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity.
Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.
There will always be times when you feel discouraged. I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it. I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate.
The reason is this: In my uttermost bones I know something, as do you. It is that there can be no despair when you remember why you came to Earth, who you serve, and who sent you here. The good words we say and the good deeds we do are not ours. They are the words and deeds of the One who brought us here. In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall: When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estes
But during the longest period of the human past nothing was more terrible than to feel that one stood by oneself. To be alone, to experience things by oneself, neither to obey nor to rule, to be an individual – that was not a pleasure but a punishment; one was sentenced to ‘individuality.’ Freedom of thought was considered discomfort itself. While we experience law and submission as compulsion and loss, it was egoism that was formerly experienced as something painful and as real misery.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
You know what truly aches all that you are? Having so much inside you and not having the slightest clue of how to pour it out.
– Christopher Pointdexter
The struggle to exist, to not disappear in this moment, is the advancing root of the struggle to exist throughout the whole passage of time. We need to help each other in this struggle. You by asking, I by struggling to respond. This is the law of love, which rules the universe.
– Jacob Needleman
Our modern world-view tragically misperceives and wrongly defines what it is to be human. We are conditioned by our society to believe happiness comes from pleasure, or from getting things or power over people or money or fame or even health and survival. None of these sometimes very good things can bring ultimate meaning to our lives. We are born to be deeply conscious, inwardly free and deeply capable of love. The longing for these things is the definition of what it means to be human.
– Jacob Needleman
The way to approach it, I think, is not to ask, “What would it be like to be black?” but to seriously consider what it is like to be white. That’s something white people almost never think about. And what it is like to be white is not to say, “We have to level the playing field,” but to acknowledge that not only do white people own the playing field but they have so designated this plot of land as a playing field to begin with.
White people are the playing field. The advantage of being white is so extreme, so overwhelming, so immense, that to use the word “advantage” at all is misleading since it implies a kind of parity that simply does not exist. It is now common—and I use the word “common” in its every sense—to see interviews with up-and-coming young movie stars whose parents or even grandparents were themselves movie stars.
And when the interviewer asks, “Did you find it an advantage to be the child of a major motion-picture star?” the answer is invariably “Well, it gets you in the door, but after that you’ve got to perform, you’re on your own.” This is ludicrous. Getting in the door is pretty much the entire game, especially in movie acting, which is, after all, hardly a profession notable for its rigor. That’s how advantageous it is to be white. It’s as though all white people were the children of movie stars. Everyone gets in the door and then all you have to do is perform at this relatively minimal level. Additionally, children of movie stars, like white people, have at—or actually in—their fingertips an advantage that is genetic. Because they are literally the progeny of movie stars they look specifically like the movie stars who have preceded them, their parents; they don’t have to convince us that they can be movie stars. We take them instantly at face value. Full face value. They look like their parents, whom we already know to be movie stars.
White people look like their parents, whom we already know to be in charge. This is what white people look like—other white people. The owners. The people in charge. That’s the advantage of being white. And that’s the game. So by the time the white person sees the black person standing next to him at what he thinks is the starting line, the black person should be exhausted from his long and arduous trek to the beginning.
– Fran Lebowitz
If anything, I’m a petty thief in a world of forgetting, a blade in an elm, a bottled note in the sea of Victory Boulevard at dusk. Friends, family, gallows saints & ghosts, rig a swing at the edge of the shore when I’m gone for the birds to perch & the bats to glide through, to disappear & appear in the small places the moon cannot touch. Thank you for the amorous & discontented beauty you saved for me here, though most days, my silence was a soldier’s slogged hand hiding a match. I love you. I leave you the match.
– Andrés Cerpa
The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God’s brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to “World.” Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.
– Annie Dillard
The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.
– Milan Kundera
Danger, when it is always imminent, does harm. It doesn’t need to actually arrive. You exhaust yourself in the act of forever looking over your shoulder. Your body readies itself to fight and never quite discharges that chemical cocktail. You channel it instead into anger and self-pity and anxiety and hopelessness. You divert it into work. But really what you do, with every fibre of your being, is watch. You are incessantly, exhaustingly alert. You don’t dare ever let up, just in case the danger takes advantage of your inattention. I’ve forgotten what it feels like to have space in my brain for anything other than watching. For a long time I kept working teaching, pitching articles, writing editorial reports and for a while, that felt like a life raft. But then, incrementally, it became impossible. I was aware of a fog descending, a seizing of the gears, but it seemed diffuse until now.
– Katherine May
But civilized human beings are alarmingly ignorant of the fact that they are continuous with their natural surroundings. It is as necessary to have air, water, plants, insects, birds, fish, and mammals as it is to have brains, hearts, lungs, and stomachs. The former are our external organs in the same way that the latter are our internal organs. If then, we can no more live without the things outside than without those inside, the plain inference is that the words “I” and “myself ” must include both sides. The sun, the earth, and the forests are just as much features of your own body as your brain. Erosion of the soil is as much a personal disease as leprosy, and many “growing communities” are as disastrous as cancer.
– Alan Watts
The Power of Silence
Silence can hold more meaning than words.
It has power to make a heartless person love and an
innocent victim hate. It is much more powerful than words,
because it takes effort to keep. It is not only about closing
your mouth. It is about taking in others’ actions or words,
thinking about them, formulating an answer, criticizing that
answer, searching for logic from your mind and reason
from your heart, and then convincing yourself that not saying
the answer is better.
Silence is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of intelligence
and inner power. It is a sign of faith that replying in the same
manner that you were treated with will only make you just as
ignorant. Learn to be an observer, a deep one, who reflects on
his or her mistakes but also on the mistakes of others.
– Najwa Zebian
Criseyde
They said Cassandra
Was the cursed one
But every woman knows too much.
I am used by now
To my voice getting caught in my teeth.
It doesn’t help
That I can smell tomorrow’s burning.
No one is interested
In the geometry
Of a falling city.
I sit politely and fan myself
Listening to old philosophies
Trying not to show
I see the sparks of death in their eyes.
My soles feel the road to come
The cool boards of an enemy’s ship
The freedom of early surrender.
– Irina Dumitrescu
Grace is something you can never get but can only be given. There’s no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about anymore than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks. A good night’s sleep is grace and so are good dreams. Most tears are grace. The smell of rain is grace. Somebody loving you is grace.
– Frederick Buechner
We Indians know about silence. We are not afraid of it. In fact, for us, silence is more powerful than words. Our elders were trained in the ways of silence, and they handed over this knowledge to us. Observe, listen, and then act, they would tell us. That was the manner of living.
With you, it is just the opposite. You learn by talking. You reward the children that talk the most at school. In your parties, you all try to talk at the same time. In your work, you are always having meetings in which everybody interrupts everybody and all talk five, ten or a hundred times. And you call that ‘solving a problem’. When you are in a room and there is silence, you get nervous. You must fill the space with sounds. So you talk compulsorily, even before you know what you are going to say.
White people love to discuss. They don’t even allow the other person to finish a sentence. They always interrupt. For us Indians, this looks like bad manners or even stupidity. If you start talking, I’m not going to interrupt you. I will listen. Maybe I’ll stop listening if I don’t like what you are saying, but I won’t interrupt you. When you finish speaking, I’ll make up my mind about what you said, but I will not tell you I don’t agree unless it is important. Otherwise, I’ll just keep quiet and I’ll go away. You have told me all I need to know. There is no more to be said. But this is not enough for the majority of white people.
People should regard their words as seeds. They should sow them, and then allow them to grow in silence. Our elders taught us that the earth is always talking to us, but we should keep silent in order to hear her. There are many voices besides ours. Many voices…
– Ella Delori
To be great, be whole; Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you. Be whole in everything. Put all you are Into the smallest thing you do. So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendor Because it blooms up above.
– Fernando Pessoa
WHAT TO SAY TO THOSE WHO THINK
YOU’RE A FOOL FOR CHOOSING POETRY
Tell them yes.
Tell them poetry is what chose you.
Tell them
you had a night, once,
just as they did,
when you knelt alone on the cold tiles
and asked the night
to give you a reason for being.
Tell them the answer was your life.
Tell them we are nothing, nothing
without passion,
the wild dark flock
that fills our rooms with joy.
Tell them
you will give the rest of your blazing days
to try to give another life
that moment,
that moment when you opened
to the coldness
and found that the music of your ruin
was too beautiful to ever be destroyed.
– Joseph Fasano
If there’s one thing we all need to stop doing, it’s waiting around for someone else to show up and change our lives. Just be the person you’ve been waiting for. Live your life as if you are the love of it. Because that’s the only thing you know for sure – that through every triumph, every failure, every fear and every gain that you will ever experience until the day you die, you are going to be present. You are going to be the person who shows up to accept your rewards. You are going to be the person who holds your own hand when you’re broken.
You are going to be the person who gets yourself up off the floor every time you get knocked down and if those things are not love-of-your-life qualities, I don’t know what are.
– Heidi Priebe
I didn’t know what to say. I felt like crying, Goddammit everybody in the world wants an explanation for your acts and for your very being.
– Jack Kerouac
The beauty of things must be that they end.
– Jack Kerouac
If I walk two steps toward Utopia, Utopia walks two steps away. If I walk ten steps toward Utopia, it walks ten steps away. So what good is Utopia? It’s good for walking.
– Eduardo Galeano
The biggest mistake I made is to put too much of a weighting on somebody’s talent and not much on their personality, it actually matters whether somebody has a good heart.
– Elon Musk
Talent builds itself in quietness, Goethe tells us, character in the tumult of the world.
– Pico Iyer
Poetry binds solitudes. It enacts a central human paradox: we exist as singular selves, yet can only know them through our relations. A poem creates a presence that’s so physically, emotionally & intellectually charged that we encounter ourselves in our response to it.
– Emily Warn
Never wear tight trousers. Always buy trousers at least one waist size too big, make sure that the pockets are big enough to comfortably hold penknife, hanky, string, phone, pencil, labels and perhaps a mint or two.
– Monty Don
This country cannot afford to be materially rich and
spiritually poor.
– John F. Kennedy
When you have nothing else left to say to the world, or when you feel the world has pushed you into silence, or if you are overjoyed to the point of having nothing to say –just start singing. Sing anything.
Just sing.
– Kudinov
We are together and very close but between us there is not an articulation or a relation that unites us. We are united to one another in the form of our being alone.
– Giorgio Agamben
I will tell you what I will do & what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: & I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can & as wholly as I can.
– James Joyce
One could go so far as to call Walt Whitman the Real Presence in the world’s poetry since 1855. He will augment in the universe’s consciousness so long as it does not warm itself or war itself to total death.
– Harold Bloom
visiting the cemetery
an old man buried
in a book
– @pauldavidmena
One must be where one is. The body does not lie. Language, if it is not propaganda, or media blab, is the body; with such language lies are not possible. If lies were possible, there would be no reason to write fiction.
– Kathy Acker
A poem oddly gestating. I’ve learned, in the garden not to pull off the seed capsule, but to let it drop off by itself, lest the leaves start out deformed.
– James McConachie
All hatred is self-hatred, just as all healing is self-healing.
– Eric Micha’el Leventhal
Reading for curiosity is better than reading for self-improvement.
– Shane Parrish
The Negro now stands at the cross roads of human destiny. He is at the place where he must either step forward or back-ward. If he goes backward he dies; if he goes forward it will be with the hope of a greater life. Those of us who have developed our minds scientifically are compelled, by duty, to step out among the millions of the unthinking masses and convince them of the seriousness of the age in which we live.
– THE PHILOSOPHY & OPINIONS OF MARCUS GARVEY
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
– Anaïs Nin
There is nothing that words could add to this.
Be still.
– Andō
You cannot make a writer—it is an innate way of seeing the world, and a love of language, and a lifetime commitment.
– Luisa Valenzuela
The Warrior’s Plume
by Bertrand N. O. Walker
On the plains and in the vales of Oklahoma,
Grew a flower of the Tyrian hue,
The color that is loved by the Redman,
That tells him light and life,
And love are true.
Long ago it flamed in beauty on the prairies,
Lighting reaching vistas with its glow;
Ere advent of the whiteman and his fences,
Told the care-free, roving hunter
He must go.
The throng, the herd, and greed have madly trampled
Prairie, woodland, valley, and the height;
Crushed the feath’ry flower and rudely blighted
Its pride and life and beauty,
And its light.
Today ’tis found in silent glades and meadows
Where by twos and threes it greets the May.
Like the scattered braves who loved its color,
It has passed, been trodden out
Along the way.
As the oriflamme it flaunted through past ages
Went to gladden the fairness of the earth;
So the greatness of the Indian will linger
In the land that loves them both
And gave them birth.
If I could write all my work again, I am convinced that I’d do it better, which is the healthiest condition for an artist. That’s why he keeps on working, trying again; he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off.
– William Faulkner
When the tyrant’s voice comes on the car radio, I close my eyes in an effort to slow the rate at which hopelessness enters me.
– Franny Choi
The pages and pages I’ve had to tear up!
– Thornton Wilder
The good thing about writing books is that you can dream while you are awake.
– Haruki Murakami
Elegy
by W. S. Merwin
Who would I show it to
I do write in my head every day—I’m tempted to say all the time. One does instinctively reserve a part of oneself as the writing self, visiting it secretly while doing and saying all the daily things.
– Shirley Hazzard
One never forgets the taste of certain tears…
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
I don’t deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know because it hurts.
– Douglas Coupland
To wish to be well is a part of becoming well.
– Seneca
People don’t have ideas. Ideas have people.
– Carl Jung
I send this out to you, dear friends, before I go, in this instantaneous thought-burst, from a place where time slows and then stops and we may live forever in a single instant.
– George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo
As long as you’re living on this planet, you have to be serious about something, but it’s better to be serious about a limited number of things.
– Mieko Kawakami
Ultimately, nothing should be more important to investors than the ability to sleep soundly at night.
– Seth Klarman
Scholarship, far from leading inexorably to a profession, may in fact preclude it. For it does not permit you to abandon it.
– Walter Benjamin, The Life of Students
Looking back, I could not point to one special time and say, There! That’s what is amazing. We can change completely and not recognize it. We think terrible events have made us into stone. But love slips in like a chisel — and suddenly it is an ax, breaking us into pieces from the inside.
– Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
See, dance changes people. Dancing makes you free. It makes people happy.
– James McBride
A great deal of psychiatry advocates social adjustment at all costs, and Jung was opposed to any conditioning that leads to a betrayal of soul. He recommended that the values of society should be critiqued rather than replicated, and that we cultivate a little madness and some secret space, so that the soul can flourish.
– David Tacey
The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.
– Martin Heidegger
We cannot rid ourselves of the form to which we now belong.
– Robert Duncan
It is criminal to steal a purse, it’s daring to steal a fortune, it’s a mark of greatness to steal a crown. The blame diminishes as the guilt increases.
– Johan Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
Listen to me, girl:
you have castles inside your bones,
coronets in your heart.
If he threatens you with battle,
you raise him a whole war.
The last time I checked,
queens cower before no man.
– Nikita Gill
the moon is tilted
with no way i can fix it
i tilt my head too
– Clark Strand
When the mind of the
Commander in Chief is broken,
we must break the chain
of command to save
the Great Chain
of Being.
– unknown
Seventh-century Chinese Chan Buddhist master Hongren advised: “Work, work! … Work! Don’t waste a moment…. Calm yourself, quiet yourself, master your senses. Work, work! Just dress in old clothes, eat simple food. … feign ignorance, appear inarticulate. This is most economical with energy, yet effective.”
you do not have to be a fire
for
every mountain blocking you.
you could be a water
and
soft river
your way to freedom too
– options
– Nayyirah Waheed
I am awake to the electricity of life.
The dynamic power of breath is renewing me
moment by moment.
Nature is wild and serene, and so am I.
– The Radiance Sutras, Lorin Roche
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. I have learned deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:
Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.
– W.H. Murray
“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –
I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.
– emily dickinson
Good thing Jesus
lives in y’all’s hearts,
because if he actually
lived here, he’d be
deported.
– Jenn Johnson
You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.
– Exodus 23:9
If you are, as I am, a nomad,
draw a border around me:
make me your country.
– Abdulla Pashew
(Tr fr Kurdish by Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse)
They sent you negative energy and you transformed it into blessings. That’s the power of the protected.
– Nika Solé
Whoever really gets this thing and understands it, knows that he hasn’t attained anything. Buddha said in the Diamond Sutra: “When I attained complete, perfect and unexcelled awakening, I attained nothing at all.”
And, you see, that “nothing at all” is the same nothing into which all trees and plants and bodies and butterflies and birds are disappearing in the course of endless transformations. Everything disappears into nothing at all. But out of this same nothing at all come all the new things forever and ever.
– Alan Watts
There are too many of us and we are all too far apart.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Jung said the truth of the matter is that the shadow is ninety percent pure gold. Whatever has been repressed holds a tremendous amount of energy, with a great positive potential. So the shadow, no matter how troublesome it may be, is not intrinsically evil. The ego, in its refusal of insight and its refusal to accept the entire personality, contributes much more to evil than the shadow.
– John Sanford
To look to the past in order to find analogies by which to solve our present problems is, in my opinion, a mythological error.
– Hannah Arendt
Day’s arches are crumbling into the autumn night.
The fire falls a little and the book is done.
The stillness is the stillness of the mind.
– Wallace Stevens
You relate to the world totally different when you prioritize your spiritual health.
– Nika Solé
Yet she tolerated him in the hope that sooner or later, in a fit of insobriety or of common or garden incontinence, he would so far forget himself as to take her in his arms.
– Samuel Beckett
And what I saw, may the Sacred be my speech
– Holderlin
We live in bewildering, drastic times, and a little spiritual guidance never killed anyone.
– Anne Lamott
The challenge of reading Jung in an age of uncertainty is to find the enemies you recognize in the outer world dwelling inside your own heart. It is to drop culture war . . . against external scapegoats in the name of facing your own contradictions.
– Alexander Blum
When there is no stopping the crumbling of structures that can no longer hold us, may we tend fervently to the seeds of light glowing within us.
– McCall Erickson
a border town
in the midst of autumn
rain gently falling
– Basho
That is what it means to be Orpheus,
to lose her, always, and always in love,
into the same dream that brought you together.
– Robert Kelly
The dragon is not the shadow. It lives in the shadow when we, without knowing it, force it into the shadows. Any time a person wakes up in the morning and feels alone, they are forcing this incredible majestic being into the shadows; one is never without the close proximity of this ‘other’ – this great other with a capital O – it’s always awake, always aware of us even if we aren’t aware of it. If we force it into shadow, as Jung and Edinger point out, it begins to be adversarial toward our ego consciousness. A lot of the negative thoughts and feelings we have, I believe, are coming from the archetype itself, or the dragon, which has been disrespected.
– Robert Moore
The modern industrial regime could do without coal and iron and steel easier than it could do without the clock.
– Lewis Mumford
Don’t partner with cynics and pessimists. Their beliefs are self-fulfilling.
– @naval
We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.
– Harold Bloom
Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk.
– Jane Kenyon
You are the creator and selector of your thoughts. You can change them at will. It is your God-given inheritance, your corner of freedom that no one can take away. No one can have control of your thoughts without your consent.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
We’re in the midst of a Flood, a Flood of Biblical proportions…And people insist, under the circumstances, on describing themselves as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative.’ It seems to me completely mad.
– Leonard Cohen
How is artificial intelligence going be deployed? We know historically that when machinery came into production, John Stuart Mill said, machinery should lighten the load of labor, I cannot understand why when machinery is actually employed, it is doubling the load of labor.
– David Harvey
and there is the whisper of deterioration toward the edge of the human mind, an old mind, we escape to an island, we lose something, we lose everything, dramatically black or white, we all escape and wait.
– Bernadette Mayer
I had observed that the men who were most in life, who were molding life, who were life itself, ate little, slept little, owned little or nothing. They had no illusions about duty… or the preservation of the State. They were interested in truth and in truth alone. They recognized only one kind of activity – creation.
– Henry Miller
And one asks oneself where are one’s dreams.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
War or no, the Brits loved lining up, they loved the theater, often they’d take in up to three performances in one evening, one after the other, and twelve lemon teas during it, always without talking. They dedicated themselves to pleasure, rumination and death.
– Céline, London
All you can do is face the world with quiet grace and hope you make a sliver of difference. Humility does not mean self-abnegation, lassitude, detachment; it’s more a calm recognition that you must trust in that which does not make sense, that which is unreasonable, illogical, silly, ridiculous, crazy by the measure of most of our culture. You must trust that you being the best possible you matters somehow. That trying to be an honest and tender parent will echo for centuries through your tribe. That doing your chosen work with creativity and diligence will shiver people far beyond your ken. That being an attentive and generous friend and citizen will prevent a thread or two of the social fabric from unraveling. And you must do all of this with the certain knowledge that you will never get proper credit for it, and in fact the vast majority of things you do right will go utterly unremarked.
Humility, the final frontier, as my brother Kevin used to say. When we are young we build a self, a persona, a story in which to reside, or several selves in succession, or several at once, sometimes; when we are older we take on other roles and personas, other masks and duties; and you and I both know men and women who become trapped in the selves they worked so hard to build, so desperately imprisoned that sometimes they smash their lives simply to escape who they no longer wish to be; but finally, I think, if we are lucky, if we read the book of pain and loss with humility, we realize that we are all broken and small and brief, that none among us is ultimately more valuable or rich or famous or beautiful than another; and then, perhaps, we begin to understand something deep and true about humility.
This is what I know: that the small is huge, that the tiny is vast, that pain is part and parcel of the gift of joy, and that this is love, and then there is everything else. You either walk toward love or away from it with every breath you draw. Humility is the road to love. Humility, maybe, is love. That could be. I wouldn’t know; I’m a muddle and a conundrum shuffling slowly along the road, paging in wonder, trying to just see and say what is, trying to leave shreds and shards of ego along the road like wisps of litter and chaff.
– Brian Doyle
When the bell rings she hurries up to me with more than twenty sheets of paper. She’s Indian—Hidatsa, maybe, or Sioux—and the other children let her pass as if she were invisible. The morning star dances in a red circle, singing a song about his girlfriend Sheila; the angel Gabriel stands before Mary, his blue wings ablaze with stars. His mouth is open wide and notes are coming out, each one a different color. A woman with green hair holds her hands up to the sky and says: These are secret words, Say them after me. May all the plants and flowers rise And all people rise from death.
I look up from the paper: a dusty shelf, a starfish in a jar caked with dust beside dusty petri dishes. I see shades of blue: the globe cerulean, the sky bleached out. And out the window, above the children’s heads, topsoil, the residue of ancient oceans, swirling like a thumbprint in the playground, wind pushing the empty swings. “So many poems,” I say, smiling at the girl. “You must love to write.” She shifts from foot to foot and weaves her hands in air. “I don’t have paper at home,” she says, “so I keep them in my head. That’s where they live until I write them down.
– Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography
In the end, everything I know comes directly out of this lifelong self-doubt. Everything.
– Vivian Gornick
The problem isn’t coming up with ideas, it is how to contain the invasion. My ideas are like uninvited guests. They don’t knock on the door; they climb in through the windows like burglars who show up in the middle of the night and make a racket in the kitchen as they raid the fridge. I don’t sit and ponder which one I should deal with first. The one to be wrestled to the floor before all others is the one coming at me with the most vehemence. I have, over the years, developed methods to deal with the invaders as quickly and efficiently as possible, though the burglars never stop coming.
You invite a handful of friends for dinner, but the door bursts open and a hundred people are pushing in. You might manage to get rid of them, but from around the corner another fifty appear almost immediately… Finishing a film is like having a great weight lifted from my shoulders. It’s relief, not necessarily happiness. But you relish dealing with these ‘burglars.’ I am glad to be rid of them after making a film or writing a book. The ideas are uninvited guests, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t welcome.
– Werner Herzog, A Guide for the Perplexed
Steer your way past the ruins of the altar and the mall
Steer your way through the fables of creation and the fall
Steer your way past the palaces that rise above the rot
Year by year, month by month, day by day
Thought by thought
They whisper still, the ancient stones
The blunted mountains weep
As he died to make men holy
Let us die to make things cheap
And say the mea culpa, which you probably forgot
Year by year, month by month, day by day
Thought by thought.
– Leonard Cohen
The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.
– Gustave Le Bon
Bergson, in elaborating his thoughts on stream of consciousness writing, observes that consciousness cannot be ‘chopped up in bits … it flows. A river or a stream are metaphors by which it is most naturally described.’ Similarly, one of Woolf’s characters observes, ‘how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one live done by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.’ In descending into the depths, the artist does not encounter a meaningless collection of trash, but rather a multiplicity held together by ‘some common feeling.’ The waters of the past seem to give cohesiveness to their suspended content. Water quite literally binds together the ‘little separate incidents’ of life – the lunchtime feast of a freshwater mussel and the fluid-bathed neural connections that drive my typing fingers; the extraction of bitumen in Northern Alberta; and the cancers of teenagers downstream.
Marcel Proust’s “À la recherche du temps perdu”, in its tenacious and brilliant preoccupation with memory, ties the notion of the retentive depths of the past to everyday materiality. Proust revels in the way smells and songs and objects can connect us to the past through the associative power of memory. In reading Proust, one becomes aware that the material world is saturated with the past, and that it is possible to engage with the world in a way that reveals its latent histories: ‘still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.’ The immense ‘structure of recollection’ is here figured as something that inhabits an ‘impalpable drop,’ that is, a vital liquid that is at once ‘tiny’ and ‘vast.’
Like Woolf, Proust approaches the past as a watery depth out of which he must pull submerged memories: ‘I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth.’ In another passage, the retrieval of a lost memory takes the form of a ‘reclamation’ from Lethe, the waters of forgetfulness: ‘The passer-by … would see me … standing still on the spot, before that steeple, for hours on end, motionless, trying to remember, feeling deep within myself a tract of soil reclaimed from the waters of Lethe slowly drying.’ This passage brings out an important dual quality of the waters of the past. In them, Lethe, the waters of forgetfulness that consign histories to oblivion, and Mnemosyne, the waters of remembrance, seem to form the same substance. The histories that Lethe washes away are always retained. They are thus potentially accessible to recovery.
Figured in this way as a watery depth, time no longer follows a chronological progression. In describing the memories triggered involuntarily by smells and tastes and sounds, Proust writes: ‘these sudden returns of disinterested memory [make] us float between the present and the past in their common essence.’ In these images, the substance of the present is made up of the accumulated depth of the past; moments do not move in a linear sequence. Our own past colours our perceptions of the present through the associations called up by the things around us. Further, everything we know and touch has been generated by collective histories—the words and actions of the dead, the past expressions of multiple human and more-than-human others. The world is heavy with immanent, tangible pasts, both personal and collective, associative and material.
– Janine MacLeod
We live among ruins in a World in which ‘god is dead’ as Nietzsche stated. The ideals of today are comfort, expediency, surface knowledge, disregard for one’s ancestral heritage and traditions, catering to the lowest standards of taste and intelligence, apotheosis of the pathetic, hoarding of material objects and possessions, disrespect for all that is inherently higher and better — in other words a complete inversion of true values and ideals, the raising of the victory flag of ignorance and the banner of degeneracy. In such a time, social decadence is so widespread that it appears as a natural component of all political institutions. The crises that dominate the daily lives of our societies are part of a secret occult war to remove the support of spiritual and traditional values in order to turn man into a passive instrument of dark powers.
– Seyyed Hossein Nasr
Out in the yard, all around the house, the things they’ve planted in years gone by are making significance, making meaning, as easily as they make sugar and wood from nothing, from air, and sun, and rain. But humans hear nothing.
– Richard Powers
If you can endure for this minute
Whatever is happening to you,
No matter how heavy your heart is
Or how dark the moment may be,
If you can but keep on believing
What you know in your heart to be true,
That darkness will fade with the morning
And that this will pass away, too–
Then nothing in life can defeat you
For as long as this knowledge remains
You can suffer with whatever is happening,
For you know God will break the chains
That are binding you tight in the darkness
And trying to fill you with fear–
For there is no night without dawning
And you know that your morning is near.
– Francesca Woodman
A Soaring Spirit
I rise, untethered by the weight of time,
Through endless skies where echoes chime.
The earthly shell I’ve left below,
Where roots no longer bind or grow.
A whisper in the breeze I’ve become,
A beam of light, a note, a hum.
In realms beyond what eyes can see,
I soar in peace, eternally free.
No walls confine, no fears restrain,
A boundless joy, a love unchained.
In every star, in every breeze,
I dance with time, I drift with ease.
The world below is just a sigh,
A fleeting glimpse as I pass by.
For here, beyond, in endless flight,
I am but spirit, pure as light.
And those I loved, I carry near,
In every pulse, in every tear.
In death, I’ve found what life concealed—
A boundless realm where all is healed.
So do not weep or mourn for me,
For I am more than you can see.
In every whisper, I am near,
A soaring spirit, free and clear.
– A.I. James
Sometime you will come face to face with the sudden and shocking realization that you are completely crazy. Your mind is a shrieking, gibbering madhouse on wheels barreling pell-mell down the hill, utterly out of control and hopeless. No problem.
– Bhante Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English
A good friend sent this: “A shooting star fell outside my window last night, and my stomach clenched because I realized my relationship to hope, to wishes, had changed utterly this week. And then I realized that all wishes now needed to be replaced with something closer to determination. We must make communities now of whatever size that support all those who have become radically more vulnerable. We must make micro countries of love inside this larger country of cruelty. Small communities that prioritize difference and expression and safety and joy. In other words, we have to do what we have always done, just more determinedly.”
– Pam Houston
For all our conceits about being the center of the universe, we live in a routine planet of a humdrum star stuck away in an obscure corner … on an unexceptional galaxy which is one of about 100 billion galaxies. … That is the fundamental fact of the universe we inhabit, and it is very good for us to understand that.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
– Carl Sagan
By asking questions rather than thinking for the audience, we invite them to join us as a partner and think for themselves. If we approach an argument as a war, there will be winners and losers. If we see it more as a dance, we can begin to choreograph a way forward. By considering the strongest version of an opponent’s perspective and limiting our responses to our few best steps, we have a better chance of finding a rhythm.
– Adam M. Grant
To get it right, be born with luck or else make it. Never give up. A little money helps, but what really gets it right is to never face the facts.
– Ruth Gordon
Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it. The event of yesterday was one of those kind of alarms which is just sufficient to rouse us to duty, without being of consequence enough to depress our fortitude. It is not a field of a few acres of ground, but a cause, that we are defending, and whether we defeat the enemy in one battle, or by degrees, the consequences will be the same.
– Thomas Paine, The American Crisis
Decayed societies, where a population is stripped of political, social and economic power, instinctively reach out for cult leaders.
– Chris Hedges
As the Arabs say, ‘The nature of rain is the same, but it makes thorns grow in the marshes and flowers in the gardens.”
– Anthony de Mello, Awareness
If I had to ‘teach poetry,’ which, thank God, I don’t, I would concentrate on prosody, rhetoric, philology, and learning poems by heart.
– W. H. Auden
You don’t always realize that you’re knee deep in the revolution, but so many of us are just in how we live our lives. Blazing a new path. Doing it different.
Don’t underestimate that.
– Nika Solé
There is no such thing as a competent public, there is no such thing as competence.
– Thomas Bernhard
… you must extract the rhythm of the waves’ sound from the roaring tumult of the sea and from the tangled net of everyday conversation, somehow draw the one living line that bears the rest.
– Rainer Maria Rilke, (tr. Will Stone)
Notes on the Melody of Things
Writing is working; being worked; questioning (in) the between (letting oneself be questioned) of same and of other without which nothing lives; undoing death’s work by willing the togetherness of one-another, infinitely charged with a ceaseless exchange
– Hélène Cixous
In The Lost World of the Kalahari, Laurens van der Post writes about living among the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert and describes how shocked they were that he couldn’t hear the stars.
At first they thought he must be joking or lying. When they realized he really couldn’t hear the stars, they concluded he must be very ill and expressed great sorrow. For the Bushmen knew anyone who can’t hear nature must have the gravest sickness of all.
For nearly all of the time humans have been on the planet, regular conversations across the species border were an everyday natural part of life.
Sadly, this seems like a strange invitation in our world today; most people have difficulty initiating such a conversation. Perhaps this is because we’ve been taught from a very young age to perceive nature as separate, a life-less object, a commodity. This mistaken perception seems to be at the foundation of our cultural ills.
Humanity’s ability to perceive the sentience of Earth is critical to our survival and to all life on earth.
Longing to be in conversation with nature can catalyze us. And perhaps the natural world longs for this relationship with us too…
– Rebecca Wildbear
The disease of poets:
making words
go every which way:
blisslexic
– Jack Foley
The story tells us that living the life of an artist is not as useful as living our lives as a work of art.
– Martin Prechtel
Night dweller
by James Crews
Fear tries to keep you small,
presses you under its wide thumb
so you never want to leave the house,
make the phone call, pray for help.
But sometimes you pry yourself loose,
slip out into the winter night
and pass through a shimmering black tunnel—
no moon, no stars, no flashlight—
where anything might happen, and does.
You fall to your knees and listen
to the scuffing noise of leftover leaves
on the beech trees, calling with each rustle:
Be more like us. Dwell naked
in the night without running away.
Hear what secret languages you learn
by staying. See what sweeping thoughts
perch in each of your available branches.
I understand why people are leaving, but I can’t stop thinking that US-based academics relocating to that more civil forum will only further isolate the university from the rest of US society and the rest of the world. As a public anthropologist, I am determined to stay.
– ieva jusionyte
Recently heard love described not as a feeling, but as a skill, and this rang so true for me. Without skill, and the resolution to apply that skill consistently over time, love amounts to nothing but a warmth or affinity that can—and will—dissipate under the slightest duress.
– Francesca Leader
She thinks as deeply as it is possible to think without dying of pain. It is all or nothing for Duras. She puts everything into language. The more she puts in, the fewer words she uses. Words can be nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
– Deborah Levy on Marguerite Duras
life only seemed
interested in
bringing me
to my edge
again and again
and so I made
the edge
my center
– McCall Erickson
You can talk all you want, but you’re never going to explain someone into a higher level of consciousness. You access each next level spiritually before you understand it with your mind.
– Nika Solé
What could he say that might make sense to them? Could he say love was, above all, common cause, shared experience? That was the vital cement, wasn’t it? Could he say how he felt about their all being here tonight on this wild world running around a big sun which fell through a bigger space falling through yet vaster immensities of space, maybe toward and maybe away from Something? Could he say: we share this billion-mile-an-hour ride. We have common cause against the night. You start with little common causes. Why love the boy in a March field with his kite braving the sky? Because our fingers burn with the hot string singeing our hands. Why love some girl viewed from a train bent to a country well? The tongue remembers iron water cool on some long lost noon. Why weep at strangers dead by the road? They resemble friends unseen in forty years. Why laugh when clowns are hit by pies? We taste custard we taste life. Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes the air of a world that I know; therefore I love that nose. Her ears hear music I might sing half the night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokeberry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow, and pain. Shared and once again shared experience. Billions of prickling textures. Cut one sense away, cut part of life away. Cut two senses; life halves itself on the instant. We love what we know, we love what we are. Common cause, common cause, common cause of mouth, eye, ear, tongue, hand, nose, flesh, heart, and soul. But … how to say it?
– Ray Bradbury, from Something Wicked This Way Comes
The important thing about despair is never to give up, never wrap up and put away a sterile life, but somehow keep it open. Because you never can know what’s coming; never. That’s the great thing about life, the crucial thing to remember. You may beat your fists on a stone wall for years and years, and every consideration of common sense will say it’s hopeless, forget it, spare yourself; and then one day your bleeding hand will go through as if the wall were theatrical gauze; you’ll be in another realm where birds are singing and love is possible, and you’d have missed it if you’d given up, because it might be only that one day the wall was not stone.
– Allen Wheelie
sad and laughing onward we go together broken and brave
– Joan Halifax
And the evil is done in hopes that evil surrenders / But the deeds of the devil are burned too deep in the embers / And a world of hunger in vengeance will always remember.
– Phil Ochs
Across the river there was a low red and gold grove of sassafras with hills of dark blue trees behind it and an occasional pine jutting over the skyline. Behind, in the distance, the city rose like a cluster of warts on the side of the mountain. The birds revolved downward and dropped lightly in the top of the highest pine and sat hunch-shouldered as if they were supporting the sky.
– Flannery O’Connor
In the time of your life, live—so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches. Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding place and let it be free and unashamed.
Place in matter and in flesh the least of the values, for these are the things that hold death and must pass away. Discover in all things that which shines and is beyond corruption. Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world. Ignore the obvious, for it is unworthy of the clear eye and the kindly heart.
Be the inferior of no man, or of any men be superior. Remember that every man is a variation of yourself. No man’s guilt is not yours, nor is any man’s innocence a thing apart. Despise evil and ungodliness, but not men of ungodliness or evil. These, understand. Have no shame in being kindly and gentle but if the time comes in the time of your life to kill, kill and have no regret. In the time of your life, live—so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it.
– William Saroyan, The Time Of Your Life
Don’t challenge yourself to be brave or fearless; challenge yourself to be open and trust in the higher Self. Challenge yourself to remain inwardly still and centered inside your own being.
– Mooji
and I’m thinking of how Brooklyn is New York city too how odd I usually think of it as something all its own.
– Ted Berrigan
Sometimes you often feel tired. Not because you’ve done too much, but because you’ve done too little of what sparks a light in you.
– Alex Heijer
I also wanted to write about the fear of realizing [that] the world you once knew is forever changed. It’s a reality many people have faced and continue to face [. . .].
– Paisley Rekdal
A man only understands that of which he has already the beginnings in himself.
Let us be true: this is the highest maxim of art and of life, the secret of eloquence and of virtue, and of all moral authority.
– Henri Frédéric Amiel
Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality – not as we expect it to be but as it is – is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.
– Frederick Buechner
I’ve always admired poems that dare me not to be there, as if my being there was of no consequence; poems that fail to notice me; poems that even actively deride me.
– @randallmannpoet
Because the only hidden meaning of things Is that they have no hidden meaning at all. That is stranger than all the strangeness.
– Fernando Pessoa
Just as the ocean has a gradual shelf, a gradual slope, a gradual inclination, with a sudden drop-off, only after a long stretch, in the same way, this doctrine and discipline (dhamma-vinaya) has a gradual training, a gradual performance, a gradual progression, with a penetration to gnosis only after a long stretch.
– Ud 5.5 Uposatha Sutta
In the midst of the untrue, flag-hung city
– Rilke
It’s easy to count non-blessings. Human propensity does that, for understandable reasons. Count the blessings, instead. Save the negative energy expended there; and, instead, elevate your endorphins by counting the blessings.
– Marian Haddad
FROZEN BY MORNING
by Tad Hargrave
This is how so many people die.
It happens like this.
The cold.
Sometimes it comes suddenly and sometimes it comes creeping, slowly like some wolf that’s been on your trail for a long time but you don’t see it until it’s too late. Sometimes you don’t see it until it’s the last thing that you see.
But you felt it coming quickly enough to build a fire and you are huddled next to it now.
Your life has fallen apart. Your marriage shattered or, perhaps worse, a sham. Your finances an indictment pointing their bone thin finger at you. Your health collapsed due to your poor choices. You feel utterly lost.
And, to stay warm, you have burned through every excuse you could find. At first the convenient justifications of that spare wood pile but that was gone soon enough.
Next it was your art. Then your furniture. Then the roof and walls. And then the floor.
And now it’s just you, out of defences, sitting by the fire and you don’t know who is dying faster, you or it.
This is how so many people die.
Exposed to the world from which they’d been sheltered for so long.
You look up at the sky and you can tell by the signs and portents that it will be warmer by morning. Relief. Thank God.
But you aren’t sure you’ll make it. You have nothing left to burn.
Of course, that’s not true.
There’s always that one thing left to burn and you are sitting on it now.
It is that old ponderous tome, old reliable in times of duress, that book of deep comfort, that book that the old timers call The Book of Supposed To.
This is how so many people die.
It is large. It is larger than the largest old dictionary in your grandparents house. It is bigger than any book you have ever seen.
It’s cover is sturdy and well worn. Its binding is the finest you’ve ever seen – stitched in neatly folded batches so that she opens flat at any page. The parchment is thick and crisp and the corners dog worn and dog eared by not torn. The scripting in it, hand done by someone who was long and well dead before your time. It is the most precious thing you own.
This is how so many people die.
You’ve never never read it but you quote from it all the time. So did your parents. So did everyone you know. Like the Bible its words and phrases dominate popular Western culture but this book is even more so. You can find it in every culture. Some cultures have smaller versions but there it is.
To survive this night you must burn this book.
Darkness.
It is growing colder.
You stand up and go to push the book into the fire but… you stop yourself. Surely you could read quickly through the pages and keep the ones worth keeping? Perhaps you could still get through the night burning some of them. It would be a shame to let a work so antique and precious be lost so easily.
And so you open the cover and begin to read quickly, looking for some passage or phrase unworthy of remaining. Something untrue. Something worth burning. If you ration it out, you’ll make it to daybreak and then you’ll be okay.
But everything you read is the truest thing you’ve ever read.
“That son of a bitch should pay for what they did.” True.
“My parents should apologize for what they did.” True.
“I’m a sack of shit.”
“I wasn’t supposed to get cancer.”
“I’ll never amount to anything.”
“You can’t trust men.”
“You can’t trust women.”
“I deserve to be punished for what I’ve done.”
“I haven’t gotten rewarded enough for all the good things I’ve done.”
“Life is unfair.”
“I should have ended up married that one not that other person.”
“My marriage was supposed to last forever.”
“I was supposed to be a better parent.”
“War shouldn’t exist.”
“My partner wasn’t supposed to die. We were supposed to grow old together.”
All true.
You turn the pages faster now as night is upon you. The moon is shining down on you cold and merciless and only coals remain. Surely there must be something you can feed into this fire.
But it’s all true. Every bit of it. No wonder everyone loves this book.
This is how so many people die. They refuse to burn that book of stories. None of them are true while all of them feel true. If you read your own book, you might feel the same way. It’s all so familiar. It’s all so comforting. You want it to be true even when you suspect it’s not.
This is how so many people die.
They are found in the morning by those who, like them, lost so much, having burned through everything else first until they finally came to this, their precious stories – none of them new – all of them handed down from generation to generation. We tend not to read the book until we have to and, by the time we do, it’s too late.
They are found like this in the morning, next to the fire, their arms clutched around this massive book, intact, no pages torn out. Their body frozen stiff. Their tears frozen to their face having died weeping for what they wished were so and having chosen this cold comfort over the chance at tomorrow.
This is how so many people die.
I feel time like a huge pain. They always leave everything with over the moon. The poor rented room where I spent a few months, the table at the province hotel where I spent six days, even the sad waiting room of the station where I spent two hours waiting for the train: yes, the good things in life hurt me in a metaphysical way when they are abandoned and I think, with all the sensitivity of my nerves, that I will never see them nor have them again, at least at that exact moment. An abyss opens in my soul and a cold breath of God’s hour rubs my lukewarm face. The weather! The past! What I was and will never be again ! What I got and I ain’t gonna get back! The dead! The dead who loved me in my childhood. When I summon them my soul cools down and I feel exiled from my hearts, alone in the night of myself, crying like a beggar the barred silence of all doors.
– Fernando Pessoa
In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted shortcuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.
We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly re-spawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.
– John Steinbeck, East of Eden
“That’s the existential problem,“ Fat said, “based on the concept that We are what we do, rather than, We are what we think. It finds its first expression in Goethe’s Faust, Part One, where Faust says, ‘Im Anfang war das Wort’. He’s quoting the opening of the Fourth Gospel; ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ Faust says, ‘Nein. Im Anfang war die Tat.’ In the beginning was the Deed. From this, all existentialism comes.”
– Philip K. Dick
Never forget that you are one of a kind. Never forget that if there weren’t any need for you in all your uniqueness to be on this earth, you wouldn’t be here in the first place. And never forget, no matter how overwhelming life’s challenges and problems seem to be, that one person can make a difference in the world. In fact, it is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about. So be that one person.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Creation: good broken up into pieces and scattered throughout evil.
– Simone Weil
If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things-praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts-not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
– C. S. Lewis
Write until your eyes close, or the pencil falls from your hand, write without wasting a second or thinking about what and how it should sound; write from a feeling of untapped life that has become so huge that it is like a massive mountain gathering inside of you; write without setting up a hundred different plans and restrictions, and with the danger that it will not last, and the danger that it will fall to pieces; write because you are still breathing and because your heart, which is probably already diseased, still beats; write until *something* from the mighty mountain of your life is carried away, since an entire nation of giants could not carry it *all* away; write until your eyes close forever; write until you choke to death.
– Elias Canetti
My much-loved friend, It matters to have trodden the earth proudly, not arrogantly, but on feet that aren’t afraid to stand their ground, and move quickly when the need arises. It matters that your eyes have been on the object always, aware of its drift but not caught up in it. It matters that we were young together, and that you never lost the instincts and intuitions of a pioneer. It matters that you have been brave when retreat would have been easier. It matters that, in many places and at many times, you have made a difference. Your laugh has mattered. Your love has mattered. Above all, it matters that you have been loved. Nothing else matters.
– Clare Venables
Does evil, as we conceive it to be when we do not do it, exist? Does not the evil that we do seem to be something simple and natural which compels us? Is not evil analogous to illusion? When we are the victims of an illusion we do not feel it to be an illusion but a reality. It is the same perhaps with evil. Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.
– Simone Weil
In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.
– Aldous Huxley
It is the integrity of each individual human that is in final examination. On personal integrity hangs humanity’s fate. You can deceive others, you can deceive your brain-self, but you can’t deceive your mind-self — for mind deals only in the discovery of truth and the interrelationship of all truths. The cosmic laws with which mind deals are noncorruptible. Cosmic evolution is omniscient God comprehensively articulate.
– R Buckminster Fuller
Today’s world has reached a state which, if it had been described to preceding centuries, would have called forth the cry: ‘This is the Apocalypse!’
Yet we have grown used to this kind of world; we even feel at home in it.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
It’s never an accident. Even the Buddha cannot protect you from your karma.
It’s never too late. Give alms. Observe the precepts. Abandon ignorance. Renounce greed and fear.
Better yet, embrace the Mahayana. Practice the bodhisattva way.
The Vimalakirti Sutra is your handbook.
– Kenneth Folk
Some cities transport, some soothe, some enchant. But what we crave are the ones (New York, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Havana) that make us feel alive.
– Pico Iyer
Let the world endure,
And words not be one day
These graying bones
That birds will peck,
Screeching, squabbling,
Wheeling apart,
Birds that are our night
Within the light.
– Yves Bonnefoy (translated by Hoyt Rogers)
If we fail to nourish our souls, they wither, and without soul, life ceases to have meaning. The creative process shrivels in the absence of continual dialogue with the soul.
– Marion Woodman
If you pay attention for just five minutes, you know some very fundamental dharma: things change, nothing stays comfortable, sensations come and go quite impersonally.
– Sylvia Boorstein
In prose you make the paragraph. Every paragraph is a poem.
– Jack Kerouac
The Sahā world is a paper flower, good people. Seek the deeper reality that gives rise to this world of woe and burns it down without a second thought.
Practice the Buddha Dharma, and find the family that waits for you on the other shore.
– Kenneth Folk
Once you realize the power that healthy love has, you see how many people have never actually been in love. Divine union love is designed to amplify and multiply your life.
– Nika Solé
The hell of unwritten poems.
– Anna Kamieńska
Want me to tell you happy lies?
Fuck off.
Practice the Dharma. You will be born in a Pure Land.
– Kenneth Folk
To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.
– Aldo Leopold
Will you ever sit opposite your god, eye to eye, toe to toe? Will your god acknowledge you, nod once, & say, “World Honored One,” as you nod once and acknowledge him?
If not, you worship a jealous god who only worships himself. This is the path for children. Practice the Dharma.
– Kenneth Folk
And if you missed a day, there was always the
next,
and if you missed a year, it didn’t matter,
the hills weren’t going anywhere,
the thyme and rosemary kept coming back,
the sun kept rising, the bushes kept bearing fruit
– Louise Gluck, Sunrise
The ancient adepts slept without subconscious dreams and woke up without worldly worries. Their food was plain. Their breath came from deep inside them. They didn’t cling to life, weren’t anxious about death. They emerged without desire and reentered without resistance. They came easily; they went easily. They didn’t forget where they were from; they didn’t ask where they were going. They took everything as it came, gladly, and walked into death without fear. They accepted life as a gift, and they handed it back gratefully.
– Ming Liu, Zhuangzi
All insight, all revelation, all illumination, all love, all that is genuine, all that is real, lies in now – and in the attempt to create now we approach the inner precincts, the holiest part of life. For in time all things are seeking completion, but in now all things are complete.
– Maurice Nicoll
It is true that causation has apparently been turned topsy-turvy; according to our theory the stress seems to be caused by the planet taking the wrong track, whereas we usually suppose that the planet takes the wrong track because it is acted on by the stress. But that is a harmless accident common enough in primary physics. The discrimination between cause and effect depends on time’s arrow and can only be settled by reference to entropy. We need not pay much attention to suggestions of causation arising in discussions of primary laws which, as likely as not, are contemplating the world upside down.
– Arthur Eddington
The tech industry is also racing ahead with AI, even though it’s shown no ability to restrain itself from causing the most obvious problems: our social networks choked to death with AI slop, the death of photographic truth, and sexualized deepfakes of teenagers. These problems were all predicted and warned against in the most dire ways, and yet they have all come to pass. Solving these problems will require creative and flexible lawmaking that considers a huge balance of interests, benefits, and harms, and a rigorous approach to thinking through the tradeoffs over time.
– theverge.com
Audiobooks are impossible, genuinely don’t understand how anyone thinks they’re easier than reading. If you think at all it’s over. You can’t allow your concentration to drift for one second or you’ll lose the narrative. Really only good for long interstate road trips.
– @leeartr
A word Americans should know now more than ever:
Kakistocracy- a government run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens.
Yes, there’s a word for it.
– Nnedi Okorafor, PhD
The wave of the Cosmos reaches its highest crest when it displays the soul in the garb of the word.
– Ludwig Klages
I consider space to be a material. The articulation of space has come to take precedence over other concerns. I attempt to use sculptural form to make space distinct.
– Richard Serra
Queerdom
A Poem of Protest by Rick Benjamin
latest dispatches from inner ear
Headlines today: most erotic moment
when sun hit face, left cheek still in a
state of ecstasy;
: humans – only species
reducing erotic to something sexual
or gendered;
: meanwhile breeze
entered ear, caressed & teased membrane
we call, drum, until percussive hum exited
that sonic cavern, cave, tunneling its way
back out into trees & dry fall leaves where
they continued to rustle;
: when someone thinks
they should govern desire or identity
or insist on any of the binaries, both
human & more-than-human they
should be summarily deposed
by the whole sentient world
&, in the event of shyness
on part of humans, all
other species will
affirm this, one,
Constitutional;
: tribunals along
lines of reconciliation
shall govern
the days & nights; making amends,
asking for forgiveness (no matter
the outcomes); crow caws (tercets
& quatrains mostly), & same inter-
vals between calls, are well worth
listening to (murders generally
knowing what they’re on about);
: mexican purple
sage round here attracts all of the
hummers, bees, hovering birds. A
whole bush can vibrate with all
of that sweetness.
: that ear drum’s
all scar tissue tbh; a thinner skin
was ruptured long ago & that low
drone you’ve been straining to
hear’s the queerest thing you’ll
ever hold.
I am allergic to spiritual practitioners who suggest my trauma was an initiation, but I am equally unimpressed by the prognosis of western psychology and colonial somatics that I must dole out hundreds of dollars and years of time to manage and integrate and fix these problems. I have earnestly tried to integrate the trauma. I have spent thousands of dollars trying to come back into a normative nervous system. And I’m done. If I can’t fix this then let me understand how it could be my superpower. If I can’t close my sensory gating, then open me wider. Dilate me like a cervix so that I may be the birth canal for stories that are not about human beings and human progress. Let me become a doorway for viruses and ecosystems and fungi and dove song. Let me become a doorway so big and so open that a new way of being can emerge, one not tied to the fiction of human individuals. One that is equally aware of the agony and ecstasy and is allowed to wildly swing out of the window of tolerance, achieving both the valleys and peaks that our culture has denied us. Let me exceed the graph. Let me swing past wellness into something wilder and less predictable.
We could say the climate itself is out of its window of tolerance. How then can I ride these nervous system oscillations in wild solidarity? How does the body of an abuse survivor act as an expert barometer for shifting ecosystems and temperatures and weather patterns? It is important to note that the temperate conditions human beings consider optimal are an actual rarity in the history of deep time. What if the window of normalcy that trauma survivors are expected to re-enter isn’t normalcy at all? What if it’s just an anthropocentric model that gates out the wily and often ecstatic experience of being ecologically alive and aware?
– Sophie Strand
Whenever there is a reaching down into innermost experience, into the nucleus of personality, most people are overcome by fear and many run away.
– Carl Jung
Missed Time
by Ha Jin
My notebook has remained blank for months
thanks to the light you shower
around me. I have no use
for my pen, which lies
languorously without grief.
Nothing is better than to live
a storyless life that needs
no writing for meaning—
when I am gone, let others say
they lost a happy man,
though no one can tell how happy I was.
It is nearly seven hundred years since Meister Eckhart exclaimed: “It is all inside, not outside, for everything is inside.” But how few people have realized as yet what he meant.
– Barbara Hannah
I just liked writing—I liked pushing a pen across a page without having to call the result an essay.
– Helen Garner
We’d all left a world behind somewhere else, and we chose this place for all of its lushness and instability. If we were going to survive, we had to be in it together.
– Emily Stone
Revision can grind a good impulse to dust.
– Billy Collins
I think the proper length for a short story is to go as far as you can without going so far that you have forgotten the beginning.
– Russell Banks
When people see your truck, they tend to see what you can do for them.
– J. D. Daniels
His poems are busted by history and fractured by time. The past doesn’t stay in the earth where it belongs, and when you dig up a piece, it holds anything but neat archaeological layers.
– Alexander Wells on the German poet Lutz Seiler
Poetry
by Marianne Moore
I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the
same thing may be said for all of us—that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand. The bat,
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base—
ball fan, the statistician—case after case
could be cited did
one wish it; nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and
school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,
nor till the autocrats among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination”—above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion—
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness, and
that which is on the other hand,
genuine, then you are interested in poetry.
Here I am, at eighty-five the week after next, writing a novel without the expectation of whether I’ll finish first or it’ll finish first.
– Penelope Lively
Empathy is what allows one to circulate between worlds.
– Jonathan Lethem on Philip K. Dick and Palestine.
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
– Wiliam Faulkner
I know not what to do,
my mind is reft:
is song’s gift best?
is love’s gift loveliest?
– H.D.
While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in a windowpane.
– Billy Collins
Leave the desk and the shuttle and the loom—
Come,
With your ashen lives,
Your lives like dust in your hands.
I call upon you, workers.
– Lola Ridge
In fiction, I feel the most intelligent, and the most free, and the most excited, when my characters are fully invented people. That’s part of the excitement.
– Toni Morrison
When I read the first line of The Metamorphosis I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago.
– Gabriel García Márquez
It’s frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is.
– W.H. Auden
I have spent seventy years trying to persuade you,
to manipulate you with the poems I’ve written,
to remember my people as if they’d been yours—
– Ted Kooser
I discovered early that I felt ill at ease with the world around me, and that writing poems alone in my room was one of the few experiences that made me feel calm. I loved being able to have my own private conversation with myself, to let my mind wander, to say things that nobody could overhear or judge. I think, in a way, a queer childhood provides painful but valuable instruction on how to be a poet: we learn early the power-and often necessity—of solitude. It’s an art form that, while deeply communal, also requires a lot of soul-searching and problem-solving on our own when we sit down to write.
– Matthew Gellman
Oh, take me, Wind, into
Thy confidence, and tell
Me, whispering soft and low,
The secrets of the dell.
– Alexander Posey
It is an extra dividend when you like the girl you’ve fallen in love with.
– Clark Gable
The future is unwritten.
– Joe Strummer
The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.
– Elizabeth Drew
It’s inside myself that I must create someone who will understand.
– Clarice Lispector
Everything is ambiguous; everything is always shifting and changing, and there are as many different takes on any given situation as there are people involved. Trying to find absolute rights and wrongs is a trick we play on ourselves to feel secure and comfortable.
– Pema Chödrön
I follow four dictates: face it, accept it, deal with it, then let it go.
– Sheng-yen
I had learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel, all those daubes and albóndigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then. These fragments mattered to me. I believed in them.
– Joan Didion
Eclipse of the light of heaven, eclipse of God – such indeed is the character of the historic hour through which the world is now passing.
– Martin Buber
Justice is the bread of the people.
Sometimes it is plentiful, sometimes it is scarce.
Sometimes it tastes good, sometimes it tastes bad.
When the bread is scarce, there is hunger.
When the bread is bad, there is discontent.
– Bertolt Brecht
She goes to the sea, she comes from the sea, and tiny seas grow calm in the warmth of her chest, sleeping like doves. / […] / She is all air, all gentle waters. A memory of salt, of lost horizons, and the soaking of every wave. The foam left by a shipwreck clings to her waist and the tips of wings send a shiver up her spine.
– Dulce María Loynaz, (tr. James O’Connor)
A sigh is the sword of a textual thing.
– Charles Bernstein
The world is turning into a cave just like Plato’s: everyone looking at images and believing that they are reality.
– Jose Saramago
You’re never in a secure position. You’re never at a point where you have it all sewed up. You have to choose to be secure and like stone, or insecure but able to flow.
– Keith Jarrett
For some unfortunate reason, complaining, rejecting, or fearing something strengthens your sense of ego & makes you feel like you are important. You contract back into your small and false self, and from there, unfortunately, it becomes harder and harder to reemerge.
– Richard Rohr
I am at the age where I look at things more calmly, but with the desire to continue growing.
I have the years when dreams begin to be caressed with the fingers, and illusions become hope…
Tomorrow is the only utopia
– Jose Saramago
Have the courage and the clarity to see that God neither cares nor even knows about suffering. Suffering is resistance, and God – eternal, infinite Awareness – like empty space, knows no resistance, and therefore cannot know suffering.
– Rupert Spira
The Lord of the Rings resonates with depth psychology because it is about a special kind of quest. Frodo leaves home not to slay a dragon or win laurels, but to let go of something that will lead to his growth.
– June Singer
Loving your enemies [is] nonnegotiable. It [means] trying to respect them, it [means] identifying with their humanity and weaknesses. It [doesn’t] mean unconditional acceptance of their crazy behavior.
– Anne Lamott
(and if there is any luck in this wretched world) you read what you wrote for and to yourself in the same way you wrote for someone else.
– Rodrigo Fresan, Melville (T. by Will Vanderhyen)
Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself; nor be only content, but delight to be alone and single with Omnipresency.
– Sir Thomas Browne
[A father, who was a famous poet, asked his son] “How do you make poems?” The boy replied, “I would make poems out of things not particularly notable, without adornment,” […] something like: “A traveler in a hat riding a horse goes west led by the bit.”
– Hiroaki Sato
Pay attention to the world around you, to the leaves and the flowers, to the birds and the rain. If you can stop and look deeply, you will recognize your beloved manifesting again and again in many forms.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
It took me like, a couple months of somatic meditation to make my inner monologue optional
If you’re someone with an endless loop in your head, or if your thought stream makes it difficult to get to sleep, it’s a great time investment to get that sorted. Changed my life
– River Kenna
When you have a soul that pulls you not only counter to culture, but also counter to counter culture, you belong to the mystery.
– McCall Erickson
There is nothing worth doing that is not scary. There is no one who has achieved greatness without wrestling with their own doubts, anxieties, limitations, and demons.
– Ryan Holiday
I read this guy saying he never has trouble sleeping because he just puts all his thoughts into their proper compartments before bed and now whenever I can’t sleep I just visualize putting whatever I’m thinking about in a drawer…. it totally works.
– @noampomsky
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
– T. S. Eliot
Why do I feel the need to defend things that many will consider obvious values? My initial impulse derives perhaps from a hypersensitivity or allergy of mine: it seems to me that language is always being used in a loose, haphazard, careless manner, which I find unbearably annoying. But don’t think that this reaction is based on intolerance for others; I feel the greatest annoyance when listening to myself.
– Italo Calvino, Exactitude; tr. Geoffrey Brock
The winds of grace are always blowing, but you have to raise the sail.
– Ramakrishna
There is no path to truth, historically or religiously.
– Krishnamurti
The image of perfection is what keeps you from seeing it.
– @naval
Art is not a passive object. It is not merely a decorative or consumable good. It is a vital force, capable of shaping narratives, sparking dialogue, and challenging the status quo.
– Laura Kerr
Ambition is a drug
that makes its addicts
potential madmen.
– Emil Cioran
That’s the beauty of formal practice: we get to create a safe space in which we can experiment and begin to see our minds’ habits without acting from those habits.
– Jon Aaron
Leaving the refuge of silence demands the willingness to be seen, to be judged. It demands that we turn away from our desires to please, to fit in….. Risking seeing that we are lesser beings than we had hoped.
– Jane Hirschfield
At least three times every day take a moment and ask yourself what is really important. Have the wisdom and the courage to build your life around your answer.
– Lee L. Jampolsky
A drink a day keeps the shrink away.
Life is too tragic for sadness: Let us rejoice…
It’s a fool’s life, a rogue’s life, and a good life if you keep laughing all the way to the grave.
– Edward Abbey
I think, generally, people are stubborn in their depression; I often notice people feel that their depression is unique, that it’s un-overcome-able, and that nobody knows the way they feel.
– Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
Land’s End
When did you wake? The sheets, still
softened by your sleep, are tousled
now, and almost cold. I turned
and, where your warmth was, all
was winter’s paw when I returned.
Come back, and lay your shiver down
beside me in this open bed; there
is no safety in the world outside
this quilt, this pillow, this bare thread.
Lie here, and let me braid your hair
until my hands are veined and old—
and weathered as the fisherman’s,
whose fingers cast an ancient net
into a brightness they can’t hold.
– Malachi Black
I think I’ve finally discovered the cure to depression and it’s just leaving the house at every single possible opportunity no matter how badly you don’t want to.
– Jack Califano
To live is to war with trolls.
– Henrik Ibsen
People who glitch the matrix shine different.
– Nika Solé
When you’re taking four, five, six years between books, you need to offer your editor some reassurance that you’re alive.
– Alice McDermott
All you have to do is be willing to rebuild yourself however many times it takes to be the version of you that was sculpted from the divine mind.
– Nika Solé
Internal mind gymnastics aren’t usually so graphic.
Psychology, like being on the rag, tends to be private.
– Sommer Browning
Enantiodromia (Ancient Greek: ἐναντίος, romanized: enantios – “opposite” and δρόμος, dromos – “running course”) is a principle introduced in the West by psychiatrist Carl Jung. In Psychological Types, Jung defines enantiodromia as “the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time.”[1] It is similar to the principle of equilibrium in the natural world, in that any extreme is opposed by the system in order to restore balance. When things get to their extreme, they turn into their opposite. Jung adds that “this characteristic phenomenon practically always occurs when an extreme, one-sided tendency dominates conscious life; in time an equally powerful counterposition is built up which first inhibits the conscious performance and subsequently breaks through the conscious control.”[1]
This principle was explicitly understood and discussed in the principles of traditional Chinese religion, as in Taoism and yin-yang. A central premise of the I Ching is that yang lines become yin when they have reached their extreme, and vice versa.[2] However, in Jungian terms, a thing psychically transmogrifies into its shadow opposite, in the repression of psychic forces that are thereby cathected into something powerful and threatening.
Eighty or ninety important models will carry about ninety percent of the freight in making you a worldly-wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight.
– Charlie Munger
When I tried to talk to him I realized that, though ties of blood made us kin, though I could see a shadow of my face in his face, though there was an echo of my voice in his voice, we were forever strangers, speaking a different language, living on vastly distant planes of reality.
– Richard Wright
Anyway, don’t they say that every good story is a suspense story? And every story is a love story. And every love story is a ghost story. And everybody loves somebody sometime.
– Sigrid Nunez
It’s limiting to be known: you can’t behave without inhibition. You can go to the ends of the earth but if you meet someone there who knows your name, you might as well have stayed at home.
– Rachel Cusk
Never trust a thought that occurs to you indoors.
– Nietzsche
Nothing is more dangerous than the influence of private interests in public affairs.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.
– Haruki Murakami
Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.
– JRR Tolkien
The lonelier the place, the better it pleased me: its silence, its aura, its peculiar conformation, its enclosedness.
– John Fowles
Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work in hand. The Sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.
– Alexander Graham Bell
One ought to hold on to one’s heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
True life is lived when tiny changes occur.
– Tolstoy
Once I witnessed a windstorm so severe two 100-year-old trees were uprooted on the spot. The next day, walking among the wreckage, I found the friable nests of birds, completely intact and unharmed on the ground. That the featherweight survive the massive, that this reversal of fortune takes place among us — that is what haunts me. I don’t know what it means.
– Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey
If you yourself are upside down in reality, then your wisdom and faith are bound to be topsy-turvey.
– Hakim Sanai
Mine ear is open, and my heart prepared. The worst is worldly loss thou canst unfold. Say, is my kingdom lost?
– William Shakespeare, Richard II
The Power of Silence
Silence can hold more meaning than words.
It has power to make a heartless person love and an
innocent victim hate. It is much more powerful than words,
because it takes effort to keep. It is not only about closing
your mouth. It is about taking in others’ actions or words,
thinking about them, formulating an answer, criticizing that
answer, searching for logic from your mind and reason
from your heart, and then convincing yourself that not saying
the answer is better.
Silence is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of intelligence
and inner power. It is a sign of faith that replying in the same
manner that you were treated with will only make you just as
ignorant. Learn to be an observer, a deep one, who reflects on
his or her mistakes but also on the mistakes of others.
– Najwa Zebian
When all our obstacles have been overcome, and we find ourselves in a state of total presence, the wisdom of enlightenment manifests spontaneously without limits, just like the infinite rays of the sun.
The clouds have dissolved, and the sun is finally free to shine once again.
Enlightenment is nothing other than the state beyond all obstacles, in the same way that from the peak of a very high mountain one always sees the sun.
Enlightenment is not a paradise or some special place of happiness, but it is in fact the condition beyond all dualistic concepts, including those of happiness and suffering.
– Chögyal Namkhai Norbu
The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is ‘a vale of tears’ from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven.
What a little circumscribed straightened notion! Call the world if you please “The Vale of Soul-making”. Then you will find out the use of the world (I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature admitting it to be immortal which I will here take for granted for the purpose of showing a thought which has struck me concerning it). I say ‘Soul making’ Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence – there may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions – but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. …
I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive – and yet I think I perceive it – that you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible – I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read – I will call the human heart the hornbook (note: a hornbook is a single-sided alphabet tablet, which served from medieval times as a primer for study, and sometimes included vowel combinations, numerals or short verse) used in that School – and I will call the Child able to -read, the Soul made from that School and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! Not merely is the Heart a Hornbook, It is the Mind’s Bible, it is the Mind’s experience, it is the teat from which the Mind or intelligence sucks its identity. As various as the Lives of Men are, so various become their Souls, and thus does God make individual beings, Souls, Identical Souls of the Sparks of his own essence…
– John Keats
God’s plan for me does not involve LinkedIn at all.
– @theharkyp
Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
– Margaret Atwood
If you eat, invest, and think according to what the ‘news’ advocates, you’ll end up nutritionally, financially and morally bankrupt.
– Naval Ravikant
My job is to trick adults // into knowing they have / hearts.
– Chen Chen, Spell to Find Family
Things fall apart, so they can fall together at a higher level of order.
– Marilyn Ferguson
My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
– Ernest Hemingway
Before there were drawing boards, what did we go back to?
– George Carlin
One of the most frequent uses of places in dreams is to show you whose “turf” you are on, whose influence you are under. So a good way to understand the significance of a place is to ask who it belongs to.
– Robert A. Johnson
To the wise man every land is to be travelled; for the whole world is the native land of the good soul.
– Democritus
MIGHTY PURPOSE
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
– George Bernard Shaw
90% of everything is crap.
– Theodore Sturgeon
I had a definite sense of somehow being a passenger in an evil vehicle crusing through Paradise.
– Sam Shepard
Look it – you start out as an artist, I started out when I was nineteen, and you’re full of defenses. You have all of this stuff to prove. You have all of these shields in front of you. All your weapons are out. It’s like you’re going into battle. You can accomplish a certain amount that way. But then you get to a point where you say, “But there’s this whole other territory I’m leaving out.” And that territory becomes more important as you grow older. You begin to see that you leave out so much when you go to battle with the shield and all the rest of it. You have to start including that other side or die a horrible death as an artist with your shield stuck on the front of your face forever. You can’t grow that way. And I don’t think you can grow as a person that way, either. There just comes a point when you have to relinquish some of that and risk becoming more open to the vulnerable side, which I think is the female side. It’s much more courageous than the male side.
– Sam Shepard
Well, we sense that there is a will that is behind all things, and we’re also aware of our own will, and it’s the distance between those two wills that creates the mystery that we call religion. It is the attempt to reconcile our will with another will that we can’t quite put our finger on, but we feel is powerful and existent. It’s the space between those two wills that creates our predicament.
[…]
Somehow, in some way, we have to be a reflection of the will that is behind the whole mess. When you describe the outer husk of that will which is yours, which is your own tiny will – in all things mostly to succeed, to dominate, to influence, to be the king – when that will under certain conditions destroys itself, we come into contact with another will which seems to be much more authentic. But to reach that authentic will, our little will has to undergo a lot of battering. And it’s not appropriate that our little will should be destroyed too often because we need it to interact with all the other little wills.
From time to time things arrange themselves in such a way that that tiny will is annihilated, and then you’re thrown back into a kind of silence until you can make contact with another authentic thrust of your being. And we call that prayer when we can affirm it. It happens rarely, but it happens in Book of Mercy, and that’s why I feel it’s kind of to one side, because I don’t have any ambitions towards leading a religious life or a saintly life or a life of prayer. It’s not my nature. I’m out on the street hustling with all the other wills.
But from time to time you’re thrown back to the point where you can’t locate your tiny will, where it isn’t functioning, and then you’re invited to find another source of energy.
– Leonard Cohen
This web of time—the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect, or ignore each other through the centuries—embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist.
– Jorge Luis Borges
As the mind matures its principles tend to harden and gradually become fixed, and it becomes unable to accept fresh material which will not fit easily into the existing structure. Thus it loses contact with the dynamism of reality. Its enclosing walls of dogmatic opinion become unable to adapt to changing circumstances, and if faced with a major challenge of ideas it can only collapse, leaving the bewildered mind within to cope as best it may with the apparent chaos that surrounds it. The lesson here is that any structure is only defensible as long as it remains flexible and capable of evolution; life itself is in a state of constant flux and no merely human construction can hope to survive if it cannot
adapt.
– Alfred Douglas
The intelligence can only be led by desire. For there to be desire, there must be pleasure and joy in the work. The intelligence only grows and bears fruit in joy. The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running.
– Simone Weil
You live out a totally different reality when your spirit is untroubled.
– Nika Solé
Short the world. Long the dharma.
– Kenneth Folk
We are moving into a period of bewilderment, a curious moment in which people find light in the midst of despair, and vertigo at the summit of their hopes. It is a religious moment also, and here is the danger. People will want to obey the voice of Authority, and many strange constructs of just what Authority is will arise in every mind… The public yearning for Order will invite many stubborn uncompromising persons to impose it. The sadness of the zoo will fall upon society.
– Leonard Cohen
They have removed the struggle to find anything. Book store owners and record store owners used to be oracles, in that way; you’d go in this dusty old place and they might point you toward something that would change your life. All that’s gone.
– Tom Waits
You can’t compete with someone who is having fun.
– @fortelabs
My films are not a personal expression but a prayer. As if I were lighting a candle in front of an icon, or placing a bouquet of flowers before it. The spectator always ends up understanding when you are sincere in what you are telling him.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
It is said stories are only told in the winter
So, the bears and snakes do not hear them
My father is not a traditional man
But he grew up as a traditional ashkii yázhí
He speaks the tongue of the sky and earth
– Amber McCrary
The World is blue as an orange
– Paul Eluard
In the burned house I am eating breakfast.
You understand: there is no house, there is no breakfast,
yet here I am.
– Margaret Atwood
The need to become familiar with Albertine’s desire is so intense that the activity of loving turns out to be something like a compulsory intellectual investigation.
– Proust
A trans person didn’t deny your health insurance claim, a giant corporation did.
An asylum seeker didn’t raise your rent, a billionaire’s private equity firm did.
Our focus must be taking on the billionaires & corporate greed.
– Congressman Greg Casar
I failed to measure how many steps it took
to walk my heart’s wanting back to front,
though I paced it over and over.
– Jane Hirshfield
The American dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now…
– J.G. Ballard
WORDS NOT SPOKEN
TO A FRIEND
why?
I’ll tell you.
it’s the incredible
egotism
you manifest
all the time.
it is utterly
exhausting.
I’m sure it exhausts
everyone around you.
it is why your relationships
never last.
you were the center
of your mother’s
world.
– Jack Foley
Two men look out a window. One sees mud, the other sees the stars.
– Oscar Wilde
Instead of following any boss or ruler, the rest of the living are deliberately staying in touch with “how things are going” in the shared communities they care about. As biologist/changemaker Tamsin Woolley-Barker says about other superorganisms, such as honey bees, in Teeming: How Superorganisms Work Together to Build Infinite Wealth on a Finite Planet: “Superorganisms are all around us. They’ve dramatically outlasted the dinosaurs, and the opportunities to consult their collaborative logic are endless, the results proven and enduring. If they can do it, why can’t we? The future is uncertain, but…life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking!” Which inherently means, by communicating well.
But since emotion is how we actually communicate, both to ourselves and others, significant change is an emotional process. (Much more on this in Chapter 3.) When an organism or society fixes its values in an inflexible hierarchy of priorities descending from a center of compulsive domination, it forfeits the adaptability and vitality gained through evolutionary diversification. The healthy natural alternative we could revive depends on the full spectrum of worthwhile values deployed by organisms.
As a society, each living organism and environment is not just a mechanism of causes and effects but a pulsing network of bargains and dramas. An ecosystem is the ‘full gamut’ required and created by a variety of character-driven styles of experience. Far from being a side-effect, the self-moving variety of living environments is essential to both the physical action and the psychological interactions of life. In communication there is no fixed determinant of primacy. Like the chicken and the egg, organisms and ecosystems presuppose one another. So a good life is not just about taking the right path or following the best program but about allowing all of the different parts of our bodies and minds to communicate and collaborate. This is about what Jane Roberts called Psychic Politics. Because every life, no matter how small or different than a human life, is more of a Shakespearean drama than a mindless machine.
– George Gorman
Perhaps our “life’s purpose” has nothing to do with what job we will find, what new thing we will manifest or attract for ourselves, or what mythical awakening journey we will complete. Perhaps the purpose of our life is to fully live, finally, to touch each here and now moment with our presence and with the gift of our one, wild heart.
And to do whatever we can to help others, to hold them when they are hurting, to listen carefully to their stories and the ways they are attempting to make sense of a world that has gone a bit mad. To speak kind words and not forget the erupting miracle of the other as it appears in front of us. Perhaps this is the most radical gift that we can all give.
– Matt Licata
Someone has a great fire in his soul… and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney.
– Vincent Van Gogh
Once you heal codependency, your body and energy will repel relationships that try to hook into you that way. Sovereign, healthy, flowing relationships become the only option.
– Nika Solé
It is your destiny to see as God sees, to know as God knows, to feel as God feels.
– Meister Eckhart
Since ancient times, spiritual masters of all traditions have pointed to the Now as the key to the spiritual dimension. Despite this, it seems to have remained a secret.
– Eckhart Tolle
There will come whispering movement, and green things unnumbered
Will pierce through the mould with their yellow-green, sun-searching fingers
– Mary Cornelia Hartshorne
The year—not yet abandoned but a living husk, a lesson.
– John Ashbery
Again space is full of voices, the entire body has become heart.
– Hélène Cixous
Politics does not reflect majorities, it constructs them.
– Stuart Hall
There’s no democratic state that’s not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery.
– Gilles Deleuze
For me, it is better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
– Carl Sagan
Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.
– Terry Pratchett
They muddy the water, to make it seem deep.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
I have learned that there is more power in a good strong hug than in a thousand meaningful words.
– Ann Hood
It must not be forgotten that there is a concrete bond between freedom and existence; to will man free is to will there to be being, it is to will the disclosure of being in the joy of existence; in order for the idea of liberation to have a concrete meaning, the joy of existence must be asserted in each one, at every instant; the movement toward freedom assumes its real, flesh and blood figure in the world by thickening into pleasure, into happiness.
– Simone de Beauvoir
Each and every one of you has the power, the will and the capacity to make a difference in the world in which you live.
– Harry Belafonte
There is within us something that is never mentioned. A Truth that is too
shameful to face:
A quiet affinity for misery,
– Kapil Gupta
There is one simple thing wrong with you – you think you have plenty of time … If you don’t think your life is going to last forever, what are you waiting for ? Why the hesitation to change? You don’t have time for this display, you fool. This, whatever you’re doing now, may be your last act on earth. It may very well be your last battle. There is no power which could guarantee that you are going to live one more minute.
– Carlos Castaneda
So many people glorify and romanticize ‘busy.’ I do not. I value purpose. I believe in resting in reason and moving in passion. If you’re always busy/moving, you will miss important details. I like the mountain. Still, but when it moves, lands shift and earth quakes.
– Joseph Cook
O Thou
Dweller in my heart,
Open it out,
Purify it,
Make it bright and beautiful.
Awaken it,
Prepare it,
Make it fearless,
Make it a blessing to others.
Rid it of laziness,
Free it from doubt,
Unite it with all,
Destroy its bondage.
Let thy peaceful music
Pervade all its works.
Make my heart
Full of joy,
Full of joy,
Full of joy.
– A favorite prayer of Gandhi
What is the purpose of reacting to something when it is changing so quickly? What is the purpose of reacting with craving or clinging? It passes away. Or hatred: it passes away.
– S.N. Goenka, Superscience
I ran. Sand spun under me and the wind lifted me. You know how it is, running, arms out so you feel veils from your fingers, caused by wind. Like wings.
– Ray Bradbury
To live in hope, one must have touched the outer limits of personal and public despair. To see that despair has a limit, and to go beyond it.
– Daniel Berrigan
This is one reason why the change – the transition period – from one epoch to another, from one world to another, is a dangerous period. Old ideas have lost their momentum and can no longer move the world. New ideas have not yet gained momentum. All through history, and even before the beginning of history, we find such periods accompanied by war and revolution, not because war and revolution are inevitable in themselves but because people have lacked that discrimination that would enable them to use this situation rightly. If we are able to go into a world in which this is understood, then the course of history can be different, because the destiny of all mankind can be raised to a higher level. There is no higher purpose in the life of man than to bring about this great transition.
If a new world is to come, we must first create it in ourselves. You may ask how the work of a few people can change the world. It has always been so. Ideas are powerful, not organizations. Nothing can be done by outward force; everything can be done by inner strength.
– J.G. Bennett
You practice and you get better. It’s very simple.
– Philip Glass
Psychologists usually try to help people use insight and understanding to manage their behavior. However, neuroscience research shows that very few psychological problems are the result of defects in understanding; most originate in pressures from deeper regions in the brain that drive our perception and attention. When the alarm bell of the emotional brain keeps signaling that you are in danger, no amount of insight will silence it.
– Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score
When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
– William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Remain unmoved by hope and fear.
To non-existence mosque and church are one;
to a shadow, heaven and hell likewise.
For someone whose guide is love,
belief and disbelief are equally a veil,
concealing the doorway of the friend;
his very being is a veil
which hides God’s essence.
Until you throw your sword way,
you’ll not become a shield,
until you lay your crown aside,
you’ll not be fit to lead.
The death of soul
is the destruction of life;
but death of life
is the soul’s salvation.
Never stand still on the path
become non-existent.
Non-existent even to the notion
of becoming non-existent.
And when you have abandoned both
individuality and understanding,
the world will become that.
When the eye is pure
it sees purity.
Unself yourself…
until you see your self as a speck of dust
you cannot possibly reach that place;
self could never breathe that air,
so wend your way there without self.
– Hakim Sanai
Earth did not survive a collision with another planet, hundreds of asteroid and comet impacts, hundreds of millions of years of deadly radiation from space, five mass extinctions, and literally freezing solid for you to give up on her now.
– Jacquelyn Gill
Sometimes you just have to accept that you’re on a totally different mission than most, and they’re not gonna understand what that means.
– Nika Solé
When wealth occupies a higher position than wisdom, when notoriety is admired more than dignity, when success is more important than self-respect, the culture itself overvalues ‘image’ and must be regarded as narcissistic.
– Alexander Lowen
The best periods of my life came after a period of being absolutely fed up with the lack of progress I was making.
– Dan Koe
Today everyone knows and no one has the faintest idea.
– Zygmunt Bauman
We share our lives with the people we have failed to be.
– Adam Phillips
In choosing security over growth, we outrage the soul, and the soul outraged, manifests in symptoms — depression, anxiety disorders, envy and jealousy of others, dependencies and many others.
– James Hollis
TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public.
– Douglas Coupland
Sometimes I sense my purpose is to feel purposeless. To wrap my aimlessness around me. To wonder at it all, not in a paralyzing way but an opening way. To remember the gift of breath, that nothing else was ever guaranteed. To breathe and return to my mystery.
– McCall Erickson
Audioanalgesia, the use of sound as a painkiller or a distraction to dispel distractions, is at heart of modernity’s production of white noise.
– Alina Stefanescu
It is impossible to get better and look good at the same time. Give yourself permission to be a beginner.
– Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
Maybe the people who are against you are just as divinely designed as anything else. Sent to you to show you that it doesn’t matter who is against you, when God is for you.
– Nika Solé
The Gnostics knew something, and it was this: that human life does not fulfill its promise within the structure and establishments of society, for all of these are at best but shadowy projections of another and more fundamental reality. No one comes to his true selfhood by being what society wants him to be nor by doing what it wants him to do. Family, society, church, trade and profession, political and patriotic allegiances, as well as moral and ethical rules and commandments are, in reality, not in the least conducive to the true spiritual welfare of the human soul. On the contrary, they are more often than not the very shackles which keep us from our true spiritual destiny.
– Stephan A. Hoeller
There was no one around with whom he could talk about his homesickness, and he had to carry it locked up inside, as the sea encloses the corals.
– Joseph Roth
I believe that meaning emerges in memoir when the writer presses pause on the anecdotes and scenes and … attempts to articulate one small aspect of the confounding human condition. When the writer says, to the reader, you are not alone.
– Beth Kephart
I used to tell students…the difference between poetry and you is you look in the mirror and say, “I am getting old,” but Shakespeare looks in the mirror and says, “Devouring Time, blunt thou thy lion’s paws.”
– Jim Harrison
Oh, my unruly soul.
I am rooted in mystery.
– McCall Erickson
Your inner purpose is to awaken. It is as simple as that. You share that purpose with every other person on the planet – because it is the purpose of humanity.
– Eckhart Tolle
The real horror, to me, lies in the fact that there is absolutely no vehicle in American journalism for the kind of “sensitive” and “intellectual” and essentially moral/merciless reporting that we all understand is necessary–not only for the survival of good journalism in this country, but for the dying idea that you can walk up to a newsstand and find something that will tell you what is really happening.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognizes infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it. It is not selfish to think for oneself. A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly selfish to require of one’s neighbor that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions. Why should he? If he can think, he will probably think differently. If he cannot think, it is monstrous to require thought of any kind from him. A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses.
– Oscar Wilde
There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error.
– William Faulkner
It is not our responsibility to prove to people who we are. Our job and responsibility is to “be.” What you do is proof of who you are.
– Iyanla Vanzant
If I live,
what more can I do?
Even the crickets who don’t know our world at all
cry and cry in autumn.
– izumi shikibu
It is the share of unknown which gives the experience of God, or of the poetic realm, their great authority. But in the end the unknown demands an undivided empire.
– Gabriel Marcel
We must become more skillful in our meditative practice to integrate things that reset, rewire, and enhance our nervous systems, so that we are capable of supporting the healing, transformation, and liberation we want to see and be.
– Larry Ward
Thought has brought about, apart from its technological achievements, chaos and pleasures that soon become agonies.
– Krishnamurti
An underrated cheat code for better health is drinking water before drinking coffee first thing in the morning.
Your body doesn’t need caffeine upon waking. It needs hydration.
– Dan Go
The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
– Alberto Brandolini
Only in classics are there reliable maps of searching or desire
– Michael Ondaatje
Everything around us—sky, earth, and beyond—molds our existence.
– Grace Song
THE PROBLEM WITH TRAVEL
Every time I’m in an airport,
I think I should drastically
change my life: Kill the kid stuff,
start to act my numbers, set fire
to the clutter and creep below
the radar like an escaped canine
sneaking along the fence line.
I’d be cable-knitted to the hilt,
beautiful beyond buying, believe
in the maker and fix my problems
with prayer and property.
Then, I think of you, home
with the dog, the field full
of purple pop-ups—we’re small
and flawed, but I want to be
who I am, going where
I’m going, all over again.
– Ada Limón
muddy boots
the dotted path across
uncommon ground
– @hegelincanada
Rather than the fixed assignment we are given at birth, dharma reflects a breathtaking capacity of any one of us to take a journey away from constriction and resignation to a vital, creative, free life.
– Sharon Salzberg
It’s not the immigrant that’s picking strawberries and broccoli that’s dangerous, it’s the one who bought an election so that Donald Trump could stay out of prison and now thinks he owns the USA.
– Karly Kingsley
Elders have a certain type of wisdom that only age & experience can provide.
Meanwhile, young people have an important perspective on the world that Elders struggle mightily to understand.
‘Gentoring’ means mentoring across generational & experiential lines. More of that please!
– @VinceFHorn
So long as we are immersed in body consciousness, we are like strangers in a foreign country. Our native land is omnipresence.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
Many lies have a beautiful melody. None have any harmony.
– @AajReu
Any act performed with full awareness, any gesture that fosters happiness in another person, is an expression of nonviolence.
– Kenneth Kraft
I think I’m still deep-down profoundly Sartrean but I don’t particularly use that language so much anymore.
– Fredric Jameson
On the tree of life, it doesn’t matter what fruit grows, just avoid the fruit of ‘what if.’
– Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The paradox of the image: the more time we spend trying to make ourselves attractive in public, the less interesting we become behind closed doors. Soon we’re condemned to living down to a false image of ourselves, or to suppressing the most beautiful part of our truer self.
– Pico Iyer
Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.
– Hannah Arendt
Some blood transfusion from the East to the West is a must to save Western science from spiritual anaemia.
– Erwin Schrödinger
You can recover from loss, from heartache, from anything that squeezes your soul with iron fists. Find the softer things. Things like plants and sweet people and slow burning candles and long walks and moving water. Wrap them around you. Repeat as necessary.
– Victoria Erickson
I’ve chosen to live – and to live the best I know how.
– Haruki Murakami
It is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to think of human beings as rational creatures. Everywhere we look we see brutality, stupidity, until it seems that there is nothing else to be seen but that – a descent into barbarism, everywhere, which we are unable to check.
… it is precisely because things are so frightening we become hypnotized, and do not notice – or if we notice, belittle – equally strong forces on the other side, the forces, in short, of reason, sanity and civilization.
– Doris Lessing
How Dark the Beginning
All we ever talk of is light—
let there be light, there was light then,
good light—but what I consider
dawn is darker than all that.
So many hours between the day
receding and what we recognize
as morning, the sun cresting
like a wave that won’t break
over us—as if light were protective,
as if no hearts were flayed,
no bodies broken on a day
like today. In any film,
the sunrise tells us everything
will be all right. Danger wouldn’t
dare show up now, dragging
its shadow across the screen.
We talk so much of light, please
let me speak on behalf
of the good dark. Let us
talk more of how dark
the beginning of a day is.
– Maggie Smith
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
– E Thomas
Our goddesses guard their shapes and colors. Each chess piece is a weapon and a prayer. Is a goddess clutching her myth. In every story there is a creek. In every story a sister. A flower.
– Claudia Monpere
Every war is answered by a new war, until everything is smashed.
– Käthe Kollwitz
Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
– T. S. Eliot
TRUE AWAKENING
We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged enough or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect. But from the point of view of someone who is awake, that’s death. Seeking security or perfection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed and whole, self-contained and comfortable, is some kind of death. It doesn’t have any fresh air. There’s no room for something to come in and interrupt all that. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience. Doing this is setting ourselves up for failure, because sooner or later, we’re going to have an experience we can’t control: our house is going to burn down, someone we love is going to die, we’re going to find out we have cancer, a brick is going to fall out of the sky and hit us on the head, somebody’s going to spill tomato juice all over our white suit, or we’re going to arrive at our favorite restaurant and discover that no one ordered produce and seven hundred people are coming for lunch.
The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when we find out that something is not what we thought. That’s what we’re going to discover again and again and again. Nothing is what we thought. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It’s a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs. To stay with that shakiness—to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge—that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic—this is the spiritual path.
Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.
– Pema Chodron
To walk in a mad world,
but not be mad.
To not imagine how it happened,
but know the all too painful why.
To mourn hope’s demise,
but revive it from deep within.
To weaken at the knees,
but stand strong in my belief.
To feel broken,
but somehow begin the repair.
To have justice denied
but know it must come of my own making
To be empty,
but not full of hate.
To know despair,
but make short the relationship.
To have worth demeaned
but know my worth’s meaning.
To have no words,
but find something worthy to say.
To have confusion be the choice,
but see my own way clear.
To be bitter,
but find sweetness in kindred hugs.
To have the game cheated away
but my life’s practice soundly played.
To wallow in all this misery,
but wash clean in worthy mission after.
To be lost
but keep the bearing home in heart’s map.
To have the heaviness weigh two tons
but find lightness knowing I’m not alone.
To lose trust in so-called-friends and neighbors,
but find faith in those more mindfully close.
To want better in some tomorrow to come,
someday
beyond this day
whenever that time might come,
These are my pleas, my promises to self, my solemn prayer;
To whatever God or gods might be listening this dark morning.
– J Drew Lanham
Living Bones
I have seen my own bones,
the ghosts of them, blue
beneath muscle, skin, and sinew.
Bones are a spooky scripture. Our lives writ in breaks, dislocations, and scars.
Always scars.
– S. E. De Haven
The oppressor would not be so strong if he did not have accomplices among the oppressed.
– Simone de Beauvoir
…emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.
– Iris Murdoch
Understand the Assignment
Christianity stands or falls by its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness and pride of power, and by its apologia for the weak.
“I feel that Christianity is doing too little in making these points rather than doing too much. Christianity has adjusted itself much too easily to the worship of power. It should give much more offense, more shock to the world, than it is doing. Christianity should take a much more definite stand for the weak than for the potential moral right of the strong.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer
It is the warriors who say: “I am empty and deficient and I will not pretend this is not so. I look to be what I am stripped of all pretense.” The poise is one of recognizing deficiencies, neediness, emptiness and not running from them. Although there is a strong compulsion to become something more, the warrior knows that feeding the ego leads only to more hunger, while remaining empty and steadfast allows an opening for grace.
– A.H. Almaas
In Nexus, Henry Miller extolled Scriabin as a divinity, a holy distraction from the world. There is a similar vibe right now, a hunger for mythos and heroes among artists. I mistrust that in myself.
– Alina Stefanescu
Earth, Isn’t This What You Want
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Earth, isn’t this what you want? To arise in us, invisible?
Is it not your dream, to enter us so wholly
there’s nothing left outside us to see?
What, if not transformation
is your deepest purpose? Earth, my love,
I want it too.. Believe me,
no more of your springtimes are needed
to win me over—even one flower
is more than enough. Before I was named
I belonged to you. I see no other law
but yours, and know I can trust
the death you will bring.
See, I live. On what?
Childhood and future are equally present.
Sheer abundance of being
floods my heart.
Cargo by Greg Kimura
You enter life a ship laden with meaning, purpose and gifts
sent to be delivered to a hungry world.
And as much as the world needs your cargo,
you need to give it away.
Everything depends on this.
But the world forgets its needs,
and you forget your mission,
and the ancestral maps used to guide you
have become faded scrawls on the parchment of dead Pharaohs.
The cargo weighs you heavy the longer it is held
and spoilage becomes a risk.
The ship sputters from port to port and at each you ask:
“Is this the way?”
But the way cannot be found without knowing the cargo,
and the cargo cannot be known without recognizing there is a way,
and it is simply this:
You have gifts.
The world needs your gifts.
You must deliver them.
The world may not know it is starving,
but the hungry know,
and they will find you
when you discover your cargo
and start to give it away.
Life is a vexatious trap : when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness, he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.
– Anton Chekhov
In a word: the first work of the hero is to retreat from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside, and there to clarify the difficulties, eradicate them in his own case [i.e., give battle to the nursery demons of his local culture] and break through to the undistorted direct experience and assimilation of what C.G. Jung has called ‘the archetypal images’. This is the process known to Hindu and Buddhist
philosophy as viveka, ‘discrimination’.
– Joseph Campbell
The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve.
On their blotter of fog the trees
Seem a botanical drawing.
– Sylvia Plath
Earthling, the dark is true; the sun’s an accident.
– Theodore Roethke
We cannot assuage our cravings by pursuits in the material world, no matter what their nature and scope. Nothing short of the experience of mystical unity with the divine source will quench our deepest longing.
– Stanislav Grof, The Cosmic Game
The body tries to tell the truth. But, it’s usually too battered with rules to be heard, and bound with pretenses so it can hardly move. We cripple ourselves with lies.
– Jim Morrison
I want the poem that limps back to me.
Poems should hurt like love,
like ice water on your teeth
like a massage to smooth out a cramped muscle.
– Kenyatta Rogers
Go ahead, light your candles and burn your incense and ring your bells and call out to God, but watch out, because God will come and He will put you on His anvil and fire up His forge and beat you and beat you until He turns brass into gold.
– Sant Keshavadas
Once, when I was in college, I wrote home complaining about the food, and my mother sent me a Julia Child cookbook. In the book was a section on dealing with eggs in which she said that the sign of a really good cook is knowing eggs. And so I took an egg out. You can watch an egg – you can learn certain things just by watching it, but you don’t learn very much. To learn about eggs you have to put them in a pan and try to make something out of them. If you do this long enough you begin to understand that there are variations in eggs, and there are certain ways that they react to heat and ways that they react to oil or butter or whatever. And so by actually working with the egg and trying to make something out of it, you really come to understand eggs. It’s similar with clay: you really don’t know clay until you become a potter and actually try to make something out of the clay.
And it’s the same with the mind: unless you actually try to make something out of the mind, try to get a mental state going and keep it going, you don’t really know your own mind. You don’t know the processes of cause and effect within the mind. There has to be a factor of actual participation in the process. That way you can understand it. This all comes down to being observant and developing a skill. The essence of developing a skill means two things. One, you’re aware of a situation as it is given and, two, you’re aware of what you put into it. When the Buddha talks about causation, he says that every situation is shaped from two directions – the causes coming in from the past and the causes you’re putting into the present. You need to be sensitive to both. If you aren’t sensitive to what you’re putting into a situation, you’ll never develop any kind of skill. As you’re aware of what you’re doing, you also look at the results. If something isn’t right, you go back and change what you’ve done – keeping at this until you get the results you want. And in the process, you learn a great deal from the clay, the eggs, or whatever you’re trying to deal with skillfully.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Knowledge is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges toward an ideal view; it is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible (and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others into greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness.
– Paul Karl Feyerabend
It is a bright afternoon: what am I going to do? I am going to work with my mind and with my pen, while the sky is clear and while the soft white clouds are small and sharply defined in it. I am not going to bury myself in books and note taking. I am not going to lose myself in this jungle and come out drunk and bewildered, feeling that bewilderment is a sign that I have done something. I am not going to write as one driven by compulsions but freely, because I am a writer, because for me to write is to think and to live and also in some degree even to pray.
– Thomas Merton
Enlightenment is found only on the way, while sojourning through the ordinary world in an extraordinary manner, that is, by greeting each incident as an opportunity for improvisation. Improvisation is the spontaneous creativity that occurs between one person and another or between people and events. There is always an established melody within which a particular note or chord surprises us. It can cause us suffering when we dwell on its departure from the rhythm or tonality of the established song. Or it can be taken as inspiration for an improvisatory riff. Enlightened beings are masters of spontaneity and improvisation. They have rooted out suffering by freeing themselves from the personal narrative which would otherwise have reacted to interruption and discord with pain. Those who are enlightened wander through the world without goals and find opportunity for creative spontaneity everywhere.
– Peter Hershock
But I’d better say: I have no religion. I don’t need any, don’t practice any, I don’t pray, don’t meditate, don’t confess and don’t atone, I am no sinner and no saint, no eremite and no philosopher – I just live, amidst this colorful world, again and again enjoying the experience of the immediate nearness and the deep community with every thing existing, and based on the insight that everything belongs to one all embracing totality which becomes manifest in me like in all other things, and so gives me the security to live in the present, to enjoy day by day whatever they may bring.
– Yun-Men
Living in forests far away from other people is not true seclusion. True seclusion is to be free from the power of likes and dislikes. It is also to be free from the mental attitude that one must be special because one is treading the path.
Those who remove themselves to far forests often feel superior to others. They think that because they are solitary they are being guided in a special way and that those who live an ordinary life can never have that experience. But that is conceit and is not a help to others. The true recluse is one who is available to others, helping them with affectionate speech and personal example.
– Prajnaparamita
ten set-asides of zen
Set aside the notion that Zen is not friendly
Set aside the notion that Zen is formal
Set aside the notion that in Zen, pain is important
Set aside the notion that in Zen, concentration is important
Set aside the notion that in Zen, emotions are dampened
Set aside the notion that Zen is macho
Set aside the notion that Zen is mysterious and secret
Set aside the notion that in Zen enlightenment is important
Set aside the notion that in Zen enlightenment is not important
Set aside the notion that these set-asides are important
– Lewis Richmond
The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world,
and become one’s key to the experience of others.
– James Baldwin
The truth is that writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial.
– Virginia Woolf
Truly, words have no power.
Even though the mountain becomes the sea,
Words cannot open another’s mind.
– Mumon
The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.
– Annie Dillard
Of course spiritual practice could quite easily be a fantasy, a set of images, legends, doctrines and explanations that might serve to distract us from the fierce reality of our confused desires – offering them a higher and more socially acceptable path for projection to take, a more sophisticated way to freeze ourselves in place than a mere personal ego.
– Norman Fischer
Autopsychography
The poet is an inventor.
He invents so completely
That he succeeds in inventing
That the pain he really feels is pain.
And those who read what he writes
Really feel in the pain they have read,
Not the two which he felt,
But only the one they do not have.
And thus in the wheel ruts
There goes round and round, diverting Reason
That clockwork toy train
Which is called heart.
– Fernando Pessoa
So go down the road. Be death, be stardust, enter the
duality known to the generations who are vanished,
who left behind this double image, but only half
the message, just the instructions for how to begin.
– Eleanor Lerman
All my life I have been in love with bad weather. The clouds calm me down; if in the morning, from bed, I see them pass, I feel capable of facing the day. But I could never learn with the sun;…The sun only makes me lie down, digest my darkness.
– Emil Cioran
The danger is that global warming may become self-sustaining, if it has not done so already. The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps reduces the fraction of solar energy reflected back into space, and so increases the temperature further. Climate change may kill off the Amazon and other rain forests, and so eliminate once one of the main ways in which carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere. The rise in sea temperature may trigger the release of large quantities of carbon dioxide, trapped as hydrides on the ocean floor. Both these phenomena would increase the greenhouse effect, and so global warming further. We have to reverse global warming urgently, if we still can.
– Stephen Hawking
We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Rain
by Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by AZ Foreman
The afternoon has brightened up at last
For rain is falling, sudden and minute.
Falling or failing. There is no dispute :
Rain is a thing that happens in the past.
Who hears it fall retrieves a time that fled
When an uncanny windfall could reveal
To him a flower by the name of rose
And the perplexing redness of its red.
Falling until it blinds each windowpane,
Within a suburb now long lost this rain
Shall liven black grapes on a vine inside
A certain patio that is no more.
A long-awaited voice through the downpour
Is from my father. He has never died.
Do not underestimate someone who has lost everything and is still here to tell the story.
Do not underestimate someone who has fought dearly for sobriety. Peace. Forgiveness. Self-love. Freedom. Authenticity. Truth.
Do not underestimate the lonely. They have braved wars that only those who understand the absence of human connection can do. Even now. They are holding it all together while coming so wildly undone. And sometimes we may see them unravel ever so softly. Or loudly. Or however their soul unties its cage the best.
Do not underestimate the ones who have suffered the kind of grief that does not seem to end. Who have been broken in places you did not even know existed. The ones who fell into silence because their lungs had no words left to speak.
We will not always be strong.
No.
But we are enduring.
– Ullie Kaye
A poet is a blind optimist. The world is against him for many reasons. But the poet persists. He believes that he is on the right track, no matter what any of his fellow men say. In his eternal search for truth, the poet is alone. He tries to be timeless in a society built on time.
– Jack Kerouac
If we do what we like doing, we are immediately rewarded by the pleasure of doing it. If we do what we don’t like doing the reward must come later. It is a mathematical law and all life is mathematics.
– George Gurdjieff
Now it also seems to me that he who dreams is more awake than he who sleeps, and that he who spends a third part of his life in utter unconsciousness better deserves to be called a sleepyhead and dullard, than he for whom the dark nights are also vivid and rich with pulsing life. To me it has always seemed a shame to lie like a stone for so many hours, and to arise from sleep no wiser than when we sank into it…
For me a dreamless night is a bad night, and I call the man who passes his days in following perverted and inharmonious impulses and his nights dead as a cork — such a man I, with good reason, call sickly and abnormal.
– Frederik van Eeden
You wouldn’t believe the kind of person I could become if you wanted it.
– Franz Kafka
say I’m beaming
not beautiful
said the lighthouse
to the waves
21.XI.24 dailies
– Alec Finlay
All beauty is a dream,
even if it exists,
For beauty is
always more than it is.
The beauty I see in you
Isn’t here, next to me.
What I see in you lives
where I dream,
Far away from here.
If you exist,
I only know it
Because I just dreamed it.
– Fernando Pessoa
Watching My Father Lie
Cheek to Pillow, Eyes Open
It’s how the old think. Every night
when their heads rest on muslin
kept crisp in dull floral blooms.
They walk towards their beds,
one foot forward, the other,
sometimes slow to drag
behind, often, their weight
pressed on a cane, and
they drop, heavy on their coils,
fluff of a mattress over the spring.
They feel each thing, the bend
a joint makes in its ivory clatter.
Glad to have made another day,
scratching off the 24th on their calendars.
These calendars do not speak, you see,
of an autumn turned into winter and back.
– Marian Haddad
I am in peace, I operate in peace, I act in peace, and I call peace forward.
– Paul Selig
I sense that there has never been a time when it has been more important for us to gather and meet each other warm hand to warm hand as we release our narrow views, and open to truly who we are in these fraught times and recognize what our priorities are and act on those priorities. These are times when courage and wisdom are really needed. These are also times when we need to gather as a community or as many communities and affirm our aspirations to meet this world with courage and compassion.
– Joan Halifax
There is a tendency in us to follow the herd, to be one more. To get scared when we walk against everyone. However, it is more important to be able to reflect and distance ourselves from the madness of the crowds. To be able to be ourselves despite how difficult it is to get away from the flow.
– Marcus Aurelius
During these end times, taking and offering refuge becomes especially important. We need to find some way to cope with this falling apart, a way that is more wholesome than the addictions and distractions we often turn to—I’m not proud to report that my sugar intake has been through the roof lately! Focusing on refuge is a generative way to support ourselves and others.
– Maia Duerr
For a human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and contemporaries…
– Thomas Mann
Nothing persuades me that “in image of God” applies only to humans. I sense mountains, rivers, trees, lakes, animals, are far closer to essence of God than humans.
– Jung
Insecure people strive to prove their intelligence. They’re quick to assure us that they have the answer—they’re determined to be right.
Secure people aim to improve their intelligence. They’re quick to speak up when they have questions—they’re focused on getting it right.
– Adam Grant
The Well
At sixteen I believed the moonlight
could change me if it would.
I moved my head
on the pillow, even moved my bed
as the moon slowly
crossed the open lattice.
I wanted beauty, a dangerous
gleam of steel, my body thinner,
my pale face paler.
I moonbathed
diligently, as others sunbathe.
But the moon’s unsmiling stare
kept me awake. Mornings,
I was flushed and cross.
It was on dark nights of deep sleep
that I dreamed the most, sunk in the well,
and woke rested, and if not beautiful,
filled with some other power.
– Denise Levertov
The sun hits the peak first
so that it stays night for a while
in the towns and fields below.
As if the mountain were
the one eye, us blind.
– Elizabeth Arnold
What is the soul allowed to keep? Every birth, every small gift, every ache?
– Tracy K. Smith
I miss you always
when I go to the beach
the sand is wet with
tears that seem mine
– Frank O’Hara
The moment you change your perception, is the moment you rewrite the chemistry of your body.
– Dr. Bruce H. Lipton
If you want to see the inside of your head, all you have to do is keep your eyes open. Because everything that you’re experiencing in the external visual field is a state of your brain. All these colors and shapes are the way in which the brain nerves translate the electrical impulses in the external world; being in the world outside the envelope of skin.
So they translate all what is going on outside into impulses which are, to us, shape and color. But shape and color are states of the nerves, so what you see when your eyes are open is how it feels inside your head.
– Alan Watts
There’s shadow and then there’s shadow and then there’s the inky black tar stuck to the bottom of your soul, utterly unrecognizable to you as a part of yourself, and you go kicking and screaming into the slimy recognition that this too is you.
– River Kenna
You believe God looks at us from above but he actually sees us from the inside
– Shams Tabrizi
spiritual practice is mostly learning how to be inhabited by bigger and bigger silences.
– River Kenna
It is an odd situation when people accept massive sociological determinations but are very sensitive to humble moral limitations.
– Jacques Ellul
Now comes the time when swaying on its stem
each flower offers incense to the night
– Baudelaire; tr. Richard Howard
Remember when we learned the secret Beckett kept buried his whole life and it was that the stuff he did for the French resistance was actually really dangerous and important?
– Peli Grietzer
poets
awaiting snow
see lightning flash
– Basho
Be like family to your friends, a friend to strangers, and a stranger to your enemies.
– @naval
When your illusions drop, you’re in touch with reality at last, and believe me, you will never again be lonely, never again. Loneliness is not cured by human company. Loneliness is cured by contact with reality.
– Anthony de Mello
Remember that you will rise to the level of your systems, not the wants of your goals.
– Bryan Johnson
Using creativity to solve problems cannot be taught, and it’s ultimately what free markets pay for.
– @naval
The essential question: can we ever forgive—or forget—ourselves?
– Pico Iyer
In itself, every idea is neutral, or should be; but man animates ideas, projects his flames and flaws into them; impure, transformed into beliefs, ideas take their place in time, take shape as events: the trajectory is complete, from logic to epilepsy . . . whence the birth of ideologies, doctrines, deadly games.
Idolaters by instinct, we convert the objects of our dreams and our interests into the Unconditional.
History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable.
Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create fake gods, he feverishly adopts them: his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.
– Emil Cioran
Where children are, there is a golden age.
– Novalis
la littérature, l’amère gorgée d’un troptard
(literature, the bitter sip of a too-late)
– Hélène Cixous
Imagine how effective you would be if you weren’t anxious all the time.
– @naval
2 things I noticed with the highest achievers in the world:
1. They exercise
2. They read books
These are non-negotiables when you’ve got a high work load and big goals.
– Dan Go
middle of the night
Orion climbing
out of the clouds
– Kathy Watts
Capitalism is an art form, an Apollonian fabrication to rival nature. It is hypocritical for feminists and intellectuals to enjoy the pleasures and conveniences of capitalism while sneering at it. Everyone born into capitalism has incurred a debt to it.
– Camille Paglia
This does not seek a remedy
this does not need a balm
this needs an ending
– Dionne Brand
The first part of self mastery is controlling the foods that go into your body.
– Dan Go
Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely homework.
– Joyce Carol Oates
There is no peak on the spiritual path. Just new revolutions of increasingly higher potential.
– Nika Solé
Don’t let me stand, if you are the enemies of Spring.
– Simin Behbahani
RUMINATION
I sit up late dumb as a cow,
which is to say
somewhat conscious with thirst
and hunger, an eye for the new moon
and the morning’s long walk
to the water tank. Everywhere
around me the birds are waiting
for the light. In this world of dreams
don’t let the clock cut up
your life in pieces.
– James Harrison
They say that walking is controlled falling, they say put one foot in front of the other, they say things will return to normal and you will adjust to the change, as if those are similar promises, and possible.
– Anna Moschovakis
POET AS IMMORTAL BIRD
A second ago my heart thump went
and I thought, “This would be a bad time
to have a heart attack and die, in the
middle of a poem,” then took comfort
in the idea that no one I have ever heard
of has ever died in the middle of writing
a poem, just as birds never die in mid-flight.
I think.
– Ron Padgett
Infinitesimal, but not concealed
So deep but I can deeper lean:
As much cerulean this way as above,
Whole atoms with a firmament between.
– Hildegarde Flanner
When humanity
evaporates
in education,
then humanity
evaporates.
– Andy Perrin
If your choices are beautiful, so too will you be.
– Epictetus
I don’t want to write anything that is a consolation. I don’t want to console. I want us to feel just a tiny fraction. A tiny fraction more than we do in our deeply comfortable American lives […]
– Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Success is the inevitable byproduct of learning (not education).
– @naval
A lot of people would like to make the world better, but they don’t know how. This is a great tragedy.
It’s tragic not only for the people who need help, but also for the people who can help, because good intentions start to rot if you don’t act them out. Well-meaning people who remain idle end up sick in the heart and the head, and they often develop exquisite ideologies to excuse their inaction—they start to believe that witnessing problems is as good as solving them, or that it’s impossible to make things better and therefore foolish to try, or that every sorrow in the world is someone else’s fault and therefore someone else’s responsibility.
We get stuck here because we assume that there are only two paths to improving the world. Option #1 is to go high-status: get rich so you can blast problems with your billions of bucks, or get into office so you can ban all the bad things and mandate all the good things. Only a fortunate few are powerful enough to do anything, of course, so most of the people attempting to improve the world through the high-status route will end up either begging our overlords to do the right thing, or trying to drum up the votes necessary to replace them.
Option #2 is to go high-sacrifice: sell everything you have and spend your life earning $7/hr to scrub the toilets in an orphanage. Only a virtuous few will have the saintliness necessary to live such a life, of course, so most of the people attempting to improve the world through the high-sacrifice path will end up writing checks to the martyrs on the front lines.
These paths aren’t wrong. They’re just too narrow. Money, power, and selflessness are all useful tools in the right hands, but the world is messed up in all sorts of ways that can’t be legislated against, bought off, or undone with a hunger strike. When we focus on just two avenues for making the world better, we exclude almost everybody, leaving most of us with a kind of constipated altruism—we’ve got the urge to do good, but nothing comes out.
I don’t know all the ways to get our good intentions unblocked. That’s why, whenever I spot someone changing the world via a righteous road less taken, I write it down on a little list. I glance at that list from time to time as a way of expanding my imagination, and now I’m sharing it in the hopes that it’ll do the same for you.
– Adam Mastroianni
And how odd it is to
be haunted by someone
that is still alive.
– Sierra Colbeth
each time
a little further…
first steps
– @lafcadiopoetry
Creativity is not a solitary movement. That is its power. Whatever is touched by it, whoever hears it, sees it, senses it, knows it, is fed. That is why beholding someone else’s creative word, image, idea, fills us up, inspires us to our own creative work. A single creative act has the potential to feed a continent. One creative act can cause a torrent to
break through stone.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estes
starry starry nights
when will the miners
dig the diamonds from our eyes
– Beez Laine
Let writing get to the real topography that we are taped to. Instead of serenading the landscape with gentle reprimands and sly innuendo, poetry could help with the labor of dislodging some of those boulders. Enough bodies lie already under them. Let the imagination use its power to see what pathway could lead up and into the terrain of a habitable possibility.
– Noah De Lissovoy
a thousand photos
what the sun
does to the sky
– @coffeeandhaiku
Just realize that much of that work on yourself reinforces self centeredness and having children moves you on the opposite direction.
– @challahman
Edit your life frequently and ruthlessly. It’s your
masterpiece after all.
– Nathan W. Morris
hunt for words
with quill blade—
walking the forest of fresh page
– @NightingaleNote
DESIRES
Like beautiful bodies of the dead who had not grown old
and they shut them, with tears, in a magnificent mausoleum,
with roses at the head and jasmine at the feet—
that is how desires look that have passed
without fulfillment; without one of them having achieved
a night of sensual delight, or a moonlit morn.
– C.P. Cavafy, translated by Rae Dalven
Nothing is ever easy or true,
except the leaves. They all fall.
Dependable as a season.
– January Gill O’Neil
The less scheduled you are, the more creative you’re going to be.
– @naval
DUST OF SNOW
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
– Robert Frost
thinking about how my job as an educator is give students the opportunity to get smarter, not to police or moralize about whether they take that opportunity.
– @profchander
Hope is no substitute for strategy.
– Percival Everett
Don’t for heaven’s sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
In analysis people finally realize that they’ve been talking nonsense at full volume for years.
– Jacques Lacan
Your metabolism isn’t slow.
Your lifestyle is excessive.
– Dan Go
Instead of asking what books you should read,
ask what ideas you should understand.
– @naval
The pages and pages I’ve had to tear up!
– Thornton Wilder
What some call grey, I call mother
of pearl—the full moon polishing the sky.
– Devon Balwit
The closest thing to creating a life is saving one. How miserably has humanity failed Palestinians.
– Hanine Hassan
For me, the revision is often when a poem is too controlled… I haven’t really disrupted it from the bottom — and that’s when I step in to mess with it and experiment.
– Allison Adair
Our modern educational system fails to provide sufficient education about compassion. The time has come to transform this whole system. Society is formed through its educational system, but the educational system does not transmit the deeper human values of compassion and kindness.
– The Dalai Lama
If your practice is breathing, be one with breathing! If your practice is shikantaza, or just sitting, then just sit! If your practice is koan, be the koan!
– Maezumi Roshi
Calm down. Both your sins and your good deeds will be lost in oblivion.
– Czesław Miłosz
It is because of you, shunyata, prajna, maya, that all the buddhas can function as the Buddha. All the buddhas’ infinite activities never end because everything is illusion, because everything is shunyata.
Today one could say is the day for mother because it is considered to be the day Buddha descended from Tushita where he went to visit his mother. Have you thought about this, that his mother’s name is Maya? That is very, very interesting because “maya” means “illusion”. And who would call somebody “illusion” these days? And for that matter, a queen. This name is something to think about. Of course, this is not accidental because, especially in Vajrayana Buddhism, we say that even the Buddha is an illusion, an illusion that arose from illusion.
– Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche
Freud thought that “love your enemies” was unrealistic. Yet Jesus was dedicated to reality. Everything shifts when we decide to look at enemies and only wish well for them. And when we cease to see them as enemies at all. But who can wish well-being for enemies? A mystic? A holy person? No. Only folks moving toward healing and health. Charles Pickering says that “a healthy democracy requires a decent society” where people are “honorable, tolerant, generous, and respectful.” But who can pull that off? Only a healed person can do that.
– Greg Boyle
When we successfully reframe public discourse, we change the way the public sees the world. We change what counts as common sense. Because language activates frames, new language is required for new frames.Thinking differently requires speaking differently.
Reframing is not easy or simple. It is not a matter of finding some magic words. Frames are ideas, not slogans. Reframing is more a matter of accessing what we and like-minded others already believe unconsciously, making it conscious, and repeating it till it enters normal public discourse. It doesn’t happen overnight. It is an ongoing process. It requires repetition and focus and dedication. To achieve social change, reframing requires a change in public discourse, and that requires a communication system.
Conservatives in America have developed a very extensive and sophisticated communication system that progressives have not yet developed. Fox News is only the tip of the iceberg. Progressives need to understand what an effective communication system is and develop one. Reframing without a system of communication accomplishes nothing.
– George Lakoff
Ghazal Overheard
for Robert Bly, 1926~2021
Ache of morning without you, ache
of the book I open seeking you, ache
of absence, ache of voice in my closest listening.
Snow falls in the field of many grasses
where this October the fox hid, voyeur of pond.
Writing poems, you said, the same: a wild listening.
Odin slung from the Tree, Inanna, stripped of crown, jewels, dominion.
Falstaff and midnight’s chimes, Jesu, Jesu, the green of Ireland,
every loss and landscape play the music of listening.
Cezanne stood in one place, Mont Sainte-Chapelle in another,
connected by the portolan of seeing. We wrote every poem
because you were listening.
The elk herd is here today, in their thick winter fur,
the small ones near their mothers. Nuthatches, chickadees,
flicker’s flash of underwing orange—choral listening.
I only know to leave by losing everything.
I have a house, then I don’t: words on the page, then
nothing. Do you hear me listening?
When the plaster cracked revealing the Golden Buddha,
we sat sesshin exactly the same as the day before.
This is our practice, over and over. We are listening.
Wagonload of hay, boxwood, Tranströmer, Antonio
Machado, Rilke. You left us so many gifts. I kept
your Giant mask, the beanstalk still (g)listening.
Yeats wrote Lake Isle of Innisfree on a London bus,
that’s the secret, isn’t it? Longing eclipses the distance
from home to here, you to us, poem to page.
You just keep listening.
– Judyth Hill
The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random among the profusion of [planets] and the galaxies, but that in this prison we can fashion images sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.
– Andre Malraux
I recognized winter. I saw it coming (a mile off, since you ask), and I looked it in the eye. I greeted it and let it in. I had some tricks up my sleeve, you see. I’ve learned them the hard way. When I started feeling the drag of winter, I began to treat myself like a favored child: with kindness and love. I assumed my needs were reasonable and that my feelings were signals of something important. I kept myself well fed and made sure I was getting enough sleep. I took myself for walks in the fresh air and spent time doing things that soothed me. I asked myself: What is this winter all about? I asked myself: What change is coming?
– Katherine May
Since the meds and therapy started working we don’t get to kiss each other goodnight anymore. He is turning off the light while I’m getting up to feed the chickens.
– Neil Hilborn
People want to know how much you care before they care how much you know.
– John Maxwell
HEALING
This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge – even wisdom. Like art.
– Toni Morrison
Children believe what we tell them. They have complete faith in us. They believe that a rose plucked from a garden can plunge a family into conflict. They believe that the hands of a human beast will smoke when he slays a victim, and that this will cause him shame when a young maiden takes up residence in his home. They believe a thousand other simple things.
I ask of you a little of this childlike sympathy and, to bring us luck, let me speak four truly magic words, childhood’s “Open Sesame”:
Once upon a time…
– Jean Cocteau
What a shame to have been born a human being and to spend your whole life worrying. You should reach the point where you can be happy to have been born a human.
Birth, old age, sickness, and death – we can’t fool around with these ultimate facts.
Reality: getting a handle on this must be our goal. Don’t get stuck in categories.
It’s strange that not a single person seriously considers his own life. For ages, we’ve been carrying around something uncooked. And we comfort ourselves with the fact that it’s the same for the others too. That’s what I call group stupidity: thinking that we just have to be like the others. Satori means creating your own life. It means waking up from group stupidity.
– Kodo Sawaki, To you
The Introverted
Intuitive has, in a way,
a very difficult life,
although one of the
most interesting lives.
– Carl Jung
Love can happen in a split second. Bondedness can’t. That’s the thing we learn the hard way. That love is not the end of the story. It’s just the first chapter. The next chapters demand that we acknowledge our wounding, clear our emotional debris, strengthen our capacity for attachment, learn how to authentically relate, mature in the deep within. Chapter after chapter of refining our ability to meet love with a true heart. This is the work of a lifetime.
Dear hearts; heart awakening message for today: Love grows in all shapes and sizes…Love grows in an open heart… Love grows by sharing, giving… being Love. You are Love… let yourself grow and transform into the beautiful Loving heart that You already are…
A Friend: Without experiencing the deepest losses and the pinnacles of joy, one has very limited view of life’s greatest pageant.
– Analytical Psychology: Theory and Practice
I phoned Leonard on the day that my mother – who in many ways was my ‘significant other’ – died. ‘Was that somehow strange, devoting one’s life to one’s mother?’ I asked. His response was impeccable: ‘Jenny, never question where love comes from. We have no control over these things. From a stranger, a mother, a dog, or that perfect mate, it comes from wherever it comes. You were lucky, in fact – everyone hopes to find love in the place that you found it.
– Jennifer Warnes, Conversation with Leonard Cohen
Your mother’s soul hovers ahead.
Your mother’s soul helps to navigate night, reef after reef.
– Paul Celan
(tr. Michael Hamburger)
People will talk like they know you because they met you once or knew you in high school. Like baby, that was three dark nights of the soul and seven rebirths ago. Get to know me again.
– Nika Solé
I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet. Anybody who could possibly call himself a poet just cannot be a poet.
– Bob Dylan
We dream of a journey through the universe. But is the universe then not in us? We do not know the depths of our spirit. Inward goes the secret path. Eternity with its worlds, the past and future, is in us or nowhere.
– Novalis
I feel inhabited by a consciousness that looks out through the eyeholes in my face, and this doesn’t seem to have originated with me. I feel like a receiver made for a transmission that was going on long before I arrived’
– Russell Hoban
How can I expect anyone else to understand what I barely understand about myself? I’m continually overtaken by wildness and mystery. My only constant is curiosity. Who am I? I can’t say definitively. But I can (finally) allow life to flow through me.
– McCall Erickson
For the record, the only real home of philosophy is a wine barrel.
– Ryan Ruby
There’s a word in modern Hungarian slang, egérmozi, which describes watching films (or shows) on your phone. It means “mouse cinema”
– @AdamCSharp
The Weight of Glory
There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarelling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.
– C.S. Lewis
The reason to moderate
is to avoid having
to quit.
– Jim Harrison
… and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
– George Eliot
The story that moved in darkness ends in darkness.
– Borges
If you want to see how healthy you are, look inside at your fridge and pantry.
– Dan Go
The writer isn’t made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.
– E. L. Doctorow
We’re taught to whisper when we pray.
The frequency of God is low.
The dead speak louder every day.
– Eric Nelson
The opposite of “Intellectual Yet Idiot” is “street smart.”
– @naval
Stories are holy and nutritious and crucial. Stories change lives; stories save lives…. They crack open hearts, they open minds.
– Brian Doyle
The people you most want to impress can read your intentions.
– @naval
Expectant and waiting you muse
On the great rare thing which alone
To enhance your life you would choose:
The awakening of the stone,
The deeps where yourself you would lose.
– Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Jessie Lemont)
The post-modern self has a tendency to revel in trauma.
I think this is largely a function of the post-modern emphasis on narrative.
When the world is made of stories the (initial) implication seems to be that the self is the source of these stories, thus one becomes obsessed with their own self-narrative, especially with their trauma.
As one deepens into post-modernism it begins to dawn that the source of these stories is much more collectively-generated than self-generated. We’re embedded in the stories of others, especially those that came before us.
Now, the post-modern ego turns its attention to marginalized stories and peoples, seeking justice for those whose stories have not been heard by those in power (I.e. those most responsible for shaping collective stories).
The entrance into meta-modernism is marked by a both/and orientation to self & others.
– @VinceFHorn
A normalized transgression is no longer transgressive. That’s the prick, the punctum, of intensity.
– Alina Stefanescu
please remember there is something so obvious to you it doesn’t bear mentioning, but if you can articulate it you will change the world.
– @bashu_thanks
Feeling like a bioregional congress is in order.
– @regenavocado
My mind is my main problem almost all the time. I wish I could leave it in the fridge when I go out, but it likes to come with me. I have tried to get it to take up a nice hobby, like macramé, but it prefers to think about things, and jot down what annoys it.
– Anne Lamott
The events of this world are not admirably connected.
– Marguerite Young
Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.
– André Gide
All that matters is that you spare yourself nothing and wear yourself out and risk everything to find something that seems true. And if you fail to do these things, you torture yourself about your failures. And then get back to work.
– Tony Kushner
Margaret Atwood once said to me, with a wise look in her eye, There are no holidays in this job. She’s right. But there are onerous tasks and less onerous tasks.
– Ali Smith
I no longer have any use for the sweeping gestures of heroes on the global stage. I’m going for a walk.
– Joseph Roth
When you allow the future into your body, you’re courting grief.
– River Kenna
This is how an angel comes
out of the earth, upwards
from the underworld
when everybody thought
they came from the light wings
of the sky – no
they are massive –
on nights of rain and sleet, split
the soil, splash and muddy the grass
wingspans wide as lakes
wearing mud armour, they crawl
full length up rivers and streams
dam ditches, seep through drains
penetrate walls, barns, chicken coops
unsettle bats with wing-beats
that shake down trees –
remind us, cradled in our prayers
how we like to remain dry, sheltered.
This is how angels come
mouths full of earth
spitting verses
of poetry.
– Miriam Darlington
To Jung, the purpose of life was to realize one’s own potential, to follow one’s own perception of the truth, and to become a whole person in one’s own right.
– Anthony Stevens
To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that’s political, in its most profound way.
– June Jordan
Suffering only shows where you are attached. That is why, to those on the path, suffering is grace.
– Ram Dass
Whatever thought passes on the screen of your mind, be a watcher. Whatever emotion passes on the screen of your heart, just remain a witness, don’t get involved, don’t get identified, don’t evaluate what is good, what is bad; that is not part of your meditation.
– Osho
Individuals rarely admit mistakes. Groups never do.
– @naval
I am just the same as when
Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers.
– Thomas Hardy
never apologize for being obsessed. wake up early. stay up late. train twice a day if you want. treat work like a game. seek knowledge like an addict. turn off the world, and create your own. set a vision. trust it. put work-life harmony over work-life balance. find joy in the extremes. it’s okay to have a burning desire, and not put out the flames.
– @lowkeyloud_
Tiredness grows
in the places where love
doesn’t stir.
Vitality shows
in the traces love makes
coming through.
Excitement hums
because love is truly
staggering.
Believing drums
so that it can be
unflagging.
– George Gorman
Bolt and bar the shutter
For the foul winds blow:
Our minds are at their best this night
And I seem to know
That everything outside us is
Mad as the mist and snow.
– W. B. Yeats
But yes, you can imagine, you must try. Nothing stands between us and atrocities but words, so there is no choice but to try and imagine.
– Abdulrazak Gurnah
Since nature and man contradict each other so often and so sharply, philosophy perhaps can’t avoid doing the same.
– Friedrich Schlegel
When the clouds dissolve, is the clear sky something new? The sky has been there from beginningless time! Only the clouds have changed.
– Lama Migmar Tseten
We take people into our hearts as is, because if we want them to change they become an object in our minds instead of the subject of our hearts.
– Stephen & Ondrea Levine
Plagiarism at the Crossroads I don’t know about you, but I realised something profound years ago when watching the movie Crossroads with Ralph Macchio. The premise is a classical guitarist who is at the same time a committed blues fan enlists the help of an aging former blues musician in order to find a lost composition by guitar great Robert Johnson, which he then hopes to be the first to record.
The real life myth, for those that are unaware, is that Robert Johnson signed a deal with the devil at the crossroads between heaven and hell, exchanging his immortal soul for musical prowess and success. Ralph and friend end up at said crossroads and the finale of the film is Ralph duelling with the devil’s guitarist, played by Steve Vai.
Now, little Stevie is pretty awesome in his attacks against Ralph, lots of technical wizardry and flawless playing but Ralph holds his own, on his trusty old Tele. Then, just when we think all is lost as Steve plays a showstopping solo, Ralph (Eugene) pulls out from his trick bag one of his classical pieces, played at a blistering pace, completely bamboozling Steve.
So, what is the response from the guitarist that represents the hordes of hell and is the finest in the eyes of his lord and master? An even harder classical piece? Technical fireworks befitting one of such stature? A sonic journey that mere mortals can only wonder at? No. He tries to copy Ralph. That is his downfall, and is a metaphor for the devil not being able to create but instead only destroy, and in the process is destroyed himself.
That was a lightbulb moment for me. Create, don’t copy. I had years of copying Hendrix, Satriani, Vai, Johnson and many other guitarists but then I realised that this is only a stage that one goes through. Use others for inspiration and to gain understanding, but ultimately one must go on and create from one’s heart and mind. Worked for me, and I am sure it will for you too, if it hasn’t already.
– Modal Method Music Theory Group
The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. If a mountain is a deity, not a pile of ore; if a river is one of the veins of the land, not potential irrigation water; if a forest is a sacred grove, not timber; if other species are our biological kin, not resources; or if the planet is our mother, not an opportunity – then we will treat each one with greater respect. That is the challenge, to look at the world from a different perspective.
– David Suzuki
It was lunar symbolism that enabled man to relate and connect such heterogeneous things as: birth, becoming, death, and ressurection; the waters, plants, woman, fecundity, and immortality; the cosmic darkness, prenatal existence, and life after death, followed by the rebirth of the lunar type (“light coming out of darkness”); weaving, the symbol of the “thread of life,” fate, temporality, and death; and yet others. In general most of the ideas of cycle, dualism, polarity, opposition, conflict, but also of reconciliation of contraries, of coincidentia oppositorum, were either discovered or clarified by virtue of lunar symbolism. We may even speak of a metaphysics of the moon, in the sense of a consistent system of “truths” relating to the mode of being peculiar to living creatures, to everything in the cosmos that shares in life, that is, in becoming, growth and waning, death and ressurrection.
– Mircea Eliade
THERE ARE SOME MEN
by Leonard Cohen
There are some men
who should have mountains
to bear their names to time.
Grave-markers are not high enough
or green,
and sons go far away
to lose the fist
their father’s hand will always seem.
I had a friend:
he lived and died in mighty silence
and with dignity,
left no book, son, or lover to mourn.
Nor is this a mourning-song
but only a naming of this mountain
on which I walk,
fragrant, dark, and softly white
under the pale of mist.
I name this mountain after him.
…Such is the Void that is beyond your understanding! You see the development of the movement and at the same time go beyond that!” This is mysticism and love. Suppose two loving people are embracing each other. In this tiniest moment, the whole universe vanishes. They feel eternity. This moment contains the eternity which is space – this eternity is either a linear movement going up, coming down, or a circular movement like that of two dolphins turning around each other.
– Sri Anirvan, Letters from a Baul
ADVICE TO MYSELF #2: RESISTANCE
by Louise Erdrich
Resist the thought that you may need a savior,
or another special being to walk beside you.
Resist the thought that you are alone.
Resist turning your back on the knife
of the world’s sorrow,
resist turning that knife upon yourself.
Resist your disappearance
into sentimental monikers,
into the violent pattern of corporate logos,
into the mouth of the unholy flower of consumerism.
Resist being consumed.
Resist your disappearance
into anything except
the face you had before you walked up to the podium.
Resist all funding sources but accept all money.
Cut the strings and dismantle the web
that needing money throws over you.
Resist the distractions of excess.
Wear old clothes and avoid chain restaurants.
Resist your genius and your own significance
as declared by others.
Resist all hint of glory but accept the accolade
as tributes to your double.
Walk away in your unpurchased skin.
Resist the millionth purchase and go backward.
Get rid of everything.
If you exist, then you are loved
by existence. What do you need?
A spoon, a blanket, a bowl, a book —
maybe the book you give away.
Resist the need to worry, robbing everything
of immediacy and peace.
Resist traveling except where you want to go.
Resist seeing yourself in others or them in you.
Nothing, everything, is personal.
Resist all pressure to have children
unless you crave the torment of joy.
If you give in to irrationality, then
resist cleaning up the messes your children make.
You are robbing them of small despairs they can fix.
Resist cleaning up after your husband.
It will soon replace having sex with him.
Resist outrageous charts spelling doom.
However you can, rely on sun and wind.
Resist loss of the miraculous
by lowering your standards
for what constitutes a miracle.
It is all a fucking miracle.
Resist your own gift’s power
to tear you away from the simplicity of tears.
Your gift will begin to watch you having your emotions,
so that it can use them in an interesting paragraph,
or to get a laugh.
Resist the blue chair of dreams, the red chair of science, the black chair of the humanities, and just be human.
Resist all chairs.
Be the one sitting on the ground
or perching on the beam overhead
or sleeping beneath the podium.
Resist disappearing from the stage,
unless you can walk straight into the bathroom and resume the face,
the desolate face, the radiant face, the weary face, the face
that has become your own, though all your life
you have resisted it.
The tension of the future is unbearable in us. It must break through narrow cracks, it must force new ways. You want to cast off the burden, you want to escape the inescapable. Running away is deception and detour. Shut your eyes so that you do not see the manifold, the outwardly plural, the tearing away and the tempting. There is only one way and that is your way; there is only one salvation and that is your salvation. Why are you looking around for help? Do you believe that help will come from outside? What is to come is created in you and from you. Hence look into yourself. Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is like
yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfill the way that is in you.
– Carl G. Jung
Behind the unwillingness to judge lurks the suspicion that no one is a free agent, and hence the doubt that anyone is responsible or could be expected to answer for what he has done. The moment moral issues are raised, even in passing, he who raises them will be confronted with this frightful lack of self-confidence and hence of pride, and also with a kind of mock-modesty that in saying, ‘Who am I to judge?’ actually means ‘We’re all alike, equally bad, and those who try, or pretend that they try, to remain halfway decent are either saints or hypocrites, and in either case should leave us alone.’
– Hannah Arendt
Contrary to popular belief, time does not heal, time does not fly, time does not do anything. Time has no consciousness. It does nothing for you. The key to happiness now is what you choose to do with your time right now. Are you, right now, making the most valuable use of your time? This moment is, after all, the time of your life. Your choices are what make each moment.
– Robert Holden
Inviting Spaciousness.
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Today when the heart is a small, tight knot,
I do not try to untangle it. I don’t tug on the strings in a desperate attempt to unravel it.
I don’t even wonder at how it got so snarled.
Instead, I imagine cradling it, cupping it with my hands like something precious,
something wounded, a bird with a broken wing.
I cradle my heart like the frightened thing it is.
I imagine all the other frightened hearts and imagine them all being held in love.
And I breathe. I breathe and feel
how the breathing invites a spaciousness.
I breathe and let myself be moved by the breathing as I open and soften. Open and soften.
And nothing changes. And everything changes.
The heart, still a knot, remembers
it knows how to love. It knows it is not alone.
Evil can be opposed without being mirrored. Oppressors can be resisted without being emulated. Enemies can be neutralized without being destroyed.
– Walter Wink
Of The Empire
We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the
world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.
– Mary Oliver
The wantonness of the conqueror that knows no respect for any creature or thing that is at its mercy or is imagined to be so, the despair of the soldier that drives him on to destruction, the obliteration of the slave or the conquered man, the wholesale slaughter — all these elements combine in the Iliad to make a picture of uniform horror, of which force is the sole hero. A monotonous desolation would result were it not for those few luminous moments, scattered here and there through out the poem, those brief, celestial moments in which man possesses his soul. The soul that awakes then, to live for an instant only and be lost almost at once in force’s vast kingdom, awakes pure and whole; it contains no ambiguities, nothing complicated or turbid; it has no room for anything but courage and love. […] It is in a moment of love that men discover their souls — and there is hardly any form of pure love known to humanity of which the Iliad does not treat.
– Simone Weil, The Iliad or The Poem of Force
Music may yet be unborn. Perhaps no music has ever been written or heard. Perhaps the birth of art will take place at the moment in which the last man who is willing to make a living out of art is gone and gone forever.
– Charles Ives
I Go Down To The Shore
I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.
– Mary Oliver
There is in Celtic mythology the notion of ‘thin places’ in the universe where the visible and the invisible world come into their closest proximity. To seek such places is the vocation of the wise and the good — and for those that find them, the clearest communication between the temporal and eternal. Mountains and rivers are particularly favored as thin places marking invariably as they do, the horizontal and perpendicular frontiers. But perhaps the ultimate of these thin places in the human condition are the experiences people are likely to have as they encounter suffering, joy, and mystery.
– Peter Gomes
This illusion which pushes us to seek the reality of the subject beyond the wall of language is the same by which the subject believes that its truth is already given in us, that we know it in advance.
– Jacques Lacan
When the moon rises, the bells hang silent, and impenetrable footpaths appear. When the moon rises, the sea covers the land, and the heart feels like an island in infinity
– Federico Garcia Lorca
A man who uses an imaginary map thinking that it is a true one, is likely to be worse off than someone with no map at all.
– Ernst Schumacher
If Jack succeeds in forgetting something, this is of little use if Jill continues to remind him of it. He must induce her not to do so. The safest way would be not just to make her keep quiet about it, but to induce her to forget it also.
Jack may act upon Jill in many ways. He may make her feel guilty for keeping on “bringing it up.” He may invalidate her experience. This can be done more or less radically. He can indicate merely that it is unimportant or trivial, whereas it is important and significant to her. Going further, he can shift the modality of her experience from memory to imagination: “It’s all in your imagination.” Further still, he can invalidate the content: “It never happened that way.” Finally, he can invalidate not only the significance, modality, and content, but her very capacity to remember at all, and make her feel guilty for doing so into the bargain.
This is not unusual. People are doing such things to each other all the time. In order for such transpersonal invalidation to work, however, it is advisable to overlay it with a thick patina of mystification. For instance, by denying that this is what one is doing, and further invalidating any perception that it is being done by ascriptions such as “How can you think such a thing?”
“You must be paranoid.” And so on.
– R.D. Laing
It is important to see that the main point of any spiritual practice is to step out of the bureaucracy of ego. This means stepping out of ego’s constant desire for a higher, more spiritual, more transcendental version of knowledge, religion, virtue, judgment, comfort, or whatever it is that the particular ego is seeking. One must step out of spiritual materialism. If we do not step out of spiritual materialism, if we, in fact, practice it, then we may eventually find ourselves possessed of a huge collection of spiritual paths. We may feel these spiritual collections to be very precious. We have studied so much. We may have studied Western philosophy or Oriental philosophy, practiced yoga, or perhaps have studied under dozens of great masters.
We have achieved and we have learned. We believe that we have accumulated a hoard of knowledge. And yet, having gone through all this, there is still something to give up. It is extremely mysterious! How could this happen? Impossible! But unfortunately it is so. Our vast collections of knowledge and experience are just part of ego’s display, part of the grandiose quality of ego. We display them to the world and, in so doing, reassure ourselves that we exist, safe and secure, as “spiritual” people.
– Chogyam Trungpa
I believe in God. But I do not believe the same things about Him that I did years ago, when I was growing up or when I was a theological student. I recognize His limitations. He is limited in what He can do by laws of nature and by the evolution of human nature and human moral freedom… I can worship a God who hates suffering but cannot eliminate it, more easily than I can worship a God who chooses to make children suffer and die, for whatever exalted reason.
– Rabbi Harold Kushner
It’s that dream that we carry with us
that something wonderful will happen,
that it has to happen,
that time will open,
that the heart will open,
that doors will open,
that the mountains will open,
that wells will leap up,
that the dream will open,
that one morning we’ll slip in
to a harbor that we’ve never known.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
– Albert Camus
We may experience a part of our self that constantly complains. Nothing is ever right. This attitude blinds the soul from perceiving the great richness of the inner and outer kingdom.
When a student begins to realize how much they are always complaining, and how much this colors reality, a kind of remorse opens up, a sorrow, because they understand that they have blinded themselves.
Such remorse leads to repentance, or inner turning. Whatever the universe or humanity has done to you may have generated bitterness within. Now there is a great and profound sweetness. Repetition of Ya Shakur (Thankfulness) is an antidote for dissatisfaction with the falseness or incompleteness of the world.
That veil that has made this universe into a place of deprivation, a place to be constantly complained about, has been removed. The whole universe becomes an oceanic goldenness. It started as a drop of honey, and it becomes a golden universe. The heart is opened, and there is sweetness and gratitude for every moment you breathe.
– Wali Ali Meyer et al, Physicians of the Heart
Elections belong to the people. It’s their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.
– Abraham Lincoln
From the moment I wrote that first poem I ran to the libraries and the bookstores and raided them nonstop. It was falling out of my ears. I was stuffing myself so fanatically and madly. I surely couldn’t understand it all.
– James Tate
There’s an elation when you finish a good poem, though there’s always the possibility that you’ll look at it later and find that it’s not as great as you’d thought.
– N. Scott Momaday
Struggling through the work is extremely important—more important to me than publishing it.
– Toni Morrison
Pain knows no distinction
Hear
the muted music of our
footsteps
thru the mist
– Mari Evans
We sat in silence with the trees
Our feet rooting into the ground
To touch the highest energy
The evergreens and us
– Desdamona
Go on more walks. Walk for no reason. Walk to solve a problem. Walk to blow off steam. Walk to get outside. Walk to listen, read, and learn. Walk to escape distractions. Walk to improve your health. Walk to think. A simple walking habit can change absolutely everything.
– Dan Koe
Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the plowshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird; keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guests, an altar for the unknown God. Then if a bird sing among your branches, do not be too eager to tame it. If you are conscious of something new – thought or feeling wakening in the depths of your being – do not be in a hurry to let in light upon it, to look at it; let the springing germ have the protection of being forgotten, hedge it round with quiet, and do not break in upon its darkness.
– Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Indeed, the beauty of nature is often the wisest balm for it gently relieves and releases the caged mind.
– John O’Donohue
Those who have integrated much of their own darkness have a kind of invisible authority, as though they had gained in weight and authority, and people do not seem to dare to attack them, instinctively feeling that they would get a slap in return.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
A calm mind, a fit body, and a house full of love. These things cannot be bought. They must be earned.
– @naval
…the world unravels always, and it must be rewoven time and time again. You must keep collecting threads—threads of meaning, threads of hope, threads of purpose, energy and will— along with all the knowledge, skill that every weaver needs.
You must keep on weaving—stopping sometimes only to repair your broken loom—weave a cloak of warmth and light against the dark and cold, a cloak in which to wrap whoever comes to you in need—the world with all its suffering, those near at hand, yourself.
– Parker J. Palmer
yes, the universe is conscious,
but what *humans* call consciousness is more of a regional dialect than a universal language
– River Kenna
Change is happening, whether it be local, in the fracturing of the UK, or across the sweep of history… It is happening on a planetary level, in the perils of climate change & species loss. Have human beings ever known such a moment?
– Kathleen Jamie
Writing a book is the worst idea you’ve ever had yet! You’re not going to make any money! It’s going to be nearly impossible to get people to care! And also, nobody has heard of you! Go for it.
– @TBQuarterly
You don’t need to get revenge when your presence is potent enough, because you know that your absence will say everything that needs to be said.
– Nika Solé
The wise warrior avoids the battle.
– Sun Tzu
Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.
– Marcus Tullius Cicero
You cannot consciously override unconscious information. This is the Law of Revered Effect and why efforts to change outward behaviors without going inward first will never work.
– Brandy Anderson
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
– Aristotle
I hear the wind blow, and I feel that it was worth being born just to hear the wind blow.
– Fernando Pessoa
The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.
– Dostoyevski
The more we get, the more we want… We have infinite longings and finite capacities.
– Stuart McAllister
The purest heart is precisely the one most willing to comprehend his own guilt most deeply.
– Søren Kierkegaard
When I’m writing, I write every day. It’s lovely when that’s happening. One day dovetailing into the next. Sometimes I don’t even know what day of the week it is.
– Raymond Carver
Memory is a rehearsal for a show that never goes on.
– Jonathan Lethem
Eternity has nothing to do with time. Time is what shuts you out from eternity. Eternity is now. It is the transcendent dimension of the now to which myth refers.
– Joseph Campbell
Every organic complexity works by the delegation of authority. Every organic unity is a system of love—that is to say: of mutual trust. It says: “Thank god I’ve got you around!” I often think about this when somebody does something that’s marvelous, and I think: “Whew! What a relief that you could do that and I didn’t have to!”
– Alan Watts
Our separation from each other is an optical illusion.
– Albert Einstein
Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I’d rather have cancer than a dishonest heart.
– Truman Capote
A further mistake of Nazism was to dress its techniques in a demoniac mask designed to inspire terror. … We do better. We dress technique in the aseptic mask of the surgeon.
– Jacques Ellul
The greatest sin is certainty. Certainty is the enemy of union. Certainty is the enemy of tolerance.
– Edward Berger
come this way
I am also lonely
this autumn evening
– Basho
All thoughts, all passions, all delights, whatever stirs this mortal frame, all are but ministers of love, and feed his sacred flame.
– Coleridge
The less we read, the more harmful it is what we read.
– Miguel de Unamuno
As a liberated person walks soundlessly, like a cat, he also takes himself lightly.
– Alan Watts
Just let go. Let go of how you thought your life should be, and embrace the life that is trying to work its way into your consciousness.
– Caroline Myss
Two dangers never cease threatening
the world: order and disorder.
– Paul Valéry
I don’t know what makes a writer’s voice. It’s dozens of things. There are people who write who don’t have it. They’re tone-deaf, even though they’re very fluent.
– Paula Fox
In the movements of starred solitudes,
to the bursting of the grains,
to the will of the leaves,
you will be howl of my substance.
– Salvatore Quasimodo (translated by Allen Mandelbaum)
It’s not the thoughts that pass through your head that impact your life; it’s the ones you take possession of and think about all day long.
– Michael Neill
When God is not being cryptic and silent, He or She is so obvious.
– Anne Lamott
The ones love us best are the ones we’ll lay to rest
And visit their graves on holidays at best
The ones love us least
are the ones we’ll die to please
If it’s any consolation, I don’t begin to understand them…
– Paul Westerberg
In a world where money has replaced morals, lies have replaced truth, billionaires have replaced public servants, sycophancy has replaced principle, corporations have replaced community, and technology has replaced simple human interaction, what are we to do? How are we to adapt and thrive, while still remaining true to ourselves? In this engaging collection of stories – covering human relationships strained by political division, Matrix-esque mind-control, page-turning political brinksmanship, and much more – Chris Kremidas-Courtney holds up a mirror to our individual and collective trauma in a world that’s changing too fast and reminds us that the choices we make today will, in infinite ways, determine how ‘the rest of our lives’ unfurl.
– Michael Bowden
The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the
men he has around him.
– Niccolò Machiavelli
“Trying to solve the problem of God,” writes Merton, “is like trying to see your own eyeballs.”
– Pico Iyer
If God wanted to hide, He would hide in the heart of man, for it is the last place he would look.
– Indian saying
It is always better to praise people for their effort, not their talent.
– Robert Greene
The ultimate test of man’s conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard.
– Gaylord Nelson
The more you are able to honor and accept the Now, the more you are free of pain and suffering.
– Eckhart Tolle
The Creator and the created are one, so what we see and feel is Spirit made manifest.
– Murdo Macdonald-Bayne
If we can’t critique our governments and homelands, we will be haunted by those failures. The Right is thriving, engorging itself on weapons and territory. The silences have been notable here for a year now. It hurts to hear your silences. It *hurts* friends.
– Alina Stefanescu
Dear diasporas, some of you want fascism in your homelands and centrists in the US, but that’s not how it works. The world is small and fascism is a global network bankrolled by billionaires. The turkey is us.
– Alina Stefanescu
It is the nature of the world of form that nothing stays fixed for very long – and so it starts to fall apart again. Forms dissolve; new forms arise. Watch the clouds. They will teach you about the world of form.
– Eckhart Tolle
Creamery Road
I hear from probably a mile away
(sounds carry across these hills) human
voices, but the words are indistinct.
Even the smell of a skunk
is pleasant, if distant enough.
– Keith Waldrop
How the Other Half Live
I wake in the night and go back to bed again
Night is another life, another world
Night says another language I listen to hear.
– William Bronk
MY THINKING
holds no thoughts:
it is patterned
like the thinking
of trees. There is
a lifting toward
light and a rooting
down into dark.
There are leafy
tongues that bloom
from my palms
and every autumn
they turn gold
and I let them
scuttle away
in the wind.
– Tomaž Šalamun
Poetry, staring out at the muscular horizon
thinking,
I miss you, I will never not miss you
non-contributing, thinking,
my first love is living,
but you do not have a first love.
– Syreeta Muir
Nothing wondrous can come in this world unless it rests on the shoulders of kindness.
– Barbara Kingsolver
We are reduced to asking others what we are. We never dare to ask ourselves.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau
To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.
– Kierkegaard
Diving down online rabbit holes was not great for my mental health… The term ‘rabbit hole’ makes us think of Alice plummeting straight down, but what I mean is an actual rabbit warren, the kind with endless looping tunnels, branching paths, all the accompanying claustrophobia.
– Rebecca Makkai
Alone by choice on Saturday nights, writing by an open window in his studio apartment, [he] had experienced a kind of euphoria: a swelling, bursting, yearning hunger that had something in common with lust but included everyone, from the revelers outside his window to the carousers down the hall. He was where he wanted to be, and needed nothing else.
– Jennifer Egan
As someone who has spent his adult life studying the human mind and the subjective nature of human experience, I can say without hesitation that the entire concept of “echo chambers” is a conservative strategy—amplified by corporate media—designed to make liberals/progressives feel bad about expressing our values.
– Ethan Nichtern
Creating allows our spirits to soar and our imaginations to flourish.
– Fida Hussain
The way you alchemize a soulless world into a sacred world is by treating everyone as if they are sacred, until the sacred in them remembers.
– Sarah Durham Wilson
The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again.
– Charles Dickens
We are all collective intelligences.
– Michael Levin
No amount of work on ourselves will grant us so much self-control that nothing will rattle us.
– Winifred Reilly
Those who win the Nobel Prize in Literature are not the best storytellers. Those who win the Nobel Prize in Economics are.
– Yuval Noah Harari
Psychology is just the study of Fallen Man.
– Jacqueline Marjorie Swift
To tend the world: read a little, listen to music.
– Adam Zagajewski
Value questions that awaken the soul over answers that silence it.
– Fida Hussain
In English, we say, “And finally, she chose herself.” But in poetry, we say, “After giving her all to everyone else, she turned to the mirror, saw the cracks in her reflection, and decided to love herself whole again.”
– atruesoulwrites@
Compounding is hard because a bad month can feel longer than a good decade.
– Morgan Housel
She said she would make a poet out of me and I didn’t know what she meant until she left.
– Tin Man
The witching hour was a special moment in the middle of the night when every child and every grown-up was in a deep, deep sleep, and all the dark things came out from hiding and had the world all to themselves.
– Roald Dahl
How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?
– Nina Simone
To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
– Walter Benjamin
Competing without software is like competing without electricity.
– Naval Ravikant
If we lose hope we become apathetic.
– Jane Goodall
You know that great pause that comes upon things before the dusk, even the breeze stops in the trees. To me there is always an air of expectation about that evening stillness.
– H.G. Wells
You don’t get happy by sitting around going on, ‘Oh this is a horrible situation, what to do?’ You’ve got to find the courage to change that.
– Florence Henderson
People take four courses in economics, go to business school, have all these I.Q. points, and write all these essays, but they can’t synthesize worth a damn.
– Charlie Munger
MESSENGER
My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird —
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.
– Mary Oliver
When asked “Why do people read books?” Jean Paul Sartre answered, “People read books to see if they are in them”
Unformed people delight in the gaudy and in novelty. Cooked people delight in the ordinary.
– Zen saying
A human lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.
– Thomas Mann
It seems, just now,
To be happening so very fast;
Despite all the land left free
For the first time I feel somehow
That it isn’t going to last…
First slum of Europe: a role
It won’t be hard to win,
With a cast of crooks and tarts.
And that will be England gone
– Philip Larkin
In a Field She Twirls, Arms Akimbo &
the World Stops to Watch (or: Happiness)
In this poem, my mother has no purpose
beyond existing, beyond beauty, beyond
dancing beneath the stars. Let me give
way before meaning, let me incoherent,
let me give her this one shining moment.
– Omar Sak
There is no way out of the spiritual battle
There is no way to avoid taking sides
There is no way you can not have a poetics
no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher
you do it in the consciousness of making
or not making yr world
you have a poetics: you step into the world
like a suit of readymade clothes
or you etch in light your
firmament spills into the shape of your room
the shape of the poem, of yr body, of yr loves
A woman’s life / a man’s life is an allegory
Dig it
There is no way out of the spiritual battle
the war is the war against the imagination
you can’t sign up as a conscientious objector
the war of the worlds hangs here, right now, in the balance
it is a war for this world, to keep it
a vale of soul-making
the taste in all our mouths is the taste of our power
and it is bitter as death
bring yr self home to yrself, enter the garden
the guy at the gate w/ the flaming sword is yrself
the war is the war for the human imagination
and no one can fight it but you/ & no one can fight it for you
The imagination is not only holy, it is precise
it is not only fierce, it is practical
men die everyday for the lack of it,
it is vast & elegant
intellectus means “light of the mind”
it is not discourse it is not even language
the inner sun the
polis is constellated around the sun
the fire is central
– Diane di Prima
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long possessed that he is set free, he has set himself free for higher dreams, for greater privileges.
– James Baldwin
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity … and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.
– William Blake
Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn’t organized to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.
– Ivan Illich
It’s one thing to know and understand the deep spiritual and universal truths. It’s a totally different thing to live them. This new era of the human timeline is all about living them.
– Nika Solé
So far as society itself is composed of de-individualized persons, it is completely at the mercy of ruthless individualists. Let it band together into groups and organizations as much as it likes-it is just this banding together and the resultant extinction of the individual personality that makes it succumb so readily to a dictator. A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but the fatally shortsighted habit of our age is to think only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hands of a single madman.
– Carl G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
It’s like this: you’ve received a revelation. Great. But this is only a seed. Now plant the darn thing and water it.
– Bill Plotkin
When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write.
– Ernest Hemingway
Whenever one tries to suppress doubt, there is tyranny.
– Simone Weil
our souls, exhausted by love and pain, are melting away and running off like water
– Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse, Rousseau
If your opinions line up neatly with those of your friends and colleagues, they’re not your opinions.
– @naval
To Revolt Is To Insist On Joy
by Nur Turkmani
Today my steps are finally light,
and the pale afternoon is a little breath.
I love cauliflower with turmeric,
the taste of sweet olive oil,
the rubber trees, how we really belong
to all of this, how the universe is as old
as it is young, and what a thought.
I am sending you a long voice note
about how so much has changed.
Nothing I say will be new,
you’ve heard it all before and still, I think,
I know-you will listen. Anyways.
You can’t see the waves from here
but they remind me of that day,
the last time we stood close. What generous sun.
To have lived is to have seen,
and come to think of it, we haven’t seen much.
I call my mother, and my mother
calls my brothers, and my father
is such a good man. The gardenia
is sprouting after I’d given up on it.
The grass is shooting, like stars,
in too many directions at once.
Look, there. I am stopping to lay in this patch,
they haven’t stolen it —yet. Even tragedy
has a shape, can be uprooted. The sea is breaking,
again and again, like our flimsy hearts. Nothing dies.
Smell this yellow flower, so little, here.
The poems weren’t lying. It’s true.
It’s true it’s true it’s true
Faith is our ability
to bear the ineffable.
– Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel
in the truest sense,
Homeless
is not just someone
who has no place to live.
Anyone who continually
lives in his head,
anyone who is afraid
of plunging
into the ocean
of his own infinite self,
that is true
homelessness.
– Guthema Roba
A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never-failing spring in the desert.
– Andrew Carnegie
A good life is just a collection of good rituals. So if you can find a rhythm, a nurturing rhythm and just lean into that, I think you are well on your way to a good life.
– Linford Detweiler
The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious.
The desire to reach hearts is wise.
– Maya Angelou
What keeps you
From the beating heart
At the center
Of all creation?
What keeps you
Is bitterness, hostility,
Resentment and scorn
And the belief
That you do not deserve
The inherence of light
That comes from
Forgiving yourself.
– Chelan Harkin
You can almost fall in love with the universe, with the general situation. At that point, there is no reference point to anyone or anything. It is just being in love, just appreciating your world. You don’t have to crank anything up. The main point is developing some kind of appetite for the universe, that everything is workable and lovable.
– Chogyam Trungpa
The Dance
Having been obscured
by cults of control,
the dramas of life’s wildness
must learn to dance again.
The dances of life happen
when playing with the team.
Learning’s more surprising
when doing it in sync.
Friendship is a dance.
Loving is a dance.
Working dances well.
So does play.
Life comes to dance.
Death dances too.
Every creature is a dance
only it can do.
And the greatest miracle
is how life and death
keep dancing on and on
forever in love’s nest.
– George Gorman
…resistance, at root, must mean more than resistance against war. It is resistance against all kinds of things that are like war…so perhaps, resistance means opposition to being invaded, occupied, assaulted and destroyed by the system. The purpose of resistance, here is to seek the healing of yourself in order to be able to see clearly…I think that communities of resistance should be places where people can return to themselves more easily, where the conditions are such that they can heal themselves and recover their wholeness.
– Zen Master, Thich Nhat Hanh
I think age is terribly overrated. You’re okay as long as you don’t grow up. By all means grow old, but don’t mature. Remain childlike, retain wonder,
the ability to be flabbergasted by something.
– Billy Connolly
I cannot tell you
how the light comes.
What I know
is that it is more ancient
than imagining.
That it travels
across an astounding expanse
to reach us.
That it loves
searching out
what is hidden
what is lost
what is forgotten
or in peril
or in pain.
That it has a fondness
for the body
for finding its way
toward flesh
for tracing the edges
of form
for shining forth
through the eye,
the hand,
the heart.
I cannot tell you
how the light comes,
but that it does.
That it will.
That it works its way
into the deepest dark
that enfolds you,
though it may seem
long ages in coming
or arrive in a shape
you did not foresee.
And so
may we this day
turn ourselves toward it.
May we lift our faces
to let it find us.
May we bend our bodies
to follow the arc it makes.
May we open
and open more
and open still
to the blessed light
that comes.
– Jan Richardson
When you are present in this moment, you break the continuity of your story, of past and future. Then true intelligence arises, and also love.
– Eckhart Tolle
The tragic statement of the poem is that whereas centuries go into the perfection of a culture, an age of carelessness or ruinous war can destroy a culture in the batting of an eye.
– Guy Davenport
Collective breath of all colors
hovers above the leaping herd.
Eagle and hawk feathers adorn
the deer dance’s rhythmic scent—
forest evergreen, damp earth.
– Max Early
This uglification of our world is the work of the ivory-towered elites of the liberal classes – people who, with their mania for modernizing, are happy to rip up beliefs that have stood the test of time for millennia.
– Sir Roger Scruton
Loving ourselves involves accepting this truth that we are imperfect, and once we realize this, we can shift away from perfection and instead move toward perfecting our love toward our imperfect selves.
– Mark Van Buren
It is fog land I have seen,
fog heart I have eaten.
– Ingeborg Bachmann (translated by Mark Anderson)
All self-help boils down to “choose long-term over short-term.”
– @naval
a gargoyle
scowling
at the cold night
– Issa
The world is a great school. Experiment, meditate, and be constantly in touch with things which disturb you. One day nothing will be disturbing, and that will be the day of great rejoicing.
– Osho
Politics has become gangsterism, one group against another.
– Krishnamurti
The poet is like a mouse in an enormous cheese excited by how much cheese there is to eat.
– Czeslaw Milosz
A man is like a house full of servants who quarrel and use the single telephone and all speak in the name of the master. A man is a house in disorder. A man is legion. Yet above him, at a higher level of himself, there is real ‘I’, that sometimes he feels the existence of, especially in conditions of great danger or great fatigue. This one permanent and real ‘I’ is the highest Being of the man and every man has this in him. So all development of Being, in the Work-sense, is defined by the approach to this real ‘I’ which unites all that is in him and is concealed in everyone, in the depths of himself, and behind all the tedious things he does and says with his other side, which only begins to become realised through self-observation.
– Maurice Nicoll
See they conducted experiments on convicts… I don’t know on what grounds they reason a man in jail is a bigger liar than one out of jail… The chances are telling the truth is what got him there… It would be a big aid to humanity, but it will never be, for already the politicians are up in arms against it… It would wreck the very foundation on which our political government is run… If you ever injected truth into politics you’d have no politics… Even the ministers are denouncing it now… Humanity is not yet ready for either real truth or real harmony.
– Will Rogers
To infer the nature of this Supreme Good, one does not need many words or any round-about discussion; it should be pointed out with the forefinger, so to speak, and not be dissipated into many parts. For what good is there in breaking it up into tiny bits, when you can say: the Supreme Good is that which is honourablea? Besides (and you may be still more surprised at this), that which is honourable is the only good; all other goods are alloyed and debased. If you once convince yourself of this, and if you come to love virtue devotedly (for mere loving is not enough), anything that has been touched by virtue will be fraught with blessing and prosperity for you, no matter how it shall be regarded by others. Torture, if only, as you lie suffering, you are more calm in mind than your very torturer; illness, if only you curse not Fortune and yield not to the disease—in short, all those things which others regard as ills will become manageable and will end in good, if you succeed in rising above them.
– Lucius Annæus Seneca
Our bodies are at once the receiving and transmitting stations for life itself. It is the highest wisdom to recognize this fact and train our bodies to render them sensitive and responsive to nature, art, and religion.
– Ruth St. Denis
Transit
If music be the food of love, play on.
This is the house that music built:
each note a fingertip’s purchase,
rung upon rung laddering
across the unspeakable world.
As for those other shrill facades,
rigged-for-a-day porticos
composed to soothe regiments
of eyes, guilt-reddened,
lining the parade route
(horn flash, woodwind wail) . . .
well, let them cheer.
I won’t speak judgment on
the black water passing for coffee,
white water for soup.
We supped instead each night
on Chopin—hummed our grief-
soaked lullabies to the rapture
rippling through. Let it be said
while in the midst of horror
we fed on beauty—and that,
my love, is what sustained us.
– Rita Dove
I believe in women more than I believe in anything.
– Jan Beatty
…and there shall be rest for tired eyes and weary hearts.
– Tolkien
Modern luxury is the ability to think clearly, sleep deeply, move slowly, and live quietly in a world designed to prevent all four.
– Justin Welsh
there’s a whole shift going on in me that’s hard to point to, but seems largely organized around something like “no one is liberated until the world-soul is liberated” or “whether you personally awaken is almost a red herring compared to the work of awakening Reality itself”
– River Kenna
As an artist, I never wanted to be fettered by gender nor recognized or defined as a female poet, musician or singer. They don’t do that with men – nobody says Picasso, the male artist. Curators call me up and say, “We want your work to be in a show about women artists,” and I’m like, why? For Christ’s sake, do we have to attach a gender onto everything?
– Patti Smith
the most reliable path to wisdom is to exhaust all your clever alternatives.
– River Kenna
The plot of history is the tradition from hunter … to farmer to citizen. Tragedy enters the plot when we note that the farmer was the first victim of usury.
– Guy Davenport
The writer must be four people:
1. The nut, the obsédé
2. The moron
3. The stylist
4. The critic
1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence.
A great writer has all 4— but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2;
they re most important.
– Susan Sontag
Neither we ourselves nor the world around us can be saved unless we learn to see both sides of things, learn to pull as well as push, and learn to maintain a broad and lofty view of the truth.
– Masahiro Mori
There’s many American poets who are still very fluent in national unipolar globalist poetics. They can expertly belt out all the old joys, traumas, rages, erotics, and styles of wit from that 25 year era. Then there’s institutionally uncaptured poets kicking ass in this new wild.
– Rodrigo Toscano
I love you. I love you,
but I’m turning to my verses
and my heart is closing
like a fist.
– Frank O’Hara
I won’t say that people don’t think today. But they think about the things a few masters have given them to think about; they think about what the masters think, if they don’t simply think what the masters think, repeating and paraphrasing them.
– Eugene Ionesco
The divine feminine is the light wherever she goes. But sometimes that light is a fire that burns down the wickedness of the world.
– Nika Solé
this is our chance to write our own history
do we destroy ourselves?
or do we take care of ourselves
– Kealoha
How shall I tell you
of all the doors I came upon?
Of the small shredded joys
that cried in paper tears,
and how I saw silence
come down in parachutes of fire?
– Herschel Horn
The most direct thing that I can say to you is to not believe your mind. Shift your focus from the mind to the Heart, which means affectionate awareness and stillness.
– Adyashanti
They ended up sinking in the very pits that they dug for you.
True story.
– Dr. Thema
The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has its pearls too.
– Vincent van Gogh
Ascension is an upward spiral.
– Nika Solé
At last, my little envelope is ready for you, at last you hear from me again, after it must’ve seemed, I had sunk into a dead silence.
– Nietzsche
Creating anything worthwhile is like a marathon, and you must train for it.
– Robert Greene
All you have to go on is faith that the light shines in the darkness, and nothing, not death, not disease, not even the government, can overcome it.
– Anne Lamott
Let’s overturn these tables
Disconnect these cables
This place don’t make sense to me no more
Can you tell me what we’re waiting for, señor?
– Bob Dylan
the ontology of sabotage, the sabotage of ontology
– Winter Pallaksch
ivy-covered fence
the parts of my life
I keep hidden
– @lafcadiopoetry
american conservatives are so funny, like what are you trying to conserve, high fructose corn syrup?
– @luxarbo
Everything
Changes and moves in the split second between summer’s
Sprawling past and winter’s hard revision
– Edward Hirsch
Banning boomers from making Facebook AI slop needs to be taken seriously as climate policy
– Charlotte E. Rosen
Everyone is Buddha himself, but you don’t recognize your Buddha-nature because you want something else. You don’t love and honor your own Self. Your Self is Buddha. Yet, you don’t believe this because you are deeply attached to something else which is temporary, and false.
– Papaji
Carrying big, beautiful energy in a world that is constantly trying to siphon it or turn it down, is what sets you apart as a revolutionary.
– Nika Solé
Having liberated yourself from oppression does not give you a license to then oppress others.
– Marc Lamont Hill
May wisdom & maturity arise
– @vincefhorn.bsky.social
to now let them fall by the wayside; failure
to think of poems as objects
to think of the body as an object; failure
to believe; failure
to know nothing; failure
to know everything; failure
– Bernadette Mayer
Coffee should not be drunk in a hurry. It is the sister of time, and should be sipped slowly, slowly. Coffee is the sound of taste, a sound for the aroma.
– Mahmoud Darwish
there’s a massive, massive gap between the sensory potentials of the human body, and how numb our modern senses actually are, and there’s a very simple and direct explanation for it but we’re not ready for that discussion yet.
– River Kenna
It was the opera that made the dreamer famous.
– Barbara Guest
You are hardly up to dealing with the problem of tolerance, my good engineer. But imprint this on your mind: tolerance becomes a crime when applied
to evil.
– Thomas Mann
Always this image
of hand on forehead,
of writing restored
to thought.
– Jabès
I never sleep anymore, only in the late morning. Who would want to sleep inside a forest of the night, so full of questions? With my hands clasped behind my head, I lie awake in the night and think how happy I was…
– Malina, Ingeborg Bachmann; tr. Philip Boehm
If anyone hurts you and you forgive him, you are leading yourself to the kingdom of God. If anyone is quarrelsome and you give understanding, you are taking yourself to the kingdom of God.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian
by Ross Gay
Tumbling through the
city in my
mind without once
looking up
the racket in
the lugwork probably
rehearsing some
stupid thing I
said or did
some crime or
other the city they
say is a lonely
place until yes
the sound of sweeping
and a woman
yes with a
broom beneath
which you are now
too the canopy
of a fig its
arms pulling the
September sun to it
and she
has a hose too
and so works hard
rinsing and scrubbing
the walk
lest some poor sod
slip on the
silk of a fig
and break his hip
and not probably
reach over to gobble up
the perpetrator
the light catches
the veins in her hands
when I ask about
the tree they
flutter in the air and
she says take
as much as
you can
help me
so I load my
pockets and mouth
and she points
to the step-ladder against
the wall to
mean more but
I was without a
sack so my meager
plunder would have to
suffice and an old woman
whom gravity
was pulling into
the earth loosed one
from a low slung
branch and its eye
wept like hers
which she dabbed
with a kerchief as she
cleaved the fig with
what remained of her
teeth and soon there were
eight or nine
people gathered beneath
the tree looking into
it like a
constellation pointing
do you see it
and I am tall and so
good for these things
and a bald man even
told me so
when I grabbed three
or four for
him reaching into the
giddy throngs of
yellow-jackets sugar
stoned which he only
pointed to smiling and
rubbing his stomach
I mean he was really rubbing his stomach
like there was a baby
in there
it was hot his
head shone while he
offered recipes to the
group using words which
I couldn’t understand and besides
I was a little
tipsy on the dance
of the velvety heart rolling
in my mouth
pulling me down and
down into the
oldest countries of my
body where I ate my first fig
from the hand of a man who escaped his country
by swimming through the night
and maybe
never said more than
five words to me
at once but gave me
figs and a man on his way
to work hops twice
to reach at last his
fig which he smiles at and calls
baby, c’mere baby,
he says and blows a kiss
to the tree which everyone knows
cannot grow this far north
being Mediterranean
and favoring the rocky, sun-baked soils
of Jordan and Sicily
but no one told the fig tree
or the immigrants
there is a way
the fig tree grows
in groves it wants,
it seems, to hold us,
yes I am anthropomorphizing
goddammit I have twice
in the last thirty seconds
rubbed my sweaty
forearm into someone else’s
sweaty shoulder
gleeful eating out of each other’s hands
on Christian St.
in Philadelphia a city like most
which has murdered its own
people
this is true
we are feeding each other
from a tree
at the corner of Christian and 9th
strangers maybe
never again.
The traitor is not external but inside everyone.
– Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love (trans. Barbara Bray)
your entire fate is Right There from the beginning – a lot of your life is just the universe repeating the pattern back to you until you finally pick up on it and start figuring out what to do with it.
– River Kenna
Don’t we forgive everything of a lover
if we are the motive,
if love promises to take us to many places, to even larger themes?
– Sandra Lim
i hope you know, i hope you know /
that this has nothing to do with you /
it’s personal, myself and i / have got some straightening out to do
– Mary Oliver
Did a handshake begin with the meeting of hands or did it begin with the idea presenting itself of wanting to meet a person in handshake friendliness. Did it end when a person became someone whose hand you no longer wanted to meet with yours.
– Emily Hall
The planets speak of an impending task,
A work of bitterness to be fulfilled
Now, in the instant future. Who shall come
To break the undisturbed serenity
Of my long solitude ? The night is quiet,
My soul companions are the wandering stars,
Whose silence I can spell.
– Maurice Baring
What, then, are The Cantos about? What is their subject? They are about the tragic loss of sensibility by which men live well.
– Guy Davenport
This loss has occurred many times: in the fall of nations, in the passing of manners, in the subversion of values. Do The Cantos show this loss, explain it, give reasons for it; or define sensibility? No. They gather examples of sensibility and its loss …
– Guy Davenport
They [The Cantos] comment voluminously. They are not a treatise systemizing a philosophy; they do not take up a subject to fashion it. They constitute a poem: an imaginative ordering of experience … through which we see the subject.
– Guy Davenport
Nobody likes being alone that much. I don’t go out of my way to make friends, that’s all. It just leads to disappointment.
– Haruki Murakami
If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?
– Franz Kafka
gonna poast so hard my spirit guides update their resumes.
– River Kenna
Poinciana
Blow, tropic wind
Sing a song through the trees
Trees, sigh to me
Soon my love, I will see
Poinciana
Your branches speak to me of love
Pale moon is casting shadows from above
Poinciana
Somehow I feel the jungle beat
Within me, there grows a rhythmic, savage beat
Love is everywhere, its magic perfume fills the air
To and fro you sway, my heart’s in time
I’ve learned to care
Poinciana
Though skies may turn from blue to gray
My love will live forever and a day
Blow, tropic wind
Sing a song through the trees
Trees, sigh to me
Soon my love, I will see
Poinciana
– Nat King Cole
Repetition doesn’t really exist. As far as your mind is concerned, nothing happens the same twice, even if in every technical sense, the thing is identical. Your perception is constantly shifting. It doesn’t stay in one place.
– Brian Eno
I actually attack the concept of happiness. The idea that—I don’t mind people being happy—but the idea that everything we do is part of the pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in Western society, which is fear of sadness. It’s a really odd thing that we’re now seeing people saying “write down three things that made you happy today before you go to sleep” and “cheer up” and “happiness is our birthright” and so on. We’re kind of teaching our kids that happiness is the default position. It’s rubbish. Wholeness is what we ought to be striving for and part of that is sadness, disappointment, frustration, failure; all of those things which make us who we are. Happiness and victory and fulfillment are nice little things that also happen to us, but they don’t teach us much. Everyone says we grow through pain and then as soon as they experience pain they say, “Quick! Move on! Cheer up!” I’d like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word “happiness” and to replace it with the word “wholeness.” Ask yourself, “Is this contributing to my wholeness?” and if you’re having a bad day, it is.
– Hugh Mackay
For Jan Beatty, poetry is neither intellectual exercise nor fodder for the tenure file, but an incantatory statement of inner life: a protest, a jeremiad, a prophecy, a manifesto.
– Ed Simon
People would pay a lot of money to someone who could turn the brain into a sieve, draining out all of that now-useless knowledge — the exact way your ex liked to be kissed, the street names of the places you no longer live — leaving only the essential, the immediate. There are so many things I wish I could forget, but maybe “forget” isn’t quite right. There are so many things I wish I never knew.
– Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom
Patrick Swayze once said, “They told me my house smelled like dogs, and I asked them, do you know what a dog smells like?” It smells like gratitude, loyalty, nobility, affection, pure unconditional love. And in spite of all they’ve been through, they smell no resentment. So blessed that my house smells like dogs.
Stepping into your power is not hardest thing. The hardest thing is to step in and remain grounded, humble and generous. Much of mundane training would have us believe we are inferior. If you begin a dedicated dance with Spirit you will start to see and feel your own power. It comes in brief slices in the beginning. Like shafts of light beaming down into the shady forest. We get a glimpse of who we are and what it feels like to be powerful. If we continue our dance with dedication a glimpse becomes a knowing. Along the path come opportunities to heal. In a perfect world our awareness would grow equally as our healing grows. But that is not always the case. It is possible to be powerful and broken. And that is an challenging combination. Don’t rush to power. Rush to healing. Rush to love. Rush to generosity. And a humble power capable of transforming the world will follow.
– Naraya Preservation Council
…the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.
– Joan Didion
The strongest rebuttal of Christian nationalism does not come from outside critics. The strongest rebuttal of Christian nationalism comes from Christians who refuse to hate, who refuse to follow an American messiah, or to reduce Jesus’ message of universal love to members of the Christian sect. The strongest rebuttal of Christian nationalism comes from those who refuse to let Calvin, Augustine, or Luther replace what Jesus taught at the Sermon on the Mount. The strongest rebuttal of Christian nationalism comes from those who realize Jesus did not teach moralism, dogma or magical rituals. He taught love, period.
– Jim Rigby
All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.
– Baruch Spinoza, Ethics
We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone.
– Robert M. Pirsig
Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it’s in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, and every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day-by-day and minute-by-minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. I know, of course, that the past is falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it, even when I did the falsification myself. After the thing is done, no evidence ever remains. The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don’t know with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories. Just in that one instance, in my whole life, I did possess actual concrete evidence after the event – years after it.
– George Orwell
Life doesn’t always get better.
But you do.
You get stronger.
You get wiser.
You get softer.
With tattered wings you rise.
And the world watches in wonder
at the breathless beauty of
a human who survived life.
– L.R. Knost
You don’t protect democracy by talking about democracy. You protect it by protecting people and making it clear what you are trying to do and what the other side is actually doing.
– Electoral-vote.com
It is one thing to process memories of trauma, but it is an entirely different matter to confront the inner void—the holes in the soul that result from not having been wanted, not having been seen, and not having been allowed to speak the truth.
– Bessel A. van der Kolk
INSIDE PRESENCE
No matter we’re in a prison of forgetting
or enjoying the banquet of wisdom,
we are always inside presence.
Drunkenly asleep, tenderly awake,
clouded with grief, laughing like lightning,
angry at war, quiet with gratitude, we are nothing
in this many-mooded world of weather
but a single brushstroke down,
speaking of presence.
– Rumi
Never doubt that thousands of invisible hands are helping you at all times.
Love is everywhere, even if you can’t see it.
The tenderest care will arrive when you least expect it, and from someone whose name you may never know ..
– Elizabeth Gilbert
If I could believe in myself, why not give other improbabilities the benefit of the doubt?
– David Sedaris
It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see…
– Thoreau
I am grateful for what I am and have.
My thanksgiving is perpetual.
It is surprising how contented
one can be with nothing definite –
only a sense of existence.
Well, anything for variety.
I am ready to try this for the next
ten thousand years, and exhaust it.
How sweet to think of!
my extremities well charred,
and my intellectual part too,
so that there is no danger
of worm or rot for a
long while.
My breath is sweet to me.
O how I laugh when I think
of my vague indefinite riches.
No run on my bank can drain it,
for my wealth is not possession
but enjoyment.
– Henry David Thoreau
Somebody has remarked, “Everything without tells the individual that they are nothing, while everything within persuades them that they are everything.” This is a remarkable saying, for it is the feeling everyone of us has when they sit quietly and deeply looks into the inmost chamber of their being. Something is moving there and would whisper to them in a still small voice that they are not born in vain. I read somewhere again: “You are tried alone; alone you pass into the desert; alone you are sifted by the world.” But let a person once look within in all sincerity and they will then realize that they are not lonely, forlorn, and deserted; there is within a person, a certain feeling of a royally magnificent aloneness, standing all by themselves and yet not separated from the rest of existence.”
– D.T. Suzuki
Inequality is corrosive. It rots societies from within. The impact of material differences takes a while to show up: but in due course competition for status and goods increases; people feel a growing sense of superiority (or inferiority) based on their possessions; prejudice towards those on the lower ranks of the social ladder hardens; crime spikes and the pathologies of social disadvantage become ever more marked. The legacy of unregulated wealth creation is bitter indeed.
– Tony Judt
Yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world. A quiet, spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world without professors or specialists, a world which one could slice with one’s thought as a fish slices the water with his fin, grazing the stems of the water-lilies, hanging suspended over nests of white sea-eggs…How peaceful it is down here, rooted into the center of the world and gazing up through the gray waters, with their sudden gleams of light.
– Virginia Woolf
This is where we are right now, as a whole. No-one is left out of the loop. We are experiencing a reality based on a thin veneer of lies and illusions. A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart.
– Bill Hicks
Limitless undying love which shines around me like a million suns it calls me on and on across the universe.
– John Lennon
Great people exist in the space between vice and virtue.
– Brian Maierhofer
One day, the mountain that is in front of you will be so far behind you that it will barely be visible in the distance. But the person you become learning to get over it will stay with you forever.
– Brianna Wiest
Always we want to learn from outside. It’s safer that way. The trouble is that it’s always other people’s knowledge. We already have all we need to know in the darkness inside ourselves. The longing is what turns us inside out until we find the sun, moon & stars inside.
– Peter Kingsley
You can learn a lot about a woman by getting smashed with her.
– Tom Waits
Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.
– Václav Havel
What Is now proved was once only imagined.
– William Blake
Quabbin Reservoir
All morning, skipping stones on the creamy lake,
I thought I heard a lute being played, high up,
in the birch trees, or a faun speaking French
with a Brooklyn accent. A snowy owl watched me
with half-closed eyes. “What have you done for me
philately,” I wanted to ask, licking the air.
There was a village at the bottom of the lake,
and I could just make out the old post office,
and, occasionally, when the light struck it just right,
I glimpsed several mailmen swimming in or out of it,
letters and packages escaping randomly, 1938, 1937,
it didn’t matter to them any longer. Void.
No such address. Soft blazes squirmed across the surface
and I could see their church, now home to druid squatters,
rock in the intoxicating current, as if to an ancient hymn.
And a thousand elbowing reeds conducted the drowsy band pavilion:
awake, awake, you germs of habit! Alas, I fling
my final stone, my calling card, my gift of porphyry
to the citizens of the deep, and disappear into a copse,
raving like a butterfly to a rosebud: I love you.
– James Tate
How may every type of literary Decadence be characterized? In that
there is no longer life in the whole. The word becomes sovereign
and springs out of the sentence; the sentence encroaches upon
and obscures the sense of the page, the page achieves life at the
expense of the whole-the whole is no longer a whole.
– Nietzsche
Breakage
by Mary Oliver
I go down to the edge of the sea.
How everything shines in the morning light!
The cusp of the whelk,
the broken cupboard of the clam,
the opened, blue mussels,
moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—
and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,
dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.
It’s like a schoolhouse
of little words,
thousands of words.
First you figure out what each one means by itself,
the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop
full of moonlight.
Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.
You don’t need more advice, you need the courage to implement what you already know.
– @orangebook_
So many factors demand our attention; isn’t it awesome that we have at least some influence over what we choose to focus on? And if there is power in acknowledging and being thankful for even small blessings, the power of finding meaning in the face of suffering can be transformative.
– Pamela Gayle White
Working with who you want to work with, on what you want to work on, is actually just play.
– @naval
To be happy at home, said Johnson, is the end of all human endeavor. As long as we are thinking only of natural values we must say that the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him; and that all economics, politics, laws, armies, and institutions, save in so far as they prolong and multiply such scenes, are a mere ploughing the sand and sowing
the ocean, a meaningless vanity and vexation of spirit.
– C.S. Lewis
The sickness of the individual is ultimately caused by and sustained by the sickness of his civilization
– Herbert Marcuse
When we study several creation myths, it is sometimes revealed very clearly to us that they represent unconscious and preconscious processes which describe not the origin of our cosmos, but the origin of man’s conscious awareness of the world.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
The Good News
You don’t have to know what your life is.
You don’t have to wake today in the summer light
and dance your way into the kitchen.
Your tired heart doesn’t have to make
a sound.
Listen. Just keep breathing
and the magic will happen.
When Lazarus
felt a hand upon his shoulder,
he didn’t ask
if he deserved that mercy.
He stood. He took
the new life.
Friend, don’t lie down forever.
Couldn’t you also
be chosen?
Hasn’t anyone told you?
The amount of agony
you carry
is only the vastness of your
love
waiting in the darkness to be found.
– Joseph Fasano
He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.
– William Blake
Anything can only ever be as big as the box you put it in.
– Nika Solé
Exercise should be part of your daily hygiene like brushing your teeth and taking a shower.
– Dan Go
The opening up of the unconscious always means the outbreak of intense spiritual suffering: it is as when fertile fields are exposed by the bursting of a dam to a raging torrent.
– CG Jung
Thanksgiving in the Anthropocene, 2015
by Craig Santos Perez
Thank you, instant mashed potatoes, your bland taste
makes me feel like an average American. Thank you,
incarcerated Americans, for filling the labor shortage
and packing potatoes in Idaho. Thank you, canned
cranberry sauce, for your gelatinous curves. Thank you,
Ojibwe tribe in Wisconsin, your lake is now polluted
with phosphate-laden discharge from nearby cranberry
bogs. Thank you, crisp green beans, you are my excuse
for eating apple pie à la mode later. Thank you, indigenous
migrant workers, for picking the beans in Mexico’s farm belt,
may your children survive the season. Thank you, NAFTA,
for making life dirt cheap. Thank you, Butterball Turkey,
for the word, butterball, which I repeat all day butterball,
butterball, butterball because it helps me swallow the bones
of genocide. Thank you, dark meat, for being so juicy
(no offense, dry and fragile white meat, you matter too).
Thank you, 90 million factory-farmed turkeys, for giving
your lives during the holidays. Thank you, factory-farm
workers, for clipping turkey toes and beaks so they don’t scratch
and peck each other in overcrowded, dark sheds. Thank you,
genetic engineering and antibiotics, for accelerating
their growth. Thank you, stunning tank, for immobilizing
most of the turkeys hanging upside down by crippled legs.
Thank you, stainless steel knives, for your sharpened
edge and thirst for throat. Thank you, de-feathering
tank, for your scalding-hot water, for finally killing the last
still-conscious turkeys. Thank you, turkey tails, for feeding
Pacific Islanders all year round. Thank you, empire of
slaughter, for never wasting your fatty leftovers. Thank you,
tryptophan, for the promise of an afternoon nap;
I really need it. Thank you, store-bought stuffing,
for your ambiguously ethnic flavor, you remind me
that I’m not an average American. Thank you, gravy,
for being hot-off-the-boat and the most beautiful
brown. Thank you, dear readers, for joining me at the table
of this poem. Please join hands, bow your heads, and repeat
after me: “Let us bless the hands that harvest and butcher
our food, bless the hands that drive delivery trucks
and stock grocery shelves, bless the hands that cooked
and paid for this meal, bless the hands that bind
our hands and force-feed our endless mouth.
May we forgive each other and be forgiven.”
You can lose yourself one small compromise at a time.
You can transform yourself one small win at a time.
– James Clear
if there is no savior, I’ll do it myself, I’ll forgive myself
– Danez Smith
For The Traveler
by John O’Donohue
Every time you leave home,
another road takes you
into a world you were never in.
New strangers on other paths await.
new places that have never seen you
will startle a little at your entry.
Old places that you know well
will pretend nothing
changed since your last visit.
When you travel, you find yourself
alone in a different way,
more attentive now
to the self you bring along,
Your more subtle eye watching
you abroad; and how what meets you
touches that part of the heart
that lies low at home:
How you unexpectedly attune
to the timbre in some voice,
opening a conversation
you want to take in
to where your longing
has pressed hard enough
inward, on some unsaid dark,
to create a crystal of insight
you could not have known
you needed
to illuminate
your way.
When you travel,
a new silence
goes with you,
and if you listen,
you will hear
what your heart would
love to say.
A journey can become a sacred thing:
make sure, before you go,
to take the time
to bless your going forth,
to free your heart of ballast
so that the compass of your soul
might direct you toward
the territories of spirit
where you will discover
more of your hidden life,
and the urgencies
that deserve to claim you.
May you travel
in an awakened way,
gathered wisely
into your inner ground;
that you may not waste
the invitations which
wait along the way
to transform you.
May you travel safely,
arrive refreshed,
and live your time away
to its fullest;
return home more enriched,
and free to balance
the gift of days
which call you.
Song For The First People
by David Wagoner
When you learned that men were coming, you changed into rocks.
Into fish and birds, into flowers and rivers in despair of us.
The tree under which I bend may be you,
That stone by the fire, the nighthawk swooping
And crying out over the swamp reeds, the reeds themselves.
Have I held you too lightly all my mornings?
I have broken your silence, dipped you up
Carelessly in by hands and drunk you, burnt you,
Carved you, slit your calm throat and danced on your skin,
Made charms of your bones. You have endured
All of it, suffering my foolishness
As the old wait quietly among clumsy children.
Now others are coming, neither like you nor like men.
I must change, First People. How do I change myself?
If no one can teach me the long will of the cedar,
Let me become Water Dog, Bitteroot, or Shut Beak.
Change me. Forgive me. I will learn to crawl, stand, or fly
Anyshere among you, forever, as though among great elders.
A Cup Of Coffee
by Gene Fowler
Such a small and homely and peasant-like thing
seems a cup of coffee.
Still, some of us know that nothing really is small
and nothing actually large, but of an entity,
and of no dimensions whatsoever except as our
imaginations make it seem large or small.
For everything is one thing and of one thing.
And the thing is not a thing at all, but an idea.
Perhaps this idea is both the creator and the created,
Timeless, endless, and inscrutable.
Figment at the Beginning of Something. . .
by David Watts
My son brings me a stone and asks
which star it fell from,
he is serious
and so I must be careful, even though
I know he will place it
among those things that will leave him
someday, and he
will go on gathering. For this
is one of those moments
that turns suddenly towards you, opening
as it turns, as if for a moment
we paused on the edge
of a heart beat, conscious
of the fear that runs beside us
and how lovely it is to be with each other
in the long resilient mornings.
Emily Dickinson
by Linda Pastan
We think of her hidden in a white dress
among the folded linens and sachets
of well-kept cupboards, or just out of sight
sending jellies and notes with no address
to all the wondering Amherst neighbors.
Eccentric as New England weather
the stiff wind of her mind, stinging or gentle,
blew two half-imagined lovers off.
Yet legend won’t explain the sheer sanity
of vision, the serious mischief
of language, the economy of pain.
Labyrinth
by Jorge Luis Borges
Translated from the Spanish by Stephen Kessler
There’ll never be a door. You are inside
and the fortress contains the universe
and has no other side nor any back
nor any outer wall nor secret core.
Do not expect the rigor of your path,
which stubbornly splits into another one,
which stubbornly splits into another one,
to have an end. Your fate is ironclad
like your judge. Do not expect the charge
of the bull that is a man and whose strange
plural form fills the thicket of endless
interwoven stone with your own horror.
It does not exist. Expect nothing. Not
even the beast obscured by the black dusk.
Bless each thing on earth until it sickens,
until each ungovernable heart admits: “I confused myself
and yet I loved”
– Ilya Kaminsky
If you can acknowledge the partial truths, and challenge the partial untruths, of both wokism and anti-wokism, what does that make you?
– @VinceFHorn
If you think having uncomfortable conversations is hard – wait until you see the result of not having them.
– Leila Hormozi
Flow is always there. You’re just in the way.
– @naval
Everybody has disciples [but it is ] Judas who writes the biography.
– Oscar Wilde
Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not ‘yours,’ not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.
– Eckhart Tolle
his broken english
and still
the warmth of his voice
– @YourMoonliness
it’s just that
my hunger
for peace
runs so deep
a famine
that was activated so so long ago
– @sullivansully_o
A group of people who think differently is a market.
A group of people who think alike is a mob.
– @naval
Get your fucking confidence back. Without it you will fail miserably no matter how skilled or smart you are.
– Tai Lopez
Subtract incentives from advice.
– @naval
Mindfulness (or vipassana meditation) is the technology for shifting from being ensnarled in suffering to being curious about it.
– Ruth King
The day I lost my passport, I discovered at the age of fifty-eight that one loses more with one’s home than a patch of bounded earth.
– Stefan Zweig
The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.
– Derek Walcott
the center of power is existentially empty.
– Frederic Jameson
frightening how many of our wounds come from trying to be less than we are
– River Kenna
the hearth
of all things
must be tended to
– @coffeeandhaiku
When reality explodes in you, you may call it experience of God. Or, rather, it is God experiencing you. God knows you when you know yourself.
– Sri Nisargdatt Maharaj
Well Peter knew, his thousand books would pass
Gray into dust, that still a tinker’s tale
As hard as granite and as sweet as grass,
Told over reeking pipes, outlasts them all.
– George Mackay Brown
I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
– G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England
I took the Master’s in creative writing to get it the hell out of the way. Don’t you have to learn every essential thing by yourself?
– James Wright
Art is an attempt to create a world in which we can live: if not for long or forever, still a world of imagination over which we can reign, and by reign I mean to reflect purely on our situation though this created world of ours…
– John McGahern
The moment I have realized God sitting in the temple of every human body, the moment I stand in reverence before every human being and see God in him – that moment I am free from bondage, everything that binds vanishes, and I am free.
– Swami Vivekanand
The Complex Mechanism of the Up
There is nothing ordinary in the garden.
The varieties are under the loose soil,
a swarm already stationary, don’t cry
when you see it, out of gratitude.
Your flushed cheeks are looking at the sorrow
in the earth, the beautiful scent of standing.
It is hard to believe so much sadness,
don’t blame yourself, you have seen it
carrying daffodils into a gong, then silence.
Listen, nothing can stop speaking,
her dress is rustling, he coughs,
couples rattle in the beams of the camera.
The sun deadens once again to no color.
If the links of the fence have an error
I am afraid I must go with them.
I must say I am grateful, and never let go.
– Laura Jensen
When a ceasefire is announced, I
will just run. No one ask me where.
I myself don’t even know. I will just
run, and run.
Maybe to a space in the city, maybe
to my old solitude, maybe towards the
sun.
I don’t know, the important thing is
to arrive at a quiet place: A place that
allows me to weep for a long time.
– Hasan Qatarwi, (Trans. Mosab Abu Toha)
A THANKSGIVING DANCE
His spirit dances the long ago, and later.
Starlight on a country road in worn-out
western Pennsylvania. The smell of weeds
and rusting iron. And gladness.
His spirit welcomes the Italian New Year’s
in a hill town filled with the music
of glass crashing everywhere in the cobbled
streets. Champagne and the first kisses.
Too shy to look at each other and no language
between them. He dances alone, the dance
of after that. Now they sit amid the heavy
Roman sunlight and talk of the people
they are married to now. He secretly
dances the waltz she was in her astonishing
beauty, drinking wine and laughing, the window
behind her filled with winter rain.
– Jack Gilbert
The universe only pretends to be made of matter. Secretly, it is made of love.
– Daniel Pinchbeck
Her silence wasn’t unpleasant, nor did it imply resentment or sadness. It was transparent, not dense. It took up almost no space.
– Roberto Bolaño
It’s such a perfect arrangement for wisdom to hide away in death. Everyone runs away from death so everyone runs away from wisdom, except for those willing to pay the price and go against the stream.
– Peter Kingsley
Normal is the average of deviance.
– Rita Mae Brown
The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.
– Charlie Munger
Find out who you are and do it on purpose.
– Dolly Parton
Understanding a question is half an answer
– Socrates
When I have an idea I turn down the flame as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.
– Ernest Hemingway
The sky is not the limit; your mind is.
– Marilyn Monroe
A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belong to dreams.
– Simone Weil
When people judge you, their brain sees you as a threat to its survival. Because of this, it quickly makes assumptions, and that’s why they judge you unfairly.
– Vedant Gosavi
I don’t think you can get to be a really good investor over a broad range without doing a massive amount of reading. I don’t think there’s any one book that will do it for you.
– Charlie Munger
A majority of life’s errors are caused by forgetting what one is really trying to do.
– Charlie Munger
Some like to understand what they believe in. Others like to believe in what they understand.
– Stanisław Jerzy Lec
Christ swears to bring us safely home and protects us from a thousand foes.
– Charles Spurgeon
Is it only writing when we have a pen in hand, or a nearby keyboard? I think writing includes much more than that: patience, attention, openness to the world past screen or page—to what’s findable there.
– Carl Phillips
There is no such thing as fun for the whole family.
– Jerry Seinfeld
I dream of a quiet man
who explains nothing and defends nothing,
but only knows where the rarest wildflowers
are blooming, and who goes, and finds that
he is smiling not by his own will.
– Wendell Berry
Dante looked through old memories back to heaven;
Surrounded by swift tides of quiring flame,
He sank into a thought of two grey eyes
And the last meaning of a long-dead name.
It is because there is a language lost,
A word born out of days we cannot know,
That there is less in words to tell love’s cost
Than in what lips or hands or eyes can show.
This is the wisdom that no century
Can age or any learning ever teach;
The surge of blood-tides that in human hearts
Day-sundered, brood in silence, each on each.
– John Gould Fletcher
Love Poems to Our Friends
Where are the poems for those who know us?
Not for star-crossed loves,
for agonies of longing,
but words for those who go with us
the whole road.
How would they start, I wonder?
You let me crash
when I was new to ruin.
You came to me
though visiting hours were over.
You held me when my loves
were done, were flames.
Yes, we will lose a few
in the changes.
But these are the ones
who save us:
not the charmers,
not the comets of wild passion,
not the ups-and-downs of love’s unlucky hungers,
but the ones who stand
by our shoulder at the funeral,
and lead us back to the city of the living
and put our favorite record on the player
and go away, and come back,
always come back,
with bread and wine
and one word, one word: stay.
– Joseph Fasano
The Orange
by Wendy Cope
At lunchtime I bought a huge orange –
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave –
They got quarters and I had a half.
And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.
The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.
No soul that seriously
and constantly desires joy will ever miss it.
Those who seek find. Those who knock it
is opened.
– C.S. Lewis
LOVE SONGS
Love songs,
you hear them and you
fall in love anywhere, probably with
no one at all.
– Alice Notley
Our brains have evolved to keep us alive. They’re really good at being anxious, seeing the negative, and what can go wrong, and really bad at seeing the present moment just as it is.
– Anthony Tshering
transformation isn’t becoming someone else – it’s finally admitng who you’ve been becoming for a long long time
– River Kenna
‘Wilderness once offered men a plausible way of life,’ the doctor said. ‘Now it functions as a psychiatric refuge. Soon there will be no wilderness.’ … ‘Then the madness becomes universal.’ Another thought. ‘And the universe goes mad.’
– Edward Abbey
Nothing is more poisonous to the nervous system than a disregarded or checked creative impulse. It even destroys people’s organic health. It is dangerous because there is that extraordinary destructive quality in the creative
thing.
– CG Jung
Wholeness of the personality is achieved when the main pairs of opposites are relatively differentiated, that is, when both parts of the total psyche, consciousness and the unconscious, are linked together in a living relation. But the dynamic gradient, the flow of psychic life, is not endangered, for the unconscious can never be made wholly conscious and always has the greater store of energy. The wholeness is always relative and gives us something to work on as long as we live. ‘Personality, as the complete realization of our whole being, is an unattainable ideal. But unattainability is no argument against the ideal, for ideals are only signposts, never the goal.
– Jolande Jacobi
It is simply this: do not tire, never lose interest, never grow indifferent—lose your invaluable curiosity… It’s as simple as that.
– Tove Jansson
No sudden leavetaking, by your grace,
This time, old ghost, so long abroad. Friend of this house,
Warm all your evanescence by this fire
That burns the both of us for ending nights.
All through my germinating years, you, unfatigued,
Obsessed the attic’s dust, the cellar’s dark,
Moaning belowstairs, creaking the doors.
The days marched with your continuities.
– Weldon Kees
The movies, radio, TV, theater, orchestra: all run on at their own rate, and the listener or the viewer must attend, keep up, or lose out; but not the reader. The reader is free. The reader is in charge, and pedals the cycle.
– William H. Gass
It’s gonna be wild when people realize that pleasure seeking is good health.
– Bryan Johnson
GLUTTONY
by Yusef Komunyakaa
In a country of splendor & high
Ritual, in a fat land of zeros,
Sits a man with string & bone
For stylus, hunched over his easel,
Captured by perfection.
But also afflictions live behind
Electric fences, among hedges
& a whirlwind of roses, down
To where he sits beside a gully
Pooling desires. He squints
Till the mechanical horizon is one
Shadowplay against bruised sky,
Till the smoky perfume limps
Into undergrowth. He balls up
Another sheet in unblessed fingers, always
Ready to draw the thing that is all mouth.
So I. I took my glory
In the running of the heart,
Knowing it good;
And in the ranging foot,
And in the dartling sight,
Knowing them good.
And darkled my days with ignorance.
I darkled the fields of my childhood,
The country roads of my young manhood,
And the streets, the streets of my full maturity.
All these, the darkling days of my ignorance.
And did run, and reveled in the run.
And knew not where I ran, nor why,
Nor toward what thing I ran.
I ran, but I had not understanding.
– William Everson
the clearness that it must be you.
who cannot ever be arrived at
– Denise Riley
No memory is guarantee, existent in itself, indifferent to the future of him who harbors it; nothing past is proof through its translation into mere imagination, against the curse of the empirical present.
– Theodor Adorno
Rhythm entrainment happens whenever any creatures work together well. Such resonance is a musical dance. Love is the song that keeps us in sync, how even our cells can dance and sing, how life gets off in cooperation!
– George Gorman
If we continue to accumulate only power and not wisdom, we will surely destroy ourselves.
– Carl Sagan
Once you know with absolute certainty that nothing can trouble you but your own imagination, you come to disregard your desires and fears, concepts and ideas, and live by truth alone.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
If you want to live in the future, live in the freest place around. Because eventually, all of the innovators and creators will show up there.
– @naval
What I can’t understand or change is distant.
War is a debate, or at worst, a headlined
nightmare. But waking
it will be there still, and one morning closer
to my implication in what I never
chose, elected, as my natal sky rains down
civilian ashes
– Marilyn Hacker
Morning jogs are for the body, evening walks for the soul.
– John le Carré
High level alchemy is when someone tries to attack you with spiritual warfare, or spew negativity at you and you use every last drop as fuel to the fire of your own expansion.
– Nika Solé
Existence is a grand cosmic joke, and we, the punchline, spend our days deciphering the laughter of the universe.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
Longing is not a mind game and that is why I’ve always trusted it. Longing is raw, longing is real; it makes one listen and be attentive to what’s inside. There is mad honesty in longing. So mad that it feels suitable. It is very suitable for me, I’m telling you — I don’t even want to write it or write about it, I want to be it.
– Anne Sexton
As the Investigator within us works with both careful perception and active exploration, every creature loves its own “Aha!” discoveries. Each animal is like a scientist in trying to perceive its environment truly. For those with an eye, an ear, or even an attentive root-tip, this is the biological source of science. Here are also all the detectives and investigators who daringly strive find out more. When perceiving the truth, we are all scientists in respecting the honesty of our senses. And the possibilities of genuine curiosity can be both risky and astonishing.
The popular understanding of the physical sciences has led many to assume that the growth of knowledge always results in an increasing amount of control. If this were the case, the exponential increase in scientific knowledge over the last five hundred years should have dramatically decreased the unpredictability in the relationship between humans and the natural world. But as the record shows, the opposite has occurred. So the success of science can be interpreted more simply: The more we listen to nature, the more nature listens to us. Listens, not obeys. As our questions become more innovative, so do nature’s answers. What does increase in any truly cooperative process is not predictability but improbability. Could our species be the biosphere’s way of challenging itself to increase the improbable? Along with being very dangerous, could humans be one of evolution’s ways of propagating novelty? For as evolution keeps showing, the mutual influence of meaningful communication can radically change the participants.
– George Gorman
Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.
– James Joyce
Eurydice
by Jenny George
It snowed the day I died, a freak spring storm.
(It was in the papers.) A whole year of fruit was lost,
each snowflake traveling down from space
to touch a blossom with its cold crystal.
Now it’s nearly spring again and inside the house
the one I married is forcing quince branches
in a jar of warm water. Oh, to be chosen, given a vessel,
shaped by anothers strictures and desire! In the end
what do any of us want? Having been woken early,
brought into the human world and made to respond,
the little buds swell with their new circumstance.
The air is dense with invisible paths. The shock of fullness?
That’s called life. That stab of light is the morning sun.
listen darlings / there is a sky / to be pulled down / into our bowls / there is a sweetness for us / to push our faces into / I promise
– Hanif Abdurraqib
The only proper intoxication is conversation.
– Oscar Wilde
i expect to die without knowing what this life was about
most big things i’ve done, i’ve done in flow, on instinct, and only much later found out why they were important — i’ll be surprised if the larger sweep of my life doesn’t continue that pattern
– River Kenna
One of the easiest way to understand ourselves is by studying our thoughts, intension, attitude and behavior towards everyone. How we treat others is a complete reflection of how we treat ourselves.
– Brahma Kumaris
Reality is not to be experienced. There is no path to it, and no word can indicate it; it is not to be sought after and be found.
– Krishnamurti
I love this world
in a way that every poison has its cure
and every cure has its poison,
in a way that every sea has its island,
and every fracture has its swelling,
– Iva Damjanovski
All that matters to me is style.
– John McGahern in conversation with Denis Sampson
Medicine means something that can cure your body, and meditation means something that can cure your soul.
– Osho
Take feedback from nature and markets, not from people.
– @naval
Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future… The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.
– C. S. Lewis
You cannot fill your stomach by thinking about eating. You will not find your true nature by thinking about meditating.
– Plato
But you’ve seen cats and how they get low in the grass and put their eyes on what they’re after. Have you seen them with their mouths aquiver and not a sound coming out? They want the whole world to be still while they move.
– William H. Gass
Transformation takes place through metaphor. Without metaphor, energy is locked in repetitive patterns; Medusa traps energy in stone. In the creative matrix, the symbol flows between spirit and matter, healing the split.
– Marion Woodman
The sadist thinks in terms of institutionalized possession, the masochist in terms of contracted alliance. Possession is the sadist particular form of madness, just as the pact is the masochist’s.
– Linda Kauffman
Whenever we use the word ‘sin’, we are assuming a redemptive goal, which is not the same thing as an ethics. Redemption always seeks purity or ‘being cleaned’; it makes a polis of metaphysics. Retail therapy, redemptive shopping, the season of consumption— the nada needs dada.
– Alina Stefanescu
We find what we are looking for. If we are looking for life and love and openness and growth, we are likely to find them. If we are looking for witchcraft and evil, we’ll likely find them, and we may get taken over by them.
– Madeleine L’Engle
The true shit that we need cannot be purchased, is never on sale & does not come without principled struggle.
– Saul Williams
The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork.
– Oscar Wilde
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
– Frank O’Hara
No one has ever regretted trying harder.
– Alex Hormozi
I tell my students that when you write, you should pretend you’re writing the best letter you ever wrote to the smartest friend you have. That way, you’ll never dumb things down.
– Jeffrey Eugenides
Though the plot would like to entangle him, Pulcinella never lives through the deeds and episodes of his life – rather, he lives through only his blessed impossibility of living, just as his gestures remain perpetually beyond or before action and his words perennially beyond or before any communication of a meaning. This is why, in Benjamin’s words, the comic character holds up the clear vision of man’s natural innocence in opposition to the dark dogma of the guilt of creatures.
– Giorgio Agamben
Loving, believing in someone or something does not mean accepting dogmas and doctrines as true. It is, rather, like remaining faithful to the emotion that one felt as a child looking up at the starry sky.
– Giorgio Agamben
Writing teaches writing.
– John McPhee
Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.
– C.S. Lewis
The twilight more than dawn, autumn than Spring,
A treasured and luxurious gloom, of choice
– Wordsworth
A gracious spirit o’er this earth presides,
And o’er the hearts of man: invisibly
It comes, to works of unreproved delight,
And tendency benign, directing those
Who care not, know not, think not what they do.
– Wordsworth
The Soul that hath a Guest,
Doth seldom go abroad –
Diviner Crowd – at Home –
Obliterate the need –
And Courtesy forbids
The Host’s departure – when
Opon Himself – be visiting
The Emperor of Men –
– Emily Dickinson
In the Middle Ages, Noah’s ark was the emblem of the total archive. In fact, bibliographers and Noah have many things in common.
– Andrew Hui, On Lists
I can push my bike
through the most
ferocious headwinds,
knowing I’ll be lifted
and pushed along by
tailwinds back home.
– Andy Perrin
Transhumance has been repeatedly destroyed and attacked by capitalist regimes that enshrine fences and borders to ‘privatize’ what has been held in common for centuries. It is happening in the West Bank as I type. Planning my situationist crèche intervention for the season.
– Alina Stefanescu
This principle works for identity psychology too.
For every aspect of your identity that you pin down, you shed 50 others that society piled upon you.
– Victoria Teasdale
Reject the matrix. That’s the old world. Commit to awakening. That’s how you build the new.
– Nika Solé
You will continue to suffer if you allow your emotions to be a reflection of everything you hear. True power lies in observing with logic, in maintaining restraint. Words only have the control you give them; if they control you, anyone can control you. Take a deep breath and let what doesn’t matter just go.
– Bruce Lee
Together
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
It smacks me, sometimes,
how connected we are—
though we draw boundaries,
build walls, fight wars,
call names, and kill. All it takes
is a photo of earth from space
and I’m stunned again,
how much we are in this together.
And though we’d rather not know it,
every choice we make
affects everyone, everything else.
Perhaps this is why I weep
when the woman I’ve barely met
embroiders me a sweater
with a word she knows I’ll love
and then brings it to my home.
Because it’s proof of kindness,
a confirmation that beauty
not only exists, it will lead us to each other.
How easily two strangers
might become friends.
It can happen anywhere
on this small blue and green planet—
anywhere two people co-exist,
the invitation to be generous,
thoughtful, to think of new ways
to be good to each other.
Each kindness a bridge that spans
the world’s flaws. Each moment,
another chance to build another bridge.
SERMON, PROBABLY
UNSUCCESSFUL
I tried to explain
that the center of a poem
is not self expression
but exploration—
and not exploration of the self
but of the various elements—
words—
that you are bringing
into the proposed
piece of writing.
how do they
connect with one another
how do they
affect one another.
the task
is to raise these
disparate elements
into that passionate
condition
that we call a poem.
it is not a task
for reason
but for feeling.
we do not know
where the poem
will take us
only that it is moving us
somewhere.
Pound called the poet
a trouvère
a finder
rather than
a maker.
poetry
is the discovery
of the powerful
movement
of words.
it is the key
that opens
the thousand doors
of the heart.
it is not a mirror—
not a mirror!—
but a lamp.
I tried to explain
that the center of a poem
is not self expression
but exploration—
and not exploration of the self
but of the various elements—
words—
that you are bringing
into the proposed
piece of writing.
listen: this
is the interrogation
of words.
Et cum spiritu tuo.
– Jack Foley
Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism, and die of euphoria.
– John Templeton
No matter how much you may hate someone, it’s hard to disrespect a person who leaves it all on the field.
– Alex Hormozi
Maybe the true doorway to enlightenment is not escaping into a meditation cave but is raising a family.
– Anam Thubten
I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.
– C. S. Lewis
NEAR THE BOTTOM
But behind the end, near the bottom,
a longing to be like everyone else:
walking around your own house
as if around the mist,
planting a tree,
and misunderstanding the prophets.
I also wanted
to eat oysters with lemon
somewhere in Montmartre,
I also wanted calm and money,
and the bright colors of stones underwater.
Those bright colors underwater!
– Sylva Fischerová, (Trans. with Stuart Friebert)
A poem is not just an act of the brain.
– Uche Nduka
Your soul circle is formed when you’re not trying to form it, but instead ensuring your soul stays right.
– Lewis Mosey
Every pound you lose takes 4 pounds of pressure off your knees and 6 pounds off your hips.
A 5% reduction in body weight can result in a 50% reduction in joint pain.
Many people think they have knee or hip issues when it’s a weight issue.
– Dan Go
rolling up his sleeves,
the monk prepares
to read the gospel
– Susan Delphine Delaney
Invest yourself in everything you do. There’s fun in being serious.
– John Coltrane
A Poet Practises Qigong
Morning drapes her arms across summer grass.
At such altar of love, my skin gives thanks
for leaf-blessed light.
I bend my joints to these deities of sky
and soil, draw circular prayers, yin and
yang, receding, rising, a liminal dance
into the sanctum of the world.
Earth floods my fascia, clinging to sinew,
tethering heart to sky, a language of birds
shimmers out my lips, my soles stained gold
with dew.
– Saraswati Nagpal
absence and yearning
nowhere to be reached —
white veils of waterfall
in the deep forest
begin to hide myself
– Aya Yuhki
The island is full of noises
Surf flows milk white on raw stone,
breaks in soft hiss. Guillemots wail
down steep cliffs, shearwaters gabble
in alien tongues. A peregrine sails
the devil’s slide, a cruising pirate prince.
South-westerlies stroke grass like silk,
lift wool and feather, hum pagan airs.
Here we are not afraid. Lundy sea-haze
fills the lungs. Its granite fires
a million stars across our eyes.
– Matthew M C Smith
I missed you even when I was with you. That’s been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
If more people valued home, above gold, this world would be a merrier place…
– Thorin Oakenshield
Psychoanalysis intervenes in phenomenal realities insofar as they involve desire.
– Jacques Lacan
Strange, isn’t it? To have dedicated one’s life to a certain venture, neglecting other aspects of one’s life, only to have that venture, in the end, amount to nothing at all, the products of one’s labors ultimately forgotten?
– George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo
Jung said, write the truth, and expect to be misunderstood, and take the consequences. That was what he had been doing all his life. People feared truth.
– Claire Myers Owens
Love is volatile. Recalcitrant. Irrepressible. We do our best to tame it, to name it and plan for it and maybe even to contain it between the hours of six and twelve, or if you’re Parisian five and seven, but like much of what is adorable and irresistible in this world it eventually tears free of you and, yes, sometimes you get scratched up in the process.
– Lisa Halliday
The future does not belong to cars.
– Mayor Hidalgo
Don’t run away from the fire. Let it burn away your chains.
– Rumi
To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life.
– Elizabeth Gilbert
It has been widely believed that there are such deep disagreements between Kantians, Contractualists, and Consequentialists. That, I have argued, is not true. These people are climbing the same mountain on different sides.
– Derek Parfit
Can you feel the bursting of our human soul? It is harvest season. We are ripe for revolution.
– Jaiya John
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
With every accident, ask yourself what abilities you have for making a proper use of it. If you see an attractive person, you will find that self-restraint is the ability you have against your desire. If you are in pain, you will find fortitude. If you hear unpleasant language, you will find patience. And thus habituated, the appearances of things will not hurry you away along with them.
– Epictetus
A woman whose mood improves with a book, a poem, a song or a cup of coffee is not defeated by anyone; even life loses with her.
– Khalil Gibran
A man must go through tribulation
No matter who or where he’s from
If he’s a man of understanding
He then know that time alone will tell
– Dennis Brown
If you are meditating and a devil appears, make the devil meditate too.
– Gurdjieff
Now the hour to part has come. I go to die, you go to live. Which of us goes to the better lot is known to no one, except the god.
– Socrates
Simple, genuine goodness is the best capital to found the business of this life upon. It lasts when fame and money fail, and is the only riches we can take out of this world with us.
– Louisa May Alcott
A person does not live the way he says he would. He lives the way he has been living.
– Haemin Sunim
The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.
– Martin Buber
Because you are not in the right business or the right environment now, do not think that you must postpone action until you get into the right business or environment.
– Wallace D. Wattles
The visions you glorify in your mind,
The ideals you enthrone in your heart..
This you will build your life by…
This you will become.
– James Allen
I think that there is a peculiar moment in everybody’s growing up or growing down when there is that language change. From being marvelous stories, like movies, and marvelous songs, which words always are for me, you suddenly realize that these things are about your own life. Literature changes from being books in a library to something that concerns you. In fact, it loses some of its exoticism. That’s when it becomes a more exciting activity, a moral activity. I…] If it did happen (for me) with anybody, it was with Yeats, because we used to go to the sea in Sligo. I suppose Yeats gives me more pleasure than any other writer, and more constant pleasure. To actually see the names like Knocknarea and Queen Maeve’s Grave, and you know, ‘I stood among a crowd at Drumahair, His heart hung all upon a silken dress, to actually know that those placenames were places that I knew, like Boyle or Carrick on Shannon.
– John McGahern
You can either live just logically or Magically – the Choice is yours.
– Sadhguru
as if a passageway would also emerge, or a bridge, fields spread on the other side, and other imaginable spaces germinate into marvelous geometries
– John Taylor, The Crossable
Seventy-six Trombones
At one with tardigrades and polar bears,
With elephants and scorpions and wrens,
With tiddlers, whales, ferrets and March hares,
With hyenas, leopards, cockerels and hens,
my organs arranged according to a plan
with mouth at one end, stomach in the middle,
a heart, an arse, all that befits a man,
I share with them the common cosmic riddle
of being here at all under a sun
not as unique as humans once believed.
I am a hippogriff, a newt, a mother’s son,
I am alive if somewhat ill-conceived,
One of a species, a cub of seventy-six,
A child of the womb still struggling while he kicks.
– George Szirtes
Nobody in the history of the planet has ever complied their way out of totalitarian control.
– RFK Jr.
You really do have to get it right. You can lose a reader by getting something simple very wrong in a book. So, research, research, research.
– Neil Lancaster, Research: Leave Most of it Out
Across the sea of space, the stars are other suns.
– Carl Sagan
He is ungrateful who denies that he has received a kindness which has been bestowed upon him; he is ungrateful who conceals it; he is ungrateful who makes no return for it; most ungrateful of all is he who forgets it.
– Seneca
This world now appeared to me exactly as my grandfather had described it to me when I was still incredulous and unwilling to endorse his description. I had listened to him but been unwilling to believe him, at least in the early years. Later, however, I had evidence that his assertions were correct: for the most part the world is nauseating, and when we look into it we are looking into a cesspit. Or was he mistaken? I now had an opportunity to examine my grandfather’s assertions. I had an obsessive desire to gather the evidence in my head, and so I began a strenuous search for the evidence, tracking it down in every direction, in every corner of the city of my youth and its surroundings. My grandfather had been right in his judgment of the world: it was indeed a cesspit, but one which engendered the most intricate and beautiful forms if one looked into it long enough, if one’s eye was prepared for such strenuous and microscopic observation. It was a cesspit which yielded up its own natural beauties to the sharp revolutionary gaze. Yet whoever contemplates it for long, whoever spends decades gazing into it, eventually becomes exhausted and dies, or plunges headlong into it. My grandfather had described nature as cruel—and it was. He had described human beings as desperate and vicious—and they were. I was always on the look-out for counter-evidence, thinking to prove him wrong in this or that particular, but I failed: all the evidence I assembled in my head confirmed his views. He had indicated to me where the truth lay, and I unearthed it, thus confirming his indication.
– Thomas Bernhard
All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
– Samuel Beckett
Dust Angel
It came from nowhere, the creature at my feet
skittering around my ankles in the wind.
A wren or a mouse but weirdly transparent,
a fallen leaf now turned to lace.
It stopped, though its body still moved, changing shape
so alive – yet made of dust.
A clot of spider web, wisps of hair, seed heads –
almost spiritual
A ghost of a creature that doesn’t exist,
the wind had given it life.
This must be the way
new worlds are created.
– Matthew M C Smith
They’d rather develop robots than to develop human beings and human potential.
– Djehuty Ma’at’Ra
A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Gautama said that when the Great Ferris Wheel
stops turning, you will still be way up
there, swinging in your seat and laughing.
– Robert Bly
BIRTHDAY
At some point the lights will go out
& a cake will appear to be floating in
the doorway & we will begin the song.
The cake will be your favorite, held aloft
by the ones who love you & it will be
on fire, an offering, one flame for each
year you’ve been with us. Inside each
flame, millions of smaller flames, one
for each hour & before you make your
wish you will wonder if these aren’t
the candles that never go out, that
jump back to life after each breath—
some call them tricks, but think what
it means for the wish, that your breath,
instead of ending it, makes the flame
want to stay.
– Nick Flynn
Loving Friends and Kindred: –
When I look back
So short in charity and good works
We are a small remnant
of signal escapes wonderful in themselves
We march from our camp a little
and come home
Lost the beaten track and so
River section dark all this time
We must not worry
how few we are and fall from each other
More than language can express
Hope for the artist in America & etc
This is my birthday
These are the old home trees
– Susan Howe
You throw thorns, falling in my silence they become flowers.
– Siddhārtha Gautama
A few beings are neither in society nor in a state of dreaming. They belong to an isolated fate, to an unknown hope. Their open acts seem anterior to time’s first inculpation and to the skies’ unconcern. It occurs to no one to employ them. The future melts before their gaze. They are the noblest and the most disquieting.
– René Char
There are times, then, when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all we simply have to sit back for a while and do nothing. And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all. The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act he can perform: and often it is quite beyond his power. We must first recover the possession of our own being before we can act wisely or taste any experience in its human reality.
– Thomas Merton
I have probably spent 80% of my life reading.
– Warren Buffett
When stuck, I widened my network: sending drafts to poets, artists, trusted readers. Exploring poetry in secondhand shops, writing on buses, trains, in coffee shops…
– @RaymondAntrobus
Logic doesn’t persuade people. Clarity, storytelling, and appealing to self-interest do.
– @morganhousel
I am not atonal, but anti-tonal. I am not trying to argue pointlessly over words: it is essential to know what we deny and what we affirm.
– Stravinsky
Leonard Cohen wrote anywhere from 80 to 180 verses for “Hallelujah” and used 4, there’s a lesson in that.
– Dylan O’Sullivan
The most intimate thing we can do is to allow people we love most to see us at our worst. At our lowest. At our weakest. True intimacy happens when nothing is perfect.
– Amy Harmon
Writers fail readers, but it also happens the other way around and readers fail writers when all they ask of them is confirmation that the world is how they see it…
– Enrique Vila-Matas
long way home
from night shift
I drag my shadow
– Chen-ou Liu
When you speak, your words echo across the room. When you write, your words echo across the ages.
– Bud Gardner Bookthreads
If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn’t. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.
– Oscar Wilde
The God who has been sufficient until now should be trusted to the end.
– Charles Spurgeon
The right wants to destroy nature, defund knowledge production, deny artists the tools to make art, replace built space with ugly developments, impose puritan sexual norms, risk the ability of posterity to feed itself. What is the point of anything to them? Why bother living?
– Samuel Miller McDonald
The pines make a music like no other, rising and falling like a distant surf at night that calms the darkness before first light. “Soughing” we call it, from Old English, no less. How weightless words are when nothing will do.
– Philip Levine, Gospel
The selfish reason to be honest is to clear the mind of exhausting lies and to navigate towards people and situations where you can be completely authentic.
– @naval
Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much.
Wisdom is humble that he knows not more.
– William Cowper
Studying, working, driving, cooking, or any other activity, so long as it only aims to get somewhere else, to achieve something else, cannot be the goal of life.
– Bret W. Davis
At times, withdrawn,
I rise into the cool skies
and gaze on at the imponderable world with the simple identification
of my colleagues, the mountains.
– Frank O’Hara
When you start working everybody is in your studio- the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas- But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.
– John Cage
The answer is never the answer. What’s really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking. I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.
– Ken Kesey
Leisure time is a mechanized time and is exploited by techniques which, although different from those of man’s ordinary work, are as invasive, exacting, and leave man no more free than labor itself.
– Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
Some indeed still hold to the now somewhat obvious delusion that we of the United States can safely permit the United States to become a lone island, a lone island in a world dominated by the philosophy of force. Such an island may be the dream of those who still talk and vote as isolationists. Such an island represents to me and to the overwhelming majority of Americans today a helpless nightmare of a people without freedom-the nightmare of a people lodged in prison, handcuffed, hungry, and fed through the bars from day to day by the contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents.
– Franklin D Roosevelt
In his little apartment, alone, Ash set his cocktail of alarms.
– John Elizabeth Stintzi
A heart glows in
me. A heart.
– Ana Božičević
What Came to Me
I took the last
dusty piece of china
out of the barrel.
It was your gravy boat,
with a hard, brown
drop of gravy still
on the porcelain lip.
I grieved for you then
as I never had before.
– Jane Kenyon
The last time I saw you was down at the Greeks
There was whiskey on Sunday and tears on our cheeks
You sang me a song as pure as the breeze
Blowing up the road to Glenaveigh
I sat for a while at the cross at Finnoe
Where young lovers would meet when the flowers were in bloom
Heard the men coming home from the fair at Shinrone
Their hearts in Tipperary wherever they go
Take my hand, and dry your tears babe
Take my hand, forget your fears babe
There’s no pain, there’s no more sorrow
They’re all gone, gone in the years babe
I sat for a while by the gap in the wall
Found a rusty tin can and an old hurley ball
Heard the cards being dealt, and the rosary called
And a fiddle playing Sean Dun na nGall
And the next time I see you we’ll be down at the Greeks
There’ll be whiskey on Sunday and tears on our cheeks
For it’s stupid to laugh and it’s useless to bawl
About a rusty tin can and an old hurley ball
So I walked as day was dawning
Where small birds sang and leaves were falling
Where we once watched the row boats landing
By the broad majestic Shannon.
– Shane MacGowan
You can’t change human nature without mutilating human beings.
– Edward Abbey
do not leave the arena to the fools
– Toni Cade Bambara
The anger is no more mine than is the breeze on my skin or the sound of a dog barking across the street.
– Amaro Bhikkhu
Woe to the book you can read without constantly wondering about the author.
– Emil Cioran
I think that a fundamentalist society can produce nothing but silence or a literature of opposition written in exile.
– Tahar Ben Jelloun
we must worry
our best wishes, casting spells against the coming darkness.
– M. Bartley Seigel
My generation, especially, was oversold on the power of words.
– Wright Morris
We break. We sing the familiar
Because it feels soft and always.
– Emma Trelles
Drench
by Anne Stevenson
You sleep with a dream of summer weather,
wake to the thrum of rain—roped down by rain.
Nothing out there but drop-heavy feathers of grass
and rainy air. The plastic table on the terrace
has shed three legs on its way to the garden fence.
The mountains have had the sense to disappear.
It’s the Celtic temperament—wind, then torrents, then remorse.
Glory rising like a curtain over distant water.
Old stonehouse, having steered us through the dark,
docks in a pool of shadow all its own.
That widening crack in the gloom is like good luck.
Luck, which neither you nor tomorrow can depend on.
The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.
– Derek Walcott
Most of the time
it was like a desk
off to the side in the kitchen
where all things useful were done.
– Michael Chitwood
You’ve never seen death? Look in the mirror every day, and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.
– Jean Cocteau
THE GREAT AMERICAN SCREENPLAY
by Patrick Ryan Frank
In corporate offices across the city,
in every company’s cubicle-chambered heart,
there are men alone all lunch hour: men
who watch the tendons shifting in their hands
as they type love over and over again—
ring finger, ring finger, index, middle—softly,
though, only barely touching the keys,
never hard enough to light up the screen.
The winter comes; I walk alone,
I want no bird to sing;
To those who keep their hearts their own
The winter is the spring.
– John Clare
Be grateful for the kind of friends who show up emotionally, spiritually, and practically.
Presence is a gift.
– Dr. Thema
Children know something that most people have forgotten.
– Keith Haring
I don’t believe in anything but the existence of my sensations; I have no other certainty, not even of the outer universe conveyed to me by those sensations. I don’t see the outer universe, I don’t hear the outer universe, I don’t touch the outer universe. I see my visual impressions; I hear my auditory impressions; I touch my tactile impressions. It’s not with the eyes but with the soul that I see; it’s not with the ears but with the soul that I hear; it’s not with the skin but with the soul that I touch. And if someone should ask me what the soul is, I’ll answer that it’s me.
– Álvaro De Campos
There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them!
– Sir Winston Churchill
There is enough beauty in being here and not elsewhere.
– Fernando Pessoa
So, now I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon. I shall walk, as I did tonight, jealous of my loneliness, in the blue-silver of the cold moon, shining brilliantly on the drifts of fresh-fallen snow, with the myriad sparkles. I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever. With masks down, I walk, talking to the moon, to the neutral impersonal force that does not hear, but merely accepts my being. And does not smite me down.
– Sylvia Plath
Many folk like to know beforehand what is to be set on the table; but those who have labored to prepare the feast like to keep their secret; for wonder makes the words of praise louder.
– Gandalf (Tolkien, The Return of the King)
…the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men. Ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary. Man is something more awful than men; something more strange.
– G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
the streetlights are marking pins
to keep the city from shifting
– Popona Tsukino
everyone’s searching for meaning;
meaning is searching for anyone who’ll stay still
– River Kenna
Aside from that, I have within me all the dreams of the world.
– Fernando Pessoa
I was shipwrecked without the slightest storm, in a sea where I had footing.
– Fernando Pessoa
A lot of the conflict you have in your life exists simply because you’re not living in alignment; you’re not be being true to yourself.
– Steve Maraboli
For You Who Are About to Give Up
Think of what you’ll miss:
the voices of children;
apples, white wine on a table;
the smell of the Spring before you’re ready.
Stay.
It doesn’t get better; it gets truer.
Winter. Albums. Madness.
Your grief in you like a cello
in its locked, black case.
The lemon-scent of someone who has gone.
Breathe. Just breathe
and be there.
In my darkest hour, I heard a voice
that woke me. Friend, I will leave you
with that little hymn-
(when you wake
there will be horse-tracks
in new snow,
wind in the ruins of the spruces):
As long as you have breath,
you could be song.
As long as you have breath you could be song.
– Joseph Fasano
The essence of what I desire is simply this:
to sleep away life.
– Fernando Pessoa
My mother said, “Women, if the soul of the nation is to be saved, I believe that you must become its soul.”
– @BerniceKing
When we see images of the desperate people under the rubble—or starving—or worse, much worse—it’s imperative to keep in mind they live, and lived, profound interior lives in which they imagined, explored, invented, and dreamed.
– Jorie Graham
acid rain passing through
to paint the evening rainbow
– Kineo Hayashida
There is a kind of stillness, a stillness within motion, attained and maintained only though [sic] motion, and the runner runs to keep this stillness in place. Carrying not only this stillness, but also your solitude that no one could reach. That’s what you do, you scoop up your solitude inside yourself and run with it, a precious numen, you take flight, use speed to exit their territory and enter your own.
– Mark Bowles
Les Luths
Ah nuts! It’s boring reading French newspapers
in New York as if I were a Colonial waiting for my gin
somewhere beyond this roof a jet is making a sketch of the sky
where is Gary Snyder I wonder if he’s reading under a dwarf pine
stretched out so his book and his head fit under the lowest branch
while the sun of the Orient rolls calmly not getting through to him
not caring particularly because the light in Japan respects poets
while in Paris Monsieur Martory and his brother Jean the poet
are reading a piece by Matthieu Galey and preparing to send a pneu
everybody here is running around after dull pleasantries and
wondering if The Hotel Wentley Poems is as great as I say it is
and I am feeling particularly testy at being separated from
the one I love by the most dreary of practical exigencies money
when I want only to lean on my elbow and stare into space feeling
the one warm beautiful thing in the world breathing upon my right rib
what are lutes they make ugly twangs and rest on knees in cafés
I want to hear only your light voice running on about Florida
as we pass the changing traffic light and buy grapes for wherever
we will end up praising the mattressless sleigh-bed and the
Mexican egg and the clock that will not make me know
how to leave you
– Frank O’Hara
None of us know how to fix ourselves, at least not entirely, not well enough.
– Catherine Lacey
December is a bewitching month. The grey of cold teeters on the edge of becoming the most enchanting blue.
– George R.R. Martin
My way of looking at the world is so nearsighted. If no one said anything, I’d probably just live like I do now year in and year out, and feel complacent about everything around me. Plus, I don’t see that many people. Something is definitely missing — I don’t know what, maybe compassion for people who are suffering, a sense of adventure, interest in other people…
– Banana Yoshimoto
This Self cannot be cut, burnt, wetted nor dried up. It is eternal, all-pervading, stable, ancient and immovable.
– Bhagavad Gita
The experience is the way to the divine, not the concept. An idea, held in the mind, can actually keep a person from experiencing his experience.
– Joseph Campbell
The human being is born with an inclination toward virtue.
– Musonius Rufus
The foundation upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
I begin to suspect that the world is divided not only into the happy and the unhappy, but into those who like happiness and those who, odd as it seems, really don’t.
– CS Lewis
Make your heart your primary guide! Not your mind.
– Shams Tabrizi
Things of this world are in so constant a flux that nothing remains long in the same state.
– John Locke
One swallow does not make a summer, neither does one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.
– Aristotle
there are a lot of ways to suppress the embodiment of archetypes, and our culture has been using a lot of them for quite awhile
– River Kenna
I have compared you / To a company of horses
– Mary Oppen
I think communication begins when words never come to us. I think we’ve given language a lot of attention, whereas silence is more important.
– Marina Abramović
Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. It is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.
– Alan Watts
But the ‘real soul-mate’ is the one you are actually married to.
– Tolkien
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
– Winston Churchill
There are many who live in the mountains and behave as if they were in the town; they are wasting their time. It is possible to be a solitary in one’s mind while living in a crowd; and it is possible for those who are solitaries to live in the crowd of their own thoughts.
– Amma Syncletica
As if some little Arctic flower
by Emily Dickinson
As if some little Arctic flower,
Upon the polar hem,
Went wandering down the latitudes,
Until it puzzled came
To continents of summer,
To firmaments of sun,
To strange, bright crowds of flowers,
And birds of foreign tongue!
I say, as if this little flower
To Eden wandered in —
What then? Why, nothing, only,
Your inference therefrom!
The Smithy of the Soul
When you are on the journey of alchemical change there will be points of time characterized by disorientation, inner friction, irritation, and sometimes even a discordance with others and the external world.
Grant yourself the latitude of solitude, and don’t fault others for not comprehending “where” you are or how you are. It may very well be that you are each citizens of completely different worlds that just happen to overlap on this earth of tremors and uncertainty.
Though there can be a kind of solace in crossing paths with those who have had their own journey, who share the vocabulary of metamorphosis, and have logged their own time in the terrain of death-rebirth, ultimately, such a journey is not about making sense to others or being understood. Those who know, know. Those who don’t know, don’t yet know, or can’t know.
C.G. Jung, and even the old Chinese scholar Wu Yubi to a certain extent, kept meticulous journals of their inner plowing, tumult, and cultivations. Their words reveal frictions, tough moods, irritations, challenging night dreams, and a palpable strain from trying to hold the dynamic tension between the simmering hot vapor of their own inner alchemy, and having to show up for (and be with) the harsh, cold realities of what they encountered in the outer world.
They, and other “alchemists,” wandered through shadowlands and threshold lands; were cooked coal-black, white-hot, glowing-red, and luminous-gold within their being. They show us there is really only one course to take: recording everything like a faithful scribe, one foot after another on the path, rising each day and tumbling shadow-like into the darkness of night where dreams are their own “mystery school.”
For the alchemist of soul, there is only the simmering, and staying with the simmering. There is only staying with the anvil-pounding and being plunged into ice cold water. Rinse and repeat.
If we are one of the fortunate ones, one day we comprehend a sudden sheen to life, a certain glow, and a quality of newfound knowing that the journey has led us to a sword-like brilliance. It may not be a brilliance by any measure of the bullet train, stock-ticker, or ticking-clock world. Most likely it won’t be, for these are ancient matters. But, at least we can look into our own eyes in the mirror and say, “I am still here. I have befriended myself.” This is what it means to become intimate with tempering.
– Frank L. Owen
In old Russia there were very devout people, but they had a great number of beliefs that couldn’t find a place in any ordinary idea of Christianity. They believed that there were spirits in forests and spirits in houses, and if one undertook something one should ask the spirit of the place to allow and help it. And life was very good, although it was very hard.
These people felt that they were in connection with the spiritual world all the time—and they were.
It is through this sense of the sacred being open in us that we can get into the world which in Sufism is called the alam-i arvah, the world of spirits. I have said that the spiritual power is like the Sun and that we do not see the Sun. What we see are carpets, chairs and so on—the light of the Sun reflected in these things. In some kind of way the alam-i arvah is a reflection of the power of God, of the Spirit. If you believe and accept that you are in that world, you really are in it. And when you accept the movements in such a way, then what one could call “the spirit of the movements” comes into what you do. It is even possible to say that every movement has its own spirit and sometimes you can feel that it is the spirit doing the movement. This does not mean that God is doing the movement—God is a long way beyond that. It means that something is at work which is not of the bodily world. We should believe that there is a spirit world, because there is. Everything has its own spirit for which there is an invocation or prayer. Buddhism told people to be very careful not to think of God in the way that they had been doing. But it never discouraged belief in the spirits.
– JG Bennett, The Way to be Free
The bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent and respectable stranger but also the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions whom we will welcome to a participation of all rights and privileges.
– George Washington
The One Forbidden Thing. Remember Bluebeard, who says to his wife, “Don’t open that closet”? And then one always disobeys. In the Old Testament story God points out the one forbidden thing. Now, God must have known very well that man was going to eat the forbidden fruit. But it was by doing that that man became the initiator of his own life. Life really began with that act of disobedience.
– Joseph Campbell
In today’s world of modern conveniences, of cell phones and pagers, stealth fighters, nuclear submarines, electron microscopes and radio telescopes, it is sometimes easy to forget that the ability to pursue science unimpeded, to let imagination wander where inquiry leads, to investigate and reach beyond ourselves, is not an entitlement but a right that was fought for, as were other rights fought for, sometimes to the death. This struggle has shaped our history and our souls. In it are the seeds that define us as a species. It was curiosity, not Eve, that tempted Adam.
– Lawrence & Nancy Goldstone
Never underestimate the potential of ego to lead one astray, no matter how hard you train or what your point on the path. The rush of learning a new skill, the flattery that accompanies a touch of success – these things can overinflate any person’s ego. Too much praise can do damage just like too much criticism. Measure a compliment the same as you measure a critique. If you think you’ve arrived somewhere, you’ve got that much farther to go. One can lose the Way in an instant.
– P.T. Sudo
Landscape Mode
In ancient Chinese paintings we see more sky than
earth, so when clouds hurry by in silver-gray
inkbursts of rolling readiness right along the river,
ripe with rain, rushing the road of time along,
pushing back light, belittling the black and white clarity
of Hollywood in its prime, the eye climbs down to greet
with shining gusto trees along the shore, Orpyland
beyond the frame, the blue horizon hidden in a sea
of possibilities. And beyond this there’s jazz: Jimmy Giuffre’s
Train on the River stretched out strong like a pet cat
– and that’s that. But not quite. This poem paints
poorly what sketchers and colorists do best. The rest
should come out empty, allowing you to fill in your own
basic emptiness, your openness, your self-portrait
forged and cataloged; on quiet exhibit, on temporary loan.
Descended from clouds immensely more ancient than China,
you never quit becoming the background, the field in a sky
whose subtle earthiness sails over our heads altogether.
– Al Young
Every day, every day I hear
enough to fill
a year of nights with wondering.
– Denise Levertov
The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.
– Jorge Luis Borges
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight.
– T S Eliot
If you never want to see the face of hell, when you come home from work every night, dance with your kitchen towel, and if you’re worried about waking up your family, take off your shoes.
– Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav
The importance and unimportance of the self cannot be exaggerated.
– R. H. Blyth
All the Hemispheres
Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out
Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadows and shores and hills.
Open up to the Roof.
Make a new water-mark on your excitement
And love.
Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.
Change rooms in your mind for a day.
All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.
Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.
All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting
While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.
– Hafiz
A miss is as good as a mile. The slightest thought of self, that is, by self, and the Great Way is irretrievably lost. A drop of ink, and a glass of clear water is all clouded. Once we think, This flower is blooming for me; this insect is a hateful nuisance and nothing else; that man is a useful rascal; that woman is a good mother, and she must therefore be a good wife, – when such thoughts arise in our minds, all the cohesion between things disappear; they rattle about in a meaningless and irritating way. Instead of being united into a whole by virtue of their own interpenetrated suchness, they are pulled hither and thither by our arbitrary and ever-changing preferences, our whims and prejudices. We suppose this particular man to be a Buddha, ourselves to be ordinary people, this action to be charming, that to be odious, and fail to see how “All things work for good” (Romans VIII, 28). In actual fact, Heaven and Earth cannot be separated; one cannot exist without the other. Together they are the Great Way.
– R. H. Blyth
They say
do not try to unlock this door
without a teacher.
Who locked this door?
– John Ezra Fowler
What is common to all human beings in all history is problems, problems, problems. We are here for problem-solving and, if you are any good at problem-solving, you don’t come to utopia, you come to more difficult problems to solve. That apparently is what we’re here for, so I therefore conclude that we humans are here for local information-gathering and local problem-solving with our minds having access to the design principles of the Universe. We are here for local information gathering and local-Universe problem-solving in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe. That is a very extraordinary and important kind of a function we have.
– R. Buckmister Fuller
Since the business of living has so many barbs in it, and since so many of our friends are liars or fools or inarticulate or emotionally blunt or are sucking on us for what they imagine we can give though we can’t, it is pure joy to read the poems of the truth-sayers, the simple singers, the masters of prayer and devotion, and the crazed, wise, babblers of Ecstasy, the High-Mind Singers to no end.
– Lew Welch
And now, advice for beginning mystics. Be sober, be intelligent, be educated, rely on the tangible reality as long as you can. Remember that the act of writing is a tiny part of a bigger something. Defend the value of the spiritual experience and if somebody tells you it’s an old fashioned notion, laugh loudly and serenely.
– Adam Zagajewski
We write to understand. Thus we should write. But we can never fully understand. The world is shifting, and we are shifting under it. Thus we should keep writing.
– Andy Couturier
Only to a magician is the world forever fluid,
infinitely mutable and eternally new.
Only he knows the secret of change.
Only he knows truly that all things are crouched in eagerness
to become something else
and it is from this universal tension
that he draws his power.
– Peter Beagle
The unspoiled colors of a late summer night,
The wind howling through the lofty pines
The feel of the autumn approaching;
The swaying bamboos keep resonating,
And shedding tears of dew at dawn;
Only those who exert themselves fully
Will attain the Way,
But even if you abandon all for the ancient path of meditation,
You can never forget the meaning of sadness.
– Dogen
Hidden on this mountain, many Buddhist monks
Chant sutras, meditate together;
Men on distant city walls gazing towards the peaks
See only white, enshrouding clouds.
– Wang Wei
Why would anyone put their shoulder against a mountain they can’t possibly shift? Why not live in the valley instead and learn day-by-day who you are? Why not stay there and explore your potential and how you can best express it?
– Hildegard of Bingen
The Establishment
They inhabit another continent.
all sheep, no wolves, a huddled mediocrity
that looks to the collective to shelter
dead impulses. All birds on that island
have stone wings and can never lift and know the sky’s
blue spaces or the generosity
that lives in the creative. They are flat
like their grey buildings; equally as flawed
as stucco fissures mapped on a highrise.
Their dead books shuttle to the fire
of a crematorium’s oven.
Their fraudulent public faces don’t see
beauty or how originality
animates the image to poetry.
I sit, back to the wall in a basement.
I write and five purpletulips instruct
me love and the word are evident;
I, and my life as an outsider, free.
– Laura Riding
Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball – I am nothing! I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.
– Emerson
If an ordinary person is silent, it may be a tactical manoeuvre. If a writer is silent, he is lying.
– Jaroslav Seifert
The sky looks very blue. Is that its real color, or is it because it is so far away and has no end?
– Chuang Tzu
You are here to learn something. Don’t try to figure out what it is. This can be frustrating and unproductive.
– Steven L. Peck
Two tasks at the beginning of your life: to narrow your orbit more and more, and ever and again to check whether you are not in hiding somewhere outside your orbit.
– Franz Kafka
There are only two worlds – your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. These worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power; provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters.
– Neil Gaiman
Asked: Whom would you want to write your life story?
Someone with a gorgeous style and a great big loving and forgiving heart.
– Sigrid Nunez, from The Vulnerables
I thought of Jung basically as what I call a noetic archeologist, someone who goes with toothbrush and pick to dig away the detritus from the bones of vanished idea systems.
– Terence Mckenna
Think of your writing desk as a resistance cell, your pen as a lockpick, your words as skeleton keys unlocking futures they tried to close. Every story that preserves truth is a small rebellion. Every poem that remembers beauty is a quiet revolution. Keep writing. Keep unlocking.
– Kerrigan Legend
The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art.
– Terence McKenna
What still frightened me was that even the unpunishable horror would be generously reabsorbed by the abyss of unending time, by the abyss of unending heights, by the deep abyss of the God: absorbed into the heart of an indifference. So unlike human indifference. Since that was a self-serving indifference, a fulfilled indifference. It was an extremely energetic indifference.
– Clarice Lispector
Sometimes the best things are right in front of you; it just takes some time to see them.
– Gladys Knight
High degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Bad company does a man real harm, for if you lie down with dogs you will get up with fleas.
– Charles Spurgeon
What is to come will be created in you and from you. Hence look into yourself. Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfill the way that is in you.
– Carl Jung
If you are asked to revise, it’s because your message is worth getting right.
– Caitlin Muir
The job of an artist is to be themselves at any cost.
– Sinead O’Connor
… a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony …
– Roland Barthes
If you’re not actively decoding your reality, you miss out on so much. The incredible ways the dots connect. The magical mechanisms that are in place to support your evolution. The divine technology that curates your highest possible reality if you simply see clearly all that is.
– Nika Solé
He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down, and without walls.
– Proverbs 25:28
If you’re doing it right, the expansion of consciousness will come as a result of you living your life.
– Nika Solé
Every high civilization
decays by forgetting
obvious things.
– G.K. Chesterton
December stillness, teach me through your trees
That loom along the west, one with the land,
The veiled evangel of your mysteries.
– Siegfried Sassoon
To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself.
– Henry Miller
Will you love me in
December
as you do in
May?
– Jack Kerouac
It is paradoxical, but you can feel both gratitude and resentment toward the person who forces you to begin down your own path of growth.
– Robert A. Johnson
amidst the morning dew
the butterfly’s mood
improves
– Issa
That was the poetry era of our love:
I was someone else. You were someone else.
– Kausar Munir
We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.
– Denis Diderot
Depth psychology is where today we find the initiatory mystery, the long journey of psychic learning, ancestor worship, the encounter with demons and shadows, the sufferings of Hell.
– James Hillman
Ever since I rubbed turmeric on your gash / all my wounds became new again.
– Kausar Munir
For even the very wise cannot see all ends.
– Gandalf (Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring)
If you were serious about hitting your goals you wouldn’t wait for January.
You’d start now.
– Dan Go
The selfish reason to be thrifty is that living far below your means frees you from obsessing over money.
– @naval
Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.
– Frank O’Hara
What every beginner needs to learn:
Failing is closer to success than thinking about success.
Failure become success over time.
Thinking becomes failure over time.
– Alex Hormozi
Though this body has its beginning and an end, the dweller in the body is infinite and without end.
– Krishna
I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home.
– Mahmoud Darwish
A life spent looking for shortcuts is a long road to nowhere.
– @naval
Heartache will stay with us all our lifetimes—
What does it matter if we descend
into the river of sorrow?
– Munir Niazi
But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist.
– Lysander Spooner
wind-kissed color
delicately sown
within an autumn garden
– Basho
The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.
– Prof. Feynman
i stand before you to say
that today i walked home
& caught the light through
the fence & it was so golden
i wanted to cry
– Eve L. Ewing
If you begin feeling like a victim, you can easily stop by asking yourself, “What do I know to be true?” That question will help you self-reflect and get back to the facts, which helps you see your reality more clearly.
– Cy Wakeman
In these days of overpopulation and social evils crying for concern it may seem wicked to withdraw from the crowd. Even from the bohemian and hippie crowd of the Sausalito waterfront.
But, to tell the truth, I have some faith in the historical idealism of “human progress.” Like the planet itself, human history goes round.
– Alan Watts
The intention to be of benefit is something we cultivate without anyone else knowing.
– Dungse Jampal Norbu
the more established the field becomes, the less can the production of the work of art, of its value but also of its meaning, be reduced to the sole labor of an artist—who, paradoxically, increasingly becomes the focus of attention.
– Bourdieu
I found myself thinking back to my own early youth, to the first shock of my encounter — at about twenty years of age — with Paris. It was like a sudden unpremeditated chord on the piano — a chord I had never struck before.
– Lawrence Durrell
Nature is a temple of living pillars where often words emerge confused and dim; & man goes through his Forrest with familiar eyes of symbols always watching him.
– Baudelaire
Everything is new
When the sky is blue
You got everything to do
– Frank Black
The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality.
– Niels Bohr
May happiness
pursue you,
catch you
often, and,
should it
lose you,
be waiting
ahead, making
a clearing
for you.
– A. R. Ammons
I have often wondered if the sadness that haunts me is not my own, but something that has been passed down through generations, an inheritance of sorrow that I carry with me. It is a sadness that I cannot fully understand, a sense of loss that I cannot explain. It is as if I am mourning something that was taken from me long before I was born, a grief that has been passed down through the ages, from parent to child, until it has become a part of me, woven into the very fabric of my being.
– W.G. Sebald
The world is a seamless, always self-creating, self-individuating, and simultaneously self-uniting, flow that is only truly knowable as it comes to be known. (I say ‘it’, for convenience at this point; it is a question worth considering whether this is the appropriate pronoun.) ‘It’ is like a stream, with its whirlpools and eddies, that come into being for a time, and resolve; while they are there they are present to all observers, even measurable up to a point; and yet, while distinct, they are inseparable from the stream, not just in the sense that without the stream they do not exist, but in the sense that they are the stream. … Once one sees this, the objectivising, time-denying, change-denying, diagrammatic mentality of modern Western thinking appears as I believe it is: a hindrance, not a help, on the path to truth.
– lain McGilchrist
Love, what’s left for us, and of us, is this
Living remnant, loving revenant, brief kiss
Like a bee flying completed dying hiveless
To find in the forest’s heart a home,
Night’s never-ending hum,
Thriving on meadowsweet, mint, and time.
Take, for all that is good, for all that is gone,
That it may lie rough and real against your collarbone,
This string of bees, that once turned honey into sun.
– Osip Mandelstam
(translated from the Russian by Christian Wiman)
Paris
by Willa Cather
Behind the arch of glory sets the day;
The river lies in curves of silver light,
The Fields Elysian glitter in a spray
Of golden dust; the gilded dome is bright,
The towers of Notre Dame cut clean and gray
The evening sky, and pale from left to right
A hundred bridges leap from either quay.
Pillared with pride, the city of delight
Sits like an empress by her silver Seine,
Heavy with jewels, all her splendid dower
Flashing upon her, won from shore and main
By shock of combat, sacked from town and tower.
Wherever men have builded hall or fane
Red war hath gleaned for her and men have slain
To deck her loveliness. I feel again
That joy which brings her art to faultless flower,
That passion of her kings, who, reign on reign,
Arrayed her star by star with pride and power.
It is not good to eat much honey: so for men to search their own glory is not glory.
– Proverbs 25:27
The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.
– Emil Cioran
ask not only what art can do for the revolution, also ask what the revolution can do for art.
– Ryan Ruby
in a desert, sea fossils point the way
– John Taylor
It is the giver, not the taker, who is the true miracle worker and, ironically, it is the one who is focused on giving as his or her purpose in life who seems to receive so much more than those who are always looking for more. It is all in your mindset.”
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
Myth is a kind of soul to the body of poetry.
– Eustathios of Thessaloniki
The cause of tragedy is that we would rather murder the world than permit it to expose us to change.
– Stanley Cavell
Hunter Biden should get a humanities PhD just to *really* piss them off
– V. Joshua Adams
Anyway celebrate I will
This winter hibernation
With apricot blossoms in my heart
– Basho Matsuo (tr. Takafumi Saito)
The literary revolution was a put up job. A middle-class revolution, a paper tiger, a media hype at best. It’s time for poor voices not heard from, hidden in the dark corners of America. Voices crushed on skid row, walking the streets & highway out of their minds.
– Jack Micheline
You can die from someone else’s misery—emotional states are as infectious as diseases. You may feel you are helping the drowning man but you are only precipitating your own disaster.
– Robert Greene
poetry puts language in a state of emergence.
– Bachelard
Your worldview is your world.
– @naval
Patience is key to your mental health when you are physically ill. It is one of the few virtues you can actively cultivate when your body ceases to cooperate.
– Shozen Jack Haubner
Tragedy is often named for the tragic person – King Lear, Hamlet, Julius Caesar – whereas comedies draw from the world at large – As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. Tragedy has proper nouns, and comedy has regular old nouns that signify the world and the structure of the world over and above the individual. Is this because tragedies are about the loss of one individual soul? The tragic perspective privileges one person over the continuity of the system, whereas comedies (which often end in marriage) use linguistic structures that describe life in general persisting after the play is over. You can still “like it” after As You Like It, but after Hamlet, Hamlet is dead forever, keeps dying, keeps on being dead.
– Sarah Ruhl
CURRICULUM VITAE
1) I was born in a Free City, near the North Sea.
2) In the year of my birth, money was shredded into
confetti. A loaf of bread cost a million marks. Of
course I do not remember this.
3) Parents and grandparents hovered around me. The
world I lived in had a soft voice and no claws.
4) A cornucopia filled with treats took me into a building
with bells. A wide-bosomed teacher took me in.
5) At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.
6) On Sundays the city child waded through pinecones
and primrose marshes, a short train ride away.
7) My country was struck by history more deadly than
earthquakes or hurricanes.
8) My father was busy eluding the monsters. My mother
told me the walls had ears. I learned the burden of secrets.
9) I moved into the too bright days, the too dark nights
of adolescence.
10) Two parents, two daughters, we followed the sun
and the moon across the ocean. My grandparents stayed
behind in darkness.
11) In the new language everyone spoke too fast. Eventually
I caught up with them.
12) When I met you, the new language became the language
of love.
13) The death of the mother hurt the daughter into poetry.
The daughter became a mother of daughters.
14) Ordinary life: the plenty and thick of it. Knots tying
threads to everywhere. The past pushed away, the future left
unimagined for the sake of the glorious, difficult, passionate
present.
15) Years and years of this.
16) The children no longer children. An old man’s pain, an
old man’s loneliness.
17) And then my father too disappeared.
18) I tried to go home again. I stood at the door to my
childhood, but it was closed to the public.
19) One day, on a crowded elevator, everyone’s face was younger
than mine.
20) So far, so good. The brilliant days and nights are
breathless in their hurry. We follow, you and I.
– Lisel Mueller
It was not the privileged and the fortunate who took in the Jews in France. It was the marginal and damaged, which should remind us that there are real limits to what evil and misfortune can accomplish. If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening. If you bomb a city, you leave behind death and destruction. But you create a community of remote misses. If you take away a mother or a father, you cause suffering and despair. But one time in ten, out of that despair rises as indomitable force. You see the giant and the shepherd in the Valley of Elah and your eye is drawn to the man with sword and shield and the glittering armor. But so much of what is beautiful and valuable in the world comes from the shepherd, who has more strength and purpose than we ever imagine.
– Malcolm Gladwell
They moved in dance steps too intricate for the noninitiated eye to imitate or understand. Clearly they were of one soul. Handsome, rangy, wildly various, they were bound in total loyalty, not by oath, but by the simple, unquestioning belongingness of part of one organism.
– Louise Erdrich
Aborigines, like other indian tribes, believe that people today have less of this life energy than in the past. Because life energy is the common source between human beings and nature, the loss of it parallels the loss of connection between human beings and their relations: the plants, animals, stones, water, sky, the Earth, and all of creation. Restoring life energy to its original condition of fullness may be the key to recovering lost potentials and realizing that “the Kingdom of Heaven is in our midst.
– Kenneth S. Cohen
The stars are night birds with bright breasts
Like hummingbirds.
Twinkling stars are birds flying slowly.
Shooting stars are birds darting swiftly.
(Taos Pueblo, New Mexico)
– Natalia Maree Belting
Whatever pain you feel, take it in, wishing for all beings to be free of it. Whatever pleasure you feel, send it out to others. In this way, our personal problems and delights become a stepping-stone for understanding the suffering and happiness of all beings.
– Pema Chödrön
People listening to songs are like people reading novels: for a few minutes, for a few hours, someone else gets to come in and hijack that part of your brain that’s always thinking. A good book or song kidnaps your interior voice and does all the driving. With the artist in charge you’re free for a little while to leave your body and be someone else.
– Douglas Coupland
The world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.
– Norbert Wiener
Not creating delusions is enlightenment.
– Bodhidharma
A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.
– Jorge Luis Borges
The missing element for many of us in the developed world has been contemplation, which allows us to see things in their wholeness and with respect (re-spect = to see a second time). If we were to spend time in nature, alone like Jesus or the Desert Fathers and Mothers, we would know many of the same things religion has been trying to teach, but we would know them on a cellular level, on a physical and energetic level. That kind of knowing does not contradict the rational; it’s much more holistic and heartfelt. There is nothing that is not spiritual for those who have learned how to see.
– Richard Rohr
We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd.
– Virginia Woolf
Everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you who you are. We build ourselves out of that story.
– Patrick Rothfuss
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
– T.S. Eliot
There is always a sunrise and always a sunset. It’s up to you to be there for it, my mom said a million years ago, when she was alive. I rolled my eyes then, a million years ago. Now I live my life by it.
– Cheryl Strayed
Only the foolish, blinded by language’s conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at its melancholy rim, green in its envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in its greatest rages, black.
– Salman Rushdie
There’s a word for the way some people freak out at the existence of humanities scholarship. It’s called anti-intellectualism. It’s a severe character flaw.
– Malcolm Harris
People say, “I’m not interested in your niche passion.” I think it’s beautiful that there are folks willing to study the world in all its complexity and strangeness. A fascination with things is a kind of love. “Don’t you think they’re the same thing, love and attention?”
– @SketchesbyBoze
It’s a wonderful thing that there are scholars and enthusiasts who study the migration patterns of swallows, Viking trade routes, and yes, the ethics of smell in literature. Someday I may want to learn about those things. The beauty of life is in the details.
– @SketchesbyBoze
Criticism, if it is to be conscientious and profound, and if it is applied to an object so unlimited as poetry, must be almost as unattainable by any hasty effort as fine poetry itself.
– Thomas De Quincey
With our power or without,
Not just heart and prayers,
Our courage and privilege;
Compassion for others—a test for us
– Saasa Akber
Neurodiversity has been stripped, sanitized, corporatized, and biologized to such a disturbing degree that many Mad folks don’t feel a connection or alignment that provides a meaningful way of sense making, identifying, building relationships or understanding our selves.
– @stefkaufman
A noble inner shrine waits for you too in
our kingdom.
There, gracious one, I will place your
oracles, and mystic
utterances spoken to my people, and
consecrate picked men.
Only do not write your verses on the
leaves, lest they fly,
disordered playthings of the rushing
winds: chant them
from your own mouth.
– Virgil
I pray this winter be gentle and kind— a season of rest from the wheel of the mind.
– John Geddes
Most of the things that are supposed to be so objectionable in books are things that every teenager, in the United States, not only knows, but has talked about at length in school, or on the way home from school.
– Bennett Cerf
On Disappearing
by Major Jackson
I have not disappeared.
The boulevard is full of my steps.
The sky is full of my thinking.
An archbishop prays for my soul,
even though we met only once,
and even then, he was busy waving at a congregation.
The ticking clocks in Vermont sway
back and forth as though sweeping up my eyes
and my tattoos and my metaphors,
and what comes up are the great paragraphs of dust,
which also carry motes of my existence.
I have not disappeared.
My wife quivers inside a kiss.
My pulse was given to her many times,
in many countries.
The chunks of bread we dip in olive oil
is communion with our ancestors,
who also have not disappeared.
Their delicate songs I wear on my eyelids.
Their smiles have given me freedom
which is a crater I keep falling in.
When I bite into the two halves of an orange
whose cross-section resembles my lungs,
a delta of juices burst down my chin,
and like magic,
makes me appear to those who think I’ve disappeared.
It’s too bad war makes people disappear like chess pieces,
and that prisons turn prisoners into movie endings.
When I fade into the mountains on a forest trail,
I still have not disappeared,
even though its green façade
turns my arms and legs into branches of oak.
It is then I belong to a southerly wind,
which by now you have mistaken as me
nodding back and forth like a Hasid in prayer
or a mother who has just lost her son to gunfire in Detroit.
I have not disappeared.
In my children, I see my bulging face
pressing further into the mysteries.
In a library in Tucson,
on a plane above Buenos Aires,
on a field where nearby burns a controlled fire,
I am held by a professor, a general, and a photographer.
One burns a finely wrapped cigar,
then sniffs the scented pages of my books,
scouring for the bitter smell of control.
I hold him in my mind like a chalice.
I have not disappeared.
I swish the amber hue of lager on my tongue
and ponder the drilling rigs in the Gulf of Alaska
and all the oil-painted plovers.
When we talk about limits, we disappear.
In Jasper, TX you can disappear on a strip of gravel.
I am a life in sacred language.
Termites toil over a grave,
and my mind is a ravine of yesterdays.
At a glance from across the room,
I wear September on my face, which is eternal,
and does not disappear
even if you close your eyes
once and for all
simultaneously
like two coffins.
Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.
– Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination
The way of love
is not a subtle argument.
The door there
is devastation.
Birds make great sky-circles
of their freedom.
How do they learn it?
They fall, and falling,
they’re given wings.
– Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi
Pulling out of the old scarred skin
(old rough thing I don’t need now
I strip off
slip out of
leave behind)
I slough off deadscales
flick skinflakes to the ground
Shedding toughness
peeling layers down
to vulnerable stuff
And I’m blinking off old eyelids
for a new way of seeing
By the rock I rub against
I’m going to be tender again
– Harryette Mullen
The more time we spend trying to rectify the ways of the past, the less time and energy we have to right the wrongs of tomorrow.
– Pico Iyer
I looked for a long time at the green trees.
Peace filled my mind.
As before, I still don’t have any great, extraordinary ideas.
The same scraps, fragments, and tail ends.
Either earthy desires flame up
Or I reach for an interesting book
Or suddenly a sweet dream knocks on my head.
I sit down by the window in a deep armchair.
I look at the clock, light a pipe,
But suddenly I jump up and walk over to the table,
Sit down in a hard chair and roll myself a cigarette.
I see a little spider running on the wall.
I watch him, can’t tear myself away.
He is stopping me from picking up my pen.
I must kill that spider!
But I’m too lazy to get up.
Now I look inside myself,
But inside me it is empty, monotonous, and boring.
Intense life beats nowhere.
Everything is limp and sleepy, like wet straw.
So I have traveled inside myself
And now I’m standing here before you.
You are waiting to hear what I’ll tell you about my journey.
But I’m silent because I saw nothing there.
Leave me alone to look quietly at the green trees.
Then maybe peace will fill my mind.
Then maybe my mind will wake up,
And I will wake up, and my intense life will start beating inside
me.
– Daniil Kharms
There is more water than earth, there is more fire than water, there is more word than fire.
– Louis Claude de Saint-Martin
The goal of life is not to retire.
It’s to be useful.
– Dan Go
When you get out of the driver’s seat, you find that life can drive itself, that actually life has always been driving itself. When you get out of the driver’s seat, it can drive itself so much easier—it can flow in ways you never imagined. Life becomes almost magical.
– Adyashanti
A man who is a master of patience is master of everything else.
– George Savile
Are the gods not just?
Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?
– C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
COOL THINGS
As a fan’s notes for grace, a quavery chant against the dark, I sing a song of things that make us grin and bow, that just for an instant let us see sometimes the web and weave of merciful, the endless possible, the incomprehensible inexhaustible inexplicable yes,
Such as, to name a few:
The way the sun crawls over the rim of the world every morning like a child’s face rising beaming from a pool all fresh from the womb of the dark, and the way jays hop and damselflies do that geometric aero-amazing thing and bees inspect and birds probe and swifts chitter, and the way the young mother at the bus stop has her infant swaddled and huddled against her chest like a blinking extra heart… and the way faces curve around the mouth and eyes according to how many times you smiled over the years, and the way people fall asleep in chairs by the fire and snap awake startled and amazed, unsure, just for a second, what planet exactly they are on, which is a question we should probably all ask far more often than we do.
Look, I know very well that brooding misshapen evil is everywhere, in the brightest houses and the most cheerful denials, in what we do and what we have failed to do, and I know all too well that the story of the world is entropy, things fly apart, we sicken, we fail, we grow weary, we divorce, we are hammered and hounded by loss and accidents and tragedies. But I also know, with all my hoary muddled heart, that we are carved of immense confusing holiness; that the whole point for us is grace under duress; and that you either take a flying leap at nonsensical illogical unreasonable ideas like marriage and marathons and democracy and divinity, or you huddle behind the wall. I believe that the coolest things there are cannot be measured, calibrated, calculated, gauged, weighed, or understood except sometimes by having a child patiently explain it to you, which is another thing that should happen far more often to us all. In short I believe in believing, which doesn’t make sense, which gives me hope.
– Brian Doyle
If you’re not enjoying something, it’s almost always because you’re doing it too fast.
– Donna Tartt
Dancing In Odessa
by Ilya Kaminsky
We lived north of the future, days opened
letters with a child’s signature, a raspberry, a page of sky.
My grandmother threw tomatoes
from her balcony, she pulled imagination like a blanket
over my head. I painted
my mother’s face. She understood
loneliness, hid the dead in the earth like partisans.
The night undressed us (I counted
its pulse) my mother danced, she filled the past
with peaches, casseroles. At this, my doctor laughed, his granddaughter
touched my eyelid—I kissed
the back of her knee. The city trembled,
a ghost-ship setting sail.
And my classmate invented twenty names for Jew.
He was an angel, he had no name,
we wrestled, yes. My grandfathers fought
the German tanks on tractors, I kept a suitcase full
of Brodsky’s poems. The city trembled,
a ghost-ship setting sail.
At night, I woke to whisper: yes,
we lived. We lived, yes, don’t say it was a dream.
At the local factory, my father
took a handful of snow, put it in my mouth.
The sun began a routine narration,
whitening their bodies: mother, father dancing, moving
as the darkness spoke behind them.
It was April. The sun washed the balconies, April.
I retell the story the light etches
into my hand: Little book, go to the city without me.
There is a concept that a person can create their your own reality. This concept is only partially correct because it is generally discussed in a one-way manner i.e., a person sending a message to the field with a request/intention/prayer desiring an outcome. This is only ½ of the loop. The wave you’re sending is the feed-forward part of the loop. You need to realize that the wave coming back is the feed-back which is the rest of the universe creating its reality and responding to you. The universe (Planck Field or ”the Divine”) interacts with the rest of humanity and your creation and the universe gives you a result that is a combination of everyone’s feed-forward waves. If a person could create a reality exactly the way they wanted it, a few things would happen: 1) you would be the only one in it because everybody else would be creating their own. It would be very lonely. 2) you’d also be bored within seconds since you had everything you wanted. What happens is that you put your intention out into the field and you stay open to what comes back, realizing it’s going to get modified for the highest evolution of the whole. This unexpected feed-back gives you empathy for yourself and others. You might not get exactly what you expected but now you’re learning from the experience. The totality of everyone’s learning is how the universe learns about itself.
– Nassim Haramein
A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
We live in time—it holds us and molds us—but I never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing—until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.
– Julian Barnes
What does it feel like to be alive?
Living, you stand under a waterfall. You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly back up, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed. Can you breathe here? Here where the force is the greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face. Yes, you can breathe even here. You could learn to live like this. And you can, if you concentrate, even look out at the peaceful far bank where you try to raise your arms. What a racket in your ears, what a scattershot pummeling!
It is time pounding at you, time. Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation’s short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.
– Annie Dillard
Everything is hard—making money is hard, watching your body change is hard. You can take these problems when you’re young—something’s difficult for a while, but you’re confident. If it doesn’t work out, you’ll do something else.
– Louise Glück
The current generation now sees everything clearly, it marvels at the errors, it laughs at the folly of its ancestors, not seeing that this chronicle is all overscored by divine fire, that every letter of it cries out, that from everywhere the piercing finger is pointed at it, at this current generation; but the current generation laughs and presumptuously, proudly begins a series of new errors, at which their descendants will also laugh afterwards.
– Nikolai Gogol
I kept silent all day,
And above all I wanted to be with you
– Anna Akhmatova
The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was… The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
– Milan Kundera
δῆλον ἄρα, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ἐν πόλει οὗ ἂν ἴδῃς πτωχούς, ὅτι εἰσί που ἐν τούτῳ τῷ τόπῳ ἀποκεκρυμμένοι κλέπται τε καὶ βαλλαντιατόμοι καὶ ἱερόσυλοι καὶ πάντων τῶν τοιούτων κακῶν δημιουργοί. δῆλον, ἔφη. τί οὖν; ἐν ταῖς ὀλιγαρχουμέναις πόλεσι πτωχοὺς οὐχ ὁρᾷς ἐνόντας;
Whenever oligarchs rule the state, the cities fill with beggars, and thieves haunt the neighborhoods and temples. And this is because where the oligarchs rule, all others are impoverished and desperation sets in.
– Plato, The Republic
I can’t presume to know how to help anyone. What I have learned as a therapist, something I didn’t know before I began this work, is that each
person is a mystery never to be fully understood. The so-called problems people bring to therapy aren’t problems at all; they’re mysteries, and the response to a mystery should be entirely different from that to a problem. A mystery is something not to be solved, but only to be honoured, appreciated, contemplated, and revered. I can best do my job by offering a chair, week after week, and a space free of ambitious intentions and heroics. I have to wash my hands, the way a priest ritually washes his or her hands before the holiest part of the rite, as an image representing purity of intention. I have to free myself of any salvational fantasies-any need on my part to save this person from fate or destiny, from the pain that is part of the initiatory progress of life, and from whatever demons he or she may describe in the hours of conversation.
– Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life
the / mercy of perfect sunlight after days // of dark,will climb; will blossom: will sing (like / april’s own april and awake’s awake)
– E. E. Cummings
We hurry into meanings. We have difficulty staying in a state of 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸𝘪𝘯𝘨, a state that is essential to reverie. Not knowing is an eros moment, and if we linger there psyche begins to speak spontaneously.
– Russell Lockhart
The obedient always think
of themselves as virtuous
rather than cowardly.
– Robert Anton Wilson
I have never seen much point in getting heavy with stupid people or Jesus freaks, just as long as they don’t bother me. In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? There is more hope of a fool than of him.
– Proverbs 26:12
on a path
where not a soul treads
as autumn bids us farewell
– Basho
The soul is a generous and brilliant interrupter of plans.
My job:
to recognize and heed the direction.
– McCall Erickson
I do not know if ever it existed—
That lost world floating dimly on Time’s stream—
And yet I see it often, violet-misted
– H. P. Lovecraft
I must be at the King’s side…there will be no help if not from me.
– Joan of Arc
Read day and night, devour books… Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.
– Emil Cioran
Even a slight feeling that the Divine is with you brings deep rest. Prayer, love and meditation are all flavors of deep rest.
– Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
Censorship is a fatal error, as it destroys the means of error correction.
– @naval
When someone dies, we go searching for poetry.
But I want elegies while I’m still alive… I want ballads, I want ugly, grating sounds, I want repetition, I want white space… and even center-aligned italicized poems that rhyme, and most of all — feelings.
– Jenny Zhang
No idea what happens next. All I know is right now I’m drawn to voices who are contemplating totally new visions for America more than those trying to strategize how to restore it to the fragile state it was in just before it was broken so easily by a buffoon.
– Ethan Nichtern
Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience; it is the ability to see again what most of us have forgotten how to see, but now fortified by the ability to translate some of that vision into words, however inadequate.
– David Bentley Hart
He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach – that it makes no sense.
– Philip Roth
We have a view of the world, but Animals have a sense of the world, do you see?
– Olga Tokarczuk
Let us render the tyrant no aid; let us not hold the light by which he can trace the footprints of our flying brother.
– Frederick Douglass
He is hardly ever happy in the place where he is, something in him is already moving forward to the next place, and yet he is never going towards something, always away, away.
– Damon Galgut
Age appears best in four things: old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust and old authors to read.
– Francis Bacon
It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.
– George Bernard Shaw
Hatred is a leech: The thing that sticks to a person’s skin; that feeds off them and drains the sap out of one’s spirit. It changes a person, and does not leave until it has sucked the last drop of peace from them.
– Chigozie Obioma, The Fishermen
The fact is, the Time Traveller was one of those men who are too clever to be believed.
– H.G. Wells
There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.
– Warren Buffett
Those other dead concepts that got stored underneath the gable, in the attic. For there is where the ghosts of our past reside: the bric-a-brac and mementos that a lifetime collects; the love letters, photographs, and memories that clutter an attic and threaten to bear us back in time.
– Michael Pollan
It may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.
– Judith Butler
The internal machinery of life, the chemistry of the parts, is something beautiful. And it turns out that all life is interconnected with all other life.
– Richard P. Feynman
Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.
– Eugène Ionesco
We will not have peace by afterthought.
– Norman Cousins
Not every god has to exist in order to do his job.
– John le Carré
As is often the case, the greatest pedagogical influence was unintended…
– Graham Robb
The mind tries unsuccessfully to influence the reflection. Instead you have to change the image that is being reflected.
– Vadim Zeland
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
– Carl Sandburg
The antidote for brain rot is books. The antidote for brain rot is books. The antidote for brain rot is books.
– literati bookstore
What concerns me is not the way things are, but the way people think things are.
– Epictetus
To be unchanged is to not move. And to not move is to die.
– Neale Donald Walsch
Before you find yourself feeling hurt by someone who is new to your world, step back for a moment and make sure that the pain you are feeling is not from squeezing yourself into a space that isn’t meant for you.
– Kalen Dion
Is capitalism inherently patriarchal? Or is patriarchy inherently capitalist? Or is it a secret third thing?
– Nisha Mody
Weaving wounds into wonders.. one word at a time
– Jasmine Tate
Existence itself is magic – the rest is science.
– @naval
The belief that the human producer is still master of production is a dangerous illusion.
– Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.
– Anne Carson
Every time you lie, you begin to isolate yourself from reality.
– Brian Maierhofer
We need to stop racing and to savor beauty, to look up from our screens at the weather, one another’s faces, the ocean, the desert, a garden, and architecture, which is another kind of garden.
– Anne Lamott
Dawn. It is not dawn – but the waning of the moon, gnawed pearl, melting ice – a dying glimmer replaced little by little by the new-born day. I love this moment, so pure, final, initial.
– Paul Valéry,
quoted by Philippe Jaccottet
(tr. Tess Lewis)
Bet on the Internet; bet against governments.
– @naval
The unconscious is not a demoniacal monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgment go, is completely neutral. It only becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree that we repress it, its danger increases. But the moment the patient begins to assimilate contents that were previously unconscious, its danger diminishes.
– C G Jung
Paper Walls & Community Building, A Haiku-
We live together,
you and I and they and us,
here in the matrix.
– @everymansdragon
One moment was enough,
We know we are not made of mortal stuff.
And we can bear all trials that come after,
The hate of men and the fool’s loud bestial laughter
And Nature’s rule and cruelties unclean,
For we have seen the Glory – we have seen.
– C.S. Lewis
Egrets flock to the paddy fields,
a mongoose family explores
the backyard; the air’s full
of neighbors’ kitchen smells:
cars, scooters, lorries
honking on the main road,
the fishmonger’s bicycle bell.
– Kim Dorman
Anything that tenderizes
And softens
A human being
Is grace.
– @KavijiPoet
A business is just an idea that is going to make other people’s lives
better.
– Richard Branson
It’s insane to risk what you have and need for something you don’t really need.
– Warren Buffett
There’s no reason to pity a person if he dies or loses his money, if he has no home or property, because none of those things belong to man. But there’s reason for pity if a person loses his one true possession, his highest blessing: his ability to love.
– Leo Tolstoy
I will not have you without the darkness that hides within you. I will not let you have me without the madness that makes me. If our demons cannot dance, neither can we.
– Nikita Gill
A kid will play air guitar with a big smile on their face. Give them a lesson, and the smile goes away.
– Victor Wooten
The key that unlocks energy is desire. It’s also the key to a long and interesting life. If we expect to create any drive, any real force within ourselves, we have to get excited.
– Earl Nightingale
Like wild horses, anything you chase after will always run away. Don’t pursue love. Don’t chase peace; don’t pursue the Holy or God. Don’t chase after what you want. You will spook ‘em; they’ll always run faster than you can. You can’t catch ’em. But what would happen if you did catch ’em? They’d be terrified of you and hate your presumptuous arrogance that you deserve love, peace, or the presence of the Holy. Instead of chasing to possess, better to learn the deepest and marvellous details of all those wild “horses“ and things you would capture, then, promising never to capture them, find out what each of these things loves the most. Then make a feast of giftgiving to that thing and learn to “call” God, love, peace, or wild horses by singing beauty to them in the way they would love the most. Leave the offerings, don’t stare at them if they do come, and don’t try to get them to stay. Thank them for allowing you to be in their rare presence. Then maybe in the process you might become worth knowing. Maybe you shall have learned how to admire and serve what you do not need to possess and enslave to serve you. Then maybe you might become a real person.
– Martin Prechtel, Rescuing The Light
Tell me how you seek, and I will tell you what you are seeking.
– Wittgenstein
You can always revise something; you can’t revise nothing.
– David Mura
Get rid of everything.
If you exist, then you are loved
by existence. What do you need?
A spoon, a blanket, a bowl, a book –
maybe the book you give away.
Resist the need to worry, robbing everything
of immediacy and peace.
Resist traveling except where you want to go.
Resist seeing yourself in others or them in you.
Nothing, everything, is personal.
– Louise Erdrich
MINDFUL BREATHING
It only takes a few seconds of mindful breathing for your body and mind to begin to come back together again. It is very easy. A child can do it. You just concentrate on your in-breath and on your out-breath. You don’t think about anything else. The past, the future, your worries, your anger, and your despair are not there anymore. Only one thing is there: your in-breath and your out-breath.
You have to deeply experience breathing in and breathing out. In a sitting position, you can really enjoy breathing in and breathing out. Go ahead and enjoy breathing for twenty minutes, just being here. You are here and you have nothing to do except enjoy mindful breathing.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Virginia Woolf on how to read a poem
Certainly, one cannot read this poem without effort. The page is often corrupt and mud-stained, and torn and stuck together with faded leaves, with scraps of verbena or geranium. To read this poem one must have myriad eyes, like one of those lamps that turn on slabs of racing water at midnight in the Atlantic, when perhaps only a spray of seaweed pricks the surface, or suddenly the waves gape and up shoulders a monster.
One must put aside antipathies and jealousies and not interrupt. One must have patience and infinite care and let the light sound, whether of spiders’ delicate feet on a leaf or the chuckle of water in some irrelevant drain-pipe, unfold too. Nothing is to be rejected in fear or horror. The poet who has written this page (what I read with people talking) has withdrawn. There are no commas or semi-colons. The lines do not run in convenient lengths. Much is sheer nonsense. One must be sceptical, but throw caution to the winds and when the door opens accept absolutely.
Also sometimes weep; also cut away ruthlessly with a slice of the blade soot, bark, hard accretions of all sorts. And so (while they talk) let down one’s net deeper and deeper and gently draw in and bring to the surface what he said and she said and make poetry.
There is, let us confess it (and illness is the great confessional), a childish outspokenness in illness; things are said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals. About sympathy for example — we can do without it. That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your experience other people have had it too, where however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you — is all an illusion. We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds’ feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.
But in health the genial pretense must be kept up and the effort renewed — to communicate, to civilise, to share, to cultivate the desert, educate the native, to work together by day and by night to sport. In illness this make-believe ceases. Directly the bed is called for, or, sunk deep among pillows in one chair, we raise our feet even an inch above the ground on another, we cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright; we become deserters. They march to battle. We float with the sticks on the stream; helter-skelter with the dead leaves on the lawn, irresponsible and disinterested and able, perhaps for the first time for years, to look round, to look up — to look, for example, at the sky.
– Virginia Woolf
Fairy tales are about trouble, about getting into it and out of it, and trouble seems to be a necessary stage on the route of becoming. All the magic and glass mountains and pearls the size of houses and princesses beautiful as the day and talking birds and part-time serpents are distractions from the tough core of most of the stories, the struggle to survive against adversaries, to find your place in your world, and to come into your own. Difficulty is always a school, though learning is optional.
Fairy tales are almost always the stories of the powerless, of youngest sons, abandoned children, orphans, of humans transformed into birds and beasts or otherwise enchanted away from their own selves and lives. Even princesses are chattels to be disowned or sold by fathers, punished by stepmothers, or claimed by princes, though they often assert themselves in between and are rarely as passive as the cartoon versions. Fairy tales are children’s stories not in who they were made for but in their focus on the early stages of life, when others have power over you and you have power over no one.
– Rebecca Solnit
Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like Negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty? In my copy of Villon’s poems the editor has actually thought it necessary to explain the line ‘Ne pain ne voyent qu’aux fenestres’ *by a footnote; so remote is even hunger from the educated man’s experience.
– George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
Applying attention to smaller emotions—or simply focusing on form, sound, or physical sensations—develops your capacity to look at long-term, overwhelming emotional states.
– Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
The poet Rumi writes, ‘Find the real world, give it endlessly away, grow rich flinging gold to all who ask. Live at the empty heart of paradox. I’ll dance there with you—cheek to cheek.’
– Gregory Boyle
The six stages of climate denial are: It’s not real. It’s not us. It’s not that bad. It’s too expensive to fix. Aha, here’s a great solution (that actually does nothing). And — oh no! Now it’s too late. You really should have warned us earlier.
– Katharine Hayhoe
Elves seldom give unguarded advice, for advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill.
– Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
The greatest courter is not the one who gets what they want but the one who, out of love, makes the one they are courting to be seen by the world for the grand being they really are.
– Martin Prechtel, Rescuing The Light
The courage to be who you are is where the spiritual path begins
– Chögyam Trungpa
HOMEWORK
I had to redrill the holes in the base of the downstairs door
a little higher so the rubber apron of the sweep
would not jam but barely brush against the floor
to keep cold rivulets of air from leaking in.
There is a right way to do things and
I would have done it that way the first time,
but I was in a hurry and grabbed the wrong tool —
that’s how I came to gouge my second knuckle
and drip blood onto the rug,
then furiously kick the antique molding loose.
Sometimes I think I’m not really qualified for this job,
the job of my life, I mean,
and yet I keep on doing it,
with more enthusiasm than skill,
as if jamming things together and twisting them hard
was an Eastern philosophy,
which claims not that life is beautiful
but that jagged edges and dried blood
are part of being here.
The damage proves that we are real.
About beauty, I am not prepared to say.
My field is wobbly table legs
and spreading ceiling water-stains.
The truth swings a little crookedly,
it has a faulty seal
and lets outside air leak in.
At some point, it may need fixing.
– Tony Hoagland
As we inhabit our body with increasing sensitivity, we learn its unspoken language and patterns, which gives us tremendous freedom to make choices. The practice of cutting thoughts and dispersing negative repetitive patterns can be simplified by attending to the patterns in the body first, before they begin to be spun around in the mind.
– Jill Satterfield, Meditation in Motion
It is the most arbitrary prejudice is to deny the human the capacity of transcending his self, of being aware of that which lies beyond the immediate senses. One needs at any moment to be a transcendent creature. Without this one would never be a citizen of the world, one would instead be a mere animal. Of course, prudence, self-discovery, is very difficult in this state, since it is so incessantly associated with the change of our other circumstances.
– Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (Novalis)
On the Death of Friends in Childhood
We shall not ever meet them bearded in heaven,
Nor sunning themselves among the bald of hell;
If anywhere, in the deserted schoolyard at
twilight, Forming a ring, perhaps, or joining hands
In games whose very names we have forgotten.
Come, memory, let us seek them there in the
shadows.
– Donald Justice
God help the culture that pretends that earlier stupidities never happened and tries to eradicate all evidence of them.
– George Saunders
it is the hard edge of things i am avoiding the separations so that i take my glasses off and then i cannot tell which are the leaves and which the angels like blake like that man who lived with lepers not noticing what was sin and what was grace visioning visions vision i take my glasses off so i can see
– Lucille Clifton
Be careful, when a democracy is sick, fascism comes to its bedside, but it is not to inquire about its health.
– Albert Camus
A divine woman can see your highest self and will actively help you reclaim that version of you.
– Nika Solé
Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.
– Proverbs 27:6
But who knows? We are in God’s hands. Our lot has fallen on evil days: but that cannot be by mere ill chance. Take care of yourself in all due ways (aequam serva mentem, comprime linguam)…
– Tolkien
Perhaps we wouldn’t talk so much nonsense, tell so many lies, if we knew that they were echoing throughout the cosmos…
– Wisława Szymborska
telling someone to believe in the gods is like telling a them to believe in the wind ,
you don’t need belief, you need perception
– River Kenna
A revolutionary attitude demands coherence–not the urge to paint a mustache on the Mona Lisa.
– Jacques Ellul
The thing about bad metaphors is the irredeemable pleasure of working them to the utmost and discovering, in that (rather horrid) excess of one’s own sowing, that language is still the game you love most.
– Alina Stefanescu
Studying the humanities is a powerful act of resistance against the illiterate tech moguls and brain-dead authoritarians who are actively trying to cultivate a population that’s dumb and compliant. They don’t want you to read, and therefore you must never stop.
– @SketchesbyBoze
it is a joy
sleeping late in autumn
like the ruler of your domain
– Basho
People think they can’t change themselves, but they can.
People think they can change others, but they can’t.
– @naval
Well here comes Christmas! That astonishing thing that no ‘commercialism’ can defile – unless we let it.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
As an immigrant with a mostly fraught relationship to language, especially to my mother tongues, I think it was so important for me to be given permission to play. I feel so lucky that my first experience with poetry was one that prioritized joy and catharsis.
– Teja Sudhakar
Which games you play is more important than how well you play them.
– @naval
He speaks to all kinds,
whether or not
they speak to him,
the poet said
about the old monk.
– The Old Monk
America is a dying empire in full collapse and the only positive way forward is socialism. Every sector, from education, infrastructure, housing, wages, health care etc is all in collapse. As a student of History, I know exactly what’s coming next if we don’t make a hard pivot.
– Ashley Stevens
Most of our schooling is focused on enhancing the dualistic capacity of mind to see differences and create distinctions.
– Adyashanti
We never could very clearly understand how it is that egotism, so unpopular in conversation, should be so popular in writing.
– Thomas Macaulay
star grass
and wild aster
whisper about my feet
cartography
of a vanishing world
– Marthe Reed
She was not builded out of common stone But out of all men’s yearning and all prayer That she might live, eternally our own, The Spirit’s stronghold – barred against despair.
– C.S. Lewis, Oxford
There’s no point declaring that the world is fundamentally unjust if you haven’t earned the right to launch such a platitude with the force of a newly discovered truth.
– Augusto Monterroso
avoiding things that will unbalance you or cost you your peace is a pretty necessary phase while you’re finding stability and practicing your ability to find center but at a certain point, why’d you bother building the capacity to re-balance if you’re never gonna use it?
– River Kenna
There is an extraordinary charm in other people’s domesticities. Every lighted house, seen from the road, is magical: every pram or lawn-mower in someone else’s garden: all smells and stirs of cookery from the windows of alien kitchens…
– C.S. Lewis
Learning a new field or skill as an adult reminds you, on a gut level, that things are actually knowable. If something feels arcane and impenetrable at first, and you take the time to make it make sense to yourself, you can realize that everything is like this.
– Lauren Wilford
Once you get close enough, you see what
one is stitching is a human heart. Another
is vomiting wings. Hell, even now I love life.
Whenever you put your feet on the floor
in the morning, whatever the nightmare,
it’s a miracle or fantastic illusion:
the solidity of the boards, the steadiness
coming into the legs. Where did we get
the idea when we were kids to rub dirt
into the wound or was that just in Pennsylvania?
Maybe the poems are made of breath,
the way water, cajoled to boil, says,
This is my soul, freed.
– Dean Young
no good deeds
but also no sins…
winter seclusion
– Issa Kobayashi
…emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.
– Iris Murdoch
If you consider the stories told at an AA meeting, the healing is for both the person hearing the story and the person telling it. The same is true in art.
– Rick Rubin
When the mind descends
into the heart
the problem becomes
it’s own solution
because the concept
of “something wrong”
dissolves into free energy,
your smile, or the tear
of a stranger, set
in the clutter of your path
like a jewel for you
to love.
The energy of wordless
humming, a gentle dance of
immaculate chaos,
the harmony somehow
always here…
What’s the answer, friend?
To find the place
where the question
does not arise.
What do you feel?
Here’s what I feel,
a vast cathedral
in my rib cage
where I listen to a litany
of silences
and taste the wine
of not knowing,
and fall down weary
as a thousand spent petals
returning to the seed
of Winter, yes,
where I discover
the Birthless born,
Infinity informed,
Darkness shining,
Beauty breathed
through the body of God.
– Fred LaMotte
There are those who want a swimming pool in the house, while those who have one barely use it. Those who have lost a loved one feel a deep sense of loss, while others who hold them close often complain about them. Those who do not have a partner yearn for him, but those who have, sometimes do not value him. The hungry would give anything for a plate of food, while the well-fed complains about the taste. The one who doesn’t have a car dreams, while the one who has one is always looking for a better one. The key is to be grateful, look carefully at what we have and understand that somewhere, someone would give everything for what you already have and don’t appreciate.
– Hiroyuki Sanada
Literature is where we free ourselves.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Liminality (which is derived from the Latin 𝘜𝘳𝘯𝘦𝘯, meaning doorway or threshold) is a word used to describe a phase when the old isn’t working but the new has not yet come to replace it.
– Howard Sasportas
Design is its paw-print in the snow,
its blast-site, night-light, lost watch,
arranged bones. Design is the world’s prosody,
wreckage and dragonfly, bloom and boom,
its croon. I love you I’m not sure this helps
but it’s written in crocus, the flaming halo
above the birdhouse, monkeys with droids,
donkeys with paintbrushes, breeze over wheat,
excessive vowel open and glottal stopped,
elided, howled, crumpled drafts under tinder,
your lightning’s fingers in the leap
and fidget of my nerves.
– Dean Young, Scribblers Everywhere
He who reads a lot and walks a lot, sees a lot and knows a lot.
– Miguel de Cervantes
Life is inexplicable, and those masterful people who base their lives on confidence and explanation deserve our sympathy.
– Stafford
There is…in the best verse a sort of residue of sound which remains in the ear of the hearer and acts more or less as an organ-base.
– Ezra Pound
There is nothing more beautiful than an ancient forest. It contains all the future a new forest does, plus the benefit of a deep past. We cannot plant it… but, by its nature, temporally, spatially, and even conceptually, it exceeds us.
– Robert Moor
sorry is a word for milk spilled on the table, or 5 minutes late, or a misspelling– no, this sanctioned and practiced flinch has nothing to do with an apology and everything to do with being seen, and you guess, you should be grateful anyone even wanted to be seen.
– Ollie Schminkey
A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
– William Stafford
Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.
– Joyce Carol Oates
If you want to court someone, instead of staring at them, ask to sit beside them and try to see what they’re looking at, try to hear what they are listening to. You cannot love someone if you are not willing to try to see through their eyes and hear through their ears.
– Martin Prechtel
The worst reason to promote people is seniority.
– @naval
Love gives its own color to every place. We think the world has changed.
– Murathan Mungan
So long as we are immersed in body consciousness, we are like strangers in a foreign country. Our native land is omnipresence.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
I still see them
as they were
bare winter trees
– Issa
Then the edge asserts itself. You are not a god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.
– Anne Carson
I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature.
– Susan Sontag
People use terms like “radical left” and “far left” to make it seem like our ideas are unpopular.
They are popular.
A majority of Americans support universal healthcare, tuition-free college, and living wages.
These terms are propaganda of the ruling class.
– Nina Turner
A new historical era is founded on breaking through this cycle that spins under the spell of mythical forms of law, and on *deposing [Entsetzung]* law together with all the forms of violence on which it depends, just as they depend on it.
– Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence
Verbal energy on my part is expended on packing words down. I am concerned with density, setting up a chain reaction using the least amount of verbal material.
– C.D. Wright
Climbing
My heart in pieces like the bits
Of traffic lost in the blue
Rain confused I roar off into
To learn how to build a ladder
With air in my lungs again
To be with you in that region
Of speed and altitude where our bodies
Sail off to be kissed and changed
By light that behaves like a hand
Picking us up in one state and putting
Us down in a different one every time
– Tom Clark
I too pass from the night,
I stay a while away, O night, but I return to you again, and love you.
Why should I be afraid to trust myself to you?
I am not afraid—I have been well brought forward by you;
I love the rich running day, but I do not desert her in whom I lay so long,
I know not how I came of you, and I know not where I go with you—but I know I came well, and shall go well.
– Walt Whitman
It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man’s hand and the wisdom in a tree’s root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.
– Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
the world turns
nocturnal
writer’s block
– @hegelincanada
Literature that indulges the tastes of the reader is a degraded literature. My goal is to disappoint the usual expectations and inspire new ones.
– Elena Ferrante
How we stumble –
You arrive after years like a broken bird.
You are finally a breath away from everything.
– Mark Nepo
The suppression of inner patterns in favor of patterns created by society is dangerous to us. Artistic revolt, innovation, experiment… may disturb an established order or an artificial conventionality, but they may rescue us from death in life, from robot life.
– Anaïs Nin
DIFFICULTY
Do not become annoyed
when faced with difficulties.
To do so merely adds difficulty to difficulty
and further disturbs your mind.
By maintaining a mind of peace and non-opposition,
difficulties will naturally fall away.
– Sheng Yen
Don’t take life so serious. It ain’t nohow permanent.
– Walt Kelly
People say “you need to start living in the real world” but they forget that the real world includes lupines and lightning bugs and ginger beer and starlight and sea coasts and Renoir paintings and Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos and fog banks and foxes playing in snow.
– @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social
It is not portrayal that destabilizes, it is praise.
– Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon
Chaplinesque
by Hart Crane
We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.
For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.
We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!
And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.
The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.
SONG OF THE BLACK HOLE
by William Trowbridge
radially extracted by NASA
You can almost see Vincent Price, black-robed,
hunched above the console of a jumbo organ
in the bowels of his creaky haunted manse; or
maybe a stadium of damned souls, strobed
in lurid red and howling nettle-robed
as they plummet into Pandemonium, pore
and pith aflame. It’s no troubadour,
undoubtedly, this vast atonal gob.
As with the Roach Motel, we’d check in,
but never out—us or anything, since
it can swallow errant planets whole, and still,
however much the mass, can’t eat its fill.
Though it’s larger far than Jupiter or Mars,
we can barely see it, thank our lucky stars.
There are moments when rules
are meant to be broken; when
bursting out of context is the
sole way to see with new eyes.
There are fences built only to
be torn down. The slats look
solid, but no one drove the nail
in tight. There are barricades
around the heart asking to be
breached. Sooner and later we
all run out of excuses for
staying small and safe.
– Danna Faulds
I would like a December
with Christmas lights off
and people’s lights on.
– Charles Bukowski
The woman has great power. She can tie knots in your chest that only God’s breathing loosens. Don’t take her appeal lightly.
– Rumi
Sometimes my
burden is more
than I can bear
It’s not dark yet,
but it’s getting
there.
– Bob Dylan
Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.
– On Ovid, Anne Carson
You will have noticed, if you look carefully, that my films never really end.
– Angelopoulos
When we resist or avoid looking at ourselves, the universe will hold up a mirror, making denial impossible.
– Iyanla Vanzant
Why love what you will lose?
There is nothing else to love.
– Louise Glück
the sun slides
behind mountains…
a sky’s song pink
– @lafcadiopoetry
Instead of searching for what you do not have, find out what it is that you have never lost.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Don’t climb a mountain for the world to see you. Climb a mountain for you to see the world.
– Unknown
The moment you trust in let-go, the moment you stop struggling against existence, you need not worry about anything, existence takes care.
– Osho
Karma means you are the maker of your life.
– Sadhguru
there is nothing that
distracts me music is
only a crossword puzzle
– Frank O’Hara
I want the beforehand of the book
– Hélène Cixous
Everyone has two journeys to make through life. There is the outer journey, with its various incidents and milestones… There is also an inner journey, a spiritual odyssey, with a secret history of its own.
– William R. Inge
Go within. Use the inner body as a starting point for going deeper and taking your attention away from where it’s usually lodged, in the thinking mind.
– Eckhart Tolle
‘God preserve us from sanity!’ cried Wittgenstein when a friend asked him if he was going mad.
– Pico Iyer
here comes a time in the Spiritual journey
where you start making choices from a very different place.
And if a choice lines up so that it supports
truth, health, happiness, wisdom and love ..
It’s the right choice.
– Angeles Arrien
SNOW
Last night the wind blew Niagara rainbows
of snow over the city, driving masses
of it over the roofs, breaking past windows,
knotting rags of it on the limbs of trees.
Around trees garnished with their gaudy blown
fruit children hung their voices out for Christ.
The twelve Apostles of the year had passed
without a word or footprint in the snow
silent as foam or cotton in our ears
cold to this winter’s long fidelity.
The angels sit before their packages
not to be opened until-
Sunlight piles
up on their fallen hoods of snow. A sign?
The long sword of the frozen river shines.
The poem’s anxiety, linked to the stars.
– Robert Seydel
death always
happens to someone else
bean flowers
– Kōsei Nakamura
Real love is beyond human love. Real love is the infinite. It cannot be described. It’s consciousness. It’s absolute reality. Real love is your real nature, and you can never really know how to love until you know who you are.
– Robert Adams
Man is a universe within himself.
– Bob Marley
The way we do anything can reflect the way we do everything. It’s useful to see whether our lives outside of meditation practice are congruent with our lives as we sit.
– Sharon Salzberg
You are hurt the moment you believe yourself to be.
– Epictetus
“Why poetry?” Because I
need poetry. Because I need
poetry to open the door to its
house while I’m standing
outside in the rain holding a
boombox. Because language
fails me so often but like the
annoying couple in every
rom-com we will fight but
we will end up together.
– Luisa Muradyan
seamlessly rolling
into the next day
war news
– @coffeeandhaiku
I didn’t tell you this because it was a small thing, but little girls, they leave their hearts at home when they walk outside. Hearts are so precious. They don’t want to lose them.
– Edwidge Danticat
Training is simply short moments of recognition repeated many times and supported by devotion and compassion.
– Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche
Once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.
– Marilynne Robinson
I love him who seeks to create over and beyond himself and thus perishes.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The deeper I get tangled up in this mass of dreams and memories the more I realize that emotional problems can’t be solved as intellectual problems are.
– Daniel Keyes
It is important to note that before language, children experience memories as image and sound, which is to say they experience them as poetry.
– Jennifer S. Cheng
Some people, when we lose them, are missed more than lamented; and others are lamented but scarcely missed.
– François de La Rochefoucauld
‘What I believe’ is a process rather than a finality. Finalities are for gods and governments, not for the human intellect.
– Emma Goldman
Oh, love isn’t there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.
– Hermann Hesse
Some things in this world just ain’t meant to be, not in the times we want ’em to, and the heart has to hold it in this world as a remembrance, a promise for the world that’s to come.
– James McBride
Good sits in a corner, collects a cheque, and pays a mortgage. Evil builds empires.
– Shehan Karunatilaka
The world is divided into men who have wit and no religion and men who have religion and no wit.
– Avicenna
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light Through whom is splintered from a single White To many hues, and endlessly combined In living shapes that move from mind to mind.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Believing means : to release the indestructible in oneself, or more exactly : to liberate oneself , or more exactly : to be indestructible , or more exactly: to be.
– Franz Kafka
Self-proclaimed kings are often seen as jesters.
– Tamerlan Kuzgov
Between two brains, there will always be misunderstandings and lies caused by parasitic smells, drafts and poor-quality reception.
– Bernard Werber
You walk into this room at your own risk, because it leads to the future, not a future that will be, but one that might be. This is not a new world, it is simply an extension of what began in the old one. It has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom. But like every one of the super-states that preceded it, it has one iron rule: logic is an enemy and truth is a menace…
– Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone
After a year of therapy, my psychiatrist said to me, “Maybe life isn’t for everyone.”
– Larry Brown
The principal purpose of taking the Fool’s Pilgrimage is to achieve a transformation within the traveller by which his self-will is voluntarily diminished in order that the universal will may increasingly reveal itself and its purposes through the human personality. The Gnostics of the first Christian centuries likened the world to a roadside tavern wherein travellers in a drunken revel forget the nature of their journey and their destination. The stupefying intoxicant administered to the wayfarer in this inn of the human condition is the willfulness and self-involvement of the human ego. Only by lessening the authority of the personal self by way of a directed, gradual discipline of internal realisation can we be assured of not being deflected from our journey by the temptations along the way.
– Stephan A. Hoeller, The Fool’s Pilgrimage
I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you’re born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly.
– Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
This is not my teeming fate, my rind, my roiling ellipsis or valedictory spray of myrrh.
– Aaron Shurin, Plume
We are so steeped in the antichrist philosophy–namely, that success consists in embracing not the values of the Sermon on the Mount but an infinity of material things, of sex and status–that we little sense how much of what passes for practical Christianity is really an apostate compromise with the spirit of the age.
– Carl F. H. Henry
Forms within the universe, whether galaxies, human beings or trees, are generated as an expression of vast forces at work within a holistic framework. Separateness, fragmentation, and disconnection are all illusions … Wholeness is never lost, and the Health within the human system, which is a manifestation of this unity, is also never lost.
– John Upledger
Every being, every bit of matter, is at the center of its
universe. An endless plurality of centers overlap and
interact. We travel like turtles, our homes on our backs,
pulling a universe along with us.
When I enter your home, I bring mine in with me.
Treat everyone like an invited guest. Behave like an invited
guest. Help others meet their needs. Provide them with
comfort. Enter others’ spaces politely and respectfully.
Remove your shoes if asked. Help with the dishes. Play with
the children.
Wherever you are, remember, you are in someone’s home.
– Adam Michael Krause
Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realize it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have
invented.
– C.S. Lewis
Non-attachment is so important. Very few things are forever. People especially. You learn to love people more when you stop clinging to them and trust however much time you have with them.
– Nika Solé
Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.
– William Burroughs
There’s no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money, either.
– Robert Graves
All photographs are ambiguous. All photographs have been taken out of a continuity. If the event is a public event, this continuity is history; if it is personal, the continuity, which has been broken, is a life story. Even a pure landscape breaks a continuity: that of the light and the weather. Discontinuity always produces ambiguity. Yet often this ambiguity is not obvious, for as soon as photographs are used with words, they produce together an effect of certainty, even of dogmatic assertion.
– John Berger
Under every depression there is a still lower level waiting for us; it is the place in which we find the agenda of growth hiding. Rather than deny the pain, over-medicate, and flee the challenge of growth which it asks further of us, we need to discover where our soul wants to go, long after the ego has exhausted its
resources.
– James Hollis
That ice within the soul, the admonisher
Of madness when we’re wildest, the unwinking eye
That measures all things with indifferent stare,
Choosing far stars to check near objects by,
That quiet lake inside and underneath,
Strong, undisturbed by any angel of strife,
Being so tranquil seems the presence of death,
Being so central seems the essence of life.
Is it perhaps that death and life make truce
In neutral zone while their old feud beyond
Fires the towered cities?
– Robinson Jeffers
There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond
its reach.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Suddenly the king cried to Snowmane and the horse sprang away. Behind him his banner blew in the wind, white horse upon a field of green, but he outpaced it. After him thundered the knights of his house, but he was ever before them. Eomer rode there, the white horsetail on his helm floating in his speed, and the front of the first éored roared like a breaker foaming to the shore, but Théoden could not be overtaken. Fey he seemed, or the battle-fury of his fathers ran like new fire in his veins, and he was borne up on Snowmane like a god of old, even as Oromë the Great in the battle of the Valar when the world was young. His golden shield was uncovered, and lo! it shone like an image of the Sun, and the grass flamed into green about the white feet of his steed. For morning came, morning and a wind from the sea; and darkness was removed, and the hosts of Mordor wailed, and terror took them, and they fled, and died, and the hoofs of wrath rode over them. And then all the host of Rohan burst into song, and they sang as they slew, for the joy of battle was on them, and the sound of their singing that was fair and terrible came even
to the City.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
My name is TOLKIEN (not -kein). It is a Ger- man name (from Saxony), an anglicization of Tollkiehn, i.e. tollkühn. But, except as a guide to spelling, this fact is as fallacious as all facts in the raw. For I am neither ‘foolhardy’] nor German, whatever some remote ancestors may have been. They migrated to England more than 200 years ago, and became quickly intensely English (not British), though re- maining musical – a talent that unfortunately did not descend to me.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Remembrance, like a candle, burns brightest at Christmastime.
– Charles Dickens
Reading the very best writers – let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy – is not going to make us better citizens.
– Harold Bloom
I never travel anywhere without it; but it is the very flower of decadence: the last trumpet should’ve sounded the moment it was written.
– Oscar Wilde on Pater’s The Renaissance
The state becomes more tyrannical as it becomes more abstract.
– Jacques Ellul
The sea moves but not in the direction of most things… the sea has an entirely other relationship to space; it seems to move backward, pushing at the end of it.
– Renee Gladman
To advance from uncertainty, nonetheless. Owning nothing, because aren’t all acquisitions paralyzing? Uncertainty the motor, the shadow is the source.
Explain nothing, but say it true.
– Philippe Jaccottet
(tr. Tess Lewis)
Zen has no goal; it is a traveling without point, with nowhere to go. To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead.
– Alan Watts
The thing that radicalized me was studying Buddhism.
The part about interdependence.
It’s the whole thing.
– Ethan Nichtern
Pseudo-intellectual pessimism is the most expensive status symbol.
– @naval
Could you have known the grief your words would be to many of your Oxford contemporaries you might even have found no noble pleasure in refraining from uttering them.
– Walter Pater
Read your own mind and your own heart. That is the greatest book; in that reading, you will find everything about life. You don’t have to turn to the printed word; there is no need for sacred books.
– J. Krishnamurti
The body without organs of capital isn’t the entire capitalist machine. The body without organs of capitalism is an idea that only works at the next level. Money qua money is incapable of producing anything; its role is sterile, unproductive.
– Gilles Deleuze
Science is the study of the knowable. Spirituality is the study of the unknowable.
– @naval
Only people who have had their self-identity utterly smashed at least once seem like grownups to me
There is this tension/caution around people who haven’t, like they are carefully carrying themselves, as if they’re a precious vase that they couldn’t bear to break
– Sasha Chapin
The leader doesn’t take charge of the tribe. The leader takes responsibility for the tribe.
– @naval
If you do not like sentiment and symbolism, you do not like Christmas; go away and celebrate something else.
– G. K. Chesterton
evening waves
the rhythm softens
into dusk
– NituYumnam
the writer cannot dwell near the work; [she] can only write it.
– Blanchot
we’re living in a golden age of information – vast libraries, wikipedia, the internet archive – and it would be tragic if, instead of using your initiative and curiosity to study this marvelous world of ours, you ceded your thinking and learning abilities to a machine.
– @SketchesbyBoze
Clarity is here —
stones in the river pulse with sunlight.
– Rumi
(tr. Haleh Liza Gafori)
It’s beautiful to see you slowing down, breathing, resting, healing, dreaming.
You’ve always been worthy of this ease, tenderness, gentleness, wholeness.
– Dr. Thema
Sugar in your blood is called diabetes.
Sugar in your brain is called dementia.
Sugar in your teeth is called cavities.
Sugar in your liver is called fatty liver.
Sugar in your cells is oxidative stress.
Sugar on your skin is called aging.
Avoid sugar for a healthy life.
– Nithya Shri
Every one of us has the capacity to love, to forgive, to understand and to be compassionate.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
mist forming
a blanket over the fields
under a bright moon
– Basho
dark gravel road . . .
all of the stars
between the stars
– @ruralitalics
If we are uneducated, we shall not know how very old are all new ideas.
– G. K. Chesterton
Realism that is limited to the end of one’s nose is more dangerous than the most insane fantasticality, because it’s blind.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
In my solitude I have seen things very clearly that were not true.
– Antonio Machado
A human being in action cannot represent perfection. The moment you take action, you are imperfect: you have decided to act that way instead of that other way. That’s why people who think they are perfect are so ridiculous.
– Joseph Campbell
The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption; all else is reconstruction, mere technique.
– Minima Moralia
Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.
– Sigmund Freud
Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.
– Leo Tolstoy
One easily forgets that human education proceeds along highly theatrical lines. In a quite theatrical manner the child is taught how to behave; logical arguments only come later. When such-and-such occurs, [the child] is told (or sees), one must laugh. It joins in when there is laughter, without knowing why; if asked why it is laughing it is wholly confused. In the same way it joins in shedding tears, not only weeping because the grown-ups do so but also feeling genuine sorrow. This can be seen at funerals, whose meaning escapes children entirely. These are theatrical events which form the character. The human being copies gestures, miming, tones of voice. And weeping arises from sorrow, but sorrow also arises from weeping.
– Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre
Before descending to this world, the Soul is emanated from the Mystery of the highest level. While in this world, She is completed and fulfilled by this lower world. Departing this world, She is filled with the fullness of all the worlds, the world above and the world below. Before descending to this world, the soul is imperfect; She is lacking something. By descending to this world, She is perfected in every dimension.
– Moisés de León
Awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.
– C.S. Lewis
In our day, we confine ourselves at the best of times to discussing the imagination. The word “imagination” is beautiful and vast, but it doesn’t hold everything.
But what is the spirit, the spiritual life? If only I were up to defining such things!
Robert Musil says that the spirit synthesizes intellect and emotion. It’s a good working definition, for all its concision.
In the case of poetry, literature, it’s simpler to say - theologians know a thing or two about this - what the spirit isn’t. It’s not psychoanalytic any more than it is behavioral, sociological, or political. It is holistic, and in it are reflected, as in an astronaut’s helmet, the earth, the stars, and a human face.
These are difficult and dangerous considerations.
– Adam Zagajewski
The beginning of love of money is the pretext of almsgiving, and the end of it is hatred of the poor. So long as he is collecting he is charitable, but when the money is in hand, he tightens his hold.
– Johannes Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent
And then the kicker is this: in passing from the real to the imagined, in following that trail, you learn that both sides have a little of the other in each, that there are elements of the imagined inside your experience of the ‘real’ world – rock, bone, wood, ice – and elements of the real – not the metaphorical, but the actual thing itself – inside stories and tales and dreams.
– Rick Bass
25 And the Lord spake unto the Angel that guarded the eastern gate, saying ‘Where is the flaming sword that was given unto thee?’
26 And the Angel said, ‘I had it here only a moment ago, I must have put it down some where, forget my own head next.’
27 And the Lord did not ask him again.
– Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
An angry man stirreth up strife, and a furious man aboundeth in transgression. A man’s pride shall bring him low: but honour shall uphold the humble in spirit.
– Proverbs 29:22-23
We are not meant to stay wounded. We are supposed to move through our tragedies and challenges and to help each other move through the many painful episodes of our lives. By remaining stuck in the power of our wounds, we block our own transformation.
– Caroline Myss
Who will wake up at the end of my dream?
– Jacques Roubaud
The physical dispersion made possible by transportation and communication technologies tends to enlarge the urban complex that must be governed as a unit.
– Emmanuel Mesthene
It’s all interlocking miracles, but because they’re explicable, we overlook them.
If they were inexplicable, we’d live in an unnavigable hell.
– @naval
No! Shakespeare’s Kings are not, nor are meant to be, great men.
– Walter Pater
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.
– TS Eliot
This dead, everlasting dead desk— how it weighs the spirit of a gentleman down! This dead wood of the desk instead of your living trees!
– Charles Lamb to Thomas Manning
The Great Rite Of Renewal
Part Two: And Where The Village?
by Martin Shaw
SECOND VULNERABILITY
And someone said to me:
Jesus’s greatest temptation may have been to not come back from the desert.
It chimed with a thought that was in my head years and years ago.
The wild’s not the problem, it’s the return.
The edges remain the edges and can still be experienced. That thing they do can still be encountered. These experiences require contemplation, but coming back does too. Even caution. The potential disconnect between desert and village could scrub out the marginal encounter as the price of admission back to what-we-knew-before. But what we-knew-before is not what we’re after.
You can have a sacred experience out in the bush, but the second vulnerability is quite what to do with it on the return.
I go to the desert to make sure I’m in touch with the Encounter, not just my carefully curated thoughts about the encounter.
So desert to the village. How do we keep the useful tension between them?
One thought about a village is that in ancient Ireland monasteries grew so large they could be considered villages themselves. There needed to be trees to grow fruit, bee keeping, farm management, schooling, even writing rooms. This is a long way from what Brendan Lehane would call, “Scrawny and impotent worshippers of a far-removed-god.” There’s a lot to be inspired by. That a certain kind of village always had more than an eye for the Interior Mountain. The intentional community I guess is a modern phrase.
I am aware when I write about the village it could seem an unreal, or quaint location. Many of us are in towns or cities or suburbs. So this is less about a physical village and more a word to describe your immediate people, animals and general setting: the intimate ties with folk you bang through life with. The reasonably settled. Those you return to.
So when it comes to such a village, I want to suggest things that could keep such a place receptive to the desert. Any scholar of Russian theology would be able to query elements in the following descriptions, but I’m going to present them anyway. And I would caution that such characters risk idealisation, so I would ask to simply get the general gist and contemplate what they could look like in our lives today. There’s always a shadowy version of every role or personality. Cleave to the good.
GREAT REMEMBERERS
How do we avoid desert experience calcifying into a village platitude?
We may need a Spiritual Fool around. We may need a Genial Wanderer.
A wanderer in a village? That may seem odd in the notion of a settlement, but I’d argue there needs to be space for such arrivals. They provide appropriate religious disruption. …
The goal is not to lose weight.
The goal is to develop habits that make losing weight automatic.
– @FitFounder
Heaven is within us. It has nothing to do with the thoughts of someone else, and everything to do with what we ourselves choose to think. Forgiving everyone is our ticket to heaven, and our only way Home. May we learn to think as God thinks.
– Marianne Williamson
Untitled
by Franz Wright
Will I always be eleven,
lonely in this house,
reading books
that are too hard for me,
in the long fatherless hours.
The terrible hours of the window,
the rain-light
on the page,
awaiting the letter,
the phone call,
still your strange elderly child
We’ll discuss it later.
I stir tornadoes
in my tea
– Seanan Forbes
Others are not responsible for what happens to us. They are only instruments of what would happen to us some way or other.
– Sri Ramana Maharshi
Most gaming companies are just digitally optimized, productivity-sucking casinos.
– @naval
I like planting poems in deep silence, [where] each person gets at the poem for himself [her/them]. He has to come to the poems with an ear for all the music they can give…
– Lorine Niedecker in a letter to Gail Roub
…it is plain that Tolkien has unleashed a mythic awakening and Lewis a Christian awakening.
– Zaleski
More and more I’ve become convinced
that the greater treasure to possess is
the UNKNOWN.
– P.L.Travers
For a time we became the same word. It could not last.
– Edmond Jabès; tr. Rosmarie Waldrop
Peace can be a lens through which you see the world. Be it. Live it. Radiate it out. Peace is an inside job.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
The true way to be deceived is to think oneself more knowledgeable than others.
– La Rochefoucauld
Do all the good you can, and make as little fuss about it as possible.
– Charles Dickens
…and yet what we truly are is whatever the impossible creates inside us.
– Clarice Lispector
If you want to change you can’t be “okay” with your current state.
Get disgusted. Get mad. Then take action.
The best periods in your life will come after massive dissatisfaction.
– Dan Go
Your deepest presence is in every small contraction and expansion, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as bird wings.
– Rumi