How odd, I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.
– David Foster Wallace
NON-ATTAINMENT
In spiritual traditions non-acquisitiveness is essential to fulfillment. To live a happy, healthy life it is essential to relinquish the quest to simply get more – more cash, more power, or more fame – because the itch to accumulate inflames the spirit and distracts from making progress on the path. Ironically, it is by the wisdom of not-getting that you achieve all things. For when you relinquish our grasp, when you stop chasing after the world, the things you really need come to you as gifts.
– Tias Little
I have never met a heavy heart that wasn’t a phone booth with a red cape inside.
Some people will never understand what kind of super power it takes for some people to just walk outside…
You.
You stay here with me, okay?
– Andrea Gibson
The world, I’ve discovered, is a masterful flirt. It leaves little gifts everywhere—the way morning light catches in spider webs, how rain releases that earthy sweetness into the air (petrichor, they call it, though no word could fully capture that particular alchemy of water and dust that smells like pure possibility), the particular green of new leaves that somehow manages to be both ancient and urgent. But here’s the thing about flirtation: it requires participation. The world can bat its eyelashes all it wants, but if we’re not looking, if we’re not present enough to catch the gesture, the moment dies unwitnessed.
– Stephanie Tyler
When Solutions Are Technologies Of Avoidance
by Bayo Akomolafe
When things don’t go according to plan, when the laboratory explodes into splinters of glass, smoke, and worthy intentions, it is very usual to subject the errant event to an analysis of what went wrong so we can draw useful lessons. Who doesn’t do this? We all do, I suppose. But of late I have wondered whether this very obvious thing to do isn’t a getting around something else – a blindness to a different sense of things.
The Yoruba have a proverb: Ile oba t’o jo, ewa lo busi. The king’s palace burns, and is more beautiful. You might think you’ve heard this before in a more familiar saying about dark clouds with silver linings or some other anecdote with the germ of the idea that rough times don’t last. But I think the Yoruba proverb is saying something more. Something else. Instead of merely instrumentalizing the failure, quarantining it behind the defence mechanisms of the ego, surrounding it with measuring devices to extract nuggets of wisdom, and processing those rough resources into bullions of solutions, I think it suggests that there’s wisdom in being taken by it. Taken by the plumes braiding the air with our desperation. Taken by the mystery of this thing we rudely call life that isn’t anchored to our best efforts. Taken – at least for the moment – by the disruption; by the glitch; by the dying; by the swaying; by the memorized lines that won’t show up when it is time; by the limbs that won’t move when we will them to; by the lyrics that travel to the places where migrant darlings – killed by their authors – take up new dwellings.
At what point do solutions become technologies of avoidance? And is it okay to try something else? To let the ruins become fleeting messengers of a queer commonwealth of abundance in a world that is richer with losses than with the things that are lost?
Failure is difficult. Humiliating. But I suspect there is some gift, some beauty – a lock of Persephone’s hair, maybe – in bowing down ever so slightly to the tornado as it screams across the plains in front of you, a dismembered town left in its wake.
“Look for the black goat while it is daytime,” another Nigerian proverb cautions. There is a time for solutions. Then there are other times. Let them pass unnamed.
“If we ever stop talking.
Send me a Song”
To make up for lost time, you need
only to put down the grudge
you are holding so you can pick up
the phone and say, ‘How many days
did we need each other at the same time
without knowing it?’
Bitterness is the easiest way
to leave this world having had only
a near-life experience.
– Andrea Gibson
Music tells us to move, to dance… But when we are still ‘within’ music, we absorb all of its power. We are its container. Not every movement needs to go out into the world. We can keep some for ourselves. Contained. Powerful.
– Meg Howrey
There are stars whose radiance is visible on Earth though they have long been extinct. There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world though they are no longer among the living. These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark. They light the way for humankind.
– Hannah Senesh
Run Ragged
by A. R. Ammons
I said I don’t want to be older, but it’s be older
and older or nothing, right: and day by day
it’s been older every day since the beginning:
still, there was a bracket of young years
within which one could say, these are not the
older years or the baby years: there are, as
Shakespeare said, groups of time, the
transitions from one group to another usually
unalarming: people who have nothing to say
should say nothing: they should drum syllables
or squeeze verbs (or nouns) or cast them like
die, craps, creeps: for example, I don’t
feel at home in this universe and it may be
the only one: that is so pathetic: I think
that is so heartrending with content:
how can the place you come from not be your
home: is the only way to make a phrase
interesting to make it sound like it’s not a
phrase: or it could be two phrases or go two
different ways when you are really going nowhere
well, the human race needs a better track,
the track itself worn or grown over.
A ‘dobe house is fireproof, if built right, and one story high; earthquake proof, dust proof, sound proof, heat and cold proof, rat and termite proof, oh, and yes, bullet proof and almost proof against bad design, due to the thickness of its walls and damned if they don’t take on more character with age.
It is said that if the workers sing as they make adobe bricks for a home, the home will always be a happy one.
– Harry Oliver, 1000 Palms, California
The true problem is that the object we are dealing with, from the outset, when it comes to desire, is in no way an object that is predestined to satisfy the instincts, in no way an object destined to satisfy the subject by serving as his instinctual complement.
The object of desire is the signifier of desire for desire.
– Jacques Lacan
…Tolkien did not merely create hundreds of erudite, apposite, and funny sayings – however great an artistic achievement that is – he also invented entire wisdom traditions in which these sayings belong.
– David Rowe, The Proverbs of Middle-earth
It’s important to try to write when you are in the wrong mood or when the weather is wrong.
– John Ashbery
You cannot get educated by this self-propagating system in which people study to pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything.
You learn something by doing it yourself, by asking questions, by thinking, and by experimenting.
– Richard Feynman
Take a cue from Rumi, and live as if at least something is rigged in your favor. Acknowledge joy when it shows up. Befriend the harder feelings when they stop by–they’re just stopping by, not moving in. Remember that you are your body, and your body is you–you’re partners in this life, not enemies.
– Heidi Barr, Collisions of Earth and Sky
Never give up. Never give in. Never become hostile… Hate is too big a burden to bear.
– John Lewis
Dreams are not arbitrary. They’re not planted in our brain by alien forces. They are natural by-products of our psyche seeking its own healing and development. Dreams come to us as part of the psyche’s natural process of healing itself for developing our journey.
– James Hollis
There’s a terror
in knowing
what the world
is about.
– David Bowie
The long silences need to be loved, perhaps
more than the words
which arrive
to describe them
in time.
– Franz Wright
When we meet pain with tenderness, we awaken love—and love is deeply nourishing.
– Zohar Lavie
Writing has become almost a celebrity thing in the sense that people don’t want to write; they want to be authors. And that’s quite different.
– Toni Morrison
This world is like a mountain. Your echo depends on you. If you scream good things, the world will give it back. If you scream bad things, the world will give it back. Even if someone says badly about you, speak well about him.
– Shams of Tabrizi
I quickly see the limitations of whatever I say or whatever judgment I make about anything.
– Susan Sontag
To have the courage to accept a quality which one does not like in oneself, and which one has chosen to repress for many years, is an act of great courage. But if one does not accept the quality, then it functions behind one’s back.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
…how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life – namely myself.
– C.S. Lewis
When you are intelligent, you are fully awake and, in that state, meet problems instantaneously.
– Krishnamurti
Do battle with yourself: if you have the will to conquer anger, it cannot conquer you.
– Seneca
People were linked together
more by enmity than by love.
It was not love but the formation
of mutual enemies that made
a bonding between human
beings possible.
– Shūsaku Endō
I was a bad student, and I only read books that had horses and dogs and mysteries. Beatrix Potter—her tiny little pictures of tiny little worlds.
– Fanny Howe
the scent of orchids
like a foreign land
crescent moon
– Ogawa
It’s a privilege to track your calories. It means you have enough to eat.
It’s a privilege to exercise. It means you have a job that doesn’t require manual labour.
Stop complaining and realize how blessed you are to have these problems.
– Dan Go
But all examples of excess become a fault.
– Seneca
the trees once
entwined by spring wind
now stand alone—
between your voice and mine
only the sky remains
– Nitu Yumnam
I’ve always thought I could use my brain and my heart to jockey everyone around to the good. But life is not jockeyable. When you try, you make people infinitely crazier than they already were, including or especially yourself.
– Anne Lamott
bindweed
and day lilies
entwined
like you and me
summer every day
– Voima Oy
A real prayer has nothing to suggest to God except a deep gratitude, thankfulness. It simply accepts whatsoever God is pouring.
– Osho
I am not a saint
Because I keep trying to be a sound, something
You will remember
Once you’ve lived enough not to believe in heaven.
– Jericho Brown
The only path by which another person can upset you is through your own thought.
– Joseph Murphy
We are involved in a serious social revolution. By and large, American politics is dominated by politicians who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic, and social exploitation.
– John Lewis, March on Washington
We are all connected to the same Source. Thus there is nothing you can think of or do to ‘another’ that will not also vibrate through you.
– James Blanchard Cisneros
The Space Between
by Jill Jupen
This entire day
I have felt
just a few seconds
separated from myself.
Stepping outside
I close the door upon my foot.
The glass on the table
is moments away
from the water I pour.
I speak words
that sound foreign
even to me;
said too early,
or perhaps too late.
The tenderness
I thought I felt
is gone
before my hand
ever reaches your arm.
To know that you are a prisoner of your mind is the dawn of wisdom. The problem is not yours – it is your mind’s only. Begin by disassociating yourself from your mind. Resolutely remind yourself that you are not the mind and that its problems are not yours.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
One of the things that we do not talk about when we talk about writing is the sound and scent and sensuality of it, the scratching and hammering and tapping, the pitter of pencils and the scribble and scrawl of pens…
– Brian Doyle
A smile on the face
Of the beloved,
And we caused it.
Never again having
To ask
The universe
If we have a purpose.
Settled forever:
The question of our worth.
– Gregory Orr
BACKWARD MIRACLE
Every once in a while
we need a
backward miracle
that will strip language,
make it hold for
a minute: just the
vessel with the
wine in it—
a sacramental
refusal to multiply,
reclaiming the
single loaf
and the single
fish thereby.
– Kay Ryan
Wouldn’t it be dreadful if some day, in our own world, at home, men started going wild inside, like the animals here, and still looked like men, so that you’d never know which were which?
– Lucy (C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian)
I knew a girl. Her hobbies included telling me I was wrong about my own life.
– J. D. Daniels
a young couple
filled with hope
little butterflies
– Issa
Silence, according to Western and Eastern tradition alike, is necessary for the emergence of persons.
– Ivan Illich
Words are the clothes thoughts wear.
– Samuel Beckett
I knew that the American Empire in which I lived was approaching its imminent end, but I could not quite believe it.
– William T. Vollmann
It’s not how much we give but how much love we put into giving.
– Mother Teresa
The room was cheap and sordid,
hidden above the suspect taverna.
From the window you could see the alley,
dirty and narrow. From below
came the voices of workmen
playing cards, enjoying themselves.
– C.P. Cavafy
Just get rid of ignorance and delusions, and you will know that you are a Buddha and that you are already complete as you are. If you awaken to this, you will burst out laughing at how much effort you spent in order for you to become yourself.
– Daehaeng
Technological solutionism–that approach that says that the answer to every problem is a new technology–is equivalent to driving a car that only has a gas pedal, but no brakes. You may be able to steer, but you can never slow down.
– Vince F. Horn
the endless blue
of the Aegean Sea …
smell of summer
– Chen-ou Liu
Everywhere man blames nature and fate, yet his fate is nothing but the echo of his character and his passion, his errors and his weaknesses.
– Democritus
It’s a strange feeling, beautiful but also eerie: not only that you can step into time’s flow, but that you ARE the flow itself.
– Natalie Hodges
I’m not interested in what you should have done. What are you going to do now?
– Hatchet (Paul Scott Grill, Travel By Star)
People finally don’t have much affection for questions, especially one so leprous as the apparent lack of a fair system of rewards and punishments on earth. The question is not less gnawing and unpleasant for being so otiose, so naive. And we are not concerned with the grander issues: say the Nez Percé children receiving the hail of cavalry fire in their sleeping tents. Nothing is quite so grotesque as the meeting of a child and a bullet. And what distances in comprehension: the press at the time insisted we had won. We would like to think that the whole starry universe would curdle at such a monstrosity: the conjunctions of Orion twisted askew, the arms of the Southern Cross drooping. Of course not: immutable is immutable and everyone in his own private manner dashes his brains against the long-suffering question that is so luminously obvious. Even gods aren’t exempt: note Jesus’s howl of despair as he stepped rather tentatively into eternity. And we can’t seem to go from large to small because everything is the same size. Everyone’s skin is so particular and we are so largely unimaginable to one another.
– Jim Harrison, Legends Of The Fall
You can be far away inside, and far away outside.
– JonArno Lawson
Growth doesn’t just set you free—it sets things on fire. Old roles, old dynamics, old relationships. From the ashes, something truer rises: not the self that kept the peace, but the self that finally knows peace.
– @tinybuddha
Crossing Kansas by Train
The telephone poles
Have been holding their
Arms out
A long time now
To birds
That will not
Settle there
But pass with
Strange cawings
Westward to
Where dark trees
Gather about a
Waterhole this
Is Kansas the
Mountains start here
Just behind
The closed eyes
Of a farmer’s
Sons asleep
In their workclothes
– Donald Justice
Hanamatsuri
I should sober up
tomorrow
– Shirotomo
Pray for rain and watch it walk across
the sea, to bless the bare head of the carrion
corbeaux, even the shy agouti, and Maria,
old pirogue left on shore, open casket
at Punta de la Playa.
– Christian Campbell
chain-link fences
on both sides of the road …
post election
– Chen-ou Liu
The Brothers Grimm owed their success to “a strain of medievalism…that suggested the German past might not be all rye bread and muddy farmyards—or rather that humble places and people might also generate stories, heroes, culture.”
– Regina Marler
It’s funny how white people never think
anyone else has a history.
Imagine that?
– Sisonke Msimang
The show of intellectualism is a clever high wire act where we (as both spectators and performers) assume mental hygiene and the idealized mind are capable of providing the means to balance over life’s abyss.
As many know from experience with the tragic, when we expect deliberative thinking by itself to provide us the sole means of balance, well, the vicissitudes of our creaturely life inevitably come along to tip us off the tightrope and we fall toward any number of existential crises —crises that we don’t give a crap about analyzing in the purely abstract— crises that beckon an urgent re-framing of perspective and force us to re-value what’s important in the short time we’re here.
A humbling and helpful 12-step addage for the high-minded person trying to think their way through recovery goes, “I can’t think my way into right action, I have to act my way in to right thinking.”
Perhaps if we’ve been living solely from our heads (to exclusion of body and emotion), a fall into our full featured humanity is what’s called for. I’d like to imagine there are other ways of coming out of a stuck place when enthralled with our intellect — ways other than crisis. But it’s how many of us who lean so heavily on our thinking find our way back to our hearts, our bodies. We hit a bottom with grief, loss of meaning, mid-life issues, etc., and no matter how clever our thoughts, we can’t think our way through the visceral process, we have to be with it, there’s no outsmarting it….
– Andrew Hagel
The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more RESISTANCE we will feel toward pursuing it.
– Steven Pressfield
C. G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters (Bollingen Series XCVII)
Margaret Tilly, a concert pianist of San Francisco, English by origin, became interested in experimentation with the therapeutic value of music when used specifically in certain cases. This interest grew out of her own experience with Jungian analysis, and Miss Tilly was urged by analysts to acquaint Jung with her work
In 1956, while in Geneva to give a concert on radio, she decided to send Jung some papers that she had written. A reply came by return mail, from Jung’s secretary, asking her to come to Kusnacht two days later.
Margaret Tilly: When I walked into his hall, Dr. Jung came with hands outstretched to welcome me, and I felt that here was one of the warmest and friendliest persons I had ever been with —so easy to talk to that one did not feel overawed.
We sat at a round table in the window of his study. My papers were lying in front of him and he seemed to be literally bursting with interest and curiosity.
He said, “I have read and heard a great deal about music therapy, and it always seemed to me so sentimental and superficial that I was not interested. But these papers of yours are entirely different, and I simply cannot wait to hear what you do. I can’t imagine what it is. You must please use your !language, not mine.”
I didn’t immediately understand what he meant by the last sentence, but said, “Before I talk, Dr. Jung, may I ask what your own relationship to music has been?”
And his reply was a surprise. “My mother was a fine singer, so was her sister, and my daughter is a fine pianist. I know the whole literature—I have heard everything and all the great performers, but I never listen to music any more. It exhausts and irritates me.”
When I asked why, he replied, “Because music is dealing with such deep archetypal material, and those who play don’t realize this.”
And then I understood at last why the idea has grown up that Jung is not particularly sympathetic to music. He cares too much, not too little.
At this point he said, “With your permission I have asked Miss Bailey and my daughter to join us this afternoon, as they will be so interested in what you are going to tell us. Now let us have a cup of tea together.”
And we proceeded into his large, dark, cozy living room, where he introduced me to his daughter and Miss Bailey,’ who were sitting in front of a fire. On the far side of the room was a Bechstein grand with its top raised.
We had a gay and delightful time around the fire, Dr. Jung full of fun and charm, and as I swallowed my last drop of tea, he said, “I can’t wait another minute—let’s begin, but you use your language.”
I said, “Do you mean you want me to play?” and he said, “Yes. I want you to treat me exactly as though I were one of your patients. Now—what do you think I need?”
We both roared with laughter and I said, “You really are standing me up, aren’t you?”
He said, “Yes, I am. Now, let’s go to the piano. I am very slightly deaf, so may I sit close?”
And with that he sat down just behind me, so that I had to turn round a little to see him.
I began to play. When I turned round, he was obviously very moved, and said, “Go on—go on.” And I played again.
This second time he was far more deeply moved, saying, “I don’t know what is happening to me—what are you doing?”
And we started to talk. He fired question after question at me. “In such and such a case what would you try to accomplish—where would you expect to get—what would you do? Don’t just tell me, show me—show me”; and gradually as we worked he said, “I begin to see what you are doing—show me more.”
I told him many case histories, and we worked on for over two hours. He was very excited and as easy and naïve as a child to work with. Finally he burst out with:
“This opens up whole new avenues of research I’d never even dreamed of. Because of what you’ve shown me this afternoon—not just what you’ve said, but what I have actually felt and experienced—I feel that from now on music should be an essential part of every analysis. This reaches the deep archetypal material that we can only sometimes reach in our analytical work with patients. This is most remarkable.”Psychoanalytic therapy workshops
At this point some evil genie made me look at my watch, and I said, “Dr. Jung, I have to go, or I miss my train back to Paris.”
“Oh, you mustn’t go,” he said. “Can’t you stay a few days and be with us? Can’t you come back?” I most reluctantly took my leave. His daughter drove me to the train and I sat in a daze all the way to Paris.’ – C. G Jung Speaking by William McGuire; The Therapy of Music; Pages 273-276
Footnote: Alan Watts, in his autobiography In My Own Way (New York, 1972), p. 394, refers briefly to Margaret Tilly’s meeting with Jung and adds:
“Shortly afterwards, Jung’s daughter said to Margaret, `Perhaps you don’t realize that you did something very important for me and my father. I have always loved music, but he has never understood it, and this was a barrier between us. Your coming has changed all that, and I don’t know how to thank you.’”
You can seem like a millionaire to one person and a homeless person to the next. The ants think you are a giant, and the trees don’t even notice you. You think you have a boring life, but the next person might be striving for your lifestyle. Comparison is the thief of joy, so stay kind and keep loving life. Life is all just a big game of perspective.
– unknown
Disappearance isn’t always about leaving.
Sometimes, you vanish inside your own life
– drifting further with each day until no
one, not even you, knows where you’ve
gone.
– Paul Auster
… when the truth isn’t hopeful, the telling of it is.
– Andrea Gibson
I do not want anybody to be a Jungian. I want people above all to be themselves. As for ‘isms,’ they are the viruses of our day, and responsible for greater disasters than any medieval plague or pest has ever been. Should I be found one day only to have created another ‘ism,’ then I will have failed in all I tried to do.
– Carl Jung
The process is the main thing, not the fruition.
– Pema Chödrön
Don’t try to hold on to the wave
That’s breaking against your foot: so long as
You stand in the stream fresh waves
Will always keep breaking against it.
– Bertolt Brecht
Poetry can also act as an antidote to the jump scares of eye-catching headlines and to the endless doom of backlit screens.
– Diego Báez
A drop of water, if it could write out its own history, would explain the universe to us.
– Lucy Larcom
The swirly nature of love – the fricking “tornadic uplift” of it – is only a part of what shows that love is not about controlling anything but your own respectfully appreciative attention and responsiveness.
– George Gorman
While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning how to play a new tune on the flute. “What will be the use of that?” he was asked. “To know this tune before dying.” If I dare repeat this reply long since trivialized by the handbooks, it is because it seems to me the sole serious justification of any desire to know, whether exercised on the brink of death or at any other moment of existence.
– Emil Cioran, Drawn and Quartered
Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists. There is, there has been, there will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners — I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem that they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’
– Wisława Szymborska
To name the ache too soon is always to risk the medicine becoming the poison.
– Báyò Akómoláfé
The experience of eros as lack alerts a person to the boundaries of himself, of other people, of things in general. It is the edge separating my tongue from the taste for which it longs that teaches me what an edge is.
– Anne Carson
Optimism is radical. It is the hard choice, the brave choice. And it is, it seems to me, most needed now, in the face of despair—just as a car is most useful when you have a distance to close. Otherwise it is a large, unmovable object parked in the garage. These days, the safest way for someone to appear intelligent is being skeptical by default. We seem sophisticated when we say “we don’t believe” and disingenuous when we say “we do.” History and fable have both proven that nothing is ever entirely lost. David can take Goliath. A beach in Normandy can turn the tide of war. Bravery can topple the powerful. These facts are often seen as exceptional, but they are not. Every day, we all become the balance of our choices—choices between love and fear, belief or despair. No hope is ever too small.
– Guillermo Del Toro
The world under heaven, after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide. This has been so since antiquity.
– Luo Guanzhong
The rose
was not searching for the rose.
Motionless in the sky
it was searching for something else.
– Lorca
My heart of silk
is filled with lights
with lost bells
with lilies and bees.
I will go very far,
farther than these mountains
farther than the oceans,
way up near the stars,
to ask Christ the Lord
to give back to me
the soul I had as a child,
Matured by fairy tales,
with its hat of feather
and its wooden sword.
– Fredrico Garcia Lorca
Why do we care about singers? Wherein lies the power of songs? Maybe it derives from the sheer strangeness of there being singing in the world. The note, the scale, the chord; melodies, harmonies, arrangements; symphonies, ragas, Chinese operas, jazz, the blues: that such things should exist, that we should have discovered the magical intervals and distances that yield the poor cluster of notes, all within the span of a human hand from which we can build our cathedrals of sound, is as alchemical a mystery as mathematics, or wine, or love. Maybe the birds taught us. Maybe not. Maybe we are just creatures in search of exaltation. We don’t have much of it. Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many painful ways deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world.
– Salman Rushdie
My heart is a parachute that has never opened in time.
– Andrea Gibson
Oh, to parley with what is not mine,
with the distance of wildness and the clash
that thrills and flenses my form and season,
till tumbling from sense and bastion I feel
the chancy call of a breathtaking knowing –
as if a frog and a dove were creating
something even more shiny than affection’s rhyme.
– George Gorman
The Song of the Universal.
by Walt Whitman
COME, said the Muse,
Sing me a song no poet yet has chanted,
Sing me the Universal.
In this broad Earth of ours,
Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,
Enclosed and safe within its central heart,
Nestles the seed Perfection.
By every life a share, or more or less,
None born but it is born—conceal’d or unconceal’d, the
seed is waiting.
Lo! keen-eyed towering Science!
As from tall peaks the Modern overlooking,
Successive, absolute flats issuing.
Yet again, lo! the Soul—above all science;
For it, has History gather’d like husks around the globe;
For it, the entire star-myriads roll through the sky.
In spiral roads, by long detours,
(As a much-tacking ship upon the sea,)
For it, the partial to the permanent flowing,
For it, the Real to the Ideal tends.
For it, the mystic evolution;
Not the right only justified—what we call evil also justified.
Forth from their masks, no matter what,
From the huge, festering trunk—from craft and guile
and tears,
Health to emerge, and joy—joy universal.
Out of the bulk, the morbid and the shallow,
Out of the bad majority—the varied, countless frauds
of men and States,
Electric, antiseptic yet—cleaving, suffusing all,
Only the Good is universal.
Over the mountain growths, disease and sorrow,
An uncaught bird is ever hovering, hovering,
High in the purer, happier air.
From imperfection’s murkiest cloud,
Darts always forth one ray of perfect light,
One flash of Heaven’s glory just heard,
To fashion’s custom’s discord,
To the mad Babel-din, the deafening orgies,
Soothing each lull a strain is heard,
From some far shore, the final chorus sounding.
O the blest eyes! the happy hearts!
That see—that know the guiding thread so fine,
Along the mighty labyrinth!
And thou, America!
For the Scheme’s culmination—its Thought and its
Reality,
For these (not for thyself) Thou hast arrived.
Thou too surroundest all;
Embracing, carrying, welcoming all, Thou too, by path-
ways broad and new,
To the Ideal tendest.
The measur’d faiths of other lands—the grandeurs of
the past,
Are not for Thee but grandeurs of Thine own;
Deific faiths and amplitudes, absorbing, comprehending
all,
All eligible to all.
All, all for immortality!
Love, like the light, silently wrapping all!
Nature’s amelioration blessing all!
The blossoms, fruits of ages—orchards divine and certain;
Forms, objects, growths, humanities, to spiritual images
ripening.
Give me, O God, to sing that thought!
Give me—give him or her I love this quenchless faith,
In Thy ensemble—whatever else withheld, withhold not
from us,
Belief in plan of Thee enclosed in time and space,
Health, peace, salvation universal.
Is it a dream?
Nay, but the lack of it the dream.
And, failing it, life’s lore and wealth a dream,
And all the world a dream.
Obsession
by Charles Baudelaire
Great forests, you alarm me like a mighty fane;
Like organ-tones you roar, and in our hearts of stone,
Where ancient sobs vibrate, O halls of endless pain!
The answering echoes of your “De Profundis” moan.
I hate thee, Ocean! hate thy tumults and thy throbs,
My spirit finds them in himself. This bitter glee
Of vanquished mortals, full of insults and of sobs,
I hear it in the mighteous laughter of the sea.
O starless night! thy loveliness my soul inhales,
Without those starry rays which speak a language known,
For I desire the dark, the naked and the lone.
But e’en those darknesses themselves to me are veils,
Where live—and, by the millions ’neath my eyelids prance,
Long, long departed Beings with familiar glance.
Sometimes a gift is given and neither giver nor recipient knows what its true dimensions are, and what it appears to be at first is not what it will be in the end. Like beginnings, endings have endless recessions, layers atop the layers, consequences that ripple outward.
– Rebecca Solnit
The merrel also knew its wing had not healed. But I could reach a great height once more before it failed me, it said. And from there I would fold my wings and plummet to the earth as if a hare or a fawn had caught my eye; but it would be myself I stooped toward. It would be a good flight and a good death. And so I eat their dead things cut up on a pole, dreaming of my last flight.
– Robin McKinley
All that I see arches, and light arches around it. The air churns out forces and lashes the marveling land. A hundred times through the fields and along the deep roads I’ve cried Holy. I see a hundred insects moving across the air, rising and falling. Chipped notes of birdsong descend from the trees, tuneful and broken; the notes pile about me like leaves. Why do these molded clouds make themselves overhead innocently changing, trailing their flat blue shadows up and down everything, and passing, and gone? Ladies and gentlemen! You are given insects, and birdsong, and a replenishing series of clouds.
– Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Walking faster and faster, weightless, I feel the wine. It sheds light in slats through my rib cage, and fills the buttressed vaults of my ribs with light pooled and buoyant. I am moth; I am light. I am prayer and I can hardly see.
– Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
A nun lives in the fires of the spirit, a thinker lives in the bright wick of the mind, an artist lives jammed in the pool of materials. (Or, a nun lives, thoughtful and tough, in the mind, a nun lives, with that special poignancy peculiar to religious, in the exile of materials; and a thinker, who would think of something, lives in the clash of materials, and in the world of spirit where all long thoughts must lead; and an artist lives in the mind, that warehouse of forms, and an artist lives, of course, in the spirit. So.
– Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared.
– Audre Lorde
The god of today is a tree. He is a forest of trees or a desert, or a wedge from wideness down to a scatter of stars, stars like salt low and dumb and abiding. Today’s god said: shed. He peels from eternity always, spread; he winds into time like a rind.
– Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
When we enter a new situation, we’re activated to focus our attention on this new event. However, traumatized people tend to be riveted on their traumas; new situations are connected to — and constricted by — that past event. The key to dissolving this constriction is simply learning to stay with the sensation until it begins to change. When you contact that stuck sensation, it will begin to change, simply because that’s the nature of all sensation. However, when you come in contact with that constriction for the first time, it can often give rise to fear. Indeed, the sensation is likely to get worse before it gets better because, for the first time, you’re experiencing it directly. As you stay with it, it may continue to get worse, then better, in a cycle of expansion and contraction. What’s important to realize is that you can pendulate — swing back and forth — between these sensations of expansion and contraction. And this means that you’re no longer stuck!
– Peter Levine
I will never deny how badly I want to live.
I have a measly wrinkle collection compared to my dream goal.
I would absolutely love to be a before-picture.
This world looks at super models the way
I now look at ninety year olds who have hair so silver
they could tinsel their own trees, so many
laugh lines their faces look like roadmaps to heaven.
But I did not meet this life until I met its brevity.
Did not meet my voice until I knew every word
could be my last. I did not know what prayer was
until I started praying for what I already have.
When I speak of the sweetness of this life
I don’t mean my butterflies never cry.
I don’t mean my heartbeat never aches.
I mean I am learning the infinite difference
between saying “I fear death” and saying “death isn’t fair”
if it finds me soon. A short life
doesn’t always equate to a life cut short.
A long life doesn’t always equate to a full one.
My life is so now full it is overflowing with
how many beautiful things can be seen in a single second,
how it is possible to blow up a second like a balloon
and fit infinity inside of it, until I am bursting
with laughter when anyone calls me an old soul
because I can’t help but feel like this is my first time here
marveling at the steam rising from a cup of coffee,
or two wild geese stopping traffic as they mosey across the road,
or my own breath and another birthday candle
to celebrate the holiday of having a body.
– Andrea Gibson
Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don’t know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves.
– Slavoj Žižek
To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one’s self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray.
– Gilles Deleuze
Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and bloodstream. I am no beauty, no mirror is necessary to assure me of this absolute fact. Nevertheless I have a death grip on this haggard frame as if it were the limpid body of Venus herself.
– Leonora Carrington
When in doubt, listen to your heart. This is why the popular phrase widely used, “Listen to your heart,” is so powerful —because it is true. The heart is where your intuition resides. The heart has no filters nor does it categorize things as good, bad, fair, unfair, right, or wrong. To the heart, there is only truth. Here is scientific fact to help you understand this. Your heart feels six seconds before your brain thinks.
– Waleuska Lazo
Words cling to the very core of our memories and lie there in silence until a new desire reawakens them and recharges them with loving energy. That is one of the qualities of love that moves me most, their capacity for transmitting love. Like water, words are a wonderful conductor of energy. And the most powerful, transforming energy is the energy of love.
– Laura Esquivel
Although the pure truth has never been stated, nevertheless it has never been lost. Its existence does not depend upon human statement but upon human sensitivity. In this it is unlike all other knowledge.
– Paul Brunton
The Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert talk about the two “hungers”. There is the Great Hunger and there is the Little Hunger. The Little Hunger wants food for the belly; but the Great Hunger, the greatest hunger of all, is the hunger for meaning…
There is ultimately only one thing that makes human beings deeply and profoundly bitter, and that is to have thrust upon them a life without meaning. There is nothing wrong in searching for happiness. But of far more comfort to the soul is something greater than happiness or unhappiness, and that is meaning. Because meaning transfigures all.
Once what you are doing has for you meaning, it is irrelevant whether you’re happy or unhappy. You are content – you are not alone in your Spirit – you belong.
– Laurens van der Post
…for I keep in the light as much as I can. Let the old heathens count Darkness the womb of all things. I count Light the older, from the tread of whose feet fell the first shadow – and that was Darkness. Darkness exists but by the light, and for the light.
– George MacDonald
You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate.
– Elizabeth Gilbert
THE TOUCH OF LATE JULY
With and without you
the intense consolation
of dusk at high tide.
– Tom D’Evelyn
Man has to cope with the problem of suffering. The Oriental wants to get rid of suffering by casting it off. Western man tries to suppress suffering with drugs. But suffering has to be overcome, and the only way to overcome it is to endure it.
– CG Jung
Ars Poetica
“What can I know? What ought I to do?
What may I hope? What is the human being?”
– Immanuel Kant
To answer Kant’s last question
she should take the curtains from her eyes
and lay them on the bed.
She should stand on her head and dream,
empty herself of I, I, I, I.
She should walk inside the living and the dead,
become some other passerby.
– Catherine Barnett
It’s True
Oh what a hard time I have
loving you as I love you.
On account of your love I have an air ache,
a heart ache, a hat ache
Someone please buy
this hatband of mine
and this fine-spun white sadness
perfect for kerchiefs!
Oh, what a hard time I have
loving you as I love you.
– Federico García Lorca, (tr. Christopher Maurer)
When I write, the process is full of risk, error and painstaking self-correction. It arrives somewhere surprising only when I’ve stayed in uncertainty long enough to find out what I had initially failed to understand.
– Meghan O’Rourke
I don’t think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.
– Margaret Atwood
The universe is not human-centric. Every life form has a role to play – that is the beauty of it.
– Sadhguru
The reclamation of the feminine is not a movement. It’s restoration of order.
– Nika Solé
Most people imagine that if they stop thinking, that’s sort of the end: the life of the mind instantly curls up and dies.
– Alan Watts
I’d stand in the shadows of your heart
and tell you I’m not afraid of your dark.
– Andrea Gibson
Love and grace are bigger than the nightmare, supposedly. Without trusting this, we’re doomed and ridiculous.
– Anne Lamott
‘Poetry,’ [Charles Baudelaire] once wrote, ‘cannot, under pain of death or of failure, become assimilated to science or to morality; it does not have Truth as its goal. It only has itself.’
– Claire Ortiz Hill
butterflies and birds
dancing into the sky
a cloud of flowers
– Basho
…writing remains. Not because it is safe to write, and certainly not because there is time or quiet or shelter for it, but because without writing, there would be nothing left that resembles continuity. Words arrive not after the devastation but within it.
– @AlaaQAlQaisi
I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me.
– Charles Bukowski
Don’t tell of suffering, talk about nothing but blessings.
– Rumi
Why I Like Marriage
by George Ovitt
At breakfast I tell my wife
To bury me in my new suit.
“The gray one?” she asks,
“Yes, with the pinstripes,”
“Fine,” and she sips her tea.
This is what I like about marriage—
The not-being-surprised part of it,
As in how I can decide on my
Funeral attire, then read aloud
A Times review of a restaurant
In Paris that we will never visit,
And a moment later suggest a
Walk in the snow—why not?
By lunchtime I will have decided
Against the gray suit and burial
Altogether, having seen a billboard
For cremations—$850, complete;
“On second thought,” I begin,
And my wife will nod, and sip her tea,
And say, “I know,” and mean it.
We cannot lead the worldly life and the higher life. We cannot allow ourselves to run after worldly love and affections and have the higher Divine Love at the same time. God and worldly affections, God and worldly passion and pleasure, cannot live together.
– Swami Brahmananda
Our happiness depends on the habit of mind we cultivate.
– Norman Vincent Peale
Don’t tell me the sky’s the limit when there are footprints on the moon.
– Paul Brandt
Certain philosophers assert that the external world does not exist, and that it is within ourselves that we develop our lives. However that may be, love, even in its humblest beginnings, is a striking example of how little reality means to us.
– Marcel Proust, Volume V In Search Of Lost Time
In a world that tells us we should always be doing more, sitting still can be an act of rebellion, the ultimate rejection of a culture that tells us our value is tied to our productivity.
– Christopher Rivas
After Brecht
Be thankful it’s this dark.
Nobody knows what you’re up to.
What if they did –
who’s to say it’s wrong?
Anything we want to do,
as long as we can find the energy,
we do it. That’s how come
it’s getting darker all the time.
What if some dark night
they do you in. No last moments
marred by the injustice of it all.
I don’t know who to thank.
– David Bromige
One has come into the presence of mystery. After all the trouble one has taken to be a modern man, one has come back under the spell of a primitive awe, wordless and humble.
– Wendell Berry
The possession of anything begins in the mind.
– Bruce Lee
The telephone is the writer’s devil, the dictionary his guardian angel.
– Octavio Paz
It’s wonderful to admire oneself
with complete candor, tallying up the merits of each
of the latrines.
– Frank O’Hara
Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.
– Edgar Degas
There is a Single Law.
The Law of Nature.
The Law of Equilibrium.
The Law of Unity.
The Law Of infinite Love.
We exist within it.
It covers us
like a mother covers a child.
If we correspond to it,
we will prosper.
If we don’t correspond to it,
we’ll suffer.
– Abraham the Patriarch
I was reading something by Plath, who’s been a common gateway drug for young women writers, and I was just blown away. It gave me a certain feeling, like the feeling you get when you listen to a piece of music you love, that moves you in some way, that opens up your spirit. The way poetry made me feel when I was reading it made me want to write it and create my own version. Whatever energy was held in that language, I wanted to find my own way of accessing it. So that was the beginning, and it really was like lightning.
– Kim Addonizio
Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.
– Anne Frank
Just like you can too little or too much of certain macros (carbs, protein, fats), you can get too little or too much of certain wavelengths of light (visible, infrared, UV)
– Abud Bakri MD
Who now shall giue vnto me words and sound,
Equall vnto this haughtie enterprise?
Or who shal lend me wings, with which from ground
My lowly verse may loftily arise,
And lift it selfe vnto the highest skies?
– Edmund Spenser
If you really care for others, you don’t demonstrate consistent self-sacrifice, you demonstrate appropriate self-sacrifice.
– @VinceFHorn
Other countries may offer you discoveries in manners or lore or landscape; Greece offers you something harder — the discovery of yourself.
– Lawrence Durrell
You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination if you are going to make use of all that the great artist gives you.
– Virginia Woolf
I have a theory that ‘holidays’ evolved from the medieval pilgrimage, and are essentially a kind of penance for being so happy and comfortable in one’s daily life.
– Philip Larkin
The tragedy of the contemporary academy is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power.
– Dr. Jennifer Frey
He has nothing useful to say about fascism who is unwilling to mention capitalism.
– Max Horkheimer
I wept and wept. I had come to believe that if I really wanted something badly enough, the very act of my wanting it was an assurance that I would not get it.
– Audre Lorde
We are suffocating among people who believe they are absolutely right. And for all those who can only live in dialogue and human friendship, this silence is the end of the world.
– Albert Camus
I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self.
– Aristotle
Yoga and writing both demand that I stay with what’s true and what’s present, however painful it may be—the sticky joint, the breaking heart, the ragged, unacceptable truth that needs to be spoken.
– Anne Cushman
We all live in a
beautifully
round world.
– Lêdo Ivo
I paced my room, imagined
myself an Aztec Angel, hurled
those words against walls, faced
the mirror, proud I was brown,
proud I was my father’s son.
– Daniel Elias Galicia
Fidelity
Say the facts:
Someone decided not to choose you.
Someone decided not to fight for you,
turning from the wild colts of your broken heart.
Someone left your one life
on its knees.
What will you do
with those ruins? When Christ
knelt before his judges,
he didn’t say a word to them,
a syllable.
He tried, He is still trying
to tell you: Your life
is the miracle
you think it is.
Give it to the ones who do believe.
– Joseph Fasano
If you get close to what
you love, who you are is
revealed to you.
– Ethan Hawke
Change is also loss, and in that sense a parent can lose a child every day, until you realize that you’d better stop predicting what they’re going to become and concentrate on what is right in front of you.
– Rachel Cusk
The physical world is true and real; the inner world is also true and real. It is when we muddle them, when we fail to live the inner world as symbol, when we try to locate it in literal people, that the illusory world is created.
– Robert A. Johnson
Truth is contrary to our nature, not so error, and this for a very simple reason; truth demands that we should recognize ourselves as limited, error flatters us that, in one way or another, we are unlimited.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Everybody has a ‘gripping stranger’ in their lives… a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you. Maybe it’s the kid in cut-offs who mows your lawn or the woman wearing White Shoulders who stamps your book at the library — a stranger who, if you were to come home and find a message from them on your answering machine saying ‘Drop everything. I love you. Come away with me now to Florida,’ you’d follow them.
– Douglas Coupland, Generation X
If we do not have the depths, how do we have the heights? Yet you fear the depths, and do not want to confess that you are afraid of them. It is good, though, that you fear yourselves; say it out loud that you are afraid of yourselves. It is wisdom to fear oneself. Only the heroes say that they are fearless. But you know what happens to the hero.
– CG Jung
You could make an entire second world out of what people throw away. The landfill is where I figured out one of my main philosophies, that everybody alive is basically in the process of trading out their old stuff for different stuff, day in day out.
– Barbara Kingsolver
There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us.
– F. H. Bradley
But if the doctor wishes to help a human being he must be able to accept him as he is. And he can do this in reality only when he has already seen and accepted himself as he is.
– CG Jung
We all have ordeals we must face… It’s through them that we find a new direction in our lives. The more grueling the ordeal, the more it can help us down the road.
– Haruki Murakami
Peace, which costs nothing, is attended with infinitely more advantage, than any victory with all its expense.
– Thomas Paine
You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.
– Marcus Aurelius
Whoever goes deeply into poetry escapes from being as certitude, meets with the absence of the gods, lives in the intimacy of this absence, becomes responsible for it, assumes its risk, and endures its favor.
– Maurice Blanchot
Psychology needs drama, not analysis; pathos, not cure.
– James Hillman
The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.
– Zadie Smith
We have to face things as they are, look at them very closely and see the urgency of doing something immediately, not leaving it to the scientist, politician or intellectual.
– Krishnamurti
Read books because you will never be able to meet and spend uninterrupted time with the thoughts of so many brilliant and unique people.
– Mark Manson
Even when they call us mad, when they call us subversives and communists and all the epithets they put on us, we know we only preach the subversive witness of the Beatitudes, which has turned everything upside down…
– St. Oscar Romero
The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line.
– Jorge Luis Borges
When thee builds a prison, thee had better build with the thought ever in thy min that thee and thy children may occupy the cells.
– Elizabeth Fry
Before you start pointing fingers, make sure your hands are clean.
– Jimi Hendrix
Never worry what others say when you walk away from all the drama. Be grateful you had the strength and courage to stay out of the conflict and be at peace with your choices.
– Elle Sommer
Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.
– Herbert Marcuse
How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how gloriously different are the saints.
– C.S. Lewis
I write to multiply the space I live in.
– Hélène Cixous
Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.
– D. H. Lawrence
The body is an archive. Memory lives in flesh.
– Tina Campt
Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.
– Umberto Eco
Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
You don’t live for the world; you build it inside you.
– Toni Morrison
To become is just as important as to be.
– Simone de Beauvoir
Only fragments are accurate. The whole always lies.
– Georges Bataille
Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
No one is truly themselves, except in exile.
– Emil Cioran
The truth of a thing is in the feel of it, not in the think of it.
– Stanley Kubrick
There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.
– Nelson Mandela
Truth isn’t found by merely connecting logical dots or filling gaps with preferred beliefs in the immediate layer of analysis. Instead, it resides in comprehending the formation of our widest spectrum of experiences, acknowledging that nothing exists independently and that everything remains within the realm of conditions.
– Primoz Korelc Hiriko
Our planet is poorly equipped for delight. One must snatch gladness from the days that are. In this life it’s not difficult to die. To make life is more difficult by far.
– Vladimir Mayakovsky
In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay.
– Ernst Fischer
The unknown is not behind us, but stitched into every second.
– John Berger
WANT
They say men want freedom
and girls want love,
but I’ve seen women leave
lovers and countries and kingdoms
of comfort just for the chance
to sleep unbothered, to bathe
unwatched, to waltz around
apartments all their own,
wearing nothing but lipstick—
the color of desire.
– Joy Sullivan
Not one person in a hundred knows how to be silent and listen, no, nor even to conceive what such a thing means. Yet only then you can detect, beyond the fatuous clamor, the silence of which the universe is made.
– Samuel Beckett
Those who have suffered understand suffering and therefore extend their hand.
– Patti Smith
Come see me
in the good light
Come tell me
what you tell the truth.
Come trouble me.
Come lightning strike.
Come read aloud
what I can’t yet pronounce
of my own life.
– Andrea Gibson
Once in a while, we all succumb
to the merely personal.
Those glass shards and snipped metal
That glitter and disappear and glitter again
in the edged night light
Of memory’s anxious sky.
– Charles Wright
Time as hunger.
Time passing and gazing.
Time as perseverance.
Mountain time.
Time as paper folded to look like a mountain.
Time compared to the wild fantastic silence of stars.
– Anne Carson
You think that just because it’s already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable? Oh no, the past is cloaked in multicolored taffeta and every time we look at it we see a different hue.
– Milan Kundera
You will need to state the reason for your visit. / Don’t say because my parents’ house / still sits empty on a bluff overlooking the sea
– Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Upon Arrival
by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
You will need to state the reason for your visit.
Don’t say because I want to walk down old roads
and caress stone walls the color of my skin.
You will need to state the reason for your visit.
Don’t say because the olives are ready for harvest
and I will coax the fruit from the trees,
press it into liquid gold.
You will need to state the reason for your visit.
Don’t say because my parents’ house
still sits empty on a bluff overlooking the sea,
the green shutters my grandfather had just painted
remain sealed shut
and the army listed the property’s owners
as absentees.
You will need to state the reason for your visit.
Don’t say because I am carrying prayers in my suitcase
for a people who wait,
and I’ll unfold them
embroidered linens of verse
and spread them out across the land.
iv. “The leaves stir not”
The leaves stir not,
[They] all are steady as the cloudless sky;
How deep the quiet: all is motionless,
As if the life of the vast world was hush’d
Into breathless dreams.
– Wordsworth
Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.
– Aldous Huxley
Don’t take anything personally. Nothing others do or say is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions of others you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.
– Don Miguel Ruiz
Never throw caution to the wind. It could whip back into your eyes and blind you.
– Stephen Colbert
To spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your own life, to rule your fate, to name the grandmothers as well as the fathers, to draw nets and not straight lines, to be a maker as well as a cleaner, to be able to sing and not be silenced, to take down the veil and appear: all these are the banners on the laundry line I hang out.
– Rebecca Solnit
Freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society.
– John Lewis
Everyone arrives one day and asks, is this it?
And the stars answer back with more stars.
– Victoria Chang
Rumour is a pipe Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures And of so easy and so plain a stop That the blunt monster with uncounted heads, The still-discordant wavering multitude, Can play upon it.
– William Shakespeare
Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave
and eats a bread it does not harvest.
Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero,
and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.
Pity a nation that despises a passion in its dream,
yet submits in its awakening.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice
save when it walks in a funeral,
boasts not except among its ruins,
and will rebel not save when its neck is laid
between the sword and the block.
Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox,
whose philosopher is a juggler,
and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking
Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting,
and farewells him with hooting,
only to welcome another with trumpeting again.
Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years
and whose strong men are yet in the cradle.
Pity the nation divided into fragments,
each fragment deeming itself a nation.
– Kahlil Gibran
When bodies are discussed, especially in popular culture, it has often meant a very circumscribed set of themes, largely to do with what the body looks like or how to maintain it at a pinnacle of health. The body as a set of surfaces, of more or less pleasing aspect. The perfect, unattainable body, so smooth and gleaming it is practically alien. What to feed it, how to groom it, the multiple dismaying ways in which it might fail to fit in or measure up. But the element of the body that interested me was the experience of living inside it, inhabiting a vehicle that was so cataclysmically vulnerable, so unreliably subject to pleasure and pain, hatred and desire.
– Olivia Laing
Sadly, because our culture has devalued the feminine, we have repressed so much of her nature, so many of her qualities. Instead we live primarily masculine values; we are goal-oriented, competitive, driven. Masculine values even dominate our spiritual quest; we seek to be better, to improve ourselves, to get somewhere. We have forgotten the feminine qualities of waiting, listening, being empty. We have dismissed the deep need of the soul, our longing, the feminine side of love.
– Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
No one ever begins anything, except by grace. To sin means to think that one can begin something oneself. We never start anything; we always respond.
– René Girard
In Hollywood, more often than not, they’re making more kind of traditional films, stories that are understood by people. And the entire story is understood. And they become worried if even for one small moment something happens that is not understood by everyone. But what’s so fantastic is to get down into areas where things are abstract and where things are felt, or understood in an intuitive way that, you can’t, you know, put a microphone to somebody at the theatre and say ‘Did you understand that?’ but they come out with a strange, fantastic feeling and they can carry that, and it opens some little door or something that’s magical and that’s the power that film has.
– David Lynch
Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.
– John Berger
I had begun to go silent. I could feel it happening to me, as though concrete were filling my cells. The more silent I grew, the more silence I wanted. Silence had become almost voluptuous—it was becoming my place of refuge. It became indistinguishable from rage. I tended this silence/rage in the darkness of my organs. I called it my privacy.
– Ariana Reines
All the chance events of our lives are materials from which we can make what we like. Whoever is rich in spirit makes much of his life. Every acquaintance, every incident would be for the thoroughly spiritual person the first element in an endless series — the beginning of an endless novel.
– Novalis
I have always thought that life and literature are intermingled and that this intermingling has been my quest.
– V. S. Pritchett
ENTERING THE KINGDOM
The crows see me.
They stretch their glossy necks
In the tallest branches
Of green trees. I am
Possibly dangerous, I am
Entering the kingdom.
The dream of my life
Is to lie down by a slow river
And stare at the light in the trees—
To learn something by being nothing
A little while but the rich
Lens of attention.
But the crows puff their feathers and cry
Between me and the sun,
And I should go now.
They know me for what I am.
No dreamer,
No eater of leaves.
– Mary Oliver
At first a yogi feels his mind
Is tumbling like a waterfall;
In mid-course, like the Ganges
It flows on slow and gentle;
In the end, it is a great
Vast ocean, where the Lights
Of Son and Mother merge in one.
– Tilopa
All at once it occured to me – why paint? Why should I limit myself to two dimensions when I could make art from anything at all: fire,water, the human body? Anything!
– Marina Abramovic
Q: Perhaps you feel a bit out of step with
your contemporaries?
UKL: Why should a woman of 74 want to be
“in step with” anybody? Am I in an army, or
something?
– Ursula K Le Guin
It is hard for most of us to believe that both angels and demons mingle with humans on Earth. Yet tradition teaches that they are rarely seen in their essential form; they go about their business in plausibly devised appearances, looking like regular people in order to pass unnoticed.
They are instructed, in fact ordered, to affect the lives of men and women, either to raise them to higher consciousness or at least higher ethics, or to seduce them downward to the animal sphere.
Their common purpose is to allow us to exercise our free will, to choose.
This free will is the unique power granted to men and women and which we must exercise or eventually lose. If either angelic or demonic influence was always stronger than our free will, people would be compelled to be good or to be bad. Real choice would not exist and free will would simply be a comforting fantasy. But in the actual struggle of forces, a man or woman can choose to follow the light with difficulty and at some cost, or not. The great Cosmic Design requires us to force our souls through this eternal struggle.
– Lillian Firestone
Theoretically, we are aware that the earth is spinning, but in reality we do not notice it: the ground we walk on seems to be stationary and gives no cause for alarm. The same happens with Time.
– Marcel Proust
Your words are you. You are them and not much more. The Description: the fieldness of fields, the weediness of weeds … When is description mere? Never. A freshness in the seeing, an innocency in the vision, the angle of perception, the bringing together of details, not necessarily as metaphors, even, just as objects. Be one of those on whom nothing is lost. Don’t strain for arrangement. Look and put it down and let your sensibility be the sieve.
– Theodore Roethke
Existence is a grand cosmic joke, and we, the punchline, spend our days deciphering the laughter of the universe.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
I know that / hope is the hardest / love we carry.
– Jane Hirshfield
At the farthest remove from knowledge, the poem is exemplarily a thought that is obtained in the retreat, or the defection, of everything that supports the faculty to know. And no doubt this is why the poem has always disconcerted philosophy.
– Badiou
It is the genius of Jung to argue that “gods” exist, but only metaphorically and only in a natural dimension. That natural dimension is the psyche.
– Michael Vannoy Adams
One must have courage to see what one does see and not to deny it for convenience.
– Javier Marías
Sometimes I think my whole professional life has been based on this hunch I had, early on, that many people feel just as muddled as I do, and might be happy to tag along with me on this search for clarity, for precision.
– Zadie Smith
For the rest of my life,
I will live with my hands outstretched
for things that are no longer there.
– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
If you do not react to
conditioning, then you’re
always in the Silence.
It is how you react
where you are
that counts.
– Robert Adams
When I first got glasses I was shocked that the world was Clear and Defined, it had never occurred to me that seeing everything blurry wasn’t just How Things Are.
– River Kenna
It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of contradictions in human nature which makes love itself wear at times the desperate shape of betrayal. And perhaps there is no possible explanation.
– Joseph Conrad
An education ought to be useless, or at least have a component of uselessness.
– Michael Hofmann
The White Horse
The youth walks up to the white horse to put its halter on
and the horse looks at him in silence.
They are so silent they are in another world.
– D. H. Lawrence
One may keep holiday without extravagance.
– Seneca
Break problems down to basic principles before solving them.
– Prof. Feynman
I’d been reading Keats since I was fourteen or so, and I was just accepting rhythm as he used it, like Robert Lowell did. That put me in a very archaic sound. It was a repetitive sound. It’s like bad rock music, not Kendrick Lamar.
– Fanny Howe
One of the best things a man can bring into the world with him is a natural humility of spirit. About the next best thing he can bring, and they usually go together, is an appreciative spirit — a loving and susceptible heart.
– John Burroughs
He whose bride is a ghost cannot live. Even though in his blood there existed the force of a life of one hundred years, that force must quickly perish.
– Lafcadio Hearn
Teachers tell you to just delete me, cross me out, excise me from your short story, essay, poem, slice-of-life documentary storytelling article. Because apparently, I’m just … unnecessary? But they’re just wrong. Just so, so wrong.
– Kerry Elson
traveling
with the gods
numbering the days
– Basho
The solution is not to suppress our rage or to let it explode. The solution is to process our rage in safe containers…. We have to move those energies.
– Valarie Kaur
Have only love in your heart for others. The more you see the good in them, the more you will establish good in yourself.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
Should art have a purpose
Beyond that
Of bringing the greatest joy
To its creator?
– Sarita Talwai
Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now.
– Jack Kerouac
Loafing
I looked into the room a moment ago,
and this is what I saw—
my chair in its place by the window,
the book turned facedown on the table.
And on the sill, the cigarette
left burning in its ashtray.
Malingerer! my uncle yelled at me
so long ago. He was right.
I’ve set aside time today,
same as every day,
for doing nothing at all.
– Raymond Carver
Neuroscience shows that our closest relationships literally shape our brains. They influence our emotional responses, decision-making patterns, and daily behaviors. Over time, who we attach to rewires who we become.
– Sheleana Aiyana
The moment there is self-pity you have provided the soil in which sorrow takes root.
– J. Krishnamurti
The more one knows, the more one still has to learn. Ignorance increases in the same proportion as knowledge– or rather, not ignorance, but the knowledge of ignorance.
– Friedrich Schlegel
cool summer breeze
rising up with the
cicada’s song
– Issa
Maybe the point isn’t to be exceptional. Maybe it’s to be present, to be real, to be kind. Maybe it’s to pass on something quieter than legacy but more lasting than ego: attention, care, perspective.
– Tony Collins
When I start writing any book, I want one thing: for the book to turn out well, which is to say for it to be a self-sufficient work of literature, one unconnected with current issues of people or the state.
– Vladimir Sorokin
In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the People.
– Eugene Victor Debs
Are you polluting the world or cleaning up the mess? You are responsible for your inner space; nobody else is, just as you are responsible for the planet. As within, so without: If humans clear inner pollution, then they will also cease to create outer pollution.
– Eckhart Tolle
If I have to distill this thought—this feeling—into questions, I’d ask the following. Is parody dangerous? Does satire of a regime ultimately serve the regime?
– Vladimir Sorokin
Oh I just understood why Seeking is unsustainable and a bad habit to get into
If you actively seek things out, your ego has more control in grabbing the things it thinks it wants
Rather than receiving what comes to you and wants you
This is how people get lost in giant book piles and lose years to The Correct Practices that aren’t actually what their souls want to find
The habit of seeking implies some sense of searching out specific things,, and the specific things your thinking mind wants to seek out are mostly gonna be the wrong things, compared to noticing what’s already coming into your life and following it
—took me years of seeking before finally dropping it and opening up to the path that kept throwing itself at my feet
– River Kenna
Life’s inherent nature is impermanence. Energy flows, and things change. But in the end, everything works out for the best. To be stable, we must learn to stay in the centre and watch the world around us change as if it is a great drama.
– Brahma Kumaris
Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.
– Alan Watts
It seems to me that love should not make all else disappear but should simply tint it with new nuances; I would like a love that accompanies me through life, not that absorbs all my life.
– Simone de Beauvoir
Let us get this straight: I do not and never have felt your love for A. ridiculous. Nothing could be less ridiculous than a young man’s feelings of that kind, even if it does not ripen into final love or end in marriage.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
We breathe air exhaled from trees
whose leaves are made of starlight.
Our veins echo the patterns
of rivers, branches, and root systems.
We are not a part of nature.
We are nature.
– Marysia Miernowska
And that other self, who watches me from the distance of decades,
what will she say? Will she look at me with hatred or with compassion,
I whose choices made her what she will be?
– Jane Hirshfield
What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.
– C.S. Lewis
The Dharma reminds us: the world isn’t just about us. Everyone matters.
– Myokei Caine-Barrett, Shonin
To be choicelessly aware of everything about you and within yourself, is meditation.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
In the overall context of the spiritual journey, it is important to remember that self-transformation is a continuous process, not a one-time event. One cannot say, “I used to be a nonspiritual person, but now I have been transformed into a spiritual person. My old self is dead.” We are constantly being transformed when we travel on the path.
– Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche
monsoon night …
side-by-side on the porch
my old dog and me
– Chen-ou Liu
There is a gathering
of something beyond
these trees
Each day it grows
stronger, suggesting
that the earth will pass away
before armies conquer it
What remains
has always been here
humming its lullabies of peace
if only we have ears to hear
– Mark Gordon
In capitalist countries, a multitude of moral teachers, advisors, and “disorientators” stand between the exploited and those in power.
– Frantz Fanon
A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.
– C.S. Lewis
how will life be
when it unfolds in your hands,
a fish squirming
to return to water,
or a ship ready to sail?
– Chen-ou Liu
pulling light
from the other world …
Milky Way
– Yatsuka Ishihara
By saving other species from ourselves, we give our descendants the chance to ridicule our harebrained theories and keep observing, keep learning, and keep expanding their imaginations to encompass the truths of the living world.
– Michelle Nijhuism
Love hath breath’d upon me and I live!
Love shineth in its deep.
Love hath lived within me and I breathe!
Lo now I wake from sleep.
– Tolkien
Summer night—
even the stars
are whispering to each other.
– Kobayashi Issa
summer lake
she and I ankle-deep
in stars
– Chen-ou Liu
silence isn’t peace.
it’s just the fear of being wrong.
dressed in calm.
– Eli Shade
Suppose we stopped compartmentalizing death, cutting it off from life. Imagine if we regarded dying as a final stage of growth that held an unprecedented opportunity for transformation. Could we turn toward death like a master teacher and ask, “How, then, shall I live?”
– Frank Ostaseski
I have no doubt whatever of the future. I know there are times in the history of all reforms, when the future looks dark… I, for one, have gone through all this. I have had fifty years of it, and yet I have not lost either heart or hope.
– Frederick Douglass
What is the point of literature? I think that the person who asks that question will not find my answer convincing anyway.
– Abdulrazak Gurnah
The intuitive is a type that doesn’t see, doesn’t see the stumbling block before his feet, but he smells a rat for ten miles.
– CG Jung
What makes a subject difficult to understand… is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
If we go too deep into the dark, we can’t tolerate the light. We have to slowly work our way back.
– Robin Robertson
He who does not read, at 70 years will have lived only one life, his own! He who reads, will have lived 5000 years: He was there when Cain killed Abel, when Renzo married Lucia, when Leopardi admired infinity… Because “Reading is backward immortality.”
– Umberto Eco
The writer is a secret criminal. How? First because writing tries to undertake the journey toward strange sources of art that are foreign to us. “The thing” does not happen here, it happens somewhere else, in a strange and foreign country.
– Hélène Cixous
Here is how I spend my days now. I live in a beautiful place. I sleep in a beautiful bed. I eat beautiful food. I go for walks through beautiful places. I care for people deeply. At night my bed is full of love, because I alone am in it. I cry easily, from pain and pleasure, and I don’t apologize for that. In the mornings I step outside and I’m thankful for another day. It took me many years to arrive at such a life.
– Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen
You can lead an untroubled life provided you can grow, can think and act systematically.
– Marcus Aurelius
This was my first lesson on the nature of love: that in a moment it could fulfill the cravings of a lifetime, like a light that someone might shine into a cavern that has been dark for a million years.
– Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
We depend on change in order to live, so just acquaint yourself with the fact that it’s all inconstant. Pleasure isn’t for sure; pain isn’t for sure; happiness isn’t for sure; stillness isn’t for sure; distraction isn’t for sure. Whatever arises, you should tell it: ‘Don’t try to fool me. You’re not for sure.’
– Ajaan Chah
That’s what I’m trying to communicate as a therapist—the idea of not pushing away the unpleasant emotions, feelings, and thoughts and not clinging to the pleasant.
– Mark Epstein
The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.
– Khalil Gibran
When people do not know how to get close, they fight.
– Virginia Satir
the modern world is kind to Lilith. — cruel to lovers.
– J Luna
The silence must be longer. The music is about the silence. The sounds are there to surround the silence.
– Arvo Pärt
I say, play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re doing, even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.
– Thelonious Monk
If art is the place that you feel the most fulfilled, then that is how you must fill it, to live your most creative life and make it glorious.
– Stephanie Elizondo Griest
We are, I know not how, somewhat double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.
– Montaigne
It seems to me that love should not make all else disappear but should simply tint it with new nuances; I would like a love that accompanies me through life, not that absorbs all my life.
– Simone de Beauvoir
The human spirit is more powerful than any drug – and that is what needs to be nourished: with work, play, friendship, family. These are the things that matter.
– Robin Williams
The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
If we’re going to fight a disease, let’s fight one of the most terrible diseases of all, indifference.
– Robin Williams
This adversity is the springboard you needed.
– Maxime Lagacé
The mind must be given relaxation. It will rise improved and sharper after a good break.
– Seneca
You cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To “have” running water you must let go of it and let it run. The same is true of life and of God.
– Alan Watts
A politician divides mankind into two classes: tools and enemies.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
When the silence inside becomes louder than the mind, the Universe begins to speak in every breath.
– Nirmala
Never mistake motion for action.
– Ernest Hemingway
It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.
– George Eliot
Battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.
– Walt Whitman
If you are concerned with what is beyond the nothingness, it means you are frightened of being nothing. Be nothing. Life then becomes extraordinarily simple and beautiful.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
The imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.
– Terence McKenna
Learn your religion, do not inherit it.
– Imam Ali
The truth is hidden in plain sight. It is so simple and obvious that most people fail to see it.
– Khorshed Bhavnagri
The truly wise have an inner joy that is like a fire; it warms the world.
– The Dalai Lama
Enough of words. Come
to me without a sound.
– Jalaluddin Rumi
The special mark of the modern world is not that it is skeptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it.
– G.K. Chesterton
It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it, I am not going to be silent.
– Madeleine K. Albright
Cynicism is misread as intelligence.
– Ocean Vuong
A billionaire didn’t work 100,000 times harder than a teacher or a janitor. They were in a system that paid them differently.
– Robert Reich
Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti
poetry doesn’t belong to those who write it, but those who need it
– Il Postino
Dostoevsky: I still believe there’s a version of us in some parcaller world.
Kafka: Even in parrcallere world’s, she’d choose not to stay..
Art originates in experiment
– Quintilian
The ignorant work for their own profit, the wise work for the welfare of the world, without thought for themselves.
– Bhagavad Gita
If you’re using dialogue, say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.
– John Steinbeck
You must always be prepared to place a bet on yourself, on your future, heading in a direction that others seem to fear.
– Robert Greene
Whenever we engage in consumption or production patterns which take more than we need, we are engaging in violence.
– Vandana Shiva
Some days are typing days.
Some days are thinking days.
But both days are writing days.
– V. E. Schwab
No pilgrimage is holier than compassion,
no gospel is truer than kindness,
no offering is grander than love.
– Abhijit Naskar
It is the force of love
that will lead us
beyond fragmentation,
loneliness, and fear.
– Sharon Salzberg
To Those Who Come After
by Bertolt Brecht
I
To the cities I came in a time of disorder
That was ruled by hunger.
I sheltered with the people in a time of uproar
And then I joined in their rebellion.
That’s how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
I ate my dinners between the battles,
I lay down to sleep among the murderers,
I didn’t care much for love
And for nature’s beauties I had little patience.
That’s how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
The city streets all led to foul swamps in my time,
My speech betrayed me to the butchers.
I could do only little
But without me those that ruled could not sleep so easily:
That’s what I hoped.
That’s how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
Our forces were slight and small,
Our goal lay in the far distance
Clearly in our sights,
If for me myself beyond my reaching.
That’s how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
II
You who will come to the surface
From the flood that’s overwhelmed us and drowned us all
Must think, when you speak of our weakness in times of darkness
That you’ve not had to face:
Days when we were used to changing countries
More often than shoes,
Through the war of the classes despairing
That there was only injustice and no outrage.
Even so we realized
Hatred of oppression still distorts the features,
Anger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly.
Oh we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and friendliness,
Could never be friendly ourselves.
And in the future when no longer
Do human beings still treat themselves as animals,
Look back on us with indulgence.
*
And to the themes in this powerful poem, Martin Prechtel writes a powerful epilogue in his book Rescuing the Light:
“When the chips are down and the army is coming, you’ve got to save your kids, you’ve got to flee or fight. But when things settle down, you have to stop running, take off your armor, and remember how to once again be human. That’s what really saves the kids.”
We actually contain a built-in ability to rise above restriction, incapacity, or limitation and, as a result of this ability, possess a vital adaptive spirit that we have not yet fully accessed. While this ability can lead us to transcendence, paradoxically it can lead also to violence; our longing for transcendence arises from our intuitive sensing of this adaptive potential and our violence arises from our failure to develop it.
– Joseph Chilton Pearce
I, who manufacture the future like a diligent spider. And the best of me is when I know nothing and manufacture whatever.
– Clarice Lispector
Breath, dreams, silence,
invincible calm…
you triumph.
– Paul Valéry
The mystic Simone Weil wrote to a friend on another continent, “Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated.” For Weil, love is the atmosphere that fills and colors the distance be- tween herself and her friend. Even when that friend arrives on the doorstep, something remains impossibly remote: when you step forward to embrace them your arms are wrapped around mystery, around the un- knowable, around that which cannot be possessed. The far seeps in even to the nearest. After all we hardly know our own depths.
– Rebecca Solnit
The Tao is always at ease.
It overcomes without competing,
answers without speaking a word,
arrives without being summoned,
accomplishes without a plan.
Its net covers the whole universe.
And though its meshes are wide,
it doesn’t let a thing slip through.
– Stephen Mitchell, Tao te Ching
Kinds of water drown us. Kinds of water do not.
– Anne Carson
I am something supernatural
not exactly god, ghost, spirit, angel, principle or element –
There is no term for it in English.
– Anne Carson
EACH STEP
Nowhere on this earth
is it not a place where the lovers
turn lightly in sleep in each others’ arms,
the blue pastures of dusk flowing gladly
into the dawn.
Nowhere that is not reached by the scent
of good bread
through an open window,
by the flash of fish in the flashing of summer streams,
or the trees unfolding their praises—
apricots, pears— of the winter-chill nights.
Briefly, briefly, we see it, and forget.
As if the spell were too powerful to hold on the tongue,
as if we preferred the weight to the prize
Like a horse
that carries on his own back
the sacks of oats he will need, unsuspecting,
looking always ahead,
over the mountains, to where sweet springs lie.
He remembers this much from his youth,
the taste of things, cold and pure—
while the water-sound sings on and on, unlistened to,
in his ears;
while each step is nothing less than the glistening
river-body reentering home.
How could I have come so far
(And always on such dark trails)
I must have traveled by the light
shining from the faces of all those I have loved.
– Thomas McGrath
Nothing Is Lost
by Noel Coward
Deep in the sub-conscious we are told
Lie all our memories, lie all the notes
Of all the music we have ever heard
And all the phrases those we loved have spoken,
Sorrows and losses time has since consoled,
Family jokes, outmoded anecdotes
Each sentimental souvenir and token
Everything seen, experienced, each word
Addressed to us in infancy before,
Before we we could even know or understand
The implications of our wonderland.
There they all are, the legendary lies
The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears
Forgotten debris of forgotten years
Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise
Before our world dissolves before our eyes
Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,
A word, a tune, a known familiar scent
And echo from the past when, innocent
We looked upon the present with delight
And doubted not the future would be kinder
A never knew the loneliness of night.
Fire-Flowers
And only where the forest fires have sped,
Scorching relentlessly the cool north lands,
A sweet wild flower lifts its purple head,
And, like some gentle spirit sorrow-fed,
It hides the scars with almost human hands.
– Emily Pauline Johnson
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche always used to say to me, ‘Don’t be so afraid of being embarrassed. If you’re going to really take a chance on yourself, there’s going to be a lot of humiliation-you are going to make a fool of yourself; feel like an idiot; as though you’re acting like a three year old child and all of it.’ But his thing was: we’re not trying to be adults, we’re actually trying to become realized people.
– Reggie Ray
What kind of world / would let loose / a low orange moon / that shocks you / into being
– Maggie Nelson
I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote ‘Fahrenheit 451’ I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are.
– Ray Bradbury
These moments of time will disappear. You yourself will forget my voice, the body you desired, your tremblings, your hesitations. I would so like for you… to carry away a part of me… Not a vague memory… but the energy of a star, its vibration in the dark. A truth.
– Mathias Énard, (trans. Charlotte Mandell)
The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was, ‘Rewrite it!’ A lot of editors said that. They were all right. Writing is really rewriting–making the story better, clearer, truer.
– Robert Lipsyte
Not knowing why, I feel
Attached to this world where
We come only to die.
– Natsume Soseki, (tr. Soiku Shigematsu)
Being a poet means that I have already written but that I have actually written nothing. Poetry is an act without a beginning or an end. It is really a promise of a beginning, a perpetual beginning.
– Adonis (‘Ali Ahmad Sa’id)
Those who think –as do many– “Let me first correct society, then get around to myself” are barred from even the outer gate of the mansion of God’s peace.
– Joseph Campbell
“read to me tonight by the fire” / “read to me aloud from Hölderlin and the Greeks”
– Susan Stewart / Susan Taubes
Learn your craft, and persist. The rest, as Henry James said, is the madness of art.
– Kim Addonizio
Nearer to Thee, not by delusion led,
Though there no house fires burn nor bright eyes gaze:
We rise, but by the symbol charioted,
Through loved things rising up to Love’s own ways:
By these the soul unto the vast has wings
And sets the seal celestial on all mortal things.
– Æ
People who are led by the shadow cheat themselves by thinking their motives are highly moral, while in fact they are crude drives for power. The shadow mixes things in an unclean way, mixes up facts and opinions, for instance. . . . The shadow gets hold of a good idea and carries it out on the wrong level, on an archaic level. When one is unaware of the shadow, it falsifies the personality.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
He who has always put desire off till later, who sees love as a divine song separated from the flesh, something that has passed into poetry like the arm’s movement into marble, for eternity, he trembles to approach this moving form, perfect, other, undefined.
– Énard; tr. Mandell
Tolkien belonged to that very rare class of linguists, now becoming extinct, who like the Grimm brothers could understand and recapture the glamour of ‘the word.’ ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’
– Simonne d’Ardenne
There are so many layers to us, and some of them we never see—or we see only in glimpses that we try to give shape to by using our brains, which are limited.
– Mary Gaitskill
In the changes of the world the shapes of lands and of seas have been broken and remade; rivers have not kept their courses, neither have mountains remained steadfast; and to Cuiviénen there is no returning.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
To live in gratitude aligns you very powerfully with Reality. Living in gratitude is a sign of a higher state of consciousness than the ego.
– Adyashanti
Immediately prescribe some character and some form to yourself.
– Epictetus
Believe a single thought that runs contrary to what is and you suffer. No exceptions.
– Adyashanti
If you ever wonder why someone is still grieving, or when they’ll ‘get over it,’ I’ll save you the trouble. We never will. And that’s not weakness. That’s love.
– Jameson Arasi
Laziness is not the problem.
Staying on the path that leads to nowhere is.
– @moveorperish
To be is to be perceived.
– George Berkeley
Western civilization needs a complete overhaul or it will fall apart one day or another. It has realized the most complete perversion of any rational order of things. Reign of matter, of gold, of machine, of number, it no longer possesses breath, or liberty, or light.
– Julius Evola
Nothing is a problem — everything is a scene.
And I? I am the calm, conscious actor.
Not reacting, just flowing…
Not resisting, just responding.
Every scene is a moment to express
my peace, my power, and my presence.
– Brahma Kumaris
Perhaps the truest form of touching the reality of this moment is this: to experience our capacity to praise and love our world, as it is. Even when it’s on fire.
– Joanna Macy
In those days, living as we did in the country, without the dubious benefits of radio or television, we had to rely on such primitive forms of amusement as books, quarelling, parties, and the laughter of our friend.
– Gerald Durrell
Extend acts of kindness, asking for nothing in return. … This is an essential activity for connecting to intention because the universal all-creating Spirit returns acts of kindness with the response: ‘How may I be kind to you?’
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
There, do you see the guiding star,
on the northern sky,
smiling incessantly, calming
the anxious travelers with its light
directing them to explore the
unexplored, and win the unknown.
– @chandanas
There is no tragedy in
having to start again, as
long as you start again.
– Albert Camus
all my life
I expect no grand bouquet
yet wish for
someone to greet me
with a single flower
– Kiyoko Ogawa
Too deep in my destiny timeline to
entertain the unseriousness of the world.
– Nika Solé
The practice of all the bodhisattvas is
to slay attachment
And the rest — mind’s afflictions – at
once, the very moment they arise,
Taking as weapons the remedies held with
mindfulness and vigilance.
For once the kleshas have become familiar,
they’ll be harder to avert.
– Gyelse Tokme Zangpo
walking out
in the middle of the lecture
on astrology
we see summer stars
in each other’s eyes
– Chen-ou Liu
Love changes the whole climate of your inner being – and with that change the whole existence is changed.
– Osho
Be kind to yourself. Not indulgent. Not harsh. Just kind. It changes everything.
– Norman Fischer
I don’t like the term ‘description of the world,’ it contains a clear reference to secondariness—to illustrativeness. No, instead, a writer must conceive of his own worlds—not describe the world that’s already been created.
– Vladimir Sorokin
The best works of art are like life: paradoxical, beautiful, strange, true, alive, and a hundred other things besides.
– Toby Thompson
I don’t want to have this pain, but I feel it anyway… When I see the hunger, the misery, the dead, the war, it seems as if all these disasters are happening to me. With any poem that I have written, I have ripped a piece of my heart.
– Simin Behbahani
…but once more I comforted myself with hope and went on.
– George MacDonald
We are getting close to having an Underground Railroad for Immigrants.
– Michael Steele
Habits are like supervisors
that you don’t notice.
– Hannes Messemer
Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
– Iris Murdoch
We die into each moment like salt into water.
– Meister Eckhart
To become empty is to become full. To know nothing is to begin to understand.
– The Tao
A being who does not doubt does not believe either.
– Miguel de Unamuno
Obscurity is not always a vice; sometimes it is the condition of being profound.
– José Ortega y Gasset
You never understand how much you believe something until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death.
– C.S. Lewis
When you understand one thing through and through, you understand everything.
– Shunryu Suzuki
Every perception is an hallucination corrected by experience.
– Bertrand Russell
Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown.
– Erwin Schrödinger
My novels aren’t realist. They’re not selective transcriptions of the real world. They’re highly organized missives from my imagination.
– Dennis Cooper
Capitalism tends to destroy its two sources of wealth: nature and human beings.
– Karl Marx
We make our own omens by the meaning we confer upon chance events, and it is the making of meaning that makes us human, that makes us capable of holding something as austere and total as the universe, as time, as love without breaking.
– Maria Popova
Fasting helps us to try harder because then we are like a boxer in the arena: you cannot just stand around awkwardly, but have to bring out all your skills and techniques to fight in order to not get knocked down.
– Ajaan Suchart Abhijato
For my part, the thing that I should wish to obtain from money would be leisure with security. But what the typical modern man desires to get with it is more money, with a view to ostentation, splendor, and the outshining of those who have hitherto been his equals.
– Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
The future is the rest of society recognizing that so many answers are within the disability communities.
– Saleem Hue Penny, 2024 Disability Futures Fellow
We must build our arks with love and ride out the storm with courage and know that the little sprig of green in the dove’s mouth betokens a reality beyond the storm more precious than the likes of us can imagine.
– Frederick Buechner (The Hungering Dark)
But how does everyone *not* keep an inventory of 15-20 languages they truly plan on learning?
– Day Heisinger-Nixon, In an Ecosystem, Everything Has a Name
Paradox is the technique for seizing the conflicting aspects of any problem. Paradox coalesces or telescopes various facets of a complex process in a single instant.
– Marshall McLuhan, Take Today
Unrighteous fortune seldom spares the highest worth; no one with safety can long front so frequent perils. Whom calamity oft passes by she finds at last.
– Seneca, Hercules Furens
No matter how careful you are, there’s going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn’t experience it all. There’s that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should’ve been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That’s how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice.
– Chuck Palahniuk
Just as madness lurks in our creativity and threatens to make dead its aliveness, so does creativity lurk in our madness. That is an astounding and heart-supporting fact.
– Ann Belford Ulanov, Madness and Creativity
One crucial disadvantage about the end of metaphysical views is that the individual looks his own short life span too squarely in the eye and feels no strong incentive to build on enduring institutions, designed for the ages.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
If there really was a Supreme Being who had to listen to people’s prayers all the time, he would go out of his mind.
– Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through
Then I remembered that night is the fairies’ day, and the moon their sun; and I thought – Everything sleeps and dreams now: when the night comes, it will be different.
– George MacDonald, Phantastes
What we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.
– Sigmund Freud
The earth is dead…We people are just worms on top of it, worms on its fat, revolting carcass, eating its entrails and all its poisons… Nothing can help us, we were born rotten… There you have it!
– Louis-Ferdinand Céline
People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as ‘nauseatingly miserable beyond repair’.
– Franz Kafka
Old Soul
To the one who remembers Pangaea,
to the soul dredged deep of a
land before God broke bread of it with
mighty words of root and cause to christen
the continents cast across the waters; be strong.
Though no one taught you of your unique
endowment, instinct and archetype are
a lamp unto your feet. The world within is as
large as the one outside, of an elemental image
arching from in the beginning to
amen. You have come into your
faith now, you are of the deeper walk, so;
Hold dear the silence within the
bounds of earth, sky, and time.
Heed not the clamor and extend
polite refusal to the alchemies of
fools and their followers. Do not
go their way. Instead, find in
each day some simple moment of
reckoning and all will be well. Tend
to the part of creation you are
given to for that is the body and the
blood of it. And know this: you would
not have that disquieting
shadow of yours were it not for
the common grace of light.
Between is your rightful place
to bend and fray the
luminous substance of love. Yours
is a refuge for the
neophyte hungry for the
remembrance you are holding.
– James Scott Smith
buck moon—
shedding my old self
for something new
– @lafcadiopoetry
In the Falling Dark
by Bruce Cockburn
And the lights lie tumbled out like gems
The moon is nothing but a toothless grin
Floating out on the evening wind
The smell of sweat and lube oil pervades the night
And the rush of life in flight at the speed of light
A million footsteps whispering
A guitar sounds — some voices sing
Smoke on the breeze — eyes that sting
Far in the east a yellow cloud bank climbs
Stretching away to be part of tomorrow’s time
Earthbound while everything expands
So many grains of sand
Slipping from hand to hand
Catching the light and falling into dark
The world fades out like an overheard remark
In the falling dark
Light pours from a million radiant lives
Off of kids and dogs and the hard-shelled husbands and wives
All that glory shining around and we’re all caught taking a dive
And all the beasts of the hills around shout, “such a waste!
Don’t you know that from the first to the last
we’re all one in the gift of grace!”
There may be times when what is most needed is, not so much a new discovery or a new idea as a different ‘slant’; I mean a comparatively slight readjustment in our way of looking at the things and ideas on which attention is already fixed.
– Owen Barfield
These awakened capacities are always available below our surface consciousness, in the ground of our experience, but they’re hidden by our limiting habits of thought and reaction.
– Lama John Makransky
The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The books transported her into new worlds. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.
– Roald Dahl
Remember that imagination and art don’t conform to a capitalist’s ratio of productivity to time, however easy it is to succumb to the wish that with enough effort they could be made to.
– Adam Haslett
It is futile to speak of liberty as long as economic slavery exists.
– Peter Kropotkin
Men’s natures are alike, it is their habits that carry them far apart.
– Confucius, Analects
Until our minds are completely transformed, we will keep falling down. The choice is between getting up and starting to walk again or giving up and staying on the ground. If we keep lying down, nothing will result but great-er depression and hopelessness.
– Dzigar Kongtrul
I need you
the way astonishment,
which is really just
the disruption of routine,
requires routine.
– Carl Phillips
A prophet has a responsibility for the moment, an openness to what the moment reveals. He is a person who knows what time it is.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
A human being is rather like a tune; he has various notes in his emotions, in his life.
– V. S. Pritchett
Chamfort says that he never had a moment’s happiness before having lost all hope and that Dante’s lines would look better on the gates of Paradise.
– Samuel Beckett
Until Carl and I had children, I really was writing very bourgeois little things—my work was very self-referential, female. Pathetic, to use one of Eileen Myles’s favorite words.
– Fanny Howe
A potential problem of ANY psychological or spiritual approach is that it closes the doors to completely independent contemplation. As powerful as an approach may be, it’s a lens and you’re taught that lens – you haven’t discovered it for yourself. And that’s fine.
But instead of using lenses on how the mind works, who looks at the mind directly, puts aside ANY preconceptions and ideas about it, and contemplates for hours on end: what is this mind and how is it functioning? Almost nobody.
But I’d say this is the most powerful work one could do, looking directly and finding out for oneself. A skill and an attitude already very hard, but it corrodes ever more in today’s world. Really, everything you don’t find out for yourself is hearsay. Useful hearsay, and in most relative regards it’s cool to simply go to it. But when you care about truth, about what you are and what reality is and about how your mind works, looking directly is really the only way to go deep.
We can still use lenses, but we see them for what they are. And then, without anything we’ve ever heard muddying our inquiry, we keep contemplating: what is true? what is reality? what am I? what is mind, what is love, what is an emotion, what is a thought?
If you spin your wheels for long enough, you realize this is what authentic spirituality is about. Teachers can remind you to look, but you have to look, long and hard, if you want to see. Maybe it’s not that helpful that 99% of teachings are simply telling you what you’ll find. And we’re really good at taking that information and imagining we already found it or we pattern match our experience to match what they told us we’ll find. This is an endless illusion. Get out now. Start looking with the most honest attitude: you don’t know, and maybe you can know, and maybe it’s not like anything you’ve ever been told. Find out for yourself and don’t stop prematurely.
It’s exactly in the context of this deep, independent contemplation, that teachings like “it’s all already here, there’s nothing to do” is out of place. It’s extremely fruitful in some context, but we’re masters at taking things out of context to feel good and have certainty.
But no conceptual teaching will ever give certainty. And truth doesn’t have anything to do with feeling good. One of the first insights we need to make for ourselves is the clear difference between direct consciousness and mental fabrication. That’s foundational for any inquiry.
It’s easy to never engage this kind of looking but be an expert at any spiritual discourse ever conceived. But it’s hard to look and not know. But if you do look, you don’t need any discourse whatsoever. If anything, someone who facilitates this process might help.
– Marvin Keilbach
What humans do over the next 50 years will determine the fate of all life on the planet.
– Sir David Attenborough
Leave it to a dreamy eyed woman
to soften the heart
of a otherwise frigid man.
– Whitney Barnes
The posture… was not greatly unlike that of a soldier who is tied neck and heels… when the idea of philosophy was added to the figure now discovered, it would have been very difficult for any spectator to have refrained from immoderate laughter.
– Henry Fielding
Don’t waste time
watching and reacting
to the minds of ‘others’.
Your own mind
causes more trouble
than the minds
of everyone put together.
– Mooji
“If its wounds won’t close, it isn’t a poem.”
they say
it’s tragic gravity.
– Laura Kerr
flowers
blooming in the colors
of a watermelon
– Basho
That’s what the world is , after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.
– Haruki Murakami
after the lightening
the sound of dew
dripping off bamboo
– Buson
Don’t confuse ‘familiar’ with ‘acceptable.’ Toxic relationships can fool you like that.
– Steve Maraboli
I’ve always loved the night, when everyone else is asleep and the world is all mine. It’s quiet and dark—the perfect time for creativity.
– Jonathan Harnisch
The only place we can rest is in this very moment, living deeply and richly and fully right now, meeting each person and event with an open heart. This is where we have a chance to meet joy, to come home to our breath and our true nature.
– Laura Burges
Nothing in the world is better suited to laziness than orthodoxy. If you gag your mouth, stop up your ears and put a blinder over your eyes, you can sleep peacefully.
– Jacob Burckhardt
All poetry is ‘hermetic,’ ‘cryptic,’ heretical use of words–not to sell, not to instruct in skills designed to produce & sell–so, in that sense, l’art is always pour l’art: the un-paraphrasable is what we want
– Anselm Hollo
So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it’s fun in the end.
– Roberto Bolaño
We have more information than emperors could have dreamed of. We are also subjected to more misinformation than they could have conceived of in their worst nightmare.
– Ryan Holiday
How might we fashion
the pace of chance?
– Sam Kerbel
summer heat fatigue
must be a pose in yoga
– Shimaneko-kun
hometown visit
even the wind
has changed
– Nitu Yumnam
We all start off knowing the same truth(s) and then – the rest of our lives consist of how we chose to distort it.
– Pat Thomas
How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshipping an imaginary God.
– C.S. Lewis
Destroy a single being’s joy, and you will work the ruin of yourself.
– Shantideva
When there are troubles within us, we must address them head-on. Do not look for distractions – distraction is not a solution.
– Sadhguru
My greatest discovery so far: The world is a tragedy to those who feel, a comedy to those who think. Most people neither think nor feel.
– Patricia Highsmith
My wish is to stay always like this, living quietly in a corner of nature.
– Claude Monet
Song
Love that is bound has gone
with the late alchemy of stars at dawn
affirming as they die
what day’s accustomed clarities deny.
Love that is lost remains
with the green advent of next season’s rains
that start the trees to flower
through their impetuous, unreported hour.
– Rosamund Stanhope
On Eroded Solar Masses
Say each eroded molecular cloud
contained uncountable solar masses
not typical but density per cubic centimeter
welling up across a million years
never speaking of the highest suns
through a totem of errors but totem
taking from density no known error
alive as pattern
as irrational ascension
sans squared impalpable quanta
its implacable winds
teeming sub-flow as absentia
– Will Alexander
Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
– Aldous Huxley
We made love a little while ago & my husband said it was better than both Picasso and Judy Garland. But I guess that’s just bragging not relevant.
– Alice Notley
There’s an infinity of ways in which you can move from that spot over there to here. But do your movements allow us to feel your spirit? Have you figured those movements out in your head? Or are we seeing your soul in motion?…. the essential thing is that your movements, even when you’re standing still, embody your soul at all times.
– Ohno Kazuo
There is also a fable told by Phaedrus, about how Simonides was once a victim of shipwreck. As the other passengers scurried about the sinking ship trying to save their possessions, the poet stood idle. When questioned, he declared, mecum mea sunt cuncta: everything that is me is with me.
– Anne Carson
The ‘kingdom of heaven’ is not something lying ‘above the earth’ or coming ‘after death’. It does not have a yesterday or a day after tomorrow, and it will not arrive in a ‘thousand years’. It is an experience of the heart. It is everywhere and it is nowhere.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
This is the truth. They stood on the stones in the lightly falling snow and listened to the silvery, trembling sound of thousands of keys being shaken, unlocking the air, once upon a time.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
The natural symbol, without our being sufficiently conscious of the fact, is identical with the reality of the world that appears to us, for every object in the natural world is at the same time a symbolic reality to us. The psyche certainly does not use an “object” of nature as a “symbol,” but rather the experience of an “object” itself is always already symbolic experience. The star or tree in us is no less real and no less symbolic than it is in outward experience. For each possibility of experience either presupposes a spiritually forming, that is to say a symbolic activity, or is identical with this.
That is, everything spiritual appears to us first not just in nature but as nature; or we could formulate this just as well the other way around: everything natural, whether outward or inward, appears to us as an image, that is to say as formed spirit. We are surrounded by images, inwardly and outwardly, but at the same time formed and determined in all our experiences by the natural symbol as though by a unitary natural-spiritual reality, for our psychic system only grasps that which appears to us as the real world through the world of natural symbolism.
– Erich Neumann
I was dancing, dancing through the crowded room and absolutely unable to stop smiling. Women who dance with their eyes closed, smiling, are as near to heaven as you can get on earth, and there I was, in heaven, only in Bakersfield.
– Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company
For Horses, Horseflies
We know nothing of the lives of others.
Under the surface, what strange desires,
what rages, weaknesses, fears.
Sometimes it breaks into the daily paper
and we shake our heads in wonder —
“Who would behave in such a way?” we ask.
Unspoken the thought, “Let me not be tested.”
Unspoken the thought, “Let me not be known.”
Under the surface, something that whispers,
“Anything can be done.”
For horses, horseflies. For humans, shame.
– Jane Hirshfield
I want to bottle-feed rage to every baby girl so that it fortifies her bones and muscles. I want her to flex, and feel the power growing inside her as she herself grows from a child into a young woman.
For too long, men have called us names designed to insult, but also designed to imply we are too angry to be taken seriously: Feminazi. Ball breaker. Crazy feminist. Bitch. Hysterical. Witch. Yes, I am those things. In other words, I am an angry woman. And angry women are free women.
– Mona Eltahawy
When the aim is to feel wholeness itself. She laid her hand on the deeply furrowed bark, groping for the area of darkest color. The trunks would be painted with a palette. Solids would develop from the center outward. Avoiding any kind of line. The body pressed against the trunk until she were certain of being extinguished by the darkness. One achieves a concealed drawing. Which is most like night.
– C.D. Wright
Paradise may be the time when we can finally turn to our past and see that its beauty was there despite our being there. In fact, its beauty can finally be seen because we aren’t there.
– Fanny Howe
How I hate all the barbarians who imagine that they are wise because they no longer have a heart!
– Friedrich Hölderlin
But in the romantic ideal upon which our modern mythos of love is built, the solidity of that togetherness is taken to such an extreme as to render love fragile. When lovers are expected to fuse together so closely and completely, mutuality mutates into a paralyzing codependence — a calcified and rigid firmness that becomes brittle to the possibility of growth.
In the most nourishing kind of love, the communion of togetherness coexists with an integrity of individuality, the two aspects always in dynamic and fluid dialogue. The philosopher Martin Heidegger captured this beautifully in his love letters to Hannah Arendt: “Why is love rich beyond all other possible human experiences and a sweet burden to those seized in its grasp? Because we become what we love and yet remain ourselves
– Maria Popova
It is possible that the things we live through
do not make us stronger.
I think of the ways I am more fragile
now. The blueness larger, the heart a well-damaged
muscle. The way my mind and heart
must sometimes close their eyes upon meeting.
– Missy-Marie Montgomery
Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph.
– Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia
chorus
should we discuss your
philanthropy
prometheus
I went a bit too far
chorus
how do you mean
prometheus
I stopped them seeing death before them
chorus
who
prometheus
human beings
chorus
how
prometheus
I planted blind hope in their hearts
chorus
why
prometheus
they were breaking
chorus
you fool
– Anne Carson
But the greatest human problems are not social problems, but decisions that the individual has to make alone. The most important feelings of which man is capable of emphasize his separateness from other people, not his kinship with them. The feelings of a mountaineer towards a mountain emphasize his kinship with the mountain rather than with the rest of mankind. The same goes for the leap of the heart experienced by a sailor when he smells the sea, or for the astronomer’s feeling about the stars, or for the archaeologist’s love of the past.
My feeling of love for my fellowmen makes me aware of my humanness, but my feeling about a mountain gives me an oddly nonhuman sensation. It would be incorrect, perhaps, to call it ‘superhuman’; but it nevertheless gives me a sense of transcending my everyday humanity. Maslow’s importance is that he has placed these experiences of ‘transcendence’ at the centre of his psychology. He sees them as the compass by which man gains a sense of the magnetic north of his existence. They bring a glimpse of ‘the source of power, meaning and purpose’ inside himself. This can be seen with great clarity in the matter of the cure of alcoholics. Alcoholism arises from what I have called ‘generalised hypertension’, a feeling of strain or anxiety about practically everything. It might be described as a ‘passively negative’ attitude towards existence. The negativity prevents proper relaxation; there is a perpetual excess of adrenalin in the bloodstream. Alcohol may produce the necessary relaxation, switch off the anxiety, allow one to feel like a real human being instead of a bundle of over-tense nerves. Recurrence of hypertension makes the alcoholic remedy a habit, but the disadvantages soon begin to outweigh the advantage: hangovers, headaches, fatigue, guilt, general inefficiency. And, above all, passivity.
The alcoholics are given mescalin or LSD, and then peak experiences are induced by means of music or poetry or colours blending on a screen. They are suddenly gripped and shaken by a sense of meaning, of just how incredibly interesting life can be for the undefeated. They also become aware of the vicious circle involved in alcoholism: misery and passivity leading to a general running-down of the vital powers, and to the lower levels of perception that are the outcome of fatigue. ‘The spirit world shuts not its gates, Your heart is dead, your senses sleep,’ says the Earth Spirit to Faust. And the senses sleep when there is not enough energy to run them efficiently. On the other hand, when the level of will and determination is high, the senses wake up. (Maslow was not particularly literary, or he might have been amused to think that Faust is suffering from exactly the same problem as the girl in the chewing gum factory (described earlier), and that he had, incidentally, solved a problem that had troubled European culture for nearly two centuries).
Peak experiences are a by-product of this higher energy-drive. The alcoholic drinks because he is seeking peak experiences; (the same, of course, goes for all addicts, whether of drugs or tobacco.) In fact, he is moving away from them, like a lost traveler walking away from the inn in which he hopes to spend the night. The moment he sees with clarity what he needs to do to regain the peak experience, he does an about-face and ceases to be an alcoholic.
– Colin Wilson
Underneath all the drama, the restlessness, the hopes and fears, behind the narratives we weave about ourselves, and even before we’ve thought of ourselves as ourselves, lies a simple, unadorned awareness. It’s not even a thing—just an event that happens, a little burst of knowing, deep in the center of it all.
– Andrew Olendzki
Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable things
– Gilles Deleuze
The fact that a symbol possesses an indefinite number of aspects does not mean that it is imprecise at all. Indeed it is its reading on an indefinite number of levels which confers on it its extreme precision. Commenting on the theatre of Samuel Beckett, Brook writes:
Beckett’s plays are symbols in an exact sense of the word. A false symbol is soft and vague: a true symbol is hard and clear. When we say ‘symbolic’ we often mean something drearily obscure: a true symbol is specific, it is the only form a certain truth can take… We get nowhere if we expect to be told what they mean, yet each one has a relation with us we can’t deny. If we accept this, the symbol opens in us a great wondering O.
– Peter Brook
Psychological work lies in coming to terms with the ghosts of our unlived lives. Not our grief for what we wanted and have missed for ourselves. Not a laying to rest of adolescent ambitions. The mystery of the psyche is that we are haunted not by what we want out of life, but by what life wants out of us. We can never lay these unlived potentials to rest. Relentlessly they seek to be lived out, regardless of how deeply we bury them. Working nine to five may be an essential adaptation for working in an urban culture, but just how well does it suit us to the instinctual energies patterned in the psyche? Learning to live out only what our parents could tolerate may have been an essential relationship to our families growing up, but just how well does it suit us to the yearnings still waiting to be played out deep within?
– D. Stephenson Bond
The heartbeat is actually the sound
made by the heart valves closing.
If you, my love, ever hold a
stethoscope to my chest, I will tell you
to listen for the silence in between.
What is and what will always be yours
is the sound of my heart finally
opening.
– Andrea Gibson
The Bee is not afraid of me.
I know the Butterfly.
The pretty people in the Woods
Receive me cordially –
The Brooks laugh louder when I come –
The Breezes madder play;
Wherefore mine eye thy silver mists,
Wherefore, Oh Summer’s Day?
– Emily Dickinson
I shall stand
for the
human side
of every
question.
– Margaret Brown
twisted vine …
I ask myself the same
old questions
– Brendon Kent
Who does not know what it is like to go with a friend to a railway station and then to watch the train take them away? As you walk along the platform back into the city, the person who has just gone is often more there, more totally there, than when you embraced them before they climbed into the train. When we embrace to say good- bye, maybe we do it for this reason – to take into our arms what we want to keep when they’ve gone.
– John Berger
From “De Jure Sanguinis”
by Kiki Petrosino
You won’t feel like this forever, unless
forever is here. Follow the dark blue
blades of kale, the flat dials of sunflowers
leading back to speech, or its underside.
Love translated you across an ocean
& now you cannot really come away
or say how, exactly, your love began.
Was it music in the mouth, or weeping
in the blood? The ancestral body splits
into water & seeds, pure syllables.
Wreck and Restore Me
Once on a violent afternoon
I prayed Please take me apart, and soon.
I fear what’s before me,
and grow despairing, mean and hard.
Demolish and renovate me, Lord.
Wreck and restore me.
Habit by habit, flaw by flaw,
break and mend me under love’s law.
The work requires it.
Retrofit me to do your will.
Yes, I know it will hurt, and still
my soul desires it.
Straighten what I have ruined or bent
for years since I was innocent.
Help me be mild.
The good in me please amplify
until this boy and you and I
are reconciled.
– Jane Greer
Poetry is the fiction we use to prove the fact.
– Charles Wright
To work magic is to weave the unseen forces into form, to make the intangible tangible, and thereby re-enchant the world.
– Thomas Moore
Don’t feel badly if you find yourself too restless to meditate deeply. Calmness will come in time, if you practice regularly. Just never accept the thought that meditation is not for you. Remember, calmness is your eternal, true nature.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
Winter man, winter woman, frozen at the heart,
lethal as a falling falcon, full of subtle art,
having put the earth beneath you – master and not friend –
miracles alone can’t teach you how to love again.
Winter people, winter world, caught in your own spell,
pinioned in the cunning coils of your heaven’s hell,
in your hives of stone and steel you tremble for the day
when the bells of spring will peal and sweep your works away.
“You are not the villain here,” sings the truthful snow.
“You are not the hero and you are not the foe.”
“You are just the seed of life still learning how to grow
far beyond your frazzled sense of a tale too great to know.”
Such a fierce yet fragile seed that bears the brunt of time,
as children of the tree of life, you yearn to fill the sky.
Now buried deep in bitter ground you are more like the dead.
But when the pipes of spring come ’round, you will lift up your heads.
You will lift up your hearts to shout with gladness loud and long!
You will cast off the husk of doubt to sing your heartfelt song.
Your ancient song of love between all creatures great and small
will echo from the highest hills and from the starry halls!
– George Gorman
I hied here, this high hill,
To hear who hailed here,
Who wailed here in the night—
Who might my courage ignite
Beyond my grasping sight.
Some dozens rang, some hundred
Voices sang—some highly,
Some slyly, some shyly
Barely whispered, like a kite
Flapping, flipping, ducking
In the wind—up, over
And down again, down to
Where we all begin.
Again, and again, I heard their
Calls, cawing, gnawing
At the very souls
Do rave and rove and ramble:
Doves on rocks; doe in bramble.
Cawing, as if enwisened;
Crying for the light;
Chirping behind blankly:
Leap so you should fall!
Fall free, fall forward, fall right!
Fall until ground breaks,
Always in front.
Always in front.
I hied here for weep and want.
Bird in flight, merry bright,
Rest me on the murmuring mountain
Rest here—
Rest with all my might.
Crawled and sprawled o’er crumbling clay,
Cradle of moon-white stones—
Cairn-clicked tongues sung in sun,
Sand-warm rays weighted,
Thoughts heady touched—
Sleep, snake coiled in hands of
Man’s most lasted fronts,
Sleep, and wake when tongues’re dumb.
What use the purple martin?
Fleet feathers what fouled the nest?
Strike me with lightness and
Sheen, strike the lake’s surface,
Sip the surface as you pass!
And as you swoop and spin
Inside my breast, be what
Is best—be it fouled
Or feathered, foreword,
Or past—step you where
The serpent rests, to spring!
Rhythm of two nimble legs
To shuffle the decayed mass.
Worn worm below the wallow,
Fleet martin in his hollow,
Hear I, who hied this high,
High hill to bide here,
Whosoever has flied here.
– Gerald Manley Hopkins
If the structure does not permit dialogue, the structure must be changed.
– Paulo Freire
Justice has nothing to do with victor nations and vanquished nations, but must be a moral standard that all the world’s peoples can agree to. To seek this and to achieve it—that is true civilization.
– Hideki Tojo
Act the way you’d like to be, and soon you’ll be the way you act.
– Leonard Cohen
If we are inspired only by literature that reflects our own interests, all reading becomes a form of
narcissism.
– Terry Eagleton
Teaching is not a lost art,
but regard for teaching
is a lost tradition.
– Jacques Barzun
Is getting older simply encountering more and more people who have been genetically engineered specifically to irritate you or is that just me not wanting to leave my house?
– Nikita Gill
To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.
– J. Robert Oppenheimer
Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why?
– Anton Chekhov
It’s a cruel and random world, but the chaos is all so beautiful.
– Hiromu Arakawa
When they kissed
Olympus shook.
– ACHILLES by Jared Singer
(Forgotten Necessities)
I hate everything that does not relate to literature.
Conversations bore me (even when they relate to literature), to visit people bores me, the joys and sorrows of my relatives bore me to my soul.
Conversation takes the importance, the seriousness, the truth, out of everything I think.
– Franz Kafka, diary entry, 1918
Like a traveler on a train
we can put down our bags.
We can relax out grip
and trust in the unfolding of life.
Do not worry.
There is a web of life
into which we are born,
from which we can never fall.
– Jack Kornfield
Short Talk On Orchids
We live by tunneling for we are people buried alive. To me, the tunnels you make will seem strangely aimless, uprooted orchids. But the fragrance is undying. A Little Boy has run away from Amherst a few Days ago, writes Emily Dickinson in a letter of 1883, and when asked where he was going
replied, Vermont or Asia.
– Anne Carson
Body means reality. Sometimes the body is an abyss and one gets engulfed, while spirit flutters around by itself like a butterfly.
A dangerous separation ensues that leads to death, for one lives outside of reality. Vitality in its fullest is experienced when one lives totally within the body and with the body!
Every spiritual progress includes a better connection to the body.
– Jung
Cupped in the palm
of infinity.
You and I
will never leave
that place.
– Andrea Gibson
A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war: wide-awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it might never live to regret it.
– Carlos Castaneda
If Music is a Place – then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.
– Vera Nazarian
The Renewal
by Theodore Roethke
1
What glories would we? Motions of the soul?
The centaur and the sibyl romp and sing
Within the reach of my imagining:
Such affirmations are perpetual.
I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs,
Yet, like a tree, endure the shift of things.
2
The night wind rises. Does my father live?
Dark hangs upon the waters of the soul;
My flesh is breathing slower than a wall.
Love alters all. Unblood my instinct, love.
These waters drowse me into sleep so kind
I walk as if my face would kiss the wind.
3
Sudden renewal of the self—from where?
A raw ghost drinks the fluid in my spine;
I know I love, yet know not where I am;
I paw the dark, the shifting midnight air.
Will the self, lost, be found again? In form?
I walk the night to keep my five wits warm.
4
Dry bones! Dry bones! I find my loving heart,
Illumination brought to such a pitch
I see the rubblestones begin to stretch
As if reality had split apart
And the whole motion of the soul lay bare:
I find that love, and I am everywhere.
Plain
Some evenings I’d like to climb
up the bell towers in the plain,
to see the great pink clouds
slow on the horizon
like mountains interwoven
with rays.
I
I’d understand from poplars’ motion
where the river passes
and what wind it drags;
foretell where the sun will rise
tomorrow
and what course it will take, shown
on already whitened rice,
on the grain.
10
I would touch with my fingers
the rim of the bells, when day declines
and the breeze lifts:
feel pass in their bronze the beat
of great flights far away.
– Antonia Pozzi, Undated
A poem, being an instance of language, hence essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to sea with the – surely not always strong — hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on a shoreline of the heart. In this way, too, poems are en route: they are headed toward.
Toward what? Toward something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality.
– Paul Celan (translated by Rosmarie Waldrop)
The suffering which has not yet arisen should be avoided.
– Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali II:16
There’s hard lessons in this world.
What’s the hardest?
I don’t know.
Maybe it’s just that when things are gone
they’re gone.
They aint comin back.
– Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain
Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.
– Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
Virginia Writes to Vita
and still doesn’t know
what love is.
The night is blue
in green.
The night is a blackbird
searching for one dolphin
in a bedfull of oysters’.
There are no martyrs
here.
The only point
of continuing
to row this old boat
is to help
another through.
– Natalie Marino
The safest communities are those with the most housing and resources, not those that make it a crime to be poor or sick.
– Jesse Rabinowitz
there must be a way.
surely there must be a way that we
have not yet
thought of.
who put this brain inside of me?
it cries
it demands
it says that there is a chance.
it will not say
“no.”
– Charles Bukowski
How does it start the sea has endless beginnings
– Alice Oswald
All of us yearn for the highest wisdom, but we have to rely on ourselves in the end.
– Czeslaw Milosz
Avoid cliques, gangs, groups.
The presence of a crowd won’t
make your writing any better than it is.
– Zadie Smith
Time, which is your enemy in almost everything in this life, is your friend in writing.
– Tobias Wolff
Socrates was the one who started it.
He would deliver knowledge, anyone’s knowledge – knowledge of which he himself was unaware.
That resembles what Freud, rather late in the piece, called ‘the unconscious’.
In his own way, Socrates wasn’t such a bad analyst.
– Jacques Lacan
A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
– Albert Camus
Look on the rising sun: there God does live
And gives his light, and gives his heat away.
And flowers & trees & beasts & men receive
Comfort in morning joy in the noonday.
And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.
– William Blake
You only love
when you love in vain.
(…)
You ask the secret.
It has just one name:
again.
– Miroslav Holub
how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and
buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
– E. E. Cummings
each time I jump
I think I’m escaping
but somehow
I always land beside
the same unsaid things
– Nitu Yumnam
Rhapsody
by Frank O’Hara
515 Madison Avenue
door to heaven? portal
stopped realities and eternal licentiousness
or at least the jungle of impossible eagerness
your marble is bronze and your lianas elevator cables
swinging from the myth of ascending
I would join
or declining the challenge of racial attractions
they zing on (into the lynch, dear friends)
while everywhere love is breathing draftily
like a doorway linking 53rd with 54th
the east-bound with the west-bound traffic by 8,000,000s
o midtown tunnels and the tunnels, too, of Holland
where is the summit where all aims are clear
the pin-point light upon a fear of lust
as agony’s needlework grows up around the unicorn
and fences him for milk- and yoghurt-work
when I see Gianni I know he’s thinking of John Ericson
playing the Rachmaninoff 2nd or Elizabeth Taylor
taking sleeping-pills and Jane thinks of Manderley
and Irkutsk while I cough lightly in the smog of desire
and my eyes water achingly imitating the true blue
a sight of Manahatta in the towering needle
multi-faceted insight of the fly in the stringless labyrinth
Canada plans a higher place than the Empire State Building
I am getting into a cab at 9th Street and 1st Avenue
and the Negro driver tells me about a $120 apartment
“where you can’t walk across the floor after 10 at night
not even to pee, cause it keeps them awake downstairs”
no, I don’t like that “well, I didn’t take it”
perfect in the hot humid morning on my way to work
a little supper-club conversation for the mill of the gods
you were there always and you know all about these things
as indifferent as an encyclopedia with your calm brown eyes
it isn’t enough to smile when you run the gauntlet
you’ve got to spit like Niagara Falls on everybody or
Victoria Falls or at least the beautiful urban fountains of Madrid
as the Niger joins the Gulf of Guinea near the Menemsha Bar
that is what you learn in the early morning passing Madison Avenue
where you’ve never spent any time and stores eat up light
I have always wanted to be near it
though the day is long (and I don’t mean Madison Avenue)
lying in a hammock on St. Mark’s Place sorting my poems
in the rancid nourishment of this mountainous island
they are coming and we holy ones must go
is Tibet historically a part of China? as I historically
belong to the enormous bliss of American death.
Healing isn’t a straight line. Some days you feel fierce. Other days, fragile. But both are part of the process.
– Heather Prince
unable to settle down
the traveling heart
remains
– Basho
Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.
– Eric Hoffer
One of the greatest pieces of wisdom I’ve ever heard comes from Fritz Perls–He said: “Fear is excitement without the breath.” Same mechanisms that produce excitement also produce fear and any fear can be transformed into excitement by breathing fully with it.
– Guy Hendricks
The best thing you can do for your children is to ensure they never witness anger, fear or conflict at home. Let them grow up in an atmosphere of Joy and Love.
– Sadhguru
In a life properly lived, you’re a river. You touch things lightly or deeply; you move along because life herself moves, and you can’t stop it; you can’t figure out a banal game plan applicable to all situations; you just have to go with the ‘beingness’ of life.
– Jim Harrison
A book should open old wounds, even inflict new ones. A book should be a danger.
– Emil Cioran
Real happiness only comes as a side-effect of peace. Most of it is going to come from acceptance, not from changing your external environment.
– @naval
If you want to make the maximum amount of money possible, if you want to get rich over your life in a deterministically predictable way, stay on the bleeding edge of trends and study technology, design, and art—become really good at something.
– @naval
I was reminded of the Four Immutable Laws of the Spirit: Whoever is present are the right people. Whenever it begins is the right time. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened. And when it’s over, it’s over.
– Anne Lamott
When someone said, This isn’t good, I would say, Well, I actually think it’s brilliant, and the brilliance will be revealed when you’re ready.
– Lynn Nottage
Your body will always take care of itself. Who grows the oranges in the orange tree? Who grows mangoes in a mango tree? Who takes care of the world and the earth? The same power that takes care of all the things on this planet, will take care of your body.
– Robert Adams
Never depend upon institutions or government to solve any problem. All social movements are founded by, guided by, motivated and seen through by the passion of individuals.
– Margaret Mead
When i see you through my eyes, i think that we are different. When i see you through my heart, i know that we’re the same.
– Doe Zantamata
Imagine how you would treat God if God were standing in front of you. Now carry that over to your human encounters and imagine how you would treat everybody else if you held them as divine.
– Neale Donald Walsch
And they searched his chest / But could only find his heart / And they searched his heart / But could only find his people.
– Mahmoud Darwish
They were only speaking the part of god that they themselves could glimpse. And this truth was only as small as they themselves were small.
– Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothing shows through.
– Paul Valéry
We fight the nothing constantly, and we always lose.
– Paul Valéry
Packed Carefully Away
by Jane Greer
It seemed an endless season of letting go,
and what was lost, surrendered, none will guess.
The tide will always smooth the battered beach
and the charred heart of the wood burst forth in green.
And all that was given up no one will know,
nor the cost which now seems nearly a caress:
all kept in secret, forming no part of speech.
Embers will cool and sands be made pristine.
All kept in secret, saved but pressed down low,
packed carefully away with a muttered blessing.
Tide cannot alter what it cannot reach.
The charred heart of the wood remains unseen.
A faithful and genuinely self-sacrificing passion will speak to us with what seems the voice of God.
– C.S. Lewis
When looking at a map of Russia and its size, you understand that it’s not a cow, but a brontosaurus.
– Vladimir Sorokin
Philosophy is never supplication: but without supplication, there is no conceivable reply.
– Georges Bataille
serene and asleep
there is peace on earth
little snail
– Issa
Karma is just you, repeating your patterns, virtues, and flaws until you finally get what you deserve.
– @naval
I think at some point I became a sort of permanent adolescent, wanting to participate in a rebellion against grown-ups.
– Fanny Howe
Guard your time. Forget the money.
– @naval
Another time, perhaps. And I shall call
The laughter that lies sleeping in your voice
To wake, or finish poems when you begin them;
The sterile years have starry moments in them.
Love me or love me not, the leaves will fall,
And we shall walk them down. I have my joys.
– Joy Davidman, Sonnet XLI (to C.S. Lewis)
The happiest of all lives is a busy solitude.
– Voltaire
Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
– Doris Lessing
The true poet is all-knowing — he is a real world in miniature.
– Novalis
The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Plato described the two different ways of approaching truth as mythos and logos. Mythos is a more silent, intuitive way of looking at reality and logos is more of a scientific, discursive, logical way, and we need both.
– Karen Armstrong
At age twelve I didn’t wonder, all the time, what other people were thinking about me. That was a magical reprieve.
– Don Lee
To have love snatched from you, especially unexpectedly, and then to be told to turn to memories. Rather than succor, my memories bring eloquent stabs of pain that say, “This is what you will never again have.” Sometimes they bring laughter, but laughter like glowing coals that soon burst aflame in pain.
– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
We think of Beatrice leading Dante up to Paradise, but he experienced that only after he had gone through Hell. Normally, the anima does not take a man by the hand and lead him right to Paradise; she puts him first into a hot cauldron where he is nicely roasted for a while.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
Life stretches out from moment to moment in stupendous infinitude. Nothing can be more real than what you suppose it to be. Whatever you think the cosmos to be it is and it could not possibly be anything else as long as you are you and I am I.
– Henry Miller
As the entrepreneur of its own self, the neoliberal subject has no capacity for relationships with others that might be free of purpose. Nor do entrepreneurs know what purpose-free friendship would even look like.
– Byung-chul Han, Psychopolitics
We live for books.
– Umberto Eco
There are books so alive that you’re always afraid that while you weren’t reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river.
– Marina Tsvetaeva
We don’t know when love will arrive. We don’t know when it will fade. We can only know that the unexpected will happen, that certainty is a falsity, and that things will be impermanent regardless of how tightly we clench our fists around them.
– Sunita Puri
We ourselves sometimes don’t know how to make our lives interesting. And it starts with the little things. I’m not even talking about bigger things. Is it really so hard to understand? After all, it’s in our hands to make life interesting.
– Vasily Shukshin
We are called not to run from the discomfort, or run from the grief, or the feelings of outrage, or even fear…when we can just be with it and keep breathing, it turns, it turns to reveal its other face; and the other face of our pain for the world is our love for the world, our absolute, inseparable connectedness to all life.
– Joanna Macy
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
– George Bernard Shaw
If I think about good and evil, it’s definitely without the capital letters. But I’m very interested in writing about goodness.
– Marie NDiaye
In vain would we talk about nature, nature doesn’t want this; it is no use to talk about the divine, the divine doesn’t want this, and anyway, no matter how much we want to, we are unable to talk about anything other than ourselves, because we are only capable of talking about history, about the human condition, about that never-changing quality whose essence carries such titillating relevance only for us…
– László Krasznahorkai
Freedom of the spirit is a bottomless well. Our substantial nature could not be the basis of freedom. On the contrary, all nature is born of freedom.
– Nikolai Berdyaev
Philosophical discussion unites the two greatest and purest pleasures of human life: study and society.
– David Hume
Does it make any difference at all if it happened anywhere else? It happened here. That’s everything, right?
– Richard Powers, Bewilderment
In contrast to many of his followers, Jung didn’t take his teaching as holy writ no more than he would have thought his word was to become a body of dogma. Jung warned that his ideas were tentative at best, subject to change, and reflective of the era in which he lived: “Whatever happens in a given moment has inevitably the quality peculiar to that moment” Jung understood both the ethical seriousness and the limits of his knowledge. He saw himself as an innovator but also, and more importantly, as part of a lineage of philosophers and healers.
– Claire Douglas, Marie-Louise von Franz and the Conference of the Birds
If only a world-wide consciousness could arise that all division and fission are due to the splitting of opposites in the psyche, then we should know where to begin.
– Carl Gustav Jung
In all classes, from the lowest to almost the highest, economic fear governs men’s thoughts by day and their dreams at night, making their work nerve-racking and their leisure unrefreshing. This ever-present terror is, I think, the main cause of the mood of madness which has swept over great parts of the civilized world.
– Bertrand Russell
Poetry is the only literary form that can accommodate such a rapid rate of reading; being able to jump seamlessly between voices like this can expand the way we think about the world.
– Laura Buccieri
There is really only one war, the war within ourselves, which produces
external wars.
– J Krishnamurti
More than naming a pet, or choosing a title for my own creative work, settling on a title for a work of translation feels to me akin to naming a child, a separate soul whose name might help carve out their path.
– Layla Benitez-James
Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.
– Hannah Arendt
You were a masterpiece I was proud to display in the gallery of my life
yet to you, I was just a mirror that only served you best in the
darkness of your closet
– Najya Williams, Epistle For Adelphia Asiya
All those solitary hours of daydreaming were a kind of training for poetry.
– Charles Simic
We have all started to see alike
worse
we have all started to write alike
I rest assured that you
are not a final word
likeness
– Laura Kerr
I tend to prefer books in which the bow isn’t perfectly tied but slightly undone. After all, our lives are full of secrets that will never be revealed, enigmas that will never be resolved.
– Marie NDiaye
The one who sees through the illusion of mind is freed. The one who tries to fix the mind remains trapped in illusion.
– Jigme Lingpa
a day at the beach —
all of the sunglasses
fill with clouds
– Chen-ou Liu
. . . We may study and practice the teachings, and they may penetrate a bit, but if we don’t want to relate to our obscurations, and refuse to believe they are even there, no spiritual development can take place. Without the proper motivation to guide and protect us, we will want to get enmeshed just as we do in all of our ordinary relationships. Meanwhile the teacher will just be waiting . . . waiting . . . waiting for the day we decide to surrender to wisdom rather than ignorance.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, Light Comes Through
We cannot become someone
new until we not only see
our current self, but consume it
– Jared Singer
When all is said and done, it would not surprise anyone if Trump were seen as the most grotesque, vile and repulsive human being of the 21st century.
– Bill Madden
Tibetans love the concept of seeing a coiled snake on the floor and realizing it is just a piece of rope. That’s what realization does.
Just as we can’t unsee what is seen, we can’t unrealize what is realized. If you think it’s hard to realize the true nature of the mind, it’s impossible to un-realize what has been realized.
What I write each day is more demanding as time goes on. And by ‘demanding” I don’t mean it takes me more time. What I mean is that the bar continues to be raised so that I have to be increasingly more integral in what I write, as I see it, to communicate to others.
I am reminded of the widening gyre of Yeats poem “The Second Coming.” I certainly am not escaping the widening of the gyre. I have to work within it. That is the nature of Samsara.
In practical terms, the whole concept of Samsara means we work against what’s good for us, against our own true nature and are not even aware of it.
That’s what Samsara is, failing to realize the nature of the mind and how it works. In other words, we work and have always worked counter to our own best interests.
Is it any wonder that from time to time we are brought down a peg or two and have to rebuild our little house of cards that we call our Self?
We should welcome this bit of sobering rather than continue to ignore or work counter to the truth of our existence or lack thereof. One thing that helps is to recognize that we are not to blame for ignoring the truth of reality. It is not like we once knew and turned away. My dharma teacher made it very clear that we never knew and have never known anything but reifying and ignoring reality. We have yet to be aware, much less to realize the true nature of our mind.
And it is not conscious ignoring on our part, but rather ignorance is our heritage. We were born into it and of it. And it is not a case of original sin as some faiths have it. We did not once know and then fall away from grace. We have never known grace although it exists right here within us all this time. We are not aware of it much less realize it. That’s the key issue.
And this is why the word Buddha means “aware” because the historical Buddha succeeded in becoming aware of what he (and we) are unaware of. He became aware and understood, experienced it consciously, and then, on top of that, ‘Realized’ the true nature of the mind and how it works, and that realization, like all realizations, stuck.
Realization is not something that comes and goes. Realization comes and stays. That’s its nature.
In other words, ‘Realization’, by nature, dispels ignorance because it is nothing more than that we see our mistake, how we mistook reality to be something it is not, like the rope for a snake. And in that moment of realization, as the Tibetans say, the darkness of eons of ignorance vanishes like striking a match in a dark cave.
The only thing that happens is that we can suddenly see because of the light of awareness, and with that the darkness just vanishes. However, realization is a one-way street. Once we realize, we cannot go back to not having realized, to not seeing. We have seen or realized and thus we have ‘realized’.
The Buddha became aware and with that stopped ignoring the true or actual nature of the mind. And he spent the rest of his life trying to point out to the rest of us how we too can realize the true nature of the mind.
– Michael Erlewine
Fiction is the truth because without footnotes and without any kind of factual reportage, when it’s true you know it. And then it becomes dangerous.
– Arundhati Roy
Nature’s real value lies in the realm of the intangibles, vistas, solitude and quiet . . . There is great need for people to come in touch with silence, cyclic rhythms, and natural beauty if they are to retain their perspective. Tension, speed, and lack of real purpose in their daily lives make it mandatory they go to places where they can find themselves, regain their dignity and fulfillment as humans. It is the intangibles of the land they need.
– Sigurd F. Olson
We can change our world for the kinder, for the more loving, for the more responsible. We can be activists with love, not hate. We can bring our work in line with our life’s mission: to be of benefit- for a more equal and decent society.
– Waylon H. Lewis
Aftermath
after Jim Moore
When the empire finally crumbles,
and the ruler has fallen, in that first
deep breath of silence just before
re-birth, please let us choose to dig
each other out of the ruins, hand
clasping hand, stranger lifting stranger.
Let us know that when everyone
has dust in our lungs, sand in our eyes,
dirt on our faces, we are all the same
person. Let us begin the first step
of each of us placing one stone on top
of another stone on top of another,
all of us a part of the building, the rising
rubblework a testament to what can be.
– paula gordon lepp
you say “both sides”
and with those two words
you bury
a thousand names
– @daliah.lina
If man is to survive, he will learn to take a delight in the
essential differences between cultures.
To learn that differences in ideas and
attitudes are a delight, part of life’s
exciting variety, not something to fear.
– Gene Roddenberry
Listening in Deep Space
by Diane Thiel
We’ve always been out looking for answers,
telling stories about ourselves,
searching for connection, choosing
to send out Stravinsky and whale song,
which, in translation, might very well be
our undoing instead of a welcome.
We launch satellites, probes, telescopes
unfolding like origami, navigating
geomagnetic storms, major disruptions.
Rovers with spirit and perseverance
mapping the unknown. We listen
through large arrays adjusted eagerly
to hear the news that we are not alone.
Considering the history at home,
in houses, across continents, oceans,
even in quests armed with good intentions,
what one seeker has done to another—
what will we do when we find each other?
TURNING
Going too fast for myself I missed
more than I think I can remember
almost everything it seems sometimes
and yet there are chances that come back
that I did not notice when they stood
where I could have reached out and touched them
this morning the black shepherd dog
still young looking up and saying
Are you ready this time
– W. S. Merwin
I want to infect you with the tremendous
excitement of living, because I believe that
you have the strength to bear it.
– Tennessee Williams
SOME NIGHT AGAIN
When the world vanishes, I will come back
here by the power of my dreams and create it
again, starting where that clear
depth in the mountain lake began,
where you swam one night across the moonlight
and I thought: Still, it’s good, though it has to end.
– William Stafford
AT EVERY GAS STATION THERE ARE MECHANICS
Around them my cleanliness stinks.
I smell it. And so do they.
I always want to tell them I used to box,
and change tires, and eat heroes.
It is my hands hanging out
of my sleeves like white gloves.
It is what I’ve not done, and do not know.
If they mention the differential
I pay whatever price. When
they tell me what’s wrong beneath my hood
I nod, and become meek.
If they were to say I could not
have my car back, that it was theirs,
I would say thank you, you must be right.
And then I would walk home,
and create an accident.
– Stephen Dunn
the shortest poem is a name
– anne michaels
Together we decide which way the dream goes.
– Matt Rasmussen
Our cultural and psychological responses are from the past, but modified by the conjunction of the past with the present. So the past is controlling and modifying the present.
– Krishnamurti
As a child I was always the ball bearings for my whole family; I thought I was indispensable to their survival, preventing hard metal from grinding against hard metal, so the family didn’t come to a broken, screeching, metallic halt.
– Anne Lamott
We must see to it that we put the best of ourselves in our letters; for there is nothing to suggest that we shall see each other again soon.
– Walter Benjamin to Gretel Adorno; tr. Wieland Hoban
Underneath pride, jealousy, fear—there’s basic goodness. In you. In them. In all of us.
– Mingyur Rinpoche
Let us not pretend to know what it is, this forgetting.
– Derrida
Someone understanding you is usually less about intelligence and more about level of consciousness. Which is why you just have to let people perceive you from their level without it being personal.
– Nika Solé
I am aware that, every time I have a conversation with a book, I benefit from someone’s decision against silence.
– Yiyun Li
All other knowledge is hurtful to him who has not the science of honesty and goodness.
– Montaigne
A passionate obsession with the outside world or the private lives of others is an attempt to compensate for a lack of meaning in one’s own life.
– Eric Hoffer
Studies suggest it’s best not to mention problem in front of power even to say there is none. Gloria Steinem says women lose power as they age and yet the loudest voice in my head is my mother.
– Solmaz Sharif
The poetic work begins tomorrow.
– René Char
All our plans failed. None of the medicine worked.
Look! How this sickened heart finally finished me off.
– Mir Taqi Mir
with blueberry juice i write my country anew in the lexicon of empire
– Gunnar Wærness, translated from the Norwegian by Gabriel Gudding
Good copy is a poor substitute for good UI. Good marketing is a poor substitute for a good product.
– @naval
When you wish good for others, good things come back to you. This is the LAW of NATURE.
– Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
If we are fractured
we are fractured
like stars
bred to shine
in every direction,
through any dimension,
billions of years
since and hence.
– Dorianne Laux
avoid
being like me
a melon split into two
– Basho
A story cannot be judged from its summarized plot, but only from the way this is told, and from the ideas and feelings which are stirred in the author – whether ever consciously formulated by him or not – in the telling, and which breathe a life and purpose into it.
– Tolkien
Every time I thought I was being rejected from something good, I was actually being redirected to something better.
– Steve Maraboli
Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.
– @naval
This cruel era
Turned me like a river.
Life was switched on me, flowed
In a different riverbed,
By another course,
And I don’t know my own banks.
O, how many shows I missed,
While the curtain rose
And fell without me. How many friends
I never met once.
– Anna Akhmatova, tr. Liza Tucker
May you be angry about what deserves anger, and may you experience such a transformation of your own anger that you become an agent of loving transformation in our world.
– Brian McLaren
Innocence shags experience and I’ll never grow.
Experience catches the dove, and I’m lost.
I find you at this intimate pasture.
A number in a tree.
A grey field of otherwise.
Inventing a globe and a wheel
to turn it on.
Inventing a dress and the bird
it remembers.
This you of my equal and never is a restoration.
Beside the elements when they broke into picture
this is my reference to the amity of sand.
– Elizabeth Willis
Political leaders are never leaders.
For leaders we have to look
to the Awakeners!
– Henry Miller
History is still not Time; nor is evolution. They are both consequences. Time is a state: the flame in which there lives the salamander of the human soul.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
there is nothing that
distracts me music is
only a crossword puzzle
– Frank O’Hara
I was not traversing the same streets as the people who were walking about town that day, I was traversing a past, gliding, sad and sweet; a past which was moreover compounded of so many different pasts that it was difficult for me to recognize the cause of my melancholy.
– Marcel Proust
One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.
– Omar El Akkad
There is only one solitude, and it is large and not easy to bear…People are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy. But it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult.
– Rilke
news after news
of record-shattering heat
day after day
a homeless man evicted
into the mayor’s silence
– Chen-ou Liu
If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.
– Ben Lerner
We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it’s all about.
– Joseph Campbell
The sky was so clear and blue, so striking in its stillness, that I wanted to cry.
– Lisa Ko
First, create your ego. Then destroy it. This is all of life.
– Kamand Kojouri
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
– James Baldwin
Logic is neither the preface, nor the instrument, nor the formula, nor an episode of philosophy. It is, rather, a coordinated pragmatic science opposed to poetry and to ethics and deriving from the demand for a positive truth and the premise of the possibility of a system.
– Friedrich Schlegel
Doubt is the hammer that breaks the windows clouded with human fancies, and lets in the pure light.
– George MacDonald
There is only one problem in the whole world. We must restore to people their spiritual significance, their spiritual concerns. You see, we can no longer live with refrigerators, politics, balance sheets, and crosswords. We simply cannot. We cannot live without poetry, without color, without love.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
You may be very learned and do the things society calls good, but they are all within the prison walls of tradition and therefore of no revolutionary value at all.
– Krishnamurti
Buy yourself some ice cream.
Draw a circle where you stand.
Run your fingers through the mud
and let the lotus bruise your hands.
– Will Kimbrough
You are the living spell, written by stars, spoken by time.
– Mystical Grimoire
Our prejudices are so deeply rooted that we never think of them as prejudices but call them common sense.
– George Bernard Shaw
You should never ever succumb to nihilism. If you can’t maintain revolutionary optimism, just do it out of spite.
– Hasan Piker
The value of every person is what he knows.
– Imam Ali
Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.
– Voltaire
The extravert knows, by feeling himself into others, by what human means people can be won over, whereas the introvert tries to create values in himself with which he tries to impress and force others toward him, or even bring them to his knees.
– Carl Jung
Nature and teaching are closely related; for teaching reforms a person, and by reforming remakes his nature.
– Democritus
I will not tire of declaring that if we really want an effective end to violence we must remove the violence that lies at the root of all violence: structural violence, social injustice, exclusion of citizens from the management of the country, repression. All this is what constitutes the primal cause from which the rest flows naturally.
– Oscar Romero
Compassion isn’t about solutions. It’s about giving all the love that you’ve got.
– Cheryl Strayed
Growth in grace is growth downward. It is the forming of a lower estimate of ourselves. It is a deepening realization of our nothingness. It is a heartfelt recognition that we are not worthy of the least of God’s mercies.
– Arthur Pink
The edge between sense and nonsense is shadow thin, and in all our deepest convictions we hover in the shadow, uncertain whether we know what our words mean, nevertheless bound by the conviction to say them.
– R.P. Blackmur
A persistent irony recognized and celebrated by novelists, poets, and playwrights is that as one moves closer to the unique characteristics of a person or a place, one discovers the universal.
– Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot
You never draw out of the deep of yourself that which you want; you always draw that which you are, and you are that which you feel yourself to be.
– Neville Goddard
If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.
– George Orwell
Woe to our society if to be human becomes a heroic act.
– Elie Wiesel
You are rewarded not according to your work or your time but according to the measure of your love.
– St. Catherine of Siena
As soon as you see your own shadow and admit that you are not perfect, you cannot identify yourself with the “Great Wise Man” and create a Puer Aeternus with your anima.
– Carl Jung
Where the land is flat there is no flow of water; it has nowhere to go; it stagnates. In order to produce energy you must have opposites—an above and a below.
– Carl Jung
…a symbol of the unity of personality, a symbol of the self, where the war of opposites finds peace.
In this way the primordial being becomes the distant goal of man’s self-development.
– Carl Jung
Some people. and particularly introverts. always put the wrong foot forward. They have a particular genius for putting their finger on the sore spot.
– Carl Jung
They praised the glow in my soul,
Danced in its shadow,
But the moment it flickered,
They vanished with the dusk.
– Faiza
In the United States, where the problems of the working poor were profound, anything that smacked of welfare was easy for lobbyists to defeat. And basic income was easily dismissed as a form of socialism—the ultimate idea-killing label in the world’s capitalist superpower.
– Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World by Peter S. Goodman
If we’d know we were going to be the Beatles, we’d have tried harder.
– George Harrison
You become political when you can no longer endure the world.
– Marguerite Duras
She bought me a bonsai,
I did not plant nor water,
Neither of us grew
– Nathaniel Rochester
Don’t turn your back on wisdom, for she will protect you. Love her, and she will guard you.
– Proverbs 4:6
With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil – that takes religion.
– Steven Weinberg
I’m Jewish. “Never again” means NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE.
– Susan Elliott Reach
Our mind paints the astral plane, its color tied to thought’s refrain. Hold hate—dark shades remain. Choose love—light breaks the chain
– Chad Erickson
The sea is like music. It has all the dreams of the soul within itself and sounds them over.
– Jung
We organize in the cracks, the spaces the empire can’t control.
– @weprintrevolution
Competition happens at the bottom.
The people at the top are collaborating.
– unknown
ALONE
by Philip Levine
Sunset, and the olive grove flames
on the far hill. We descend
into the lunging shadows
of goat grass, and the air
deepens like smoke.
You were behind me, but when I turned
there was the wrangling of crows
and the long grass rising in the wind
and the swelling tips of grain
turning to water under a black sky.
All around me the thousand
small denials of the day
rose like insects to the flaming
of an old truth, someone alone
following a broken trail of stones
toward the deep and starless river.
On Eroded Solar Masses
by Will Alexander
Say each eroded molecular cloud
contained uncountable solar masses
not typical but density per cubic centimeter
welling up across a million years
never speaking of the highest suns
through a totem of errors but totem
taking from density no known error
alive as pattern
as irrational ascension
sans squared impalpable quanta
its implacable winds
teeming sub-flow as absentia
A reader knows the difference.
“I needed you.”
“I needed you.”
“I needed you.”
IT’S POSSIBLE TO BE
COMPLETELY
ENLIGHTENED … EXCEPT
WITH YOUR FAMILY.
– CHOGYAM TRUNGPA
Make it a rule never to
give a child a book you
would not read yourself.
– George Bernard Shaw
Americans have
decided to be
stupid and
shallow since
1980. Madonna
is like Nero; she
marks the
turning point.
– Joni Mitchell
To come back to a place
you’ve never left
and see the old moon
still leaning on the ruined barn
and watch the stream
still rivering. And the trees’
stiff alphabet
still rehearsing signs
you still can’t read,
a love-letter from the future
sealed with a kiss
but from whose lips?
– Robert Kelly
if there is no savior, I’ll do it myself, I’ll forgive myself
– Danez Smith
Love is never any better than the lover.
Wicked people love wickedly,
violent people love violently,
weak people love weakly,
stupid people love stupidly,
but the love of a free man is never safe.
There is no gift for the beloved.
The lover alone possesses his gift of love.
– Toni Morrison
I wash my hands of those
who imagine chattering
to be knowledge,
silence to be ignorance,
and affection to be art.
– Kahlil Gibran
Once you teach people to say what they do not understand, it is easy enough to get them to say anything you like.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Being human is no small task. This world belongs to the courageous ones.
– Anam Thubten
One can’t build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.
– Anne Sexton
The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.
– Martin Buber
Our true home is the place where “What if”s disappear.
– Pico Iyer
Fresh water on Sunday, new pages discarded. Reporters talk it up, Islanders play it down. Films do not leave you to your own thoughts. Language preys on the mind.
– Clark Coolidge
What would it be about if it weren’t about your comfort?
– Kenneth Folk
But logic is not all; one needs one’s heart to follow an idea.
– Prof. Feynman
on forever’s very now we stand
– e. e. cummings
The best way, perhaps the only way, to change others is to become an example.
– @naval
Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.
– Lawrence Durrell
New hottest thing anyone has said to me:
“If you have thoughts on this let me know — your consciousness is trustworthy and I can triangulate reality through you”
– River Kenna
I kneel into a dream
where I am good & loved.
I am good. I am loved.
– Natalie Wee
Friends I am here to modestly report
seeing in an orchard
in my town
a goldfinch kissing
a sunflower.
– Ross Gay
I think that’s what we’re feeling, out in the world. We are thirsty. We are hungry, and we have forgotten where our sources of nourishment lie. We are collectively forgetting what feeds our spirits because we’re erasing them, destroying them, killing them-at our own peril.
– Terry Tempest Williams
Socialism is, in fact, a form of
Christianity, people wishing to
imitate Christ.
– Kurt Vonnegut
I found the
world to be
woefully
lacking in
safe places.
So, I became
one.
– J. Warren Welch
I would rather people
speak up imperfectly
than not speak up at all.
I would rather have people
join movements for liberation late
than not have them join at all.
I would rather
hear your voice
than not hear it at all.
It is not too late to save this world.
And I would rather people believe that
than not believe it at all.
– Nikita Gill
Everything you have ever seen with your eyes is the self-emptying of God into multitudinous physical and visible forms. In other words, Infinity is forever limiting itself into finite expressions, and this could even be called the “suffering” of God.
– Richard Rohr
There are a whole lot of things in this world you haven’t started wondering
about yet.
– Roald Dahl
When our grief cannot be spoken, it falls into the shadow and arises as symptoms. So many of us are depressed, anxious, and lonely. We struggle with addictions and find ourselves moving at a breathless pace, trying to keep up with the machinery of culture.
Grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture. Because of that, grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul. Contrary to our fears, grief is suffused with life-force…. It is not a state of deadness or emotional flatness. Grief is alive, wild, untamed and cannot be domesticated. It resists the demands to remain passive and still. We move in jangled, unsettled, and riotous ways when grief takes hold of us. It is truly an emotion that rises from the soul.
– Francis Weller
Humility is a form of liberation: it makes us accept our frailties and inadequacies, that we stop wanting to constantly mask in the eyes of others. It gives us the effects of the grip, of the obsession of social judgment, since we seek neither to hide its limits nor to put them forward.
– Christophe Andre
Skywalking
Much grief awaits us, friends.
From this day on
We’ll be testing our luck
Like a man stretching a wire
Between two skyscrapers,
Who sets out to walk on it
Carrying an open umbrella
Which the wind may snatch away
When he is halfway,
And then have its fun
Bouncing it off walls and windows.
We are likely to forget the man
Waving his arms up there
Like a scarecrow in a squall.
– Charles Simic
if you do not think that a house
where everyone must be fine
all the time
is fine
you can leave that house
or leave yourself
choose your rupture
– Tricia Dearborn, The Family Line
When I’m in Canada, I feel this is what the world should be like.
– Jane Fonda
Habit makes us weak against the self. Even simple habits die hard. You may be aware of how bad smoking is for your health, but that doesn’t necessarily convince you to stop smoking, especially when you enjoy the ritual, the slender shape of the cigarette, the way the tobacco smolders, the fragrant smoke curling around your fingers.
But the habit of self is not just a simple addiction like smoking cigarettes. From time immemorial we have been addicted to the self. It is how we identify ourselves. It is what we love most dearly. It is also what we hate most fiercely at times. Its existence is also the thing that we work hardest to try to validate. Almost everything that we do or think or have, including our spiritual path, is a means to confirm its existence. It is the self that fears failure and longs for success, fears hell and longs for heaven. The self loathes suffering and loves the causes of suffering. It stupidly wages war in the name of peace. It wishes for enlightenment but detests the path to enlightenment. It wishes to work as a socialist but live as a capitalist.
When the self feels lonely, it desires friendship. Its possessiveness of those it loves manifests in passion that can lead to aggression. Its supposed enemies—such as spiritual paths designed to conquer the ego—are often corrupted and recruited as the self’s ally. Its skill in playing the game of deception is nearly perfect.
It weaves a cocoon around itself like a silkworm; but unlike a silkworm, it doesn’t know how to find the way out.
– Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche
Our teepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation’s hoop, a nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children.
– Black Elk
Quietly do the next and
most necessary thing.
– C.G. Jung
You must be true to your own way until at last you actually come to the point where you see it is necessary to forget all about yourself.
– Shunryu Suzuki
The whole duty of man consists in being reasonable and just… I am reasonable because I know the difference between understanding and not understanding and I am just because I have no opinion about things I don’t understand.
– Gertrude Stein
What connects us? Physicists don’t
know what to call that entanglement
other than an attribute of the
quantum world. The entangling
experience is what I refer to as
‘space-time dreaming.’
– Arnold Mindell
You are not different from your friend, but with your friend you are different from yourself, and recognizing that, I withdrew, wanting to protect my honesty, because I had defined integrity on two dimensions.
– Lyn Hejinian
School, politics, sports, and games train us to compete against others. True rewards – wealth, knowledge, love, fitness, and equanimity – come from ignoring others and improving ourselves.
– @naval
There’s a way a city leans after it’s been hit.
Not physically
I mean it like a person who’s just gotten bad news
but hasn’t sat down yet.
– Sushanta Basumatary
Everyone making art is a pioneer.
You’re the first to feel it exactly like you do.
That’s enough.
– Laura Kerr
Poets calling themselves pioneers on here is wild.
You’re not clearing a path.
You’re joining a centuries-long conversation.
Pull up a chair.
– Laura Kerr
Morning Star
by C. D. Wright
This isn’t the end. It simply
cannot be the end. It is a road.
You go ahead coatless, light-
soaked, more rutilant than
the road. The soles of your shoes
sparkle. You walk softly
as you move further inside
your subject. It is a living
season. The trees are anxious
to be included. The car with fins
beams through countless
oncoming points of rage and need.
The sloughed-off cells
under our bed form little hills
of dead matter. If the most sidereal
drink is pain, the most soothing
clock is music. A poetry
of shine could come of this.
It will be predominately
green. You will be allowed
to color in as much as you want
for green is good
for the teeth and the eyes.
God’s Mouth
The girl thought that the sky was God’s
wide-open mouth. After discussion, arguing,
I decided to agree. She was so sure
of herself, adamant in fact, as if stomping
a foot made anything true. I suppose
that at the back of the mouth is the brain
that created insects and galaxies, the girl
herself who is now singing a banal popular song
in a thin reedy voice. Then she told me
about a huge African catfish who keeps
her unruly children in her mouth. They come
and go, retreating when in danger. God is like
that, the girl said. We can go in and out.
– Jim Harrison
I am unable to make any distinction between the feeling I get from life and the way I translate that feeling into painting.
– Henri Matisse
Everyone just wants to be happy. Even when it looks unskillful, that’s what we’re reaching for.
– Vanessa Zuisei Goddard
Prescribing how poems should speak flattens what they are.
A poem is not always a voice.
In my work, it’s a field.
The missing is the point.
Some poems reach emotional conclusions—and do so brilliantly.
But a poem that refuses tidy resolution may be closer to the truth.
– Laura Kerr
Wherever tenants in the same building or portfolio organize, they have the potential leverage to force repairs, drive down the rent, and halt evictions.
– Charlie Dulik
So many of my transparencies could not resist the race!
– Frank O’Hara
In anger, we should refrain both from speech and action.
– Pythagoras
Melancholy and happenstance,
patience worn thin of the daily prance
Doused and sealed in a crypt of sand,
for pillaging crops and life of the land
– Michael J, Rhubarb bandits
Evil calls for expiation, otherwise the wicked will destroy the world utterly, or the good will suffocate in the rage which they cannot vent, and in either case no good will come of it.
– C.G. Jung
We’re in a world where it is basically 30 people who are in the same group chats who are responsible for a substantial amount of what happens in our economy and politics… Economics as a discipline leaves us very ill-equipped to have useful thoughts on this.
– Krugman & Ferrell
The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.
– Bachelard
THE LEADER
Head like a big
watermelon,
frequently thumped
and still not ripe.
– Wendell Berry
The tunes of my own choosing
all sounded false and wrong.
I sought a newer music,
I found an older song.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Cause nobody’s the slightest idea who we are, or who we were, not even we ourselves — except, that is, in the glimmer of a moment of fair business between strangers, or the nod of knowing and agreement between friends. Other than these, we go out anonymous into the insect air and all we are is the dust of colour, brief engineerings of wings towards a glint of light on a blade of grass or a leaf in a summer dark.
– Ali Smith, How to Be Both
No one wants to be a ‘human being’, that’s not supposed to be something worth being. No one wants to be a ‘Christian’, that’s not supposed to be anything either. People don’t think tasks like these suffice for life. Yet they all want — yes, they fight and struggle and wear themselves out — to become something.
– Søren Kierkegaard
It is easy to speak with precision upon a general theme. Only, one must commonly surrender all ambition to be certain. It is equally easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague.
– Charles Sanders Peirce
The weaker the consciousness of a person is, the more he or she is likely to get fixated in projection, even when the reality has long departed from it, and he or she will remain captive to the power of history, the agenda of longing, and the wheel of repetition.
– James Hollis
No one will remember you if you say there’s no such thing / as a magical nerve gas or that there was no miracle / that day on the battlefield. If you say milk is good / for you or that we should love our mothers.
– David Kirby
Truth must enter into the soul, penetrate and saturate it, or else it is of no value.
– Spurgeon
With the support of tranquility, what is wise will often be obvious and simple. This is especially true in meditation; everyone has the ability to be wise in meditation, provided we are not too agitated to recognize it.
– Gil Fronsdal
Many traumatized people can’t describe their feelings, leading to a disconnect with their needs.
– Brad Schipke
The lack of empathy is rotting this nation from the inside out.
– Dr. Allison Wiltz
If I’m able to see how my intentions are connected to the anxiety I feel, then there’s a chance for me to break free from attachment and the suffering that follows from it.
– Suli Qyre
Don’t try to be better than you are, otherwise the devil gets angry. Don’t try to be worse because God gets angry. Try to be what you are, that is acrobatics enough.
– Carl Jung
The heart wisdom is wild wisdom. It’s spontaneous creativity, it’s enchanting, it’s illogical, it’s beautiful, it’s alive.
– Katerina Satori
We find no rest for our weary bones unless we cling to the word of grace.
– Martin Luther
We’re only travelers, singing songs whose meanings are obscure, wandering through the dark sky. That is all.
– Hao Jingfang
You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization – including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility, and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain – without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.
– Thomas Sowell
A body will not become weak where the intention is strong.
– Imam Sadiq
The ego changes all the time, it has every kind of illusion, but the Self is as it is, there is nothing we can alter in it.
– Carl Jung
I wish I knew how we achieve the goal of world peace. My bumper sticker reads ‘Just Another Version of You.’ The sooner we agree that we’re just other versions of each other – we human beings – the sooner we will find some sense of world peace.
– Norman Lear
The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
– G.K. Chesterton
You deserve love that feels like clarity, not confusion disguised as passion.
– Robert Wilkinson
Only the self enters in there, or the man who has completely become his self. he who is neither in events. nor in men, nor in his thoughts.
– Carl Jung
Poetry does not flow from thin air but requires always either a literal faith, and imaginative faith, or, as in Shakespeare, a mind full of many provisional faiths. The life we all live is not alone enough of a subject for the serious artist; it must be life with a leaning, life with a tendency to shape itself only in certain forms, to afford its must lucid revelations only in certain lights.
– R.P. Blackmur
Life is made up of small pleasures. Happiness is made up of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. And if you don’t collect all these tiny successes, the big ones don’t really mean anything.
– Norman Lear
Civil Wars happen when the victimized are armed. Genocide happens when they are not.
– A.E. Samaan
One can never know in what form a man will experience God.
– Carl Jung
Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.
– Sun Tzu
When the soul returns into itself and reflects, it passes into the realm of pure ideas and eternal truths; then it is freed from opinion and wanders no longer.
– Plato
my inbox is full of compliments
from people who don’t know
they’re reading the autopsy of a boy
who wrote his way back from the dead.
– Christopher Sexton
Poets, create from the very depths of the collective unconscious, voicing aloud what others only dream.
– Carl Jung
The eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears.
– Heraclitus
The major problem of life is learning how to handle the costly interruptions. The door that slams shut, the plan that got sidetracked the marriage that failed, or that lovely poem that didn’t get written because someone knocked on the door.
– Martin Luther King Jr
It’s not ‘natural’ to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting, articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little…have few verbal means. Eloquence…thinking in words…is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality. In groups, it’s more natural to sing, to dance, to pray: given, rather than invented (individual) speech.
– Susan Sontag
The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
To die hating them, that was freedom.
– George Orwell
How incredible in some ways it is to thirst for pen and paper. To need them as if they were water.
– Alice Walker
People who appear most outwardly perfect often hide the most inner chaos.
– Sigmund Freud
I think people would be happier if they admitted things more often. In a sense we are all prisoners of some memory, or fear, or disappointment — we are all defined by something we can’t change.
– Simon Van Booy
I believe alien life is quite common in the universe, although intelligent life is less so. Some say it has yet to appear on planet Earth.
– Stephen Hawking
Talking of patriotism, what humbug it is; it is a word that always commemorates a robbery. Patriotism is being carried to insane excess. I know men who do not love God because he is a foreigner.
– Mark Twain
I was made to go with my girl the way a saxophone was made to go with the night.
– Mark Knopfler
Get people to sing together and they’ll and they’ll act together too.
– Pete Seeger
If only we’d stop trying to be happy, we’d have a pretty good time.
– Edith Wharton
Whatever the apparent cause of any riots may be, the real one is always want of happiness. It shows that something is wrong in the system of government that injures the felicity by which society is to be preserved.
– Thomas Paine
To whom do I owe the biggest apology?
No one’s been crueler than I’ve been to me.
– Alanis Morissette, Sorry to Myself
Most people won’t attack your flaws.
They’ll attack your light.
Because your light exposes their shadows.
– Joselyn Ramos
“Everybody ‘writes’,” he said. He didn’t know until he saw my notebook that I was married to it.
– Alice Walker
A friend is one who joyfully sings with you when you are on the mountaintop, and silently walks beside you through the valley.
– William Arthur Ward
Things will improve when we start living on the top of the earth, on wind and light.
– Louise Erdrich
It is recovered!
What? Eternity.
It is the sea
Mixed with the sun.
– Arthur Rimbaud, tr. Louise Varèse
Humans aren’t evolved to worry about everything happening outside of their immediate environment.
– @naval
“Sound of Surviving”
I deliver
four rapid jabs, then a right
at my rival …
the blood dripping off
my shadow on the wall
another
defeat by greedflation
and rent hike …
I yell out, I want to feel
alive in this broken world
– Chen-ou Liu
A wise man accepts his pain, endures it, but does not add to it.
– Marcus Aurelius
In feature films, the director is god. In documentaries films, God is the director.
– Alfred Hitchcock
I name a cloud
for each of those involved
– reiko nakahara
I remember the black wharves and the slips
and the sea-tides tossing free,
and the Spanish sailers with bearded lips
and the beauty, and the mystery of the ships,
and the magic of the sea…
– Rudyard Kipling
summer drought
ant tracks in the dust
to another world
– Chen-ou Liu
If you’re hurt, you’re hurt. It doesn’t matter if anyone else thinks you don’t have a good enough reason. Pain doesn’t require approval.
– Sara Beth Durst
You can’t fool me. I know the difference between being busy and not being interested.
– sakara
tardigrade
in the Antarctic
is that all you’ve got?
– Jerome Berglund
“emily dickinson summer,” i whispered and never left the house again
– melissa broder
Love. No matter where I start, I always end up here.
– John Perkins
With few words I shall make thee understand my soul.
– Michelangelo
Samadhi, love, and psychological healing lead one away from fascism and all manner of authoritarianism.
– @awakened_living
We meet in words and we part in words, we adopt words and we lose words, after all, what is between man and man except the words that connect or separate.
– J. Elia
Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.
– Virginia Woolf
They’re trying to convince people they can’t do the things they’ve been doing easily for years – to write emails, to write a presentation. Your daughter wants you to make up a bedtime story about puppies – to write that for you.”
We will get to the point, she says with a grim laugh, “that you will essentially become just a skin bag of organs and bones, nothing else. You won’t know anything and you will be told repeatedly that you can’t do it, which is the opposite of what life has to offer.
Capitulating all kinds of decisions like where to go on vacation, what to wear today, who to date, what to eat. People are already doing this. You won’t have to process grief, because you’ll have uploaded photos and voice messages from your mother who just died, and then she can talk to you via AI video call every day. One of the ways it’s going to destroy humans, long before there’s a nuclear disaster, is going to be the emotional hollowing-out of people.
– Justine Bateman on AI
But we have never met our brains before, and perhaps we lack the metaphor with which to understand them. When I lie in bed in the morning, struggling to get up – a problem that has come with retirement and became much worse with hormone therapy and radiotherapy for cancer – I find it hard to escape a marine metaphor. My conscious self is like a small boat sailing on a deep ocean, or perhaps more like a submarine that comes to the surface when I awake. I then delude myself that I am steering the boat, when in fact its course is determined by the wind and the deep currents.
But this is a false metaphor, of course, as my conscious and unconscious selves are part of the same phenomenon, in a way that we find impossible to describe. The submarine is part of the ocean, not separate from it.
Most writers trying to describe the relationship between the conscious and unconscious sink into a muddled flood of analogies and metaphors – or perhaps I should more modestly say that I become muddled by what I read. My conscious and unconscious selves (for want of a better word) are made of the same material – the electrochemical activity of my 86 billion nerve cells. T am both my conscious and unconscious – they are not separate entities. Some psychologists and philosophers delight in telling us that our sense of self is an illusion. I briefly studied philosophy at Oxford University, but eventually fled to the more practical world of medicine. But at least I learned from studying philosophy for one year the importance of the phrase It all depends on what you mean by. The word ‘self’ is not easy to define, and the word illusion simply means that something is different from how it appears. I have no intention of going down the rabbit hole of what the word ‘self’ means, but I realise that I find it very hard to know what it is that I might be losing as my brain shrinks. How can I compare myself now with my past self?
– Henry Marsh
…the soul, disappears, comes back, draws nearer, moves away, alien to itself, elusive, at times certain, at others uncertain of its own existence, while the body is and is and is and has no place of its own.
– Wislawa Szymborska
If I look back on my life, the most wonderful things were always given to me, free or unexpectedly. Never in my life did I get something wonderful by trying to get it or with a strong intention.
– Hong Sangsoo
This book has you by heart. It knows you
backwards,
you and your sulky anguish, because you’re in it
now, you’re in this book,
it’s reading you, you’re caught by it, you can’t
get out.
– Margaret Atwood
In the summer I stretch out on the shore
And think of you
Had I told the sea
What I felt for you,
It would have left its shores,
Its shells,
Its fish,
And followed me.
– Nizar Qabbani
Writing is walking on a dizzying silence setting one word after the other on emptiness. Writing is miraculous and terrifying like the flight of a bird who has no wings but flings itself out and only gets wings by flying.
– Hélène Cixous
Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.
– Chuck Klosterman
Christianity taught us to see the eye of the lord looking down upon us. Such forms of knowledge project an image of reality, at the expense of reality itself. They talk figures and icons and signs, but fail to perceive forces and flows. They bind us to other realities, and especially the reality of power as it subjugates us. Their function is to tame, and the result is the fabrication of docile and obedient subjects.
– Gilles Deleuze
Did you ever notice how in the Bible, when ever God needed to punish someone, or make an example, or whenever God needed a killing, he sent an angel? Did you ever wonder what a creature like that must be like? A whole existence spent praising your God, but always with one wing dipped in blood. Would you ever really want to see an angel?
– Thomas Daggett
Get out of the construction business! Stop building bridges across the raging waters of samsaric existence, attempting to reach the “far shore,” nirvana. Better to simply relax, at ease and carefree, in total naturalness, and just go with the primordial flow, however it occurs and happens. And remember this: whether or not you go with the flow, it always goes with you.
– Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche
We sometimes go on as though people can’t express themselves. In fact they’re always expressing themselves. The sorriest couples are those where the woman can’t be preoccupied or tired without the man saying “What’s wrong? Say something…,” or the man, without the woman saying … and so on. Radio and television have spread this spirit everywhere, and we’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves;
What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying. What we’re plagued by these days isn’t any blocking of communication, but pointless statements. But what we call the meaning of a statement is its point. That’s the only definition of meaning, and it comes to the same thing as a statement’s novelty. You can listen to people for hours, but what’s the point? …
That’s why arguments are such a strain, why there’s never any point arguing. You can’t just tell someone what they’re saying is pointless. So you tell them it’s wrong. But what someone says is never wrong, the problem isn’t that some things are wrong, but that they’re stupid or irrelevant. That they’ve already been said a thousand times. The notions of relevance, necessity, the point of something, are a thousand times more significant than the notion of truth. Not as substitutes for truth, but as the measure of the truth of what I’m saying. It’s the same in mathematics: Poincaré used to say that many mathematical theories are completely irrelevant, pointless; He didn’t say they were wrong – that wouldn’t have been so bad.
– Gilles Deleuze
Gorgeous, amazing things come into our lives when we are paying attention: mangoes, grandnieces, Bach, ponds. This happens more often when we have as little expectation as possible. If you say, ‘Well, that’s pretty much what I thought I’d see,’ you are in trouble. At that point, you have to ask yourself why you are even here. And if I were you, I would pray ‘Help.’ Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time. Let it be. Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business.
– Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow, The Three Essential Prayers
…and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.
– John Steinbeck
Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.
– Teilhard de Chardin
May your love be firm,
and may your dream of life together
be a river between two shores—
by day bathed in sunlight, and by night
illuminated from within…
– James Bertolino
When, in Paradise Lost, Adam asks about the movements of the heavens, Raphael refuses to answer. “Let it speak,” he says, “the Maker’s high magnificence, who built / so spacious, and his line stretcht out so far; / That man may know he dwells not in his own; / An edifice too large for him to fill, / Lodg’d in a small partition, and the rest / Ordain’d for uses to his Lord best known.
– Bill McKibben, The End of Nature
I stood in the back corner watching them. They resembled three veterans who had met once more on a cold day after years of separation, and had lit a fire to warm themselves. I had pricked up my ears to overhear what they said, but none of them opened his mouth. You felt the air between them was vibrating and that a string of unspoken words was being unwound from mouth to mouth. Without the slightest doubt, this was how the angels spoke in heaven. How long did their silence last – how many hours? It seemed to me time had come to a standstill, that one hour and one century were of the same length.
– Nikos Kazantzakis
In his essays on world events, Jung was at pains to point out that society is vulnerable to psychic epidemics, since we no longer have any forms to humanize or contain our nonrational impulses. In these essays he argued not only that we can expect an increase in neurotic or mentally disturbed individuals, but that the social fabric itself is disturbed, and increasingly prone to acts of madness, violence and irrationality.
– David Tacey, How to Read Jung
The empty community of greed propped up by the cult of corporate personhood selects ever more severely for dark traits, until “empathy” is forever vanquished, silently and thoroughly replaced by a completely pervasive, all-encompassing, viciously relentless malignant narcissism that knows no beauty, harmony, or sustenance, only cold, violent, murderous destruction as its sole sad “strength” – treating humans, animals, plants, and all abundantly bountiful creatures, creations, and spontaneously arising magical beings inhabiting our vast fertile earth as two-dimensional objects to be ruthlessly cannibalized, wholly suffocated and subsumed into a grandiose false reality fabricated, eternally reinforced and constantly reified by utterly traumatized toddlers in order to escape the truth – too painful to face – that they will never know love, only bitter competition to the death for corporeal survival and oneupsmanship, DARVOing til the end, mercilessly killing their own family and flesh (their very own selves) preemptively for sport and “supply” with no reproach, due process, or comeuppance, leaving none for all and all for none.
Something’s gotta give
– Daniel Brummel
let them in
weary women, men and children
..into our hearts
– Gabriel Rosenstock
The universe is a great unknown wonderful place, and we know nothing, really, to speak of about it. I think that either depresses and frightens one or is exhilarating. We are very important, and we’re not important in quite the way we think we are. Each one of us is unique, and we can find out a whole lot just by examining ourselves. I think that’s the essential thing. Not paying attention to how you’re going to make money, just paying attention to whatever is around you. Each one of those seconds is your only chance. It’s your life. And it’s wonderful. The more attention that we pay to our ordinary lives leads to a real elation that we’re here at all.
– W.S. Merwin
Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it’s the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. …Science fiction is central to everything we’ve ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don’t know what they’re talking about.
– Ray Bradbury
One person may be seriously injured, but recovers quickly. Another person may be less seriously injured, but is left in the throes of chronic pain. Still another receives no physical injury, undergoes no strain of muscular exertion, and yet becomes racked with neuromuscular pain. In a large measure, these individual differences may be assigned to differences in the nervous system’s reactions to stress. Whether stress is physical or mental, its general effects are essentially the same. Even when stress is solely centered in the mind, the body never escapes its harrowing effects…
– J.F. Vannerson, M.A., D.C.