Journal XXXIX

Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect [us].
– Stewart Udall

Tender Spots

This is how you love a hurting world,
by finding the tender spots, like that
soft patch by the edge of the woods
where magenta asters have bloomed,
their bright color burning through the dusk
as leaves tumble down around them.
Or listening to a friend when she says
she feels like a failure, answering
Me too, before reminding her that failure
is also fertilizer, is just information.
You love a hurting world by touching
the tender spots hidden in you,
by taking your loud fury, your desire
to apologize on behalf of all men,
down to the pond, where lit ripples catch
every angry thought, every healing wish,
and hold them with you, with you.

– James Crews

To “look with the eyes of love” seems a vague and sentimental recommendation; yet the whole art of spiritual communion is summed in it, and exact and important results flow from this exercise. The attitude which it involves is an attitude of complete humility and of receptiveness, without criticism, without clever analysis of the thing seen… The doors of perception are cleansed, and everything appears as it is. The disfigurating results of hate, rivalry, prejudice vanish away. Into that silent place to which recollection has brought you — new music, new color, new light are poured from the outward world.
– Evelyn Underhill

This is the bright home
In which I live,
This is where
I ask
My friends
To come,
This is where I want to love all the things
It has taken me so long
To learn to love.

– David Whyte

The meaning of it all is unfolding right under our noses, all the time, but we can’t see it. We don’t pay any attention. We were taught from childhood to avert our gaze, lest we be considered fools. So now we seem to live in some kind of collective trance, lost in a daze. The likes of which have probably never before been witnessed in history. We feel the gaping emptiness and meaninglessness of our condition in the depths of our psyches. But, like a desperate man thrashing about in quicksand, our reactions only make things worse: we chase more fictitious goals and accumulate more fictitious stuff, precisely the things that distract us further from watching what is really happening. And, when we finally realize the senselessness of such reactions, we turn to ‘gurus’ doling out pill-form answers instead of paying attention to life, the only authentic teacher, who is constantly speaking to us. There is no literal shortcut to whatever it is that the metaphor of life is trying to convey. There is no literal truth. The meaning of it all cannot be communicated directly. There are no secret answers spelled out in words in some rare old book. The metaphor is the only way to the answers, if only we have patience and pay attention. Look around: what is life trying to say?
– Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney

But what can be done, the one who loves must share the fate of the one he loves.
– Mikhail Bulgakov

Arrogance in full bloom bears a crop of ruinous folly
from which it reaps a harvest all of tears.
– Aeschylus

There is a moment in the experience of love when you start to cut yourself on everything. On the edges of drawers and on the screen of your mobile phone, on your toothbrush and when you are watering a house plant, when you put your trousers on and when you take them off, when you open a book or close a door, when you tie your shoelaces and when you adjust the thermostat on the central heating; even bars of soap and the handrails on buses cut you. Suddenly objects want to sharpen their edges on you.
– Agustín Fernández

That your world is in agony is no reason to turn your back on it, or to try to escape into private “spiritual” pursuits. Rilke reminded me that I had the strength and courage to walk out into the world as into my own heart, and to “love the things / as no one has thought to love them.
– Joanna Macy

I’m not too gone to be healed, am I

I’m not too gone am I?

– Alice Notley

Which kind of safety are we endorsing? Is it the safety from psychological power-over and actual harm, or is it the safety from being made uncomfortable by active information that challenges one’s self-perception? If it is the latter, it is the assertion of this book that we owe it to one another to help each other tolerate the temporary discomfort that is necessary for the personal and social change produced by positive, interactive problem solving.
– Sarah Schulman

One tree is like another tree but not too much. One tulip is like the next tulip but not altogether. More or less like people: a general outline, then the stunning individual strokes. Hello Tom. Hello Andy. Hello Archibald, Violet, and Clarissa Bluebell. Hello Lillian, and Willow, and Noah, the oak tree I have hugged and kissed every first day of spring for the last 30 years, and in reply its thousand leaves tremble. What a life is ours. Doesn’t anybody in the world want to get up anymore in the middle of the night and sing?
– Mary Oliver

There is only one situation in which people put in effort to read: when they are in love and reading a love letter. Then, they read for all they are worth. They read every word three ways; they read between the lines and in the margins; they read the whole in terms of the parts, and each part in terms of the whole; they grow sensitive to context and ambiguity, to insinuation and implication; they perceive the color of words, the odor of phrases and the weight of sentences. They may even take punctuation into account. Then, if never before or after, they read.
– Mortimer J. Adler

I’m up to here with cool, okay? I am so amazingly cool you could keep a side of meat in me for a month. I am so hip I have difficulty seeing over my pelvis.
– Douglas Adams

There are three types of people in the world. What three?

One who is like carving on a rock, one who is like scratching on the ground, and one who is like writing on the water.

What sort of person is like carving on a rock? Imagine a certain person who is always getting angry and his anger lasts long, just as carving on a rock is not soon worn off by wind, water or lapse of time.

What sort of person is like scratching on the ground? Imagine a certain person who is always getting angry but his anger does not last long, just as scratching on the ground is soon worn off by the wind, water and lapse of time.

And what sort of person is like writing on the water? Imagine a certain person who, even though spoken to harshly, sharply, roughly, is easily reconciled and becomes agreeable and friendly, just as writing on the water soon disappears.

– Buddha Anguttara Nikaya

Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

I basked in you;
I loved you, helplessly, with a boundless tongue-tied love.
And death doesn’t prevent me from loving you.
Besides,
in my opinion you aren’t dead.
(I know dead people, and you are not dead.)

– Franz Wright

Healing is more than eliminating disease symptoms; it is a process of achieving wholeness, alignment, and integration that encompasses every level of our being.Healing encourages self-awareness and enables us to express our unique potential more fully in our work, study, and relationships with ourselves and others.The healing journey not only helps us connect to our own inner rhythms, but also brings us closer to our spiritual nature and the world around us.
– Nathaniel Altman

In mystical literature such self-contradictory phrases as “dazzling obscurity”, “whispering silence”, “teeming desert” are continually met with. They prove that not conceptual speech, but music rather, is the element through which we are best spoken to by mystical truth.

Many mystical scriptures are indeed little more than musical compositions… Music gives us ontological messages which non-musical criticism is unable to contradict, though it may laugh at our foolishness in minding them.

There is a verge of the mind which those things haunt; and whispers therefrom mingle with the operations of our understanding, even as the waters of the infinite ocean send their waves to break among the pebbles that lie upon our shores.

– William James

When you have lived as long as I, you will see that every human being has his shell, and that you must take the shell into account. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There is no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we are each of us made up of a cluster of appurtenances. What do you call one’s self? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us – and then flows back again. (…) One’s self – for other people – is one’s expression of one’s self; and one’s house, one’s clothes, the books one reads, the company one keeps – these things are all expressive.
– Henry James

The older I get, the more I find that you can only live with beings who liberate you, who love you with an affection that is as light to bear as it is strong to feel. Life today is too hard, too bitter, too debilitating for us to suffer new bondages, new captivities from those whom we love. This is how I am your friend: I love your happiness, your freedom, your adventure, in a word – and I would like to be, for you, a companion you can be sure of, always.
– Albert Camus

We human beings are in search of meaning, in search of our selves. Very little of what we already are and already have brings us deeper meaning or happiness. We are born for meaning, not pleasure, unless it is pleasure that is steeped in meaning. And we are born as well for suffering, not the suffering that leads to madness but the suffering that leads to joy: the struggle with ourselves and our illusions. We are born to overcome ourselves, and through that overcoming to find an inner condition of great harmony and being. We are born for that—we are not yet that. We are searchers; that is the essence of our present humanness.
– Jacob Needleman

What would you do differently, you up on your beanstalk looking at scenes of all peoples at all times in all places? When you climb down, would you dance any less to the music you love, knowing that music to be as provisional as a bug? Somebody has to make jugs and shoes, to turn the soil, fish. If you descend the long rope ladders back to your people and time in the fabric, if you tell them what you have seen, and even if someone cares to listen, then what?
– Annie Dillard

Between two musical notes there exists another note, between two facts there exists another fact, between two grains of sand, no matter how close together they are, there exists an interval of space, there exists a sensing between sensing—in the interstices of primordial matter there is the mysterious, fiery line that is the world’s breathing, and the world’s continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.
– Clarice Lispector

One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity.
– Albert Camus

I had a powerful sense of having escaped something: of having finally stepped outside the script.
– Elif Batuman

Love, like rain, can nourish from above, drenching couples with a soaking joy. But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself alive.
– Mitch Albom

There is more beauty in truth, even if it is a dreadful beauty. The storytellers at the city gate twist life so that it looks sweet to the lazy and the stupid and the weak, and this only strengthens their infirmities and teaches nothing, cures nothing, nor does it let the heart soar.
– John Steinbeck

…the genius of the English law would not suffer those persons to enjoy the benefits of society, who secluded themselves from it, and refused to submit to its regulations.
– William Blackstone

Everything was a status symbol and everything cost too much. There were so many on-trend consumers, standing in lines for blocks to experience a fad dessert, gimmicky art exhibits, a new retail concept store. We were all making such uninspired lifestyle choices. We, including me.
– Ling Ma

That’s the thing. Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you’re not really losing it. You’re just passing it on to someone else.
– Mitch Albom

The people have been deprived of what they should have received, and I would like to see that something is done for them.
– Mary Rice Farris

Being needed is hard bait for a lonely man.
– J. Steinbeck

This is my gold.
I will not hide it.
I will not trade it for approval.
I will bring it with me wherever I go.

– Jeffrey MacNutt, LSP

A gospel of love and community was truer to Christ’s teachings than a gospel of guilt and damnation.
– Jonathan Franzen

Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor teaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup.
– D. H. Lawrence

The quality of your life depends on what you pay attention to and how much you pay attention to.
– Swami Sarvapriyananda

Some people say, ‘I don’t take sides – I’m neutral.’ There’s no such thing. In your mind you’re on one side or the other.
– Florence Reece

Time picks the pockets that were full of dreams
Leaves us with the lessons written softly in between
Carries off the sunrise we forgot to see
But somehow it returns to who we’re meant to be
– Kathy Duff

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.
– Bertrand Russell

To do something well does not necessarily imply the ability to do everything else equally well. If you can do in one direction that which I cannot do, I may in another direction, be able to do that which you cannot do.
– Frederick Douglass

If there is neither excessive wealth nor immoderate poverty in a nation, then justice may be said to prevail.
– Thales

If justice truly existed, prisons would be filled with politicians, not the poor.
– Machiavelli

…how comfortable I used to be when I wrote, how easily I did it, how little
thought I gave to what I was saying until I had already said it. In fact,
in any real sense, what I was doing then was never writing at all: I
was doing no more than sketching in a rhythm and letting that
rhythm tell me what it was I was saying.
– Joan Didion

The secret of life is that it is not a secret. It is in front of you at every moment.
– Hafiz

Only the refusal to listen guarantees one against being ensnared by the truth.
– Robert Nozick

Kinder Than Man
by Althea Davis

And God
please let the deer
on the highway
get some kind of heaven.
Something with tall soft grass
and sweet reunion.
Let the moths in porch lights
go someplace
with a thousand suns,
that taste like sugar
and get swallowed whole.
May the mice
in oil and glue
have forever dry, warm fur
and full bellies.
If I am killed
for simply living,
let death be kinder
than man.

Like the sea, life didn’t promise us anything; it just carried us forward.
– Ke Huy Quan, Never Say Die: A Memoir

One of the best means for arousing the wish to work on yourself is to realize that you may die at any moment.
– Gurdjieff

For me, writers are what the priest has been throughout history, this person we pay to talk about spirituality.
– Dany Laferrière

When a man has learned – and not on paper – how to remain alone with his suffering, how to overcome his longing to flee, the illusion that others may share, then he has little left to learn.
– Albert Camus

Art, when it is authentic, is animated by restlessness.
– Pope Leo XIV

The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

Mine is not an obedient writing. I think that literature as any art has to be irreverent.
– Reinaldo Arenas

If they think you are weak, do not correct them.
Use their mistake against them.
– Octavia Butler

We carry the memory of yesterday, and it darkens our being.
– Krishnamurti

Human beings are called to be co-workers in the work of creation, not merely passive consumers of content generated by artificial technology.
– Pope Leo XIV

Maybe the life I was mourning was never the one I was meant to live; maybe I was only grieving the version of myself that believed it was.
– Malcolm Marshall

Always be reading something, he said. Even when we’re not physically reading. How else would we read the world? Think of it as a constant.
– Ali Smith, Autumn

I am a thorn bird in a silicon valley.
– Priyanka Jain

The most interesting things are invisible.
– Ramesh Kashyap, Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao

Expand your imagination.
– Robin S. Sharma

Smoke
by Henry David Thoreau

Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird,
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight;
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,
Circling above the hamlets as thy nest;
Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;
By night star-veiling, and by day
Darkening the light and blotting out the sun;
Go thou, my incense, upward from this hearth,
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.

We are living in the future
I’ll tell you how I know
I read it in the paper
Fifteen years ago
We’re all driving rocket ships
And talking with our minds
And wearing turquoise jewelry
And standing in soup lines
We are standing in soup lines

– John Prine, Living in the Future

How You Know

You will know a great love
has entered your life
when out of nowhere—
lying on a yoga mat
or driving to the store—
you weep with a mix
of gratitude and a bruising
grief, even at the thought
of someday losing it.

– James Crews

You would give up your dreams in order to escape your nightmares and I would not. I think it’s a bad bargain.
– Cormac McCarthy

A Single Tree
by Susan Stewart

In the distance, at the horizon, toward sunset,
the sole survivor of a native forest
that had vanished entirely.
It stood along a long and narrow path sloping
upward, drawing a neat separation
between one place and another, alfalfa
from field corn—a stipulated deed.
It was a mark, a landmark,
in a sheaf of maps lost when the learned
surveyors left or maybe
the courthouse had housed an arsonist,
maybe someone dropped a will into
the sea.

None of that mattered.
It seemed as if the starlings worshipped something
there, but it was too far to tell and depth
perception fails as the light fails.

I used to think I knew that tree and it
knew something of me—that it would
forever be a radiant orientation,
the axis of all later turns and reversals,
fixed by roots that stretched so
deep and invisible—as far and
wide as the canopy itself.

But only today I realized how, every
so often–when I awaken in the night,
just for a moment, foundered, lost—
it is the tree that comes to me.
And then I feel the leaves again against
my hair, then I hear the wind
again, nearer, almost near.
And I look to the west and sleep.
I look to the west and sleep.

The QUIET MACHINE

I’m learning so many different ways to be quiet. There’s how I stand in the lawn, that’s one way. There’s also how I stand in the field across from the street, that’s another way because I’m farther from people and therefore more likely to be alone. There’s how I don’t answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the floor in the kitchen and pretend I’m not home when people knock. There’s daytime silent when I stare, and a nighttime silent when I do things. There’s shower silent and bath silent and California silent and Kentucky silent and car silent and then there’s the silence that comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones and wails and wails and wails until I can’t be quiet anymore. That’s how this machine works.

– Ada Limón

Matisse said, “I believe in God when I’m working.” If our creative energy is blocked, it will find an outlet in some kind of distorted religion, or addiction. An addiction to me is a distorted religion.
– Marion Woodman

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
– William Faulkner

By handsomely rewarding the persona, the outside world invites us to identify with it. Money, respect and power come to those who can perform single-mindedly and well in a social role. No wonder we can forget that our essential identity is something other than the work we do, our function in the collective. From being a useful convenience, therefore, the persona easily becomes a trap. It is one thing to realise this, but quite another to do something about it. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke [ The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge] put it quite well:

We discover, indeed, that we do not know our part; we look for a mirror; we want to rub off the paint, to remove all that is artificial and become real. But somewhere a bit of mummery that we forget still sticks to us. A trace of exaggeration remains in our eyebrows; we do not notice that the corners of our lips are twisted. And thus we go about, a laughing-stock, a mere half-thing:
neither real beings nor actors.

– Daryl Sharp, Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey

I feel completely paralyzed, away from you; I’m not hungry; I can’t sleep; can’t read; can’t think. I’ll be all right, but not by recovering from missing you; only by learning, and it must take a good deal of learning, how to live with this huge whistling hole in my guts and heart.
– Sylvia Plath

There is the tragedy and despair of all machinery laid bare. Unlike art which is content to create a new secondary world in the mind, it attempts to actualize de- sire, and so to create power in this World; and that cannot really be done with any
real satisfaction.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

To have risked so much in our efforts to mold nature to our satisfaction and yet to have failed in achieving our goal would indeed by the final irony. Yet this, it seems, is our situation.
– Rachel Carson

Parents are constitutionally unable to throw out anything that their kids made.
– Anne Lamott

Symbols of the Self, collective symbols of the Self, wear out. Religions, convictions, truths, they all age.
– Marie Louise von Franz

This inner world is truly infinite, in no way poorer than the outer one. Man lives in two worlds.
– Jung

darkening fields
the village still waiting
for moonlight

– Basho

Neither failure nor success has the power to change your inner state of Being.
– Eckhart Tolle

Relationship is absolutely necessary; otherwise, you cannot exist. Relationship means co-operation. Relationship means love and generosity.
– Krishnamurti

Darkness exists but by the light, and for the light.
– George MacDonald

“New York is punctate, scintillating, the way all cities look from a plane at night,” wrote the virtuoso, word-drunk, absent-minded and deeply present Oliver Sacks. “It is a mosaic of qualities and peoples and dates and styles, a sort of enormous urban jigsaw.”
– Pico Iyer

Seeing things as they really are entails becoming more attuned to other human beings—their sufferings, needs, and aspirations. It lies in a shift toward greater empathy and understanding of the subjective realities of those around us.
– Nagapriya

The foolish few who, with such knowledge, failed to keep their wealth of intuitions in their hearts, revealed their feelings and their visions to the rabble, have in all times been crucified and burned.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust

Jung said, “Every part of us we do not love will regress and become more primitive.” He didn’t say, “Indulge it,” or even, “Indulge in it.” He said, “Accept that part,” and he’s right to say that.
– Robert Bly

CHOP WOOD, CARRY WATER

Forget mistakes, forget failures, forget everything,
except what you’re going to do now and do it.
Today is your lucky day.

– Will Durant

In a world where everyone has the same access to AI, it’s hard to be differentiated.

I think what’s left to humanity is the outside the box thinking, the creative process, the insight.

And if you look at our most successful investments, they’ve usually been cases where we’ve done something that someone hasn’t done before.

– Shane Parrish

Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?
– Leo Tolstoy

I feel a faintly physical vertigo when I hear of jets that fly faster than sun-time—or in the opposing direction. It ain’t natural.
– Wright Morris

It is worse to stay where one does not belong at all than to wander about lost for a while and looking for the psychic and soulful kinship one requires. It is never a mistake to search for what one requires.
– Clarissa Pinkola

I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.
– Emil Cioran

We need to become vividly aware of our ecology, of our interdependence and virtual identity with all other forms of life which the divisive and emboxing methods of our current way of thought prevent us from experiencing. The so-called physical world and the so-called human body are a single process, differentiated only as the heart from the lungs or the head from the feet.
– Alan Watts

He was not a bitter man, but he was a man who had known much sorrow, and he had learned that sorrow is a room you can never entirely leave; you can paint the walls and buy new furniture and let the light in through big windows, but the room is always there. He told himself to share the beauty out loud, but to let grievance simmer quietly in the hope that it might cook down into wisdom.
– Brian Doyle

Hearts are wild creatures.
Thats why our ribs are cages.
– Mark Beech

If you want to choose the pleasure of growth, prepare yourself for some pain.
– Yalom

To be saved I must
slip away from the moderns
quietly and go to that land
I have heard
so much
about (the north wind) the gardens
full with my favorite
lilacs.

– Frank Samperi

It is so easy to be hopeful in the daytime when you can see the things you wish on. But it was night, it stayed night. Night was striding across nothingness with the whole round world in his hands … They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against cruel walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.
– Zora Neale Hurston

The blue seems eternal.
– Virginia Woolf

The ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it.
– Margaret Mead

Teilhard believed that each person is a universe wherein the dust of experience is gathered into a unity.
– Ilia Delio, Christ in Evolution

This is the message of your life and my life – it’s that nothing lasts. Heraclitus said it: Panta Rhei. All flows, nothing lasts. Not your enemies, not your fortune, not who you sleep with at night, not the books, not the house in Saint-Tropez, not even the children – nothing lasts. To the degree that you avert your gaze from this truth, you build the potential for pain into your life. Everything is this act of embracing the present moment, the felt presence of experience, and then moving on to the next felt moment of experience. It’s literally psychological nomadism is what it is.
– Terence McKenna

Be joyful because it is humanly possible.
– Wendell Berry

One must not content oneself with small demands but must rise to the thought that all living creatures have to be redeemed. One must not be trivial and irresponsible in heart, but must strive to make deeds prove one’s words.
– Richard Wilhelm

His student said to him,
“So, tell us, then, what our end and destiny will be?”
Yeshua answered,

“Have you already discovered your origin
so that you are now free to seek after your end?
It is only at your source that you will find your destiny.
Blessed are those who come to stand
in their place of origination,
for it is there that they will know their end–
never tasting death.”

– The Gospel of Thomas – Logion 18

Parsifal, Turning Difficulties into Healing,
by Jack Kornfield

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

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

The train of my life
by Jean d’Ormesson

At birth, we board the train and meet our parents.
And we believe they will always travel with us.
Yet, at one station, our parents will get off the train, leaving us alone to continue the journey…
As time goes by, other people board the train.
And they will be important: our siblings, friends, children, even the love of our life.
Many will step down (even the love of our life) and leave a void, greater or lesser.
Others will be so discreet that we won’t even realize they’ve left their seats.
This train journey will be full of joys, sorrows, waits, hellos, goodbyes, and farewells.
Success is having good relationships with all the passengers, provided we give the best of ourselves.
We don’t know at which station we will get off.
So let’s live happily, love, and forgive!
It’s important to do so, because when we get off the train,
we should leave only beautiful memories to those who continue their journey…
Let’s be happy with what we have and thank the heavens for this fantastic journey.
Also, thank you for being one of the passengers on my train.
And if I have to get off at the next station,
I’m glad to have traveled a stretch of the way with you!
I want to say to every person who reads this text that
I thank you for being in my life and for traveling on my train.

Translated from French

Kingfisher
by Hai-Dang Phan

for Roya

You are far and I am a falling thing.
My winter haunts our summer hunts

when we were blue and blur. Remember?
I remember watching you watching the river.


How you wore the sky on your back and the earth
on your breast. How you pierced the river

and scattered the clouds. A bolt split through me
seeing you at work and at play, hearing you


rattle and rush up and down the river the length of day.
Those spring mornings, I sensed new depths

in the meaning of the word alive,
understood how sunlight and mist conspire

to reveal us to each other. But each winter
I must lose you to find you again. I see you everywhere,

in everything the wind stirs. This morning,
for instance, as I was reading the book of the forest,

I noticed how each ghost gray beech tree clings
to its autumn leaves, saw in their trembling

the color of your flanks, a copper nimbus
clouding my love-sight. My dagger, lover, queen,

eros arrows us to the spot. The river talks
stories of us if you listen, and the trees keep our secrets

like moss, like lichen. Maybe memory
is not such a bad thing after all—

memory will fly you back to me.
Until then, any perch will do,

and a little river medicine.

Within us is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, the eternal One.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

As for me, she said, I seek not the Lover that completes me, that was good for when I was poor of time, when biology dictated my clockwork, ticking into doom. Now I seek the transmuting agent, the opener of worlds, the substance actuator, that which I will be made to re-spect forever. I seek the intertwined reality of numerous sensations, allowing me to explode into innumerable bright sparks of inquisitiveness, of realigning curiosities of old into new constellations of sense-thought. You see, my dear, no longer being constrained by the time of body, I am now the explorer of the body of time, which is love for the me-eternal.

My desire is fierce into the unknown, parsing joys unheard of, protecting the freedom of ecstasy from the banality of its conclusion.
That is my job description, the eternal lover.

– Aubrey De Grey

But do not speak of gardens, do not speak of the moon, do not speak of the rose, do not speak of the sea. Speak of what you know. Speak of what vibrates in your marrow and plays light and shadows in your eyes, speak of the ceaseless pain in your bones, speak of vertigo, speak of your breathing, of your desolation, of your treason […] Oh speak of silence.
– Alejandra Pizarnik

Who do you serve? Do you serve somebody? I serve the poem, no one.
– In the Pines Alice Notley

Who defined me? My culture, a culture of mercy, a living codex. I am a unique culture of one, from everywhere. I am her map and her self. I am everyone in the story; I am the story.
– Alice Notley, Culture of One

There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt, of examining what our ideas really mean (feel like) on Sunday morning at 7 AM, after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth; while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while tasting our new possibilities and strengths.
– Audre Lorde

A bouquet of clumsy words: you know that place between sleep and awake where your still dreaming but it’s slowly slipping? I wish we could feel like that more often. I also wish I could click my fingers three times and be transported to anywhere I like. I wish that people didn’t always say ‘just wondering’ when you both know there was a real reason behind them asking, and I wish I could get lost in the stars. Listen, there’s a hell of a good universe next door, let’s go.
– E.E. Cummings

She didn’t read books so she didn’t know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop.
– Zora Neale Hurston

There are certain constant entropies and creatings which are a part of our inner cycles. It is our task to synchronize with them. Like the chambers of a heart which fill and empty and fill again, we “learn to learn” the rhythm of this Life/Death/Life cycle instead of becoming martyred by it. Liken it to jump rope. The rhythm already exists; you sway back and forth until you are copying the rhythm. Then, you jump in. That’s how it is done. It is no more fancy than that. Further, intuition provides options. When you are connected to the instinctual self, you always have at least four choices… the two opposites and then the middle ground, and “taken under further contemplation.” If you’re not vested in the intuitive, you may think you only have one choice, and often that it is an undesirable one. And you feel that you should suffer about it. And submit. And force yourself to do it. No, there’s a better way. Listen to the inner hearing, the inner seeing, the inner being. Follow it. It knows what to do next.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The world is a totality in itself. It has its own muscles, its own brain, its own limbs, and its own circulation. We are not talking about the totality of the world in the sense that everything should be good and perfect and fantastic, and nobody should acknowledge anything bad. We are talking about reality, in which good is made out of bad and bad is made out of good. Therefore, the world can exist in its own good/bad level, its self-existing level of dark and light, black and white, constantly. Whatever is there, favorable or unfavorable, is workable: it is the universe.
– Chögyam Trungpa

A day is like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doing something else, plan to run an errand, but never get there … And at the end of your life, your whole existence has the same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day.
– Michael Crichton

And after that loneliness will accompany you to
every airport, train station, bus depot, café, cinema,
and onto airplanes and into cars, strange rooms and
offices, classrooms and libraries, and it will hang near
your hand like a habit.
But it isn’t a habit and no one can see it.
It’s your obligation, and your companion warms itself
against you.
You are faithful to it because it was the only vow you
made finally, when it was unnecessary.
If you figured out why you chose it, years later, would
you ask it to go?
How would you replace it?

– Fanny Howe

…to be loved and found magical, like a secret…
– Anne Sexton

It’s that thing when you’re with someone, and you love them and they know it, and they love you and you know it… but it’s a party… and you’re both talking to other people, and you’re laughing and shining… and you look across the room and catch each other’s eyes… but – but not because you’re possessive, or it’s precisely sexual… but because… that is your person in this life. And it’s funny and sad, but only because this life will end, and it’s this secret world that exists right there in public, unnoticed, that no one else knows about. It’s sort of like how they say that other dimensions exist all around us, but we don’t have the ability to perceive them. That’s That’s what I want out of a relationship or just life, I guess.
– Frances Ha (2012), Dir. Noah Bumbach

People who feel any sort of regret where you are concerned will suppose you are angry, and they will see anger in what you do, even if you’re just quietly going about a life of your own choosing. They will make you doubt yourself, which, depending on cases, can be a severe distraction and a waste of time. This is a thing I wish I had understood much earlier than I did.
– Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Let me say this before rain becomes a utility they can plan and distribute for money. By ‘they’ I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment, it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness.
– Thomas Merton

You can start with nothing. And out of nothing and out of no way, a way will be made.
– Michael Bernard Beckwith

Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.
– Anne Carson

Magic doesn’t sweep you away; it gathers you up into the body of the present moment so thoroughly that all your explanations fall away: the ordinary, in all its plain and simple outrageousness, begins to shine – to become luminously, impossibly so. Every facet of the world is awake, and you within it.

The deeper I slid into the material density of the real, the more I found that there was nothing determinate or predictable about existence. Actuality, this inexhaustible mystery, cannot be domesticated. It is wildness incarnate. Reality shapeshifts.

– David Abram

Generosities

Believe in the smaller generosities
of life. The basket of clementines
piled high at the coffee shop, free
for any child who wants one. The plum
sliced open and held out by a vendor
at the farmer’s market, juice running
down his scarred hand as you receive it.
The few extra hours of sleep after
your heart hammers you awake at 3am,
or the compliment from a friend—
“I love that shirt!’ -which you carry
like an ember in your pocket all day,
something to warm you when wind
rips at your down coat, and a lid
of gray cloud settles over the city,
pressing everyone closer together.

– James Crews, The Sacred Everyday

If words are of any use at all,
they are the words of the poet.
For poetry has the ability to
point us toward the truth,
then stand aside.

– Bill Porter / Red Pine

Who you are has more in common
with the Sky than the Clouds.
– Susan Piver

YOU WILL SEE BRILLIANT COLORS

We are located in the tract between
preservation and obsolescence; we are great
vacancies; we are great in our vacancies;
we are fantastic.

Frames of ships that can’t but sink sink
and between there’s fog; any number of
events associated with the sea.

This is large and also vacant.

When we move hands the hands we see mirror
ways that move the moving in that it and in it
we see hands collecting in movement collections
of seeing mirrors of moving and we move in, we do.

– Thea Brown

From the psychological point of view,
demons are nothing other than
intruders from the unconscious,
spontaneous irruptions of unconscious
complexes into the continuity of the
conscious process. Complexes are
comparable to demons which fitfully
harass our thought and actions; hence
in antiquity and the Middle Ages acute
neurotic disturbances were conceived
as possession.
– CG Jung

According to the Taoists, yang and yin, light and shadow, useful and useless are all different aspects of the whole, and the minute we choose one side and block out the other, we upset nature’s balance.
– Connie Zweig

In the widest sense of the word, to name is to interpret experience by the past, to translate it into terms of memory, to bind the unknown into the system of the known.

Civilized man knows of hardly any other way of understanding things. Everybody, everything, has to have its label, its number, certificate, registration, classification. What is not classified is irregular, unpredictable, and dangerous.

Without passport, birth certificate, or membership in some nation, one’s existence is not recognized.

– Alan Watts

I write because I have nothing better to
do in this world: I am superfluous and
last in the world of men. I write because I
am desperate and weary. I can no longer
bear the routine of my existence and,
were it not for the constant novelty of
writing, I should die symbolically each
day.
– Clarice Lispector

I miss nothing, but on this night
I mourn that there is nothing
to miss.
I am a house someone has left,

– Tove Ditlevsen

This world is made of clouds and of the shadows of clouds. It is made of mental landscapes, porous as air, where men and women are as trees walking, and as reeds shaken by the wind.
– John Cowper Powys

What a privilege it is to carry heavy shopping bags, to have clean clothes, to slip into freshly made sheets, and to sit down to a meal you love. What a privilege it is to laugh, to love, to be held, to feel safe, to have choice and to start again.
– Sophie Harvey

The divine has no place on earth more kindred to it than a pure soul.
– Demophilus

Allow shame to find no home in your posture,
in your dances, in your aura, in your
lovemaking, in your lovemaking sounds, in your
dreaming spaces, in your every single desire.
– India Ame’ye

Yearning for others’ accomplishments is a way of avoiding the hard work of developing one’s own potential. What one desires in others is an unlived aspect in oneself that needs attending.
– Rose-Emily Rothenberg

At the bottom of the modern man there is always a great thirst for self-forgetfulness, self-distraction; he has a secret horror of all which makes him feel his own littleness; the eternal, the infinite, perfection, therefore scare and terrify him. He wishes to approve himself, to admire and congratulate himself; and therefore he turns away from all those problems and abysses which might recall to him his own nothingness.
– Henri-Frédéric Amiel

I do mind, resent really, years
wasted with my own neurotic
living and my dull mind.
– Anne Sexton

There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable— a novel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown.
– Freud

We need people to challenge the status quo. We need a population that refuses to tolerate propaganda, rationalizations, or cover-ups. People who are willing to stand up and say, “This is not right. I won’t be a part of it.”

We need you to say it.

– Ryan Holiday

so, here you are
too foreign for home
too foreign for here.
never enough for both.

– Ijeoma Umebinyuo, diaspora blues

We living contemporaries are of mysterious significance to one another.
– Hugo von Hofmannsthal

All things must change
As the wind is blown;
Time will estrange
The flesh from the bone.
– Countee Cullen

The universe is real but you can’t see it. You have to imagine it. Then you can be realistic about reproducing it.
– Alexander Calder

A man lives in slavery without meditation because he lives unconsciously. He lives like a robot.
Meditation starts changing you: it transforms your unconsciousness into consciousness. It changes your darkness into light.
– Osho

Now you are among us, you really exist,
a tiny actuality of living blood,
still with some amazement,
uneasy still,
not knowing why you came.
(And you will never know,
although seraphs unfold
their wings to your gaze, although
God reveal Himself to you in a rose,
and the whole world yield itself to you in one evening.)
You will not know. And you will cry with grief,
and laugh, and wear your soul for all to see,
and love a pair of eyes,
and kiss the lips of life and death.
But you will not know.
Your journey here
is veiled in the mystery of music
that flows from star to star,
from sky to sky,
from heart to heart.

– Eugenio Florit, (tr. Donald Devenish Walsh)

wake up butterfly
we have miles
to travel together

– Basho

The awakening is
not gentle. It is the
sudden knowledge
that no one is
coming to save you.

– Marguerite Duras

Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves.
– Gandalf (Tolkien, The Two Towers)

We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy.
– Thurgood Marshall

Zen’s aspiration is experiential, not academic. You don’t have to prove the existence of a god before you commit yourself to living a good life. Otherwise, you may never get started.
– Geoff Dawson

To strip ourselves of the imaginary royalty of the world. Absolute solitude. Then we possess the truth of the world.
– Simone Weil

This, then, is the state of affairs: Modern Science has led to a prodigious increase of information about the phenomena in formerly unexplored or neglected fields, but in so doing it has not brought man any closer to the depths of reality, but has rather distanced and estranged him from them…

Nature’s mysteries have simply been covered over, and attention diverted from them by the spectacular success of technology and industry, where one no longer tries to know the world, but to change it for the purposes of earthbound humanity…

The truth is that man has gained nothing from the progress of science and technology, neither in regard to knowledge, nor in regard to his own power, and still less in regard to any higher law of conduct.

– Julius Evola

distant sirens …
from one dream to another
no blinking exit

– Chen-ou Liu

Cleanse your mind of all negation, such as fear, worry, anger; then fill it with thoughts of love, service, and joyous expectation. In the sanctum of your heart there must be enshrined one power, one joy, one peace — God.
– Paramahansa Yogananda

I want to produce my best thought, my best feeling, my best technique. I can produce copy—that’s not a problem. I can produce books left and right. The question is, What do you want your name on? What do you want to endure?
– Charles Johnson

the sparrow’s young mouth
opens
the underworld’s well

– Jack Galmitz

and all that flies today
is crooked and vain and has been cut from a book.

– Anne Sexton

Poets whose work supports the status quo often fail to acknowledge that their poems are just as political as poets whose work questions it.
– Jericho Brown

For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

…a little comic relief in a discussion does no harm, however serious the topic may be. (In my own experience the funniest things have occurred in the gravest and most sincere conversations.)
– C.S. Lewis

It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge.
– Voltaire

Buddha saw life as a flowing procession of conditions, events and circumstances, with one thing leading to another without beginning or end—timeless and limitless.
– Diana St Ruth, Understanding Karma and Rebirth

The true self…responds to no lure except that of the divine freedom.
– Thomas Merton

All escapes are the same; there is no superior or inferior escape.
– Krishnamurti

You be greater than your feelings. I don’t demand this of you — life does. Otherwise you’ll be washed away by feelings. You’ll be washed out to sea and never seen again.
– Philip Roth

Marriage was built around permanence; modern desire was built around options. We are asking an ancient institution to survive a marketplace of infinite alternatives.
– Esther Perel

A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.
– Roald Dahl

We live in the twilight of things, granted one last glorious vision. Unable to even bearing adequate witness to the wonder that is vanishing, and unable to halt it.
– Richard Flanagan

Where mercy lives, God needs no other address.
– Deepak

Rest is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be.
– David Whyte

Yes, the mind is brilliant, but the more we observe it, the more we see it is also obsessive and repetitive.
– Richard Rohr

Freedom would be meaningless without security in the home and in the streets.
– Nelson Mandela

A compensation is something which does not quite compensate.
– Frances Parkinson Keyes

If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves.
– Thomas Edison

Every time you meet a receptive human being, show him your interest in his physical, mental, and spiritual welfare. Never neglect to do whatever you can for yourself in the forms of others.
– Paramahansa Yogananda

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.
– Neil Postman

When a door of earthly opportunity closes, a door of spiritual opportunity opens.
– Said Nursî

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.
– Francois de la Rochefoucauld

As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested.
– Oscar Wilde

Every creature is a letter written by the Divine Hand, waiting to be read.
– Said Nursî

He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.
– Socrates

FRIENDSHIP

Oh, the comfort –
the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person –
having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words,
but pouring them all right out,
just as they are,
chaff and grain together;
certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them,
keep what is worth keeping,
and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.

– Dinah Maria Craik

“And what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversation?”
– Lewis Carroll

Some days I can’t get an idea, and I think, ‘Man, I’m just washed up,’ but it’s just a mood.
– Jean-Michel Basquiat

I know the burden’s heavy
As you wheel it through the night
Some people say it’s empty
But that don’t mean it’s light

– Leonard Cohen (A Street)

Our view of life is but a sliver of light in the thick, velvety darkness. […] Remember that any summary of life, even a well-written biography, fails to capture the details that comprise a life: the quiet evenings by the sink, the way a person smiled or laughed, an April sunset turning crimson behind a row of beech that sets them into a reverie of childhood, which is, itself, misremembered, since accessing a memory changes its form.
– Andrew Bertaina

Hope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door at some point, some way out of the problems of the present moment even before that way is found or followed.
– Rebecca Solnit, Hope

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.
– James Baldwin

INTERVIEWER
You’ve also written that Americans tend to avoid contemplating larger issues. What is it that we’re afraid of?

ROBINSON
People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.

– Marilynne Robinson, The Art of Fiction

But AI can’t do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to save anyone money. Take radiology: there’s some evidence that AIs can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss, and look, I’ve got cancer. Thankfully, it’s very treatable, but I’ve got an interest in radiology being as reliable and accurate as possible.

If my Kaiser hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: “Hey folks, here’s the deal. Today, you’re processing about 100 x-rays per day. From now on, we’re going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you’ve missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you’re only processing 98 x-rays per day. That’s fine, we just care about finding all those tumors.”

If that’s what they said, I’d be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market’s bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: “Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists’ job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it’s catastrophically wrong.

“And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist’s fault, because they are the ‘human in the loop.’ It’s their signature on the diagnosis.”

This is a reverse centaur, and it’s a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it’s what Dan Davies calls an “accountability sink.” The radiologist’s job isn’t really to oversee the AI’s work, it’s to take the blame for the AI’s mistakes.

This is another key to understanding – and thus deflating – the AI bubble. The AI can’t do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can’t do your job. This is key because it helps us build the kinds of coalitions that will be successful in the fight against the AI bubble.

– Cory Doctorow

There is a love for the real, an affection for the true, in all of Dutch art. A church interior with its stillness. A hand with its gesture. A landscape with its distances. A cloud with its motion.
– Katharine Weber

With few exceptions music has been for some centuries the art which has devoted itself not to the reproduction of natural phenomena, but rather to the expression of the artist’s soul, in musical sound. A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end.
– Wassily Kandinsky

The group enhances the ego… but the self is diminished and put in the background in favor of the average…. Instead of finding security and independence in oneself, which is what is needed, the danger exists that the individual will make the group into a father and mother and therefore remain as dependent, insecure and infantile as before..
– Jung

Your ancestors used to sit in the sun to regulate their nervous systems. They would walk in the woods, bathe in the river, sit around a fire and share stories with one another. They’d sing under the moonlight. They would dance with their full body. They’d look up at the stars, lay in the grass, and feel the wind on their skin. Before it was called regulation, your ancestors knew it as a way of life.
– Lexy Florentina

The true metaphysicians are found among the debauchees, not elsewhere. It is by extenuating, by martyrizing our senses that we realize our nothingness, the abyss our frolics conceal for a moment.
– Emil Cioran

Compassion is the primary attitude that assists the awakening to reality.
– Karuna Cayton

For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.
– C.S. Lewis

Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing, for the known way is an impasse.
– Heraclitus

Some writers are trying to explore lines of enquiry and work through an idea and encourage us to think, be haunted, and to deal with it. But many of us want just buzzwords, quotables, or a checklist.

Like Quincy Jones said, “We need more songs, man. Fucking songs, not hooks.”

– @tamaranopper

Love that lasts doesn’t run away from hard conversations, it picks you back up when you feel low and it eases your stress when too much is going on.
– Yung Pueblo

There are processes in the body which the mind can never comprehend or control—the beat of the heart, the surge of feeling, the longing for love. And because the mind cannot fully control the body, it is afraid of the body as it is of the unknown forces in nature.
– Alexander Lowen

You must confront things as they truly are.
– Richard Wilbur

a path
that no one travels
autumn dusk

– Basho

The land is numb.
It stands beneath the feet, and one may come
Walking securely, till the sea extends
Its limber margin, and precision ends.
By night a chaos of commingling power,
The whole Pacific hovers hour by hour.

– Yvor Winters

People are the best
show in the world. And
you don’t even pay for
the ticket.

– Charles Bukowski

This land is your land and this land is my land, sure, but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway.
– Bob Dylan

I had to have it. It was a phantasmagoria.
– Diane Williams

Jack Kerouac is gone in October, sixty-two dollars in the bank
And he′s buried near the place of his birth
Getting beat up outside of bars and passing out in cars
He left his blood soaked in the railroad earth
October in the railroad earth

What′s that thing called fame really worth?
Light a candle for his soul in some old Mexicali church
October in the railroad earth…

– Tom Russell

do not go outward; return into yourself. truth dwells in the inner man; and if you find your nature mutable, transcend even yourself.
– Augustine of Hippo

Trust rarely dies in one dramatic moment. It usually dies from a hundred tiny inconsistencies.
– Unknown

All is a play in consciousness. All divisions are illusory. You can know the false only. The true you must yourself be.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Nearly anything can be turned into a spiritual art if you do it with the right intention.
– Nika Solé

As I revise another draft I mutter to myself, “Like James Baldwin said, ‘I’m not a writer. I’m a re-writer.’”
– @tamaranopper

Only when firmly grounded in a strong real self can we live and share our lives with others in ways that are healthy, straightforward expressions of our deepest needs and desires, and in so doing find fulfillment and meaning.
– James F. Masterson

Art gives life to what history killed. Art gives voice to what history denied, silenced, or persecuted. Art brings truth to the lies of history.
– Carlos Fuentes

At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes…
– Charles Bukowski

Health is not everything, but without health, everything is nothing.
– Arthur Schopenhauer

My life is an open book, but there is a subterranean life I don’t want to reveal to anyone. And why the hell should I?
– Louise Nevelson

The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.
– Aldous Huxley

Something inside you knows when you’re sleeping that the moon is shining on you and on half the world, and even though it may be very dark in the room, the moon’s shy light is present. It silvers the wavering dark, as if the night is an ocean.
– Anne Lamott

Energy can be both poison and medicine depending on the source.
– Nika Solé

I have lived, as they say, keeping myself to myself, that is, utterly alone-alone, entirely alone. Do you know what it means to be alone?
– Dostoevsky

If it entertains you now but will bore you someday, it’s a distraction. Keep looking.
– @naval

REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #23

A lack of faith is simply a lack of courage
one who says ‘I wish I could believe that’ means simply that he
is coward, is pleased
to be spectator, on this scene where there are no spectators
where all hands not actually working are working against
as they lie idle, folded in lap, or holding up newspapers
full of lies, or wrapped around steering wheel, on one more
pleasure trip

– Diane di Prima

At some point, more
understanding stops
being useful.

If someone keeps
showing you the same
pattern, believe
the pattern.

– @upwardchanging

Now a willpower that I have published with an artist’s attention will support my feeble legs and tired out lungs. I will make it.
– Che Guevara

Even the most dramatic miracles or displays of power weren’t as effective a way of emphasizing the difference between humans and gods as the utter unshakability of divine stillness.
– Peter Kingsley

Whenever she gave two reasons for saying no to something—or even three—it was clear she had no reason at all.
– Pico Iyer

People criticize the intense ones a lot, but I’ve never met anyone extraordinary who has lived all their passions with moderation.
– Maria Jose Castaño

Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.
– David Bowie

The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.
– Gabriel García Márquez

We entered alone and we left alone. And most of us lived lonely and frightened and incomplete lives.
– Charles Bukowski

Ordinary nightmares don’t transport one
to higher spiritual levels.

– Grzegorz Wróblewski

REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #8

Everytime you pick the spot for a be-in
a demonstration, a march, a rally,
you are choosing the ground for a potential battle.
You are still calling these shots.
Pick your terrain with that in mind.
Remember the old gang rules:
stick to your neighborhood, don’t let them lure you
to Central Park everytime, I would hate
to stumble bloody out of that park to find help:
Central Park West, or Fifth Avenue, which would you
choose!

go to love-ins
with incense, flowers, food, and a plastic bag
with a damp cloth in it, for tear gas, wear no jewelry
wear clothes you can move in easily, wear no glasses
contact lenses
earrings for pierced ears are especially hazardous

try to be clear
in front, what you will do if it comes
to trouble
if you’re going to try to split stay out
of the center don’t stampede or panic others
don’t waver between active and passive
resistance know your limitations, bear contempt
neither for yourself, nor any of your brothers
NO ONE WAY WORKS,
it will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides
to bring it down.

– Diane di Prima

Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
– Sigmund Freud

Kobayashi Issa

little trout
swim west, the blossoms
flow east

わか鮎は西へ落花は東へ
waka ayu wa nishi e ochi hana wa hingashi e

A lovely scene of conflicting movement and color.
The trout swim upstream (west),
while the fallen floating blossoms flow east.

See others as yourself.
See families as your family.
See towns as your town.
See countries as your country.
See worlds as your world.

– Lao Tzu

I dove in and decided that I would rather fail at poetry than succeed at anything else. Looking back at it now, I feel that it all had an air of desperation—as if I were drowning and saw an oar going by and grabbed on for dear life.
– Edward Hirsch

Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face
of the deep.
– T.S. Eliot

An open heart allowed me to ask for feedback from authors I didn’t know. An open heart will let me overcome resistance to change.
– Andrea Eschen

the endless blue
of the Aegean Sea …
smell of summer

– Chen-ou Liu

If you don’t receive love from the ones who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it.
– Robert Goolrick

That’s what every uncomfortable feeling is for – that’s what pain is for, what money is for, what everything in the world is for: your self-realization.
– Byron Katie

Maturity is the ability to postpone gratification.
– Sigmund Freud

Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions.
– William O. Douglas

I alone cannot change society for the better. But I can radically transform my own consciousness, overturning the conditioning that limits my potential. We can all do this, one by one. Over time we can change ourselves to the degree from the inside out.
– Unknown

Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.
– Sigmund Freud

On the other hand, there is reason to believe that the first pot of jam was mysteriously discovered by a child. His parents only learned of the event once the pot was empty — of course.
– Erik Satie

All of your ideas, all of your concepts they’ve all got to go. There has to be only silence, quietness and everything will take care of itself. … Let go of everything.
– Robert Adams

Know the male, yet keep to the female: be the ravine of the world. Being the ravine of the world, eternal virtue will not desert you… Know the white, yet keep to the black: be the pattern for the world. Being the pattern for the world, eternal virtue will not falter.
– Laozi

happy or not
just to be as I am …
patches of fog

– Chen-ou Liu

The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.
– Sigmund Freud

I really miss when humor was recreational for me. Now apparently it’s a load bearing component of my mental stability.
– @RationalBlonde

Aiming at simplicity and lucidity is a duty of all intellectuals: lack of clarity is a sin, and pretentiousness is a crime.
– Karl Popper

Other worlds are not far away. They are here, but we do not see them because our senses are limited. When consciousness expands, they are revealed.
– Majide Bou Tiybe

Ice-cream is exquisite. What a pity it isn’t illegal.
– Voltaire

Liberalism, properly understood, is the political science of putting first things first.
– Mark Lilla on Judith N. Shkla

I compare human life to a large mansion of many apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me.
– John Keats

You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
– E. M. Forster

But this was what happened when you didn’t want to visit and confront the past: the past starts visiting and confronting you.
– Bret Easton Ellis

We contemplate eternity
Beneath the vast indifference of heaven
– Warren Zevon

There are only three kinds of scenes: negotiations, seductions, and fights. I’m finished. Thats all.
– Mike Nichols

Evil possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste to the world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface.
– Hannah Arendt

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
– Thomas Mann

We are experiencing a rise in so-called dissociative disorders, such as borderline personality disorder, conditions in which the sense of one’s own identity is weakened or lost altogether. In the modern world the individual may experience himself or herself as no longer having a role and a place in a close-knit community on a human scale, and therefore as engulfed in the mass – of the populace, of the city, of bureaucratic organizations and global corporations – relatively powerless. No wonder people emphasize (with tragic and damaging results) something called ‘identity’, in which, ironically, their true identity is swallowed up.
– Iain McGilchrist

Learn the plants
They have been here longer than you
– the ancestors

She took the sea with her
Not beaches but the grey
relentless Irish sea,
its rhythm and the crying gulls.
– Caroline Davies

You ought to be out raising hell. This is the fighting age. Put on your fighting clothes.
– Mother Jones

The nihilist is right in thinking that the world possesses no justification and that he himself is nothing. But he forgets that it is up to him to justify the world and to make himself exist validly.
– Simone de Beauvoir

The state of enchantment is one of certainty. When enchanted, we neither believe nor doubt nor deny: We KNOW.
– W.H. Auden

There is a kind of vanishing that isn’t a departure, but a slow, quiet rot from the inside out until your absence is more real than your presence.
– Thomas Ligotti

Whoever builds up too good a persona has to pay for it in irritability.
– Frances G. Wickes

Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.
– Elie Wiesel, Night

It was always better to tell a partial truth with a willing aspect than to tell a perfect truth in a defensive way. The appearance of cooperation was worth a great deal, if only because it forced a reciprocity, fair met with fair.
– Eleanor Catton

Whether you believe or disbelieve,
It is a wicked thing to take away hope.
– Winston Churchill

He slept beneath the moon, he basked beneath the Sun;
He lived a life of going to do and died with nothing done.
– James Albery

We are threatened with universal genocide if we cannot work out the way of salvation by a symbolic death.
– Carl Jung

Can you maintain what started on the mountain top when you go into the valley?
– Bill Johnson

When we applaud humility only for its softness or discipline only for its ferocity, we lose the fruit of gentleness in all its spiritual richness.
– Julia B. Seymour

When you ask a question and there is no response, then that is the answer.
– Haemin Sunim, The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down

…to betray friends… may enable a man to achieve empire, but not glory.
– Niccolò Machiavelli

There’s a capacity for appetite . . . that a whole heaven and earth of cake can’t satisfy.
– Samuel, East of Eden (Steinbeck)

And when the roofs darken, when the stars drift
until they shatter on the sea’s finish,
you will know what I told you is true
when I said abandonment is beautiful.

– Spencer Reece, Portofino, The Clerk’s Tale

The Surrealist tradition … is united by the idea of destroying conventional meanings, and creating new meanings or counter-meanings through radical juxtaposition (the “collage principle”). Beauty, in the words of Lautréamont, is “the fortuitous encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.”
– Susan Sontag

It is poetry I desire now. I want concentration and wonder, and words agglutinated together, gushing and radiant.
– Virginia Woolf

Courage, purity, effort in yoga, generosity, control of the senses—these are the divine qualities. Cruelty, anger, ignorance—these belong to those born for destruction.
– Krishna

Everywhere, halfway between revelation and fiction, that’s where I belong.
– Margaux Cassan

The known looking at the unknown brings about fear.
– Krishnamurti

I live in the United States, but I do not know exactly where. My address is wherever there is a fight against oppression. My address is like my shoes; it travels with me. I abide where there is a fight against wrong.
– Mother Jones

the problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind. the problem is how to get old ones out.
– Dee Hock

If you love me, as you say you do, then let me feel at peace.
– Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

When men claim the supernatural, they are called Gods and Prophets. When women do the same, they are called witches and get burned alive.
– Sofiana Spinoula

The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived.
– Oscar Wilde

As a young man, your primary assignment is to build. Your mind. Your skills. Your body. Your income. Your character. Your vision. These are not side quests. They’re the main mission. They determine the man you become and the life you’ll be able to offer later. Get to work!
– @Healthwolf2

Everyone who loves you must realize that you need a little protection.
– Franz Kafka, 1920.

morning breeze …
sipping the sunlight
from my tea cup

– Chen-ou Liu

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
– Virginia Woolf

One night I dreamed of such a world. I rowed upon the surface of the moon and there was no wind, there were no moments, for the moon is as empty as the inside of an eye and not even the sound of a shadow falling falls there.
– Anne Carson

I am assailed with my own ignorance and inability.
For no one else knows my lack of ability the way I do.
– John Steinbeck

What the warrior renounces anything in his experience that is a barrier between himself and others.
– Chögyam Trungpa

The problem is that we don’t smile when chaos occurs to us.
– Chögyam Trungpa

People don’t need love. What they need is success in one form or another. It can be love but it needn’t be.
– Charles Bukowski, Factotum

The unknown cannot be experienced. You may think or speculate about the unknown, or be afraid of it, but thought cannot comprehend it.
– Krishnamurti

When we are aware of all the intricate processes and parts that make up our bodies, we are less likely to identify the overall image as “me.” Disdain for our bodies is, in fact, born not of detachment but of identification.
– Hannah Tennant-Moore

For most of my adult life, ‘easy’ was the highest compliment I thought I could earn. Easy to date. Easy to room with. Easy to work with… Being easy meant being good. Being easy meant people wanted me around. What I didn’t examine—what took me years to even notice—was that being ‘easy’ required a constant, invisible sanding-down of my own preferences.
– Dakota J. Dawson

Without community there
is no liberation.
– Audre Lorde

The function of freedom is
to free someone else.
– Toni Morrison

All flourishing is mutual.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer

WISDOM OF NO MISTAKES

All too often, we get stuck in the belief that things are good or bad, right or wrong. Today, around the world, this split is no doubt a source of real division and harm. This is why each day we need to put into practice “The Wisdom of No Mistakes.”

In Zen calligraphy, it is the brush stroke of the empty circle, known as the enso. It is not meant to be perfect or complete. This suggests letting the brush stroke be natural. However, many of us aim for a perfect circle and criticize ourselves when it is uneven. If not careful, we can go over and over how it is imperfect and should have been better. Rather than becoming preoccupied with “getting it right,” what if we see that there are no mistakes, that everything is like a river flowing by?

The Wisdom of No Mistakes asks us to live fully and openly, staying in the flow itself. The composer John Cage once said, “A ‘mistake’ is beside the point, for once anything happens, it authentically is.”

Each passing brush stroke of our lives is unique, never before arisen. To live authentically is to live whole-heartedly with the way things are. When we relinquish the insistence to get things right, we can fly freely through the universe. So, don’t expect you yourself or those around you to be perfect. Use the energy of the world to your advantage. When you abandon judgement about right and wrong and let things be, the world will lift you up and take you. Can you remain open to the circle of life just as it is today?

– Tias Little

All I know is that there was a change in me and, discovering that change in me, I would do anything to keep it unchanged I would not let it die in me. I had to keep listening, listening, listening to it, just as you listen to another thing in this shutter. The sawmill tried to drown it out, the cisternwheel tried to drown it out; I had to save it, hear it; so I went away. I don’t want to live if I can’t hear that voice.
– William Goyen

Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.
– Ray Bradbury

We turn these women who “refuse to back down” into icons; our voracious appetite for heroism is characteristic of a society of spectators glued to their seats, crushed by a sense of powerlessness. Being fragile has become an insult. […] What will become of the uncertain? Of those who cannot cope—or who do so only with great difficulty and without glory? We end up celebrating the very same values ​​as the government we revile: strength, power, conquering, and winning.
– Lola Lafon

And I understood that if I kept it all up…
no one would know me.
A dim light far in the distance? No.
To love — I had to be there.
I had to be there to be loved.
– Marie Howe

So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent—if not inappropriate—response.

[…] Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question of what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing ‘we’ can do—but who is that ‘we’?—and nothing ‘they’ can do either—and who are ‘they’?—then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic. […] It is passivity that dulls feeling.

– Susan Sontag

What would it be like
to live in a library
of melted books.

With sentences streaming over the floor
and all the punctuation
settled to the bottom as a residue.

It would be confusing.
Unforgivable.
A great adventure.

– Anne Carson

A mind might ponder its thought for an epoch, and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach in a day.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

The world is a totality in itself. It has its own muscles, its own brain, its own limbs, and its own circulation. We are not talking about the totality of the world in the sense that everything should be good and perfect and fantastic, and nobody should acknowledge anything bad. We are talking about reality, in which good is made out of bad and bad is made out of good. Therefore, the world can exist in its own good/bad level, its self-existing level of dark and light, black and white, constantly. Whatever is there, favorable or unfavorable, is workable: it is the universe.
– Chögyam Trungpa

We must lead a double life within our lives, carry a double stream of blood in our hearts, joy alongside sorrow, laughter alongside shadows, two horses in the same harness, each pulling in its own direction at a breakneck pace. So we ride, travelers on a snowy path seeking the right stride, seeking the true thought; and sometimes beauty burns us like a low-hanging branch striking our face, and sometimes beauty bites us like a wondrous wolf leaping at our throat.
– Christian Bobin

I will live, even if life betrays me and I will dream, even if dreams
abandon me.
– Mahmoud Darwish

We are like hedgehogs on a cold winter day.
We want to be close together for warmth,
but we hurt each other with our quills.
– Arthur Schopenhauer

Love grounds us to face
all things with courage
and tenderness.

– James Finley

And I have become cold
again, and insensible;
nothing is left but a senile
love for unbroken calm.
– Franz Kafka

Be so deeply intimate with existence
that the separate you dissolves
and awareness is all that is left.
– @KavijiPoet

Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed, but in every case it is someone else’s blood. That is why some of our thinkers feel free to say just about anything.
– Albert Camus

Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again.
– Karl Popper

Ruthless Love, great bane, great curse to mankind, from thee come deadly strifes and lamentations and groans, and countless pains as well have their stormy birth from thee. Arise, thou god, and arm thyself against the sons of our foes in such guise as when thou didst fill Medea’s heart with accursed madness.
– Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica

I wanted pure love: foolishness; to love one another is to hate a common enemy: I will thus espouse your hatred. I wanted Good: nonsense; on this earth and in these times, Good and Bad are inseparable: I accept to be evil in order to become good.
– Jean-Paul Sartre

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.
– Sigmund Freud

difference between
who I am and what I was
new year’s drops of dew

– Chen-ou Liu

Learn everything.

Study the history of science, magic, medicine, government, war. Learn to cook, sew, paint and climb. Grow plants. Raise kids. Start a business and pick up an instrument.

You are a writer, the whole world is your domain.

Take it.

– James Carran

My longing for her was like a bad cold that had hung on for years despite my conviction that I was sure to get over it at any moment.
– Donna Tartt

The Water Rat was restless, and he did not exactly know why.
– Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

Man often plays a part in life, and he may play a part which is not his.
– Nikolai Berdyaev

Anarchists are committed to treating other people as equals, rather than as either masters or subordinates.
– Roderick Long

I love you so much that I am even careless and indifferent with you. You feel so much a part of me, as though you had always been my sister, my first love, my wife, my mother, and everything a woman has ever been to me. You are That Woman.
– Boris Pasternak

Inasmuch as existence originates from corruption, corruption from desire, desire from sensation, sensation from contact, I have ever avoided all action, all contact, and perpetually – motionless as the stela of a tomb… I dreamed of the essence of the great Soul whence continually escape the principles of life.
– Gustave Flaubert

I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.
– Charles Dickens

In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory.
– Walker Percy

He who nurtures benevolence for all creatures within his heart overcomes all difficulties and will be the recipient of all types of riches at every step.
– Chanakya

I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.
– Terry Pratchett

The spiritual path wrecks the body and afterwards restores it to health. It destroys the house to unearth the treasure, and with that treasure builds it better than before.
– Rumi

The path to oneself is difficult.
– Hermann Hesse

Freedom is always, and exclusively, freedom for the one who thinks differently.
– Rosa Luxemburg

To send light into the darkness of men’s hearts — such is the duty of the artist.
– Robert Schumann

The whole purpose of religion
is to facilitate love and compassion, patience,
tolerance, humility, forgiveness.
– Dalai Lama

I give myself sometimes admirable advice , but I am incapable of taking it.
– Mary Wortley Montague

There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you’d been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place, and for a moment you’re suspended knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself.
– Ann Patchett

Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.
– Plato

Weapons cannot cleave it, nor fire burn it; water cannot wet it, nor wind dry it away.
– Bhagavad Gita

The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end finds God.
– Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Even the most elaborate philosophical system is ultimately just a raft. Use it to cross, then leave it behind.
– Adi Shankara

Surrender will always feel like dying, and
yet it is the necessary path to liberation.
– Richard Rohr

The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.
– Lorraine Hansberry

Emotions are inconvenient for the bottom line, so we are trained from a young age to perform as though we don’t have any.
– Rayelle Davis, Money In the Mountains

If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up recreating fundamentally the same world, the same evil, the same dysfunction.
– Eckhart Tolle

Our consciousness does not create itself—it wells up from unknown depths. In childhood it awakens gradually, and all through life it wakes each morning out of the depths of sleep from an unconscious condition.
– Carl Jung

We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.
– Rainer Maria Rilke

My mother is a poem
I’ll never be able to write,
though everything I write
is a poem to my mother.

– Sharon Doubiago

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
– George Bernard Shaw

The Italians have a word for the store of poems you have in your head: a gazofilacio […] in its original language it actually means a treasure chamber of the mind. The poems I remember are the milestones marking the journey of my life. And unlike paintings, sculptures or passages of great music, they do not outstrip the scope of memory, but are the actual thing, incarnate.
– Clive James

Writing is a continuation. We take one breath after another, one step after another, always one step away from something, one word closer to something we don’t yet know.
– Marcia Aldrich

Beauty makes me hopeless. I don’t care why anymore I just want to get away. When I look at the city of Paris I long to wrap my legs around it. When I watch you dancing there is a heartless immensity like a sailor in a dead-calm sea. Desires as round as peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather what falls.
– Anne Carson

A person is a prism, you know, and concepts just flash from this to that from day to day.
– Anne Carson

You think psychopathy
has nothing to do with
the capitalist system?
You’re wrong.
Capitalism farts cruelty
like gas from a
lawnmower.

– Anne Carson

Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror
up to where you are bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence
is in every small contracting and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.

– Rumi

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

Quiet people always know more than they seem. Although very normal, their inner world is by default fronted mysterious and therefore assumed weird. Never underestimate the social awareness and sense of reality in a quiet person; they are some of the most observant, absorbent persons of all.
– Criss Jami

There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.
– Zora Neale Hurston

She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just something she grabbed up to drape her dreams over. In a way she turned her back upon the image where it lay and looked further. She had no more blossomy openings dusting pollen over her man, neither any glistening young fruit where the petals used to be. She found that she had a host of thoughts she had never expressed to him, and numerous emotions she had never let Jody know about. Things packed up and put away in parts of her heart where he could never find them. She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen. She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.
– Zora Neale Hurston

The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying ‘And another thing…’ twenty minutes after admitting he’d lost the argument.
– Douglas Adams

The mediocre have no importance except through appointment. They feel invaded and defeated by the presence of creative folk among them.
– Zora Neale Hurston

She ain’t a fact and neither do she make a good story when you tell about her.
– Zora Neale Hurston

Repent means “the pain again.”
– Anne Carson

I kept silent all day,
And above all I wanted to be with you
– Anna Akhmatova

When the bell rings she hurries up to me with more than twenty sheets of paper. She’s Indian—Hidatsa, maybe, or Sioux—and the other children let her pass as if she were invisible. The morning star dances in a red circle, singing a song about his girlfriend Sheila; the angel Gabriel stands before Mary, his blue wings ablaze with stars. His mouth is open wide and notes are coming out, each one a different color. A woman with green hair holds her hands up to the sky and says: These are secret words, Say them after me. May all the plants and flowers rise And all people rise from death.

I look up from the paper: a dusty shelf, a starfish in a jar caked with dust beside dusty petri dishes. I see shades of blue: the globe cerulean, the sky bleached out. And out the window, above the children’s heads, topsoil, the residue of ancient oceans, swirling like a thumbprint in the playground, wind pushing the empty swings. “So many poems,” I say, smiling at the girl. “You must love to write.” She shifts from foot to foot and weaves her hands in air. “I don’t have paper at home,” she says, “so I keep them in my head. That’s where they live until I write them down.”

– Kathleen Norris

I love a good man outside the law, just as much as I hate a bad man inside the law.
– Woody Guthrie

I make all my decisions on intuition, but then I must
know why I made that decision. I throw a spear into the
darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army
into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.
– Ingmar Bergman

If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.
– William James

Suffering is part and parcel of extensive intelligence and a feeling heart.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Zen is a method for transformation. It’s fierce, you don’t hide out, you appear as yourself. You want freedom, you want to understand the universe. You want to stop building the house of pain.
– John Tarrant

Leon Dufour, a world-renowned Jesuit theologian and Scripture scholar, a year before he died at ninety-nine, confided in a Jesuit who was caring for him, “I have written so many books on God, but after all that, what do I really know? I think, in the end, God is the person you’re talking to, the one right in front of you.” I mantra I use often, to keep me focused in delight on the person in front of me, comes from an unlikely place. Richard Rolheiser writes that, “the opposite of depression is not happiness, it’s delight.” After all, we breathe in the Spirit that delights in our being. We don’t breathe in the Spirit that just sort of puts up with our mess. It’s about delight.
– Greg Boyle

Oh men, your destiny.
When all is well a shadow can overturn it.
When trouble comes a stroke of the wet sponge,
and the picture’s blotted out. And that,
I think that breaks the heart.
– Aeschylus

Let people realize clearly that every time they threaten someone or humiliate or unnecessarily hurt or dominate or reject another human being, they become forces for the creation of psychopathology, even if these be small forces. Let them recognize that every person who is kind, helpful, decent, psychologically democratic, affectionate, and warm, is a psychotherapeutic force.
– Abraham Maslow

Wisdom: The Voice of God
by Mary Karr

Ninety percent of what’s wrong with you
could be cured with a hot bath,
says God through the manhole covers,
but you want magic, to win
the lottery you never bought a ticket for.
(Tenderly, the monks chant,
embrace the suffering.) The voice never
panders, offers no five-year plan,
no long-term solution, no edicts from a cloudy
white beard hooked over ears.
It is small and fond and local. Don’t look for
your initials in the geese honking
overhead or to see through the glass even
darkly. It says the most obvious shit,
i.e. Put down that gun, you need a sandwich.

In the darkness a large black-and-yellow spider had woven a perfect web right above me, guying it to the log, several elderberry stems, and my shirt. I eased out from under it as carefully as I could, but not without damaging it. In my bewilderment I spent several perfectly crazy minutes trying to fix it. But of course a man can’t make a spider’s web, any more than he can make a world. Finally I said, “Pardon me, old friend, I have got to go.”
– Wendell Berry

Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference, and do not pretend to undervalue the worldly rewards of ambition, we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us. But, above all, we have learned that whether a man accepts from Fortune her spade, and will look downward and dig, or from Aspiration her axe and cord, and will scale the ice, the one and only success which it is his to command is to bring to his work a mighty heart.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

In failing societies, there is a thousand fools for every enlightened mind, and a thousand crude words for every conscious word. The majority always remains ignorant, and the reasonable man is constantly defeated. If you see trivial topics dominating discussions in a society, and fools taking center stage, then you are in the presence of a very failing society. For example, songs and meaningless lyrics find millions of people to dance to them and repeat them, and the singer becomes famous, known, and loved. To the point that people take his opinion on matters of society and life. As for writers and authors, no one knows them and no one gives them value or weight. Most people love futility and anesthesia. Someone who anesthetizes us to distance us from our thoughts, and someone who makes us laugh with trivialities, is better than someone who wakes us to reality and hurts us by telling the truth. That is why democracy is not suitable for ignorant societies, because it is the ignorant majority who will decide your fate.” The Literary World.
– Chekhov, Translated from French

Although one might wish otherwise, in dreams what is important is not the images. What matters is the impression produced by the dream. The images are minor; they are effects.
– Jorge Luis Borges

WRITTEN
ON MASTER HENG CHAO’S WALL

A Zen path
The autumn moss grows over;
Icy windows bear streaks
Of rain.

The true mind
Mysteriously integrates
Itself, but who appreciates
Good poems? Dew chills;
Cricket noises muffle.
A light wind fans
Shadows of foliage.

As if intent,
All day in the window
White clouds.

– Chien Chang (tr. Paul Hansen)

You seek the path. I warn you away from my own. It can also be the wrong way for you. May each go his own way.
– CG Jung

east and west
one shared sadness
autumn wind

– Basho

The word at last,
No more dependencies:
Cold moon in pond,
Smoke over the ferry.

– Koko (tr. Lucien Stryk)

Every challenge we encounter is an opportunity to learn to stand on our own again, grounded and immovable by any external force, unperturbed by inner grasping or turmoil.
– Reverend Cristina Moon

The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.
– Alberto Giacometti

No one lives his life.

Disguised since childhood, haphazardly
assembled from voices and fears and little
pleasures, we come of age as masks.

Our true face never speaks.

Somewhere there must be storehouses where all
these lives are laid away like suits of armour or
old carriages or clothes hanging limply on the
walls.

Maybe all paths lead there, to the repository of
unlived things.

– Rainer Maria Rilke

MY LIFE

You go off without me, my life,
You roll,
And me, I’m still waiting to take the first step.
You take the battle somewhere else,
Deserting me.
I’ve never followed you.

I can’t really make out anything in your offers.
The little I want, you never bring it.
I miss it; that’s why I lay claim to so much.
To so many things, to infinity almost…
Because of that little bit that’s missing, that you never bring.

– Henri Michaux (tr. W. S. Merwin)

The only rule of the journey is: don’t return the way you left. Return different.
– Anne Carson

We live amidst absurdity, so close to it that it escapes our notice.
– Tom Stoppard

Generally speaking you’re free until you’re about four years old… then you go to grammar school and then you start becoming demanded and solved and orientated and shoved into areas. You lose what individualism you have. If you have enough of course, you retain some of it, but most don’t have enough so they become watchers of game shows, you know, and things
like that.
– Charles Bukowski

into the middle of this question and leave us there. It makes me
think of a hardboiled egg. Cut it open, you see an exquisite de-
sign-the yellow circle perfectly suspended within the white oval.
The two shapes are disjunct and dissimilar yet construct one form.
They do not contradict or cancel out, they interexist. Can you say
one is prior? Circle as distorted oval? Oval as imperfect circle?
Rather they each follow the other in a perfect system called egg.
– Anne Carson

To the complaint, ‘There are no people in these photographs,’ I respond, There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.
– Ansel Adams

Joy erupts on many fronts as the always uncontainable and original multi-media classicist Anne Carson receives the Nobel. Canada itself has long been the home of what sits outside all categories, so perhaps it too is being recognized.
– Pico Iyer

More computation does not [make] us more ‘intelligent,’ only more computationally powerful.
– Joichi Ito

Your greatness as a human being is not your productivity, your financial potential, or your speed at finding “answers,” as a machine might. Your greatness is that you are a question the universe has never asked before.
– Joseph Fasano

I’d like to see more novels not written by people who have all the time in the world to write them.
– William F. Buckley Jr.

I fell in love with literature and stayed lovesick all my life.
– Tom Stoppard

Time is not made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose on action.
– Anne Carson

You don’t have to prove your worth. You have to live like you believe in it.
– Lewis Howes

This is where the real work begins. Not in the doing, but in the being. Meditation is not an escape from life — it is the practice of meeting yourself, fully, without flinching. When you learn to sit in the silence, you discover that the silence has always been speaking.
– J. Aldo

Doesn’t it seem extraordinary to you that the world embroils itself in this madness called war and, at the same time, the flowers, the bees, and the seasons continue on their course, wise, never tiring of waiting for humanity to come to its senses and remember how beautiful life is?
– Kate Morton

Ontologically speaking, is the sky something or merely what is left over because everything else has edges.
– Anne Carson

When we are flooded with the presence of love, a thousand years’ thirst is quenched, and we suddenly realize:

this is what I’ve been thirsty for.

This is what I was searching for.

– Shai Tubali

The progressive degeneration of the human species is clearly perceived in the fact that we are increasingly deceived by people with less talent.
– Charles Darwin

What you send out is already finding its way back.

Every thought, feeling, and intention is energy —
and energy is never still.

It ripples through the cosmos,
weaving into the infinite pattern of creation,
and returns in ways more magical than we can imagine.

– Bill Philipps

To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
– Anne Carson

Who do you think you are? Imagine there’s a version of you that sees all of it. A version that knows when versions are messing with the other ones, trying to get things off track, trying to erase things. A record of all the keystrokes, the storage of all the versions, partial and deleted and written over. All the changes. All truths about all parts of our self. We break ourselves up into parts. To lie to ourselves, to hide things from ourselves. You are not you. You are not what you think you are. You are bigger than you think. More complicated than you think. You are the only version of you that is you. There are less of you than you think, and more. There are a million versions of you, half a trillion. One for every particle, every quantum coin flip. Imagine this uncountable number of yous. You don’t always have your own best interests at heart. That’s true. You are your own best friend and your own worst enemy. You can’t trust a guy who gives you a book and says, This is your life. He might have been your future, he might not. Only you know how you get there. Only you know what you need to do. Imagine there is a perfect version of you. Out of all the oceans of oceans of you, there is exactly one who is perfectly you. And that’s me. And I’m telling you: you are the only you.
– Charles Yu

The Wonder Is

The washing never gets done.
The furnace never gets heated.
Books never get read.
Life is never completed.
Life is like a ball which one must continually
catch and hit so that it won’t fall.
When the fence is repaired at one end,
it collapses at the other. The roof leaks,
the kitchen door won’t close, there are cracks in the foundation,
the torn knees of children’s pants . . .
One can’t keep everything in mind. The wonder is
that beside all this one can notice
the spring which is so full of everything
continuing in all directions — into evening clouds,
into the redwing’s song and into every
drop of dew on every blade of grass in the meadow,
as far as the eye can see, into the dusk.

– Jaan Kaplinski

I live in a world that is completely seamless between the two. Fantasy is the real story. The world in which we live is structured from notions that are completely fabricated; your clothes, your wallet, that we all agree that pieces of paper are worth something. Geography is a complete fabrication. Where does Mexico start and America end? From space, nowhere. We agree to kill each other, to tax each other, to shame each other from notions that are complete fabrications. To me, those are harmful fantasies. Whereas my fantasies are liberating.
– Guillermo Del Toro

We feel, from a Western standpoint, that haiku are unfinished. They are simply titles; first lines of something that could go on to elaborate and express everything. But in this kind of artistry, one leaves the best part unsaid, because the work of the poet is not to impress everybody with how clever he is, and leave them speechless, but to evoke something in the listener. In exactly the same way, the art of the painter–in the tradition of Sung Chinese painting–is to leave something to the beholder’s imagination; hence, there is what is called “one-corner painting.”

A painter like Mahiwon [i.e., Ma Yuan]–or Byon, as he is known in Japanese–is a master of one-corner painting. He indicates a line of hills somewhere near the top, and down at the bottom there is a single drifting boat and a fisherman. This is all there is. The path, as it were, comes to an end in the parsley. To understand this, you have to go back to childhood. Remember how as a child you loved to explore paths and get right down among the stalks of grasses and weeds, to see where it all goes? One of the eternal children’s stories is that you were one day walking along a little lane and discovered a door in a wall that you had never seen before. You opened it, and it led into a magical garden where all the bushes were covered in jewels, and there were marvelous birds and fantastic songs. And you came out because you had to get home in time for dinner, and the next day you looked for that door again but you couldn’t find it anywhere. You knew it was there–it was just between this fence and that fence. But today it isn’t there. And yet somehow it is always there.

So, for every child there is always a kind of funny place that leads to somewhere else, and you don’t figure out exactly where it leads because that would spoil it. You mustn’t know. And all this haiku poetry, and this kind of painting that the Sung artists so marvelously mastered, seeks to evoke that sense of what I would call possibility or potentiality, without actually filling in any details. And that is real magic.

– Alan Watts

Dear Friend
(excerpt)

I become each day more reckless,
too impatient for summer, the unbearable heat,
the calm that comes with it. There are no hills here,
not one, and I’m bored with the stillness

of the yellow field outside my window. And you,
who cannot keep still, who can never
look back, where will you go next?
How will I find you?

Can you feel the world pull
apart, the seams loosen?
What, tell me, will keep it whole,

if not you? if not me?
Send a postcard, picture, tell me
how you’ve been.

– Blas Falconer

Now, as far as I was concerned, there are two ways of living, and because we’re on a ball in space these were more or less exactly poles apart. The first, accept the world as it is. The world is concrete and considerable, with beauties and flaws both, and both immense, profound and perplexing, and if you can take it as it is and for what it is you’ll all but guarantee an easier path, because it’s a given that acceptance is one of the keys to any kind of contentment. The second, that acceptance is surrender, that there’s a place for it, but that place is somewhere just before your last breath where you say All right then, I have tried and accept that you have lived and loved as best you could, have pushed against every wall, stood up after every disappointment, and until that last moment, you shouldn’t accept anything, you should make things better.
– Niall Williams

Although nobody planned it that way, most of us wind up emerging from adolescence with a deeply nuanced sense of what is real, with shades of gray all over the place. (However, I have known, and probably you have too, reader, a few adults for whom every issue that strikes me as subtle seems to them to be totally black-and-white — no messy shades of gray at all to deal with. That must make life easy!) Actually, to suggest that for most of us life is filled with “shades of gray” is far too simple, because that phrase conjures up the image of a straightforward one-dimensional continuum with many degrees of grayness running between white and black, while in fact the story is much more multidimensional than that.

All of this is disturbing, because the word “real”, like so many words, seems to imply a sharp, clear-cut dichotomy. Surely it ought to be the case that some things simply are real while other things simply are not real. Surely there should be nothing that is partly real — that wouldn’t make sense! And yet, though we try very hard to force the world to match this ideal black-and-white dichotomy, things unfortunately get terribly blurry.

– Douglas R. Hofstadter

The Festival of Almost Getting There

At the festival of almost getting there
Zeno pokes his head out halfway, asks

directions, half-heartedly, to the train,
admits he’s been riding on the tortoise,

been running after arrows to watch them
stand still. He understands course, path,

way, even relative position (dichotomize,
divide) but motion’s still a figment:

distance halved and halved (split infinity,
twin trajectory) the long, long way, and all

that longing (two-fold, doubled) (moments,
instants, continuous or discrete) for some

unfamiliar end—such unforgiving progress,
portioned, yes, bisected. A half-assed effort?

No, he’s as good as got it. So much struggle
and amends. Sure, we’re goddamned tired of

this much waiting, but look! He’s halfway there.

– Renée Ashley

“Carpe diem” doesn’t mean seize the day—it means something gentler and more sensible. “Carpe diem” means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be “cape diem,” if my school Latin serves. No R. Very different piece of advice.

What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day’s stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things… Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant—pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don’t freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it.

– Nicholson Baker

Humans and their
terrible habit of carrying
oceans inside their hearts,
Yet fearing
they’ll die of thirst in the
hands of those who
could not even hold sand.
– Reema Sherin

The goal is to progress and get better at your craft. Fortunately, this is something everyone can do.
– Rick Rubin

I finally decided that understanding isn’t what grief is about. Or laments. They’re just about making something beautiful out of the ugly chaos you’re left with when someone dies. You want to make that good. And for me, making it good means making it into an object that’s exciting and beautiful to look at.
– Anne Carson

For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.
– Cicero

I felt as if the sky was torn off my life.
– Anne Carson

A wound gives off
its own light,

– Anne Carson

Many people have the idea that they lack what they need in order to start working toward their dream. They feel they do not have enough power, or they do not have enough money.

But they should know that any point is the right starting point. This is the perspective that emptiness opens up. We can start from zero.

– The 17th Karmapa

Love is a flower that blossoms in freedom. It needs its own space, its own sky, its own sunlight and soil.
– Osho

The noise of the past years fades
when a human soul sits across from me,
unfolding the truth of who they are.
I am humbled by the vastness of their stories,
the heavy roads they walk,
the brilliant ways they endure.
They are teaching me, day by day,
that growth is not a ladder to climb,
but a deepening of the roots.
– Cleo Wade

The faith of each person is born from their nature. You are made of your faith—as you believe, so you become.
– Krishna

I read somewhere recently about shifting your thinking from ‘How fast can I get this done?’ to ‘How relaxed can I be while doing this?’ and I suspect that might have changed my life.
– Kim Perez

It is so quiet and peaceful here in the studio right now — it is already late — but it is stormy and rainy outside — and that makes the calm inside even greater.
– Vincent van Gogh

We die in proportion to the words we scatter around us. Those who speak have no secrets.
– E. M. Cioran

I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.
– Ernest Hemingway

I am so smart that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.
– Oscar Wilde

We’re here for a little window. And to use that time to catch and share shards of light and laughter and grace seems to me the great story.
– Brian Doyle

One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.
– Kazuo Ishiguro

Love is a strange thing; as long as thought is woven through it, it is not love.
– Krishnamurti

The damnable thing about bad art is that the insincerity which lies at its roots is not perceived by the artist himself.
– Quentin Bell

Kafka: “I wanted to remain intact.”
Dostoevsky: “I wanted to be undone.”

The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind.
Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.
– Martin Prechtel

We are all looking for something of extraordinary importance whose nature we have forgotten; I am writing the memoirs of a man who has lost his memory.
– Eugene Ionesco

The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.
– Sigmund Freud

they have, yeah, the usual questions. and I have no answers.
– Anne Carson

I sometimes think that rich men belong to another nationality entirely, no matter what their actual nationality happens to be. The nationality of the rich.
– William Saroyan

The opposite of mindfulness can be called unmindfulness—a state of mind in which we believe our thoughts and opinions without questioning them and are ruled by our emotions, lacking the wisdom of self-reflection. We all pay a high price when we fall prey to this state of mind. It may be the genesis of much of our suffering.
– Anam Thubten Rinpoche

There’s more beauty in the truth even if it is a dreadful beauty. The storytellers at the city gate twist life so that it looks sweet to the lazy and the stupid and the weak, and this only strengthens their infirmities and teaches nothing, cures nothing, nor does it let the heart soar.
– John Stein

Twilight’s Dawn

It’s a hell of a thing you take out on yourself
You ain’t gettin any younger, get your livin off the shelf
You got one more day, time to turn it all around
Drop your bags and get your feet into the ground

When the sun comes up, rub the dreamin out your eyes
Feel the sheets caress your body as you gather your goodbyes
It’s a twilight dawn for the ones who carry on
Gettin out before you know the gettin’s gone

Seasons come and seasons go and there’s always room to grow
And a waltz with time’s a wastin who you tell and what you show
Whatcha got left to say, who’s listenin away?
Every twilight’s dawn is still another day

It’s an old cliche ‘bout the ones that got away
And it isn’t quite the story you been tellin anyway
When a dream goes down, it always shakes the ground
Doesn’t matter if nobody hears the sound

Winter comes and winter goes and there’s always room to grow
And a waltz with time’s a wastin who you tell and what you show
Whatcha got left to say? Who cares who walks away?
Every twilight’s dawn is still another day
Every twilights dawn is still a brand new day

– Brian Juan

There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be right about things and still not agree.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Yet this gravitational draw that holds us to the ground was once known as Eros—as Desire!—the lovelorn yearning of our body for the larger Body of Earth, and of the earth for us. The old affinity between gravity and desire remains evident, perhaps, when we say that we have fallen in love—as though we were off-balance and tumbling through air, as though it was the steady pull of the planet that somehow lay behind the eros we feel toward another person. In this sense, gravity—the mutual attraction between our body and the earth—is the deep source of that more conscious delirium that draws us toward the presence of another person.
– David Abram

Old houses are best – they have secrets,
shadows trembling everywhere in closets and corners,
their weaknesses secret, cracks in the block, corroded pipes,
the termites’ patient gnawing. Their strengths are secret, too,
the hand-carved attic beam, the portrait paneled over.
A feeling they’ve earned their way. Every board in the house has been pressed by finger and foot, forearm and knee.
Tears on old tiles have worn their stories.
Stories spread through the rooms like the hint of camellias we breathe. Stories here – we inhale old passions;
exhale the dead resolutions that are still moving.
In the closet there is something. Sun slants through casement windows around slender candles, shattering on the wicker
where we sit in love with the shadows. Old houses are best.
Old oaks bend over the windows whispering, ‘It’s alright;
it’s alright.’ All those kids had fun. And remember that young couple had such love for each other? It overflowed.
And did the azaleas sing, and birds blaze like roses?
And even the garage, long ago burned down,
was an object of affection.

– Peter Meinke

When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another.
– Zora Neale Hurston

In moments like this, in front of death, and being free from the known, we can enter the unknown, the complete stillness where there is no deterioration. Perhaps such moments are the only time in which we can find out what life is and what love is.

And without that love, we will never find the truth.

– Jeanne de Salzmann

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.
– Cormac McCarthy

To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
– Anne Carson

I wished for a system of thought
that would leave my imagination free
to create as it chose
and yet make all that it created,
or could create,
part of the one history,
and that the soul’s.

– W.B. Yeats

Of course he wasn’t dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.
– Zora Neale Hurston

Poets are masters of the concrete. They first pull us into a single similarity between an animal, an object in nature, or an event, before they shock us with the dissimilarity. Then, they leave us there to make the connection between the concrete and the universal. When we make that connection, there’s suddenly a great leap of meaning, an understanding that it’s one world. The very word “metaphor,” which comes from two Greek words, means to “carry across.” A good metaphor carries us across, and we don’t even know how it’s occurred.
– Richard Rohr

Reason cannot check a racing pulse by demanding that it act differently. Nor can it fill an empty heart.
– Marion Woodman

As I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters but me.
– Stephen Fry

You saw the eyes bulge suddenly like that, as though something had happened inside him, and there was that glitter. You knew something had happened inside him, and thought: It’s coming. It was always that way. There was the bulge and the glitter, and there was the cold grip way down in the stomach as though somebody had laid hold of something in there, in the dark which is you, with a cold hand in a cold rubber glove.

It was like the second when you come home late at night and see the yellow envelope of the telegram sticking out from under your door and you lean and pick it up, but don’t open it yet, not for a second. While you stand there in the hall, with the envelope in your hand, you feel there’s an eye on you, a great big eye looking straight at you from miles and dark and through walls and houses and through your coat and vest and hide and sees you huddled up way inside, in the dark which is you, inside yourself, like a clammy, sad little foetus you carry around inside yourself. The eye knows what’s in the envelope, and it is watching you to see when you open it and know too. But the clammy, sad little foetus which is you way down in the dark which is you too lifts up its sad little face and its eyes are blind, and it shivers cold inside you for it doesn’t want to know what is in that envelope. It wasn’t to lie in the dark and not know, and be warm in its not-knowing.

The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know. He can’t know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can’t know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he got or because of the knowledge which he hasn’t got and which if he had it, would save him. There’s the cold in your stomach, but you open the envelope, you have to open the envelope, for the end of man is to know.

– Robert Penn Warren

INTERVIEWER
Is swimming important to you?

OSWALD
It was probably when I took up gardening that I discovered that being was better than thinking -that actually you don’t have to think things through, you can garden all day and your mind will have been moved by the gardening. And it’s the same when you’re in water. You’re thought through by the water rather than having to think.

– Interview Alice Oswald

The Sweetest Little Song
by Leonard Cohen

You go your way
Ill go your way too

Poetry, the best of it, is lunar and is concerned with the essential insanities. Journalism is solar (there are numerous newspapers named The Sun, none called The Moon) and is devoted to the inessential.
– Tom Robbins

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet—
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space…
You must grieve for this right now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
if you’re going to say ‘I lived’…

– Nazim Hikmet
(trans. Mutlu Konuk and Randy Blasing)

Meaning
by Czeslaw Milosz

When I die, I will see the lining of the world.
The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.
The true meaning, ready to be decoded.
What never added up will add Up,
What was incomprehensible will be comprehended.
– And if there is no lining to the world?
If a thrush on a branch is not a sign,
But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day
Make no sense following each other?
And on this earth there is nothing except this earth?
– Even if that is so, there will remain
A word wakened by lips that perish,
A tireless messenger who runs and runs
Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,
And calls out, protests, screams.

The history of the universe…is the handwriting produced by a minor god in order to communicate with a Demon
– Jorge Luis Borges

Feldenkrais called attention to the fact that all negative emotional expressions are accompanied by a shortening of flexor muscles. Therefore, about the time that someone gets overly interested in negative emotion, he begins to get chronic shortening of he flexor muscles. The energy in a chronically flexed body has to work just to hold it up; the man continuously has to add energy to that body to keep it going. Such chronic flexion gives a feeling of tiredness, of “depression.”
– Ida Rolf

These are pregnant times throughout the world. Just as in geology we have breaking lines between huge blocks of earth, so today we are at the juncture between great blocks of time. This is the place of storm and volcano — and of becoming. In today’s reality, a small act can have far-reaching consequences, beyond imagination, whereas things that will be done five or ten years from today will be so much less effective. This is precisely the meaning of pregnant times: Anything can be born. And this is exactly the time when one must not sleep.
– Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

Could I
If you are not the free person you want to be, you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name.
– Anne Carson

I love myself when I am laughing… and then again when I am looking mean and impressive.
– Zora Neale Hurston

We’re no longer shocked by noise or sudden commotion. It’s silence that jolts us awake.
– Pico Iyer

The maintenance of a façade predisposes a person to somatic illness because it imposes a constant stress upon the body. One tries to be what one isn’t which deforms the personality and the body.
– Alexander Lowen

Truly, man is but a passing flame, moving unquietly amid the surrounding rest of night; without which he yet could not be, and whereof he is in part compounded.
– George MacDonald

What if we can be intimate with the entire world? This can happen in small, quiet ways. It isn’t dramatic. To simply be alone is to be whole within one’s self, and this radical solitude exists whether or not we are with others.
– Sallie Jiko Tisdale

She was too much under the influence of an ardent imagination to adhere to common rules.
– Mary Wollstonecraft

If you’re a true believer; if you have some pre-packaged philosophy then you’re going to miss a great deal because you’re pre-programmed to ignore what doesn’t fit into your model. And it doesn’t matter what your model is.
– Terence Mckenna

Forty hour workweeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes – train and sprint, then rest and reassess.
– @naval

Let’s not get carried away with exegesis. A scholar is one who knows to limit himself to the matter at hand.
– Anne Carson

Watch the process of your own thinking. How cunning and deceptive it is!
– Krishnamurti

her to do list
so much longer than mine —
here I sit
biting an apple
down to the core

– Lesley Anne Swanson

Would the color of my eyes
remain the same, even if I
removed hope from them?

– Rumaisa Rida Tabir

It’s OK
to be wrong.

Just don’t stay wrong
after you find out.

– Kenneth Folk

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

The rules that were drilled into your head were fake. Arbitrary. Made up, often by abusers & bullies looking to control you, body, mind, & soul.

Notable among the bullsh*t are the rules for when you’re “allowed” to be happy or who you’re “allowed” to be.

– Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle

She contemplated the past, and viewed the present, and when she compared them, the contrast struck her with astonishment. The whole appeared like one of those sudden transitions so frequent in dreams . . .
– Ann Radcliffe

Some people think a poem should move them in just the way they expect. Like, nature is beautiful, one’s nation is wonderful, love is powerful, etc. So, when a poem questions these feelings rather than reproduces them, some get angry rather than trying to sit with the questions.
– @chenchenwrites

I recall my solar nature and would like to rush to my rising. But ruins stand in my way…
– Jung

…but nonsense, after all, does exist. And minds can get drunk with nonsense.
– Charles Williams

Those who call for Nonsense will find that it comes.
– C.S. Lewis

I lived in blank for many years. And I learned two things. Understanding is of no use and nothing replaces the ardor of love, for better or for worse.
– Anne Carson

Not understanding but falling anyway into the dream of another’s making is one of the most exhilarating experiences. I’m sad for those who deny themselves such experiences by refusing to dip even a second into strangeness/mystery when, say, reading a poem or watching a film.
– @chenchenwrites

O, mountain stream
Basalt beneath
Bedrock of flight
Pendulum-home
Vise of the heart
Lily of the soul
Contralto of quiet
And faithful shroud.

– Aleksander Wat
(tr. Czesław Miłosz & Leonard Nathan)

There was a time
as young musicians
when people believed
there could be another Beatles.

It wasn’t true,
but it was possible then
to believe it
for a while.

– Kenneth Folk

All things manifesting in the lower worlds exist first in the intangible rings of the upper spheres, so that creation is, in truth, the process of making tangible the intangible by extending the intangible into various vibratory rates.
– Manly P. Hall

We descend into solitude step by step
further and further down stanzas of verses
into depths never expected
determined to live without poor substitutes
in a cruel and impossible purity

– Anna Kamieńska
(tr. Grażyna Drabik & David Curzon)

There’s a theory that depression is
sometimes the soul’s way of rejecting the
life you’re forcing yourself to live. It’s not
failure, it’s misalignment.

Your spirit shuts down when you’re too far
from your purpose, people, or path.

– liminal

He felt contempt bloom into hatred, bloat, blur into pity, and then, on his way to poly sci, he gradually felt something different, something new, in regard to Slotsky. He stopped for coffee. When reading through the paper, he coiled inward to catch it.

– Leonard Michaels

Has an artwork ever stopped the clock?

Not merely reflected history, but interrupted it?

We are all connected, yet endlessly scrolling.

Could an artist create something so powerful that the world stops looking away—and accountability becomes unavoidable?

– Laura Kerr

…Pleasure puts you to sleep and pain wakes you up. If you do not want to suffer, don’t go to sleep. You cannot know yourself through bliss alone, for bliss is your very nature. You must face the opposite, what you are not, to find enlightenment.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj

That which we can no longer prevent or hide is our fruit.
– Jung

Love is an untamed force. When we try to control it, it destroys us. When we try to imprison it, it enslaves us. When we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused.
– Paulo Coelho

You are questioning
the timing of the
universe that has
never missed a
single sunrise.

– @aachalol

Everyday Buddhist: If you want to see the nature of impermanence, buy a bar of chocolate.
– Zen Graffiti

Clean hands do no worthwhile work.
– JH Prynne

Love takes care of everything. Love is the same as absolute awareness, pure intelligence, or the power of God. When you have enough love inside, there are truly no problems. Problems only arise when you believe you are separate and lacking love.
– Robert Adams

night news on mute …
I look out at the stars
breathe in
the silence of a world
longing for tenderness

– Chen-ou Liu

And you,
you scare people
because you are whole
all by yourself.

– Lauren Alex Hooper

Compassion is of little value if it just remains an idea. It must motivate how we respond to others and be reflected in all our thoughts and actions.
– Dalai Lama

We are all like clay in the hands of the potter, and no vessel could ask him:

“Why have you made me thus?”

– Daniel Defoe

It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.
– Ernest Hemingway

A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them; they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.
– Sigmund Freud

If instead of trying to manage your time, you clearly set your Priorities, time will arrange itself around them.
– Sadhguru

The mad sometimes heal themselves, the imbeciles never.
– Oscar Wilde

When one wants to be profoundly oneself, which is the case in a poem, one puts oneself on a plane that is at least partly incommunicable to others.
– Yves Bonnefoy

One of the great dangers on the spiritual path is if the ego becomes spiritualized. The ego can easily think of itself as enlightened. It is very difficult to free yourself from an enlightened ego.
– Leonard Jacobson

Advance, as you have done until now,
Against fear, since it has never abandoned you.
– Yolanda Pantin

When I was born, the phrases that will save humanity had already all been written; only one thing was missing—saving humanity.
– Almada Negreiros

The idea of getting bad reviews is not nearly as bad as getting no reviews, frankly.
– Jim Harrison

Any thought we hold about anyone we hold subconsciously about ourselves.
– Marianne Williamson

The herd forgives you for being wrong, but it will not forgive you for being different.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

Early on, I sensed that—in every art—the ultimate shared subject is human consciousness itself.
– Allan Gurganus

In me, hatred for individual thought (the mosquito claiming ‘I think differently’) attains calm, simplicity. When I advance a word, I play with the thought of others, which I have gleaned by chance from the human substance around me.
– Bataille, (tr. Kendall)

It’s hard to grasp just how badly humanity is handicapping itself by excluding all solutions that can’t generate a profit. There’s a whole vast spectrum of potential solutions to the troubles we face as a species, and we’re limiting ourselves to a tiny, shitty fraction of it.
– Caitlin Johnstone

Fidelity is the effort of a noble soul to equal another greater than itself.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Stop making conclusions in life. Conclusions means death. Just keep looking. See.
– Sadhguru

You will someday see there is no use for incessant internal chatter and no reason to constantly attempt to figure everything out. Eventually you will see the real cause of problems is not life itself. It’s the commotion the mind makes about life that really causes problems.
– Michael Singer

Everyone must take time to sit and watch the leaves turn.
– Elizabeth Lawrence

Cutting back is the crucial act that allows the vitality, precision and emotional heart of a piece of writing to emerge.
– Pamela Erens

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them… so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.
– Aristotle

Don’t try to be original. Be simple. Be good technically, and if there is something in you, it will come out.
– Henri Matisse

Love has nothing to do with possession.
Its highest expression is to grant freedom.
– Jean-Paul Sartre

The book reveals, between the lines, the futile search for truth in the author’s writing journey: a game with extremely simple rules but hopelessly complicated gameplay.
– Georges Perec

I thought that perhaps she had gone mad, but she simply had a powerful intuition.
– Carl Gustav Jung

The only way to win World War III is to prevent it.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower

The reader, as well as the main character, does not view the work from outside. He too is in the labyrinth.
– Alain Robbe-Grillet

No citizen should be rich enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Don’t be afraid. There are exquisite things in store for you. This is merely the beginning.
– Oscar Wilde

The Sun had ways of reaching us wherever we were.
– Kazuo Ishiguro

You pile up enough tomorrows, and you’ll find you are left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays.
– Meredith Willson

So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart, I shall say life is good.
– Helen Keller

Wherever you have friends that’s your country, and wherever you receive love, that’s your home.
– Dalai Lama

If they occupy your country, you resist.
– Elias Khoury

I write in longhand. I am accustomed to that proximity, that feel of writing.
– James Salter

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
– Virginia Woolf

Time moves in one direction, memory in another…
– William Gibson

As I fear not a child with a weapon he cannot lift, I Will never fear the mind of a man who does not think.

– Dalinar Kholin: Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson

Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that’s what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.
– Albert Camus

We ought to feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we’re talking about when we talk about love. Most people don’t know love. They just know the absence.
– Raymond Carver

Waste work will make you heavy and tired and positive work makes you happy, light and refreshed.
– Brahma Kumaris

And I, I always thought that happiness was something that would come to me. And yet, it’s something I must create, shape, like a house.
– Albert Camus

What choice do I have? Poets write poems and cats miaow, dogs howl and fish lay their eggs, since that is what they must do. And I’ll faithfully write it all down…
– Miklos Radnoti, The Poet

You insist on confusing my solitude with bitterness, my seriousness with anger, and my silence with apathy. You still fail to understand me.
– Elena Poe

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words.
– Orhan Pamuk

Everyone who has ever built a new paradise first found the strength to do so in their own hell.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn’t make it so.
– Lev Grossman

Love is not maximum emotion. Love is maximum commitment.
– Sinclair B. Ferguson

– what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilization –

– Virginia Woolf, The Mark on the Wall

Whenever one finds himself in a state of conflict with someone or with a situation, he should entertain the hypothesis that the psyche has propelled him into that situation in order to generate consciousness.
– Edward Edinger

We believe that once we have the words to describe a phenomenon, we understand it, but although words are necessary, they are insufficient. Meaningful discovery becomes possible only when knowledge is enlivened by experience that is lived through the body. If an experience is not coming from the body, then it is not known.
– Marion Woodman

We live in two landscapes, as Augustine might have said, One that’s eternal and divine, and one that’s just the back yard.
– Charles Wright

It is impossible to deal with evil by mere avoidance, one has to visit the dark lands, go to the edge of doom itself.
– Robin Robertson, The Shadow’s Gift

As if his misfortune were not enough, he fell in love.
– Oscar Wilde

Our passage through the world is so absurd and fleeting that the only thing that gives me peace of mind is knowing I have been authentic—that I have managed to be as true to myself as I could.
– Frida Kahlo

It is yet another of Nietzsche’s merits that he joins to his critique of Enlightenment moralities a sense of their failure to address adequately, let alone to answer the question: what sort of person am I to become? This is in a way an inescapable question in that an answer to it is given in practice in each human life.
– Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

I prefer open hostility to the poisonous silence of supposed neutrality or the empty lip service of performative solidarity.
– Jamie Arpin-Ricci

You free yourself by letting go, since you cannot fix it by struggling.
– Frida Kahlo

It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth.
– Milan Kundera, Encounter

Everything’s a story. You are a story—I am a story.
– Frances Hodgson Burnett

Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all costs, against all resistance.
– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

(…) Deep-wounded mind, I wasn’t
doing anything with it anyway. (…)
– Richard Siken

War transforms its participants. What was once necessary appears inessential; what was taken for granted, unappreciated and abused now reveals itself to be central to our existence. Strange inversions proliferate.
– Zadie Smith, Intimations

Take me to the land of those who understand.’ ‘Who perish,’ the linguist corrected him. ‘It’s the same thing.’
– Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Memories of the Future

Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.
– Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

Don’t be afraid to suffer; return that heaviness to the earth’s own weight; heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.
– Rainer Maria Rilke

Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.
– Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Do good to all. Speak good of all. Think good of all. This is the whole of religion.
– Sarada Devi, Gospel of the Holy Mother

I have embraced the dawn of summer.
– Arthur Rimbaud

You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes…
– Richard Powers, The Overstory

Tell the coroner, when he digs into my entrails, to please—if he finds my love for you—take it out so that I may rest in peace.
– Frida Kahlo

If you want to express yourself as freely as you can, it’s probably best not to start out by asking “What am I seeking?” Rather, it’s better to ask “Who would I be if I weren’t seeking anything?”
– Haruki Murakami, Novelist as a Vocation

I was broad awake by this time, but, lying perfectly at ease, remained still, having no inducement to change my position.
– Joseph Conrad

The end of a stage of evolution is usually marked by a powerful recrudescence of all that has to go out of the evolution.
– Sri Aurobindo

We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.
– N. Scott Momaday

There is a profound ground of unity that is more pertinent and authentic than all the unilateral dimensions of our lives. This a man discovers when he is able to keep open the door of his heart. This is one’s ultimate responsibility, and it is not dependent upon whether the heart of another is kept open for him. Here is a mystery: If sweeping through the door of my heart there moves continually a genuine love for you, it by-passes all your hate and all your indifference and gets through to you at your center. You are powerless to do anything about it. You may keep alive in devious ways the fires of your bitter heart, but they cannot get through to me. Underneath the surface of all the tension, something else is at work. It is utterly impossible for you to keep another from loving you.
– Howard Thurman, Keep Open the Door of the Heart

Strange, isn’t it, how we spend so much of our spiritual energy trying to get out of human form when all along it seems that God’s real wish is for us to get into it.

Whatever you make of this paradox, it’s hard to deny that our human psyche does seem to be perfectly anatomically wired for the job of bridging the realms: mediating between the infinite and the finite; the universal and the particular; the gross world of form and the more subtle realms, in a marvelous and mysterious two-way street.

– Cynthia Bourgeault

I don’t go to church with any expectation of fulfillment or illumination. I just go because I have gone, and my mother went and her mother went. A kind of thinking takes place there that doesn’t take place anywhere else.
– Anne Carson

Much of what happens to us in life is nameless because our vocabulary is too poor. Most stories get told out loud because the storyteller hopes that the telling of the story can transform a nameless event into a familiar or or intimate one. We tend to associate intimacy with closeness and closeness with a certain sum of shared experiences. Yet every day total strangers, who will never say a single word to one another, can share an intimacy. An intimacy contained in the exchange of a glance, a nod of the head, a smile, a shrug of a shoulder. A closeness which lasts for a second or for the duration of a song being sung and listened to together. An agreement about life. An agreement without clauses.
– John Berger

God’s Work

Moonlight in the kitchen is a sign of God.
The kind of sadness that is a black suction pipe extracting you
from your own navel and which the Buddhists call

“no mindcover” is a sign of God.
The blind alleys that run alongside human conversation
like lashes are a sign of God.

God’s own calmness is a sign of God.
The surprisingly cold smell of potatoes or money.
Solid pieces of silence.

From these diverse signs you can see
how much work remains to do.
Put away your sadness, it is a mantle of work.

– Anne Carson

We need to acknowledge that it is not our discriminating and reflexive self-consciousness that makes us human, but rather the ability to move beyond this self-consciousness to engagement and beholding, the irruption of our core silence into everyday life. Robert Bringhurst notes, “If you divide the world into them and us, and history into ours and theirs, or if you think of history as something only you and your affiliates can possess, then no matter what you know, no matter how noble your intentions, you have taken one step toward the destruction of the world.” Life really does hang in the balance in every moment. It hovers horizontally between the past, which cannot be changed, and the future, which is refulgent with potential but fraught with our projections. It is poised vertically between self-conscious rationality, which is the source of these projections, and deep silence, where we touch reality directly. We need to recover the ability to live at the intersection: in the present moment, energized by the upwelling from deep silence where, in Christian terms, our shared nature with God becomes manifest.
– Maggie Ross, Silence: A User’s Guide

Town on the Way
through God’s Woods
by Anne Carson

Tell me.
Have you ever seen
woods so.
Deep so.
Every tree a word
does your heart
stop?
Once I saw a cloud over Bolivia so
deep.
Mountains were cowering do you
ever?
Look in so quick you see the
secret.
Word inside the word?
As in an abandoned railway car.
One winter afternoon I saw.
The word for “God’s woods.”

…yet, listen, there was rain, then the swift interval before evaporation, & the stillness of brimming, & the wet rainbowing where oil from exhaust picks up light, sheds glow, then echoes in the drains where deep inside the drops fall individually, plink, & the places where birds interject, & the coming-on of heat, & the girl looking sideways carrying the large bouquet of blue hydrangeas, shaking the water off, & the wondering if this is it, or are we in for another round, a glance up, a quick step over the puddle carrying speedy clouds, birdcall now confident again, heat drying…
– Jorie Graham

A window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person.
– Saul Leiter

Seeing. We might say that the whole of life lies in that verb—if not ultimately, at least essentially. Fuller being is closer union: such is the kernel and conclusion of this book. But let us emphasize the point: union increases only through an increase in consciousness, that is to say in vision. And that, doubtless, is why the history of the living world can be summarized as the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen. After all, do we not judge the perfection of an animal, or the supremacy of a thinking being, by the penetration and synthetic power of their gaze? To try to see more and better is not a matter of whim or curiosity or self-indulgence. To see or to perish is the very condition laid upon everything that makes up the universe, by reason of the mysterious gift of existence. And this, in superior measure, is man’s condition.
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

He stood at the gateway between two worlds, at the place where imagination passed into creation.
– Michael Bedard, The Green Man

Shared by Roshi Joan Halifax
during the Upaya Varela Retreat:

Hakuin
Shine Through It

When you see something, shine through it;
when you hear, shine through what you are hearing;
shine through the five skandhas;
shine through the six fields of sense perception—in front, behind,
left and right, through seven calamities and eight disasters, become
one with radiant vision of the whole body. See through all things,
internal and external;
shine thought them.
When this work becomes solid, then perception of reality will be
perfectly, distinctly clear, just like looking at the palm of your hand.
At this point, while increasing the use of this clear knowing and
insight, if you enter awakening, then shine through awakening.
If you get into agreeable circumstances, then shine through
agreeable circumstances.
If you fall into adverse situations, then shine through adverse
situations.
When greed or desire arise, shine through greed and desire;
when hatred or anger arise, shine through hatred and anger;
when you act out of ignorance, shine through ignorance.
When the three poisons of hatred, greed, and ignorance are no
more, and the mind is pure, shine through that pure mind.
At all times, in all places, be it desires, senses, gain, loss, right,
wrong, visions of Buddha or of dharma, in all things shine through
with your whole body.

You know, do I really need to exist? To be here as an organism? I mean, good lord, I am here, you know? And, well, I can’t help it! It has nothing to do with my ego that I have feet and that I exist and that I’m here. Do I really mean it or don’t I? Well, I guess I do. I mean, my physical existence here is perfectly sincere. It’s about as real as anything can be, but I didn’t intend it. I don’t have to say UGH! you know?
– Alan Watts

The people on the right make me hate the right, the people on the left make me hate the left. In fact, with a man of the right, I am on the left; with a man of the left, I am on the right.
– Emil Cioran

Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

Alexander created cities everywhere he passed: I have left dreams everywhere I have trailed my life.
– François-René de Chateaubriand

In the matrix, the rules are fake. The truth is inverted. The norms are depraved. The rulers are wicked. And winning, is losing. Tune out. Quit following the crowd. Stop conforming. The new world will be built by those who do it different.
– Nika Solé

Genuine change, whether it be in the hearts of people or in the culture at large, is more difficult than changing the appearance of things and therefore can be a more rare occurrence. In hard times, inner changes must precede changes to outer circumstances.
– Michael Meade

Jung was more interested in where a person’s life was leading him, rather than the supposed causes of his situation.
– Andrew Samuels

Direct the winds into the central channel. If you don’t know what this means, read Lama Yeshe’s Introduction to Tantra.
– Kenneth Folk

The subtle energies are called “winds” and sometimes they move quickly like air. But sometimes it feels like molasses squeezing through a soda straw. That’s normal. See if you can keep your attention steady on the flows even when it’s uncomfortable. Don’t force it. Just watch.
– Kenneth Folk

It’s moments of transcendence that I try to let guide my life, these beautiful moments of self-forgetting where the soul breaks free from the metaphysical chains of finitude, and rises above the muck of materialism and the superficial confusion that passes for reality.

Transcendence is what we moderns have lost touch with. Many of us today suffer from attention fatigue, squandering the brief light of our awareness and letting ourselves get trapped in an algorithmic panopticon that triggers dopamine release in exchange for data, privacy, and attention.

With this digitalized stupor, unending conveniences, and chronic stimulation, we moderns have lost any real reference to the sacred and transcendent.

– Erik Rittenberry

Are you even a writer unless annoying, reactionary people hate what you’re doing?
– @chenchenwrites

The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

She was too much under the influence of an ardent imagination to adhere to common rules.
– Mary Wollstonecraft

As far as I’m concerned, it’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity.
– Hunter S. Thompson

deep into autumn
what kind of life
goes on next door?

– Basho

Happiness means feeling you are on the right path every moment. You don’t need to arrive at the end of the path in order to be happy. The right path refers to the very concrete ways you live your life in every moment.
– Thich Nhat Hanh

It’s actually really unfortunate how many women have stopped dating the spiritual men because they’re the worst ones.
– Nika Solé

Progress is such a comforting word, so reassuring, a word with which we hypnotise ourselves.
– Krishnamurti

Only in the polarity of subject and object is our life.
– Karl Jaspers

What could be more important in life than to know that we are already that for which we long?
– Rupert Spira

I am an enemy of places full of people, of the boastfulness of money and lineage, of pretension, of consumerist people, of fleeting relationships, and of gatherings full of hypocrisy and lies.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

traveling geese —
the human heart, too
wanders

– Issa Kobayashi

The source of your mind is love, and whatever you do to go to that source is a spiritual practice.
– Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.
– James Baldwin

Peace of mind is not a goal I need achieve. It’s a place inside I never want to leave. Close my eyes, I still my thoughts and then I say I will choose to live in peace today.
– Robert Alan

‘no’ does not hide anything, but a ‘yes’ very
easily becomes a deception.
– Søren Kierkegaard

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day…. The wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.
– Jane Eyre

Over the course of his life Jürgen Habermas sought to honor the principle that in a modern democracy the only legitimate force should be the unforced force of the better argument.
– Peter E. Gordon

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
– Louis Brandeis

Learning to be nothing special
day by day
autumn deepens.

– Mitsu Suzuki

We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.
– Franz Kafka

It’s fascinating to me that as recently as 2015, most of us felt we lived in the greatest era in history, that things were only going to improve, and now despair has set in, climate disasters, the average IQ has fallen for the first time in a century. The world has broken irreparably.
– @SketchesbyBoze

How can we learn to hear something more interesting than our own thoughts? The question grows more urgent as the temptation to sit in front of a screen grows ever more irresistible.
– Pico Iyer

The best remedy for the turbulence of the mind is learning. It is the only thing that never fails. You can grow old and tremble, you can stay up all night listening to the disorder of your veins, you can miss your one true love and you can lose your money to a monster; you can see the world around you devastated by dangerous madmen, or know that your honor is trampled in the sewers of the most vile minds, there is only one thing to do in such circumstances: learn.
– Marguerite Yourcenar

Because dawn breaks in the interior.
And now to awaken, awaken,
and know how to smile, the opposite of pain
and sleeplessness.
– Ida Gramcko

Why remind me of the misery
substantial of life,
if I am in love with the earth,
the sun, with your smile?

– Ida Gramcko

tree house
a ladder leading
to the moon

– Chen-ou Liu

The goal of Eastern religious practice is the same as that of Western mysticism: the shifting of the center of gravity from the ego to the self, from man to God. This means that the ego disappears in the self, and man in God.
– Carl Jung

Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much
as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn’t stop you from doing anything at all.
– Richard P. Feynman

I am a retiring, silent,
unsociable, and
discontent person.

– Franz Kafka

Bless the poets, the workers for justice,
the dancers of ceremony, the singers of heartache,
the visionaries, all makers and carriers of fresh
meaning – We will all make it through,
despite politics and wars, despite failures
and misunderstandings. There is only love.
– Joy Harjo

We have a tendency to want the other person
to be a finished product while we give ourselves
the grace to evolve.
– T.D. Jakes

Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live life.
– Jonathan Safran Foer

Happiness is strange; it comes when you are not seeking it. When you are not making an effort to be happy, then unexpectedly, mysteriously, happiness is there, born of purity, of a loveliness of being.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti

Humanity is deeply asleep and is walking towards the edge of a precipice that it does not see.

But an individual can realize that he is on the edge of a precipice; and if he opens his eyes to it, he would see that there is a rope above his head, and he can climb: but to reach this rope he has to jump.

When we are at the level where we imagine we can be helped as we are, no help can reach us. For something better to exist, it is necessary to change ourselves. Personal satisfaction, vanity, ignorance, these and all other things, prevent the help from reaching us.

Originally, prayer was a request for help to rise to a higher level of consciousness.

– Maurice Nicoll

Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.
– Anthony Doerr

Total courage arises out of seeing that there is really nothing that can be done. Holding things together for as long as you can hold them together is a sort of illusion, because you know time’s going to run out, and within a hundred years nothing will matter. You’ll be dead anyway. One reaction to that is, of course: why bother? But the other reaction is: good Lord, if that’s the truth, what fun we can have now!
– Alan Watts

There is always a kind of drying out produced by language… For me… there is something prior to language: a sensation, a perception, something in search of its language, which cannot exist without language.
– Nathalie Sarraute

When you have faced your own demons, the demons of others will not frighten you.
– James Hollis

Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship.
– Sam Harris

Faërie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible. It has many ingredients, but analysis will not necessarily discover the secret of the whole.
– J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy-stories

Right attitude in practice fearlessly inquires, ‘What story of suffering am I telling myself?’ When awareness observes the threads of the story, wisdom dissolves the suffering.
– Steve Armstrong

Thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought.
– Eckhart Tolle

I know God is necessary and must exist. I also know that he does not and cannot exist.
– Dostoyevsky

To Oscar Wilde:

not down in the gutter
nor high in the cirrus clouds …
at thirty
holding a cubicle job
I stare at the fireworks-lit sky

– Chen-ou Liu

chrysanthemum fragrance
in the old temple town
the ancient Buddhas

– Basho

Your daily life is your temple and your religion.
When you enter into it, take with you, your all.
– Kahlil Gibran

Perhaps this is a new and good beginning.
– Franz Kafka, 1914.

O apes and hairy uncles of us all,
I hear the gibberish of a mother tongue
inside this throat. (A prattle from the sea.
A hum in the locked egg. A blather of bloods.)
O angels and attendants past the world,
what shall the sleeps of heaven dream but time?
– John Ciardi

There is no outside of you. It’s all an inside game.
– Adyashanti

Fou-rire

It really is amusing
that for all the centuries of mankind
the problem has been how
to kill enough people
and now
it is how
not to kill them all

– Frank O’Hara

When Jesus tells us about his Father, we distrust him. When he shows us his Home, we turn away, but when he confides to us that he is ‘acquainted with Grief,’ we listen, for that also is an Acquaintance of our own.
– Emily Dickinson

The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.
– Anton Chekhov

The Motive for Metaphor
by Wallace Stevens

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon⁠—

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound⁠—
Steel against intimation—the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.

Life is that which animates all of existence. Its energy is found everywhere. Without its energy, nothing that is, is.
– Neale Donald Walsch

In a world filled with influences and influencers, be hard to influence.
– Nika Solé

Villainy wears many masks; none so dangerous as the mask of virtue.
– Washington Irving

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
– Ernest Hemingway

IF YOU SAY THE RIGHT WORD, I CAN SING…

If you say the right word, I can sing
you the praises of the raven with its changeable
and shimmering feet.
I love these cold flowers of laughter
best and their nodding shadows that shine in
the dark.

Who will take the madness from the trees?
Who does heaven give steamviolets to?
How does one downfall advise the next?

There are answers to these and other questions:
You separate the scent from its path and
try to tuck in your ear while racing for a
mile. Now the air can narrow its limits
by two degrees and the result will not
be long in coming.

– Meret Oppenheim

I’d be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string.
– Haruki Murakami

Yes, that is artist’s job: takes mineral rock from dark silent earth transforms it into shining light-reflecting form from sky. Has brought the dead to life.
– Philip K. Dick

Despite literature’s high-brow aura, the appetite for lost books echoes not only the world of used bookstores, but the present yearning for a less predigested, more incautious mode of cultural life that still lurks in living memory.
– Jonathan Lethem

To enter into your own mind you need to be armed to the teeth.
– Paul Valéry

Mistakes are painful when they happen, but years later a collection of mistakes is what is called experience.
– Denis Waitley

Some of the biggest shifts in your spiritual stature come from going into pain instead of running away from it.
– Nika Solé

The kind of self-love necessary to trauma recovery is not about writing flowery affirmations over & over in your journal (though if that works for you, go for it).

It’s more about realistically talking ourselves through a “stupid” trigger in the middle of a stupid Wednesday.

– Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle

Mindset is everything. Like the eye of a storm -find the sunshine and calm within you, even if there is chaos outside of you.
– Brittany Burgunder

Who isn’t lonely, I’d like to know? And that includes people who do have someone but just haven’t noticed.
– Magda Szabó

Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life…
– Carl Jung

I wondered if I would / be there / asleep in the privilege of slumber.
– Janice Lobo Sapigao

When the old ache arrives, I remind it that we live differently now. We eat, we rest, we ask for help. We do not build altars to what hurt us. We build mornings around sunlight and the sound of our own name said kindly. The ache learns its place and I learn mine.
– Izzie Babea

Your relationships aren’t random. They’re emotional remixes of your childhood. But once you notice the same old melodies, you can stop auditioning for roles that keep breaking your fucking heart.
– Mark Manson

To locate a thing you need space, to place an event you need time; but the timeless and spaceless defies all handling. It makes everything perceivable, yet itself it is beyond perception. The mind cannot know what is beyond the mind, but the mind is known by what is beyond it.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj

dear reader,
do you know something?
those who keep asking the same question
really don’t want to hear the answer.

– Bukowski

In the mirror of your mind, all kinds of pictures appear and disappear. Knowing that they are entirely your own creations, watch them silently come and go. Be alert, but not perturbed.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

If you are not the free person you want to be, you must find a place to tell the truth about that.
– Anne Carson

I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go.
– Charles Bukowski

A revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is the age of advertisement and publicity. Nothing ever happens but there is immediate publicity everywhere.
– Kierkegaard

It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part, the rest are lost in the multitude.
– Voltaire

A disease with a name seems on the way to a cure, so uncontrollable phenomena are frequently renamed to create the impression of control. Such verbal exorcisms continue to appeal wherever science remains illusory or ineffective.
– René Girard

Never lend books, because no one returns them; the only books I have in my library are the ones that other people have lent me.
– Anatole France

A rational person can find peace by cultivating indifference to things outside of their control.
– @naval

Within the consensual framework of tribal values, there will be unending diversity — but there will be few if any rebels who challenge the tribe itself.
– McLuhan

I Have Been Living
by Jane Mead

I have been living
closer to the ocean than I thought-
in a rocky cove thick with seaweed.

It pulls me down when I go wading.
Sometimes, to get back to land
takes everything that I have in me.

Sometimes, to get back to land
is the worst thing a person can do.
Meanwhile, we are dreaming:

The body is innocent.
She has never hurt me.
What we love flutters in us.

You who read
me–are you certain
you understand my
language?

– Jorge Luis Borges

What I mean to say is, we had been considerable. Had been loved. Not lonely, not lost, not freakish, but wise, each in his or her own way. Our departures caused pain. Those who had loved us sat upon their beds, heads in hand; lowered their faces to tabletops, making animal noises. We had been loved, I say, and remembering us, even many years later, people would smile, briefly gladdened at the memory.
– George Saunders

The time of the falling leaves has come again. Once more in our morning walk we tread upon carpets of gold and crimson, of brown and bronze, woven by the winds or the rains out of these delicate textures while we slept.
– John Burroughs

There’s not much to be said about the period except that most writers don’t reach it soon enough.
– William Knowlton Zinsser

Let us not squander love on those who are not loyal, goodness on those who do not appreciate it, knowledge on those who do not understand it, or secrets on those who do not keep them.
– Alejandro Jodorowsky

Imagination is a powerful agent for creating, as it were, a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature.
– Immanuel Kant

Don’t we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it.
– Michael Ondaatje

My double, seen from behind, explains something to me: that I’m me and also someone else, that I’m leaving and also staying. This realization momentarily jostles my melancholy, like a current that stirs the branches, that discomfits the leaves of a tree.
– Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts

Whatever you do,
eat, offer in sacrifice, or give,
whatever austerity you practice,
do it (…) as an offering (ritual).
What matters is not the offering (gift) itself,
but the spirit in which it is given.
– Bhagavad Gita

Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.
– Anne Carson

The truth is, it didn’t matter what or how hard we yelled. Nothing was coming back to us.
– Barbara Kingsolver

I attained the marvelous power of sympathizing with anything that suffered.
– Alejandra Pizarnik

Stroll through the open spaces of time to the center of opportunity. Wise hesitation ripens success and brings secrets to maturity.
– Baltasar Gracián

See God in everyone. It is deception to teach by individual differences and karma. Love people and feed them.
– Neem Karoli Baba

Beauty attracts, intelligence charms, and kindness holds.
– Ortega y Gasset

To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching the books.
– Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages

Trust the good idea. You can throw them away, but they’ll always come back.
– Alan Menken

No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress.
– Arthur Schopenhauer

Normative concepts like right, good, obligation, reason, are our names for the solutions to normative problems, for what it is we are looking for when we face them. And if we sometimes succeed in solving those problems, then there will be normative truths: that is, statements which employ normative concepts correctly.
– Christine M. Korsgaard

I think people who are generous with food have a goodness about them.
– Nathan Filer

The ego will endure the worst agonies of neurotic misery rather than consent to one minute of diminishment of its sense of importance.
– Helen Luke

I’m so lazy and the thing ahead is so very difficult.
– John Steinbeck

You have to transcend your thinking mind to get into the farthest out planes, because the thinking mind always thinks about things. So it’s always thinking about objects. You’re always one thought away from where the action is, as long as you think you’re the thinker.
– Ram Dass

What I’m against is what Blake called single vision—being possessed by one single idea and seeing everything in terms of this one idea, whether it’s a religious idea or a scientific idea or a political idea. It’s a very bad thing. We need a multiplicity of viewpoints.
– Philip Pullman

Inconvenient truths are the salt of literature. They don’t guarantee that the results will be good, but it’s where words derive their power and flavor.
– Elena Ferrante

The operation taking down Russian bot farms being called “quiet piggy” is my favorite thing I have heard all year.
– Shagah Zakerion

The man who truly and disinterestedly appreciates anything in the world, and does not care a whit what other people think about it, will be, by that very fact, forearmed against some of our subtlest modes of attack.
– C. S. Lewis

Because whenever I find myself completely alone in the quiet, all I do is think about her.
– Alyson Derrick

When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for.
– Toni Morrison

Not everything can be resolved through kindness, which is why angel’s carry swords, not flowers.
– C.S Lewis

North, south, east, and west – a leader must learn to lead in all these directions. But it doesn’t matter how many points you manage to hit around the compass if you aren’t strong in the middle.
– Rob Lott

There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty—unless she is wed to something more meaningful—is always superficial.
– Donna Tartt

Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves.
– Thomas Merton

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.
– David Hume

People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.
– John Kenneth Galbraith

He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.
– James Joyce

All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.
– Baruch Spinoza

The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists’ discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.
– Milan Kundera

The dimensions of a work of art are seldom realized by the author until the work is accomplished. It is like a flowering dream. Ideas grow, budding silently, and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the work progresses. A seed grows in writing as in nature. The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them.
– Carson McCullers

Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you.
– Flannery O’Connor

There are no words for what happened in meditation this morning. The words would only reduce it.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti

God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.
– Herman Melville

How did my land become someone else’s country?
– John Trudell

The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

You have to know how to look even if you don’t know what you’re looking for.
– Roberto Bolaño

The freedom of others, far from limiting or negating my liberty, is on the contrary its necessary premise and confirmation.
– Mikhail Bakunin

I had always regretted that, in modern times, there were no longer some forbidden limits on earth, like the Pillars of Hercules for the ancients, because I would have liked to cross them first, defying the prohibition with my audacity.
– Elsa Morante

Never argue; repeat your assertion.
– Robert Owen

The most readily accessible expression of unconscious processes is undoubtedly dreams.
– Carl Jung

I build a house of words
and live in it.
– Suzanne Alaywan

California has been the beckoning cloudland to which I often return.
– Wright Morris

I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing, I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.
– Marilynne Robinson

Memory, all-night’s bedside tattoo artist.
– Charles Simic

In empty country everybody knew everything about everybody. One’s inner thoughts seemed to transmit themselves through the clear, dry air without need for verbalizing.
– Tony Hillerman

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

Our community has aspired to be a sanctuary for a certain species of artist, theatremakers who embrace their divinity, who understand their sacred obligation to lead and inspire us. I encourage everyone to aspire to that kind of community. And to substitute for “theatremakers” whatever they want to call their vocation – “health facilitators”, “garbage collectors”, “singers”, “mail-deliverers”, “carmakers,” “teachers”, “athletes”, “coders.” Every worker who understands and embodies their sacred obligation creates that kind of community. In turn, that enlivens the world.
– James C. Nicola, Artistic Director of New York Theatre Workshop

Tending
by Jess Lee

A moment past Kahili my car lights die,
then the engine shuts down
on a blind turn,
on a moonless night,
in monsoon rain.

He comes without pause
to my panicked voice on the phone,
the brother whose presence here
won’t let me forget
where I come from.

The beauty of our Appalachian past
is that we were born breathing the dust
of mountains as old as dirt itself,
weaned on spring water
that once quenched the Cherokee
and the Shawnee,
before our ancestors arrived
and vowed, it seemed,
never to uproot again—

until two hundred years later
my brother stands in the drenching rain
of another faraway land,
tying a rope to my dead car.

He’s tired from cutting trees
all day, all week, all year,
his arms still vibrating
from the chainsaw that turned out
to be more useful in this world
than the college debt.

We’ve crossed a continent and an ocean
and I still wonder
if we’ll ever escape our roots.

Twice the rope breaks.

I coast blind into the dark,
equal odds of soft grass
or steep cliffside,
watching his taillights fade,
knowing he’ll notice
and come back.

He’s laughing when he ties
the third knot,
just past the mud road
thick and slick from the storm.

For a moment I try to remember us young—
before the sharp edge formed in his smile,
before the anxiety rooted in my stomach.

Maybe we were never young,
not in the way that means unjaded.

We grew up knowing
the end was coming.

He thinks I’m naive for trying.
He listens to my mainland protest stories
and calls them honorable but futile.

All we can do now, he says,
is plant survival gardens,
learn to hunt,
get ready.

I wish I had this kind of acceptance.

I’ve tried yoga, meditation,
running from civilization itself
to calm the panic in me.

But when I ask what it’s like down there
when he spearfishes,
and he says, “full of garbage,”
I don’t know which shocks me more—
his nonchalance,
or my own surprise.

I’ve seen the ocean vomit plastic.

He tells me, without irony,
of sunlight filtering through plastic bags
floating like jellyfish,
and how future generations
may still dive down
to see them shine.

Still, compared to the orange rivers
of our pockmarked homeland,
even this feels like mercy.

The pain of our Appalachian past
is that we grew up in the blast zone
of a nuclear plant
in a little town
where the coal-ash pond
was already leaking.

We went further up the mountain to fish anyway.
We swam in the river anyway,
floated for days on inner tubes,
hunted crawdads in the creek
where copperheads hid among the rocks
like pieces of braided rope.

We never imagined
we’d live in paradise.

We never imagined
we’d get to watch paradise die too.

Here, we’ve watched
the coral disappear,
the nets come up emptier,
whales wash up full of plastic,

the beaches fill
with mainland refugees,
no more West to go
as their old homes burn, or sink.

While I fester on this,
he goes to spearfish,
seeking kala and uhu
in the iridescence,
or hunts boar by night
in the shadow of the ti leaves.

When I tell him I’m going back
to the mainland,
back to the movement,
he shakes his head—

but I know he gets it.

The next morning,
on the way to get a new battery,
he pulls over to show me
the hidden cliffside garden
where he’s planting kolo and cassava

one plant
one hike at a time,

for the ones who will survive
the sea-rise.

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Everything that Anne Carson has written is risky & original in some (unpredictable) way. truly an unclassifiable imagination– poet, translator, essayist, philosopher, observer of the vicissitudes of life; we’d met just once decades ago at Princeton where Anne Carson was an instructor in the Classics Dept. & I was–hypothetically–just a “visitor” for one year in Creative Writing. not predictable that Anne would move on, & on, & on to numerous universities & I would remain at Princeton; now hoping that she is in Canada & not caught up in toxic US politics so antithetical to the humanism & freedom of the imagination required for the soul to breathe.
– Joyce Carol Oates

For ten years now, I have lived under a singular monster, a hive brain with many bitter limbs. For ten years I have lived under landlords.
– Joel Golby

Evictions should be the absolute last resort for landlords and not the first-choice, nuclear option. Evicting people is mostly an unnecessary exercise in power-tripping and avoidable.
– Stewart Stafford

Urban landlords quickly realized that piles of money could be made by creating slums: “maximum profits came, not from providing first-class accommodations for those who could well afford them… but from crowded slum accommodations, for those whose pennies were scarcer than the rich man’s pounds.” Beginning in the sixteenth century, slum housing would be reserved not only for outcasts, beggars, and thieves but for a large segment of the population.
– Matthew Desmond

The profits were staggering. In 1966, a Chicago landlord told a court that on a single property he had made $42,500 in rent but paid only $2,400 in maintenance. When accused of making excessive profits, the landlord simply replied, “That’s why I bought the building.”
– Matthew Desmond

Take a long time with your anger,
sleepyhead.
Don’t waste it in riots.
Don’t tangle it with ideas.
The Devil won’t let me speak,
will only let me hint
that you are a slave,
your misery a deliberate policy
of those in whose thrall you suffer,
and who are sustained
by your misfortune.
The atrocities over there,
the interior paralysis over here —
Pleased with the better deal?
You are clamped down.
You are being bred for pain.
The Devil ties my tongue.
I’m speaking to you,
“friend of my scribbled life.”
You have been conquered by those
who know how to conquer invincibly.
The curtains move so beautifully,
lace curtains of some
sweet old intrigue:
the Devil tempting me
to turn away from alarming you.
So I must say it quickly:
Whoever is in your life,
those who harm you,
those who help you;
those whom you know
and those whom you do not know —
let them off the hook,
help them off the hook.
You are listening to Radio Resistance.

– Leonard Cohen

When you’ve got the hot water faucet on and cold water is coming out, and you leave it alone, and it keeps coming cold water, cold water, you may, with your fingers on the tap, be impatient and say, “Oh, it’s never going to come!” Sometimes it comes quickly. But this is the idea, you see: that meditation is putting your fingers under the cosmic hot water tap, and then you have to wait for it to happen.
– Alan Watts

There are times when you have nothing, are nothing:
A beach in cold October air
Breathing the space that held you;
Or a cool-dark basement, naked,
The night breeze garlanding your bare skin.
– Paul Zweig

My favorite definition of mythology: other people’s religion. My favorite definition of religion: misunderstanding of mythology. The misunderstanding consists in reading spiritual mythological symbols as though they were primarily references to historical events.
– Joseph Campbell

Your best performances will come when you are working in a way that is a full expression of you. The work becomes a natural display of your personality. This is when you not only get better results, but also love the activity — because in doing the craft, you feel alive.
– James Clear

For you young fellas just figuring out masculinity, the manliest men I know are badass cooks. If’n you wanna git a girl, show her the food. You can’t fake good cookin’.
– Kenneth Folk

But after life has begun to run away from us, nothing is ever again really credible, nor does it matter.
– Robert Aickman

The weirdness levels of this world outdo themselves every single day.
– Nika Solé

If there really is truth in comedy, maybe there must also be comedy in truth.
– Pamela D. Winfield

In that very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us.
– Peter Matthiessen

In the end the only events in my life worth telling are those when the imperishable world erupted into this transitory one.
– CG Jung

You Want a Social Life, with Friends
by Kenneth Koch

You want a social life, with friends,
A passionate love life and as well
To work hard every day. What’s true
Is of these three you may have two
And two can pay you dividends
But never may have three.

There isn’t time enough, my friends—
Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends—
To find the time to have love, work, and friends.
Michelangelo had feeling
For Vittoria and the Ceiling
But did he go to parties at day’s end?

Homer nightly went to banquets
Wrote all day but had no lockets
Bright with pictures of his Girl.
I know one who loves and parties
And has done so since his thirties
But writes hardly anything at all.

autumn sunlight
nothing to prove
nothing to become
– @BashoSociety

long journey
a raindrop rests
on my umbrella

– Saumya Bansal

Musicians make the best yogins. They understand practice, take masters as role models, and expect to spend a lifetime learning their craft.
– Kenneth Folk

More brilliant autodidacts are in existence today, thanks to the Internet, than at any other time in human history.
– @naval

Why should listening to music from the past mean we’ve stopped looking forward?
– Laura Kerr

How many people eat, drink, and get married; buy, sell, and build; make contracts and attend to their fortune; have friends and enemies, pleasures and pains, are born, grow up, live and die ― but asleep !
– Joseph Joubert

Words are never ‘only words’; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.
– Slavoj Žižek

Empathy is the most important thing one needs in life to get along reasonably with one another.
– Christine Nöstlinger

Please, in all this muddle of
life, continue to be a bright
and constant star. Just a few
things remain as beacons:
poetry, and you, and solitude.

– Vita Sackville-West

One cannot learn either music or meditation in a single day.
– Kenneth Folk

It’s getting harder and harder to lose your phone because you are reaching for it more and more often.
– @naval

Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined.
– Baruch Spinoza

Sooner or later
meditation brings
itself to its own
ending; it subsides
in simply being.

– Rupert Spira

You’re a Christian and a Buddhist (whether you like it or not)
Is religion defined more by beliefs or practices?

by Jonny Thomson

KEY TAKEAWAYS

“Orthopraxy” says we can define a religion by what people do more than what people believe.

So, if someone meditates, they might be a Buddhist. If someone goes to church at Christmas, they might be a Christian, and so on.

In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I push Andrew Henry, a scholar of religion, on this, and he argues that this is just the real messiness of being human.

I’M GOING TO CALL you a Christian.

I don’t care if you don’t believe in God, or read the Bible, or accept that Jesus died for your sins. I’m going to call you a Christian anyway, because you do Christian things. You’re kind to others, you give to charity, you look after your neighbor. You don’t work on the Sabbath, you give gifts at Christmas, and you are awestruck by the sight of a cathedral touching the sunset sky. You’re a Christian.

In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with the popular YouTuber and scholar of religion Andrew Henry. He introduced me to the term “orthopraxy,” which says being religious is not defined by what you believe but by what you do. If you behave according to a certain religion, you are that religion.

To those born into a mostly Protestant culture, that might sound weird. In the West, we tend to treat religion as a matter of belief. But that idea is surprisingly local. The academic study of religion, Henry notes, “was mostly invented by Protestant scholars back in the late 1800s and 1900s,” and they built the category in their own image. Step outside it and you find that for most of history, and for much of the world today, religion was never mainly about what you believed.

The ancient debate still with us

If you think debates about religion are the worst, well, be prepared to be upset, because there’s a debate about even the word religion. The Roman philosopher Cicero argued that the word religion derives from relegere, “to re-read, go over again.” And so, the religiosi were people who carefully attended to every detail of a text, with the diligence of ritual. But around the year 300, the Christian writer Lactantius rejected Cicero’s idea and said religion comes from religare, “to bind,” because we are bound to God. Or, outside of the Christian mindset, we are bound to a creed, a dogma, a belief system.

It’s an ancient debate we’re still having. The orthoprax follow in a line from Cicero — a religion is defined by what we do. The rituals we perform, the words we repeat, the small, everyday superstitions we find ourselves doing all define our religion. The orthodox follow from Lactantius and argue that religion requires assent to a belief. “I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.”

So who is right? Well, in terms of philosophy and theology, it depends on who you listen to or who you read. But in terms of how most of the world actually practices, things lean toward orthopraxy.

In Confucianism and traditional Chinese beliefs, ancestor worship is far more important than any formal creed. In Japan, there is a saying: “born Shinto, marry Christian, die Buddhist.” A lot of Japanese people claim they aren’t religious, and yet pack out shrines at New Year’s, and Christian-style chapel weddings have been hugely popular since the 1990s, often led by a hired “priest” who isn’t ordained and quite possibly has never read the entirety of the Gospels. There’s an old joke within the Jewish community. Two people, Goldberg and Schwartz, are going to the synagogue. Goldberg goes to talk to God, while Schwartz goes to talk with Goldberg. The social, bonding aspect of Judaism is seen as an essential — even defining — part of the religion.

Even within the Christian tradition, things aren’t so obvious. In 2012, the Richard Dawkins Foundation commissioned a poll of people who had ticked “Christian” on the 2011 census and found that only about 30% actually believed in Christianity’s teachings. Three out of four said it was because they had been baptized. Sixty percent hadn’t freely chosen to read any part of the Bible.

If nothing else, it shows that “being religious” is complicated.

The Buddhist who likes a walk

Henry is orthoprax, but it turns out I’m more of an “essentialist,” or orthodox. I never even knew I was. And so I put it to Henry: “If I say I’m going for a walk and therefore I’m meditating, therefore I’m now a Buddhist, that’s not true, is it? By that logic I’m also a Hindu, a mystical Christian and a Sufi, which are incompatible.”

Henry disagrees. In religious studies, he explained, there’s a long-running fight between “essentialists,” who often align with orthodoxy, and “functionalists,” who often align with orthopraxy. Essentialists think a religion has core ingredients, such as belief in the supernatural or membership in the right community, and without them it isn’t the real thing. Functionalists, like Henry, care less about what a practice is and more about what it does.

Take, for example, the Nicene Creed. Every Sunday, millions of Christians recite it together. But millions of people also pack into stadiums and chant “USA! USA!” Both are rituals. Both produce the same feeling: we’re all in this together. So, for Henry, “slapping the label religion on either one of those is kind of artificial.”

As for my incompatible-beliefs objection, Henry’s reply was to say that “people aren’t consistent.” He pointed to surveys suggesting that something like one in ten American evangelicals believe in reincarnation, which is “literal heresy” in a religion built on resurrection. And in the late Roman world, Christians “might go light some incense to Apollo at his temple on Tuesday and then go to the basilica and take the Eucharist on Sunday.”

So if we think that beliefs are incompatible, Henry asks: according to whom? Usually, the answer is a religious authority. Catholics and Protestants disagree about what sits at the heart of Christianity. Sunnis and Shias disagree about Islam. Mormons insist they’re Christians, and a lot of other Christians say they’re not.

There is good and bad news for my opening gambit. The good news is that orthopraxy says I might be right — how you behave is more important than what you believe. But the bad news is that if there’s no core, no central, absolute arbiter of “religious,” then nobody gets to hand out the labels: not the Pope, not the scholar, and certainly not me. You might be a Christian, but it’s not because I said so.

ALL THAT TIME CONTAINS

Each one bead is transparent, and each has a world, or the same world, light and alive and apparent inside the drop: it is all there ever could be, moving at once, past and future, and all the people. I can look into any sphere and see people stream past me, and cool my eyes with colors and the sight of the world in spectacle perishing ever, and ever renewed. I do; I deepen into a drop and see all that time contains, all the faces and deeps of the worlds and all the earth’s contents, every landscape and room, everything living or made or fashioned, all past and future stars, and especially faces, faces like the cells of everything, faces pouring past me talking, and going, and gone. And I am gone.

– Annie Dillard

People think they need to be healed, but the truth is much more beautiful. Even a minute is more than we deserve. No one should be anything but dead. Instead we get honey of out rocks. Miracles from nothing. It’s easy. We don’t need to get better. We’re already us. And everything that is, is ours.
– Richard Powers

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little,
and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
– Robinson Jeffers

The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects which is itself but an endless circle of mutually reflecting metaphors.
– Pierre Bourdieu

Man is more interesting than men (…) Each one is more precious than all.
– André Gide

One must not entirely disregard the notion that we are living in an age of rather greater illusion than the average for man. At a certain period, mankind lives in a state which is nearer to a natural and proper existence and at other times below it. This is the notion of yugas, which the Hindus speak about, or the degree of bonding that there is in man. If it is believed, as I believe it, we are now just going through the last throes of this. You have a good chance of living into the beginning of an age of greater light, and I hope to God that all of you will hold on to this and not allow yourself to be drawn back into belief in things as they appear to be.
– JG Bennett

No Self stands alone. Behind it stretches an immense chain of physical and – as a special class within the whole – mental events, to which it belongs as a reacting member and which it carries on. Through the condition at any moment of its somatic, especially its cerebral system, and through education, and tradition, by word, by writing, by monument, by manners, by a way of life, by a newly shaped environment… by so much that a thousand words would not exhaust it, by all that, I say, the Self is not so much linked with what happened to its ancestors, it is not so much the product, and merely the product, of all that, but rather, in the strictest sense of the word, the SAME THING as all that: the strict, direct continuation of it, just as the Self aged fifty is the continuation of the Self aged forty.
– Erwin Schrödinger

image
of water, a brightness
not gold, not silver,
rippling
as if with laughter.

– Denise Levertov

You know what the greatest tragedy is in the whole world?… It’s all the people who never find out what it is they really want to do or what it is they’re really good at. It’s all the sons who become blacksmiths because their fathers were blacksmiths. It’s all the people who could be really fantastic flute players who grow old and die without ever seeing a musical instrument, so they become bad plowmen instead. It’s all the people with talents who never even find out. Maybe they are never even born in a time when it’s even possible to find out. It’s all the people who never get to know what it is that they can really be. It’s all the wasted chances.
– Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures

Only an unabashed acceptance of the similarities between the Nazi and Soviet systems permits an understanding of their differences. Both ideologies opposed liberalism and democracy. In both political systems, the significance of the word party was inverted: rather than being a group among others competing for power according to accepted rules, it became the group that determined the rules. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were both one-party states. In both the Nazi and Soviet polities the party played a leading role in matters of ideology and social discipline. Its political logic demanded exclusion of outsiders, and its economic elite believed that certain groups were superfluous or harmful. In both administrations, economic planners assumed that more people existed in the countryside than was really necessary. Stalinist collectivization would remove superfluous peasants from the countryside and send them to the cities or the Gulag to work. If they starved, that was of little consequence. Hitlerian colonization projected the starvation and deportation of tens of millions of people.
– Timothy D. Snyder

The sensitive person’s hostility to the machine is in one sense unrealistic, because of the obvious fact that the machine has come to stay. But as an attitude of mind there is a great deal to be said for it. The machine has got to be accepted, but it is probably better to accept it rather as one accepts a drug – that is, grudgingly and suspiciously. Like a drug, the machine is useful, dangerous and habit-forming. The oftener one surrenders to it the tighter its grip becomes.
– George Orwell

The only way is to enjoy your life. Even though you are practicing zazen, counting your breath like a snail, you can enjoy your life, maybe much better than making a trip to the moon. That is why we practice zazen. The kind of life you have is not so important. The most important thing is to be able to enjoy your life without being fooled by things.
– Shunryu Suzuki

“But where shall I find courage?” asked Frodo. “That is what I chiefly need.”

“Courage is found in unlikely places,” said Gildor. “Be of good hope!”

– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Before” has fewer syllables than “prior to” and is perfectly good and useful. Just saying.
– Alicia E. Stallings

External things are not the problem. It’s your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now.
– Marcus Aurelius

Our own Hell is everything we would cast off, reject. If we do not face our Hell, we continue to deposit the unwanted, the loathsome, the horrific in our neighbor and try to kill it there.
– Ann Belford Ulanov

Among our egocentric sad-sacks, despair is as addictive as heroin and more popular than sex, for the single reason that when one is unhappy one gets to pay a lot of attention to oneself. Misery becomes a kind of emotional masturbation.
– Tom Robbins

Life is so much better when your conscience is clear and your body is healthy and you’re ruling your reality.
– Nika Solé

Don’t try to 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.
– CG Jung

Thinking how soon
all in this world passes
I loved
the yellow roses
that now have scattered

– Shiki Masaoka

The man who is empty of heart writes a great deal about love; the man who is unhappy composes music on love and beauty.
– Krishnamurti

One could probably say that the living humanity of a human being diminishes to the extent that he renounces thinking.
– Hannah Arendt

And if the poet doesn’t risk absurdity, he isn’t even in the game.
– D. A. Powell

Today, we have more remedies than ever before in history – and
more sickness.
– Manly P. Hall

To be aware of your breath reduces the amount of thinking you do. You take consciousness away from what it is usually absorbed by, which is the stream of thinking.
– Eckhart Tolle

The mindset:

Confident enough to start. Humble enough to keep learning.

The trap:

Too humble to start. Or too confident to keep learning.

– James Clear

The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. To a vote. To a number. To a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind. As a glorious thing made of star dust.
– Rohith Vemula

And nothing is true, or good, or right, except in its own living relatedness to its own circumambient universe; to the things that are in the stream with it.
– DH Lawrence

However deeply we go into a particular sensation, we find no center. And however much we sense outward through the layers of sensation, we find no edge.
– Martin Aylward

Once you start answering the call that’s woven into the framework of who you are, your life is going to end up looking a lot different than what everyone else is doing. That’s a good thing.
– Nika Solé

Only the paranoid survive. But they aren’t a happy bunch.
– @naval

The life force and the mind are operating, but the mind will tempt you to believe that ‘you’ are the one who is acting. Do not believe the mind. Always understand that you are the timeless, spaceless witness.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj

To be with her
is to sit in
autumn sunlight.

– Virginia Woolf

The Bridge

Imagine if we could each
release our sorrows into
the safe-hold of another.

The hidden continents
of our inner selves would
inch ever closer, forming

a bridge anyone could cross.

– James Crews