We are running out of poetic ways to say this: life in Gaza is as precious as anywhere else on this earth. It must be protected with the same commitment and rigor and devotion.
– Hala Alyan
while i am absolutely still engaged, i am also old. and tired. been at actively trying to avoid this brand of very specific eventuality for a very long time. i’m also loving all of this newer activist energy. people write me a lot, asking how i haven’t completely burned out over time. so. fwiw…
notes to newer activists (or) things i wish i would’ve known 30 years ago (or) what i’ve learned so far:
activism without community leads to burnout. find your people. stay engaged. cultivate community. if you don’t have it, build it.
while we’re all aligned, there will inevitably be differing ideas. anchor into your values. the infighting will happen. that’s just a given. esp on the left. we’re famous for it.
you don’t have to do everything – just do a one thing. something. anything. and then do the next right thing.
ask yourself often – is my reaction and movement rooted in trauma response? adjust accordingly. work from a place of wholeness, as close as you can get to that. rage is fine. incredibly valid. but also embrace grief, love, joy, imagination, creativity, vision. they last longer. feel it all.
rest is resistance. it’s not a detour. or betrayal. community is resistance.
take news breaks. let your nervous system reset, as best as possible.
before actions or organizing, make a little ritual. get grounded in the present. a breath. a mantra. a magical rock in your pocket. after, return to rest. a quiet walk. a nap. a cup of tea. reflect in a journal. create a playlist of songs that soothe you. this is a reminder to your nervous system that right now you are safe, whole, human.
celebrate small wins. joy is also resistance. there will be far more of these.
you’re likely feeling a great sense of urgency. hold that by the edges. none of this happened overnight and it’s not going to be undone overnight. urgency culture is real. what’s an emergency? triage it, emotionally and practically.
observe, don’t absorb. act where/when you can. it takes all of us. it takes every moment you are able to give.
your heart will break. a lot. you’ll feel frustrated. it’s part of being aware. take care of you. a lot of trauma lives in activist spaces. the basics: sleep, eat, hydrate, move. the not so basic but also vitals: somatic work, breathing – the intentional kind. therapy.
keep learning, keep unlearning. being teachable, being open, stepping outside your comfort zone is radical. you don’t need to be a flawless activist, just show up. know you’ll screw something up. own it. adjust. shift.
vision: what are you fighting for, not just against. imagine it. draw it. write it. collage it. build it in micromoments.
healthy activism means you’re leaving it better than you found it.
get cozy with grief. it’s part of justice work. it honors what hasn’t changed. what’s been lost. grieve alone, grieve collectively.
visibility isn’t impact. anchor to your why. return to it often. not all social media posts are effective. not all social media posts are performative. but some are. will it have an impact? is it effective? things to ask you.
justice is a practice, not a purity test. guilt and shame backfire and will not lead to action. teach. welcome. provide on-ramps to action.
go back and find the activists throughout history that bring the fire for you.
there are certain words i always return to when i’m feeling despair. collect them to have at the ready.
stay open to wonder. look at the stars. listen to old songs. look at the sky. a river. babies. there’s a lot of beauty to fight for.
authoritarianism wants you tired, scared, joyless. your delight is resistance fuel. joy is resistance.
never forget. we are all connected. what happens to one of us happens to all of us. we are wired for connection. fierce individualism is killing us.
empathy is not weakness. it’s a lifeline. no matter what they say. don’t let the bastards grind you down.
mostly, thank you, deeply and sincerely, thank you, for whatever it is you are doing to make the world a better place. for knowing we are all connected. for acting accordingly.
– Kara Joy
The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.
– Cormac McCarthy
In pursuing his perceptions of reality, he [the poet] must often sail against the currents of his time.
– John F. Kennedy
The artist’s fidelity has strengthened the fibre of our national life.
– John F. Kennedy
There is a visceral
reaction when you know
something’s good.
And it doesn’t have
to make sense.
It’s not intellectual.
It transcends intellect.
– Rick Rubin
Tomorrow means I might / have her forever. Yesterday means / I say goodbye, again. / Kal means they are the same.
– Fatimah Asghar
Intelligence is not normally distributed.
– @naval
Letting go of thoughts in meditation calms them—but it doesn’t uproot our habits of self-fixation.
– Lama Kathy Wesley
Do not hold back your love, your joy, and your exuberance. Only what you give becomes your quality, not what you hold back.
– Sadhguru
Once you deeply realize there’s nothing to stabilize, the attempts to stabilize things stop.
This stopping is the original stabilization you were seeking, though not the one you thought you were looking for.
– @VinceFHorn
They tried to siphon your energy. They tried to lower your vibration. They tried spiritual warfare. And look at you, glowing with life force energy. You transformed it all into love.
– Nika Solé
Psychologically you develop in a spiral, you always come over the same point where you have been before, but it is never exactly the same, it is either above or below.
– CG Jung
And the empty pages?
Should they ever be filled
Let it be with observed
Celestial recurrences,
The day the flowers come,
And when the birds go.
– Philip Larkin
A kite in the shape
of a map floats
over the land it depicts,
but at night no one sees
its roads at the end
of which a child feels
his hand tugged upward,
disappearing
in salutations.
– Bill Knott
Collapsing generational curses and passing forward generational blessings, a lifestyle.
– Nika Solé
If we understand anything of the unconscious, we know that it cannot be swallowed. We also know that it is dangerous to suppress it, because the unconscious is life and this life turns against us if suppressed, as happens in neurosis.
– Carl G. Jung
Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
– Anne Carson
It is not enough to live, to experience life.
To be fully alive, we must also reflect on life;
and go beyond reflection to integration.
– Jungian-Senoi Dreamwork Manual
I am a drunkard from another kind of tavern. I dance to a silent tune. I am the symphony of stars.
– Rumi
What’s important about poetry
in the context of leadership
is that most of the time,
power has to do with dominance.
But poetry is never about dominance.
Poetry is powerful
but it cannot even aspire to dominate anyone.
It means making a connection.
That’s what it means.
– June Jordan
Of such loves unwrit, at the boundary layer
between earth and air,
I feel most clear.
– Jenny Johnson
The Buddha realized that old age, sickness, and death are not problems in themselves. It is the mind that makes them problems—by believing they shouldn’t happen, by insisting on figuring them out, resisting, controlling.
– Matthias Birk
One could laugh at the world better
if it didn’t mix tender kindliness
with its brutality.
– D. H. Lawrence
They’re going to want you to come in a nicely wrapped package of small, quiet, and digestible. But you’re an entire multiverse and they’re just going to have to learn how to navigate that, or get lost.
– Nika Solé
The dusty war of day is past;
Its uncompanioned lonely fears
Of yearning toil and hopeless tears
Grow mellow as they fade at last.
– Tolkien
Simplicity does not mean poverty or austerity. It is the conscious choice to reduce the superfluous in order to focus on the essential – what truly matters in life.
The more we clutter our lives with distractions, the less space we have for genuine contentment. Happiness thrives in simplicity, in moments of quiet presence rather than in the relentless pursuit of more.
– Matthieu Ricard
We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
– Gaston Bachelard
One of the great surprises on the human journey is that we come to full consciousness precisely by shadowboxing, facing our own contradictions, and making friends with our own mistakes and failings. People who have had no inner struggles are invariably superficial and uninteresting. We tend to endure them more than appreciate them because they have little to communicate and show little curiosity. Shadow work is what I call “falling upward.” God hid holiness quite well: the proud will never recognize it, and the humble will fall into it every day—not even realizing it is holiness.
– Richard Rohr
Our lives are lived as stories
Though their intrapsychic actors
May play from scripts whose scripting comes
From key genetic factors;
Our lives are understandable
In terms of mental rules
Though they respond, like puppets,
To brain protein molecules.
– Samuel Barondes
I always imagined I would write a book, if only a small one, that would carry one away, into a realm that could not be measured nor even remembered.
I imagined a lot of things. That I would shine. That I’d be good. I’d dwell bareheaded on a summit turning a wheel that would turn the earth and undetected, amongst the clouds, I would have some influence; be of some avail.
– Patti Smith
And That Is Why
And that is why I paced the corridors
Of those great museums
Gazing at paintings of a world
In which David is blameless as a boy scout
Goliath earns his shameful death
While eternal twilight dims Rembrandt’s canvases,
The twilight of anxiety and attention
And I passed from hall to hall
Admiring portraits of cynical cardinals
In Roman crimson
Ecstatic peasant weddings
Avid players at cards or dice
Observing ships of war and momentary truces
And that is why I paced the corridors
Of those renowned museums those celestial palaces
Trying to grasp Isaac’s sacrifice
Mary’s sorrow and bright skies above the Seine
And I always went back to a city street
Where madness pain and laughter persisted-
Still unpainted
– Adam Zagajewski
[…] like any human practices, those of religions are not exempt from ethical questioning. Rituals and rites in groups change behavior, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. For the madness of crowds is a very close cousin to the fervor or congregations and the martial spirit of armies.
– Simon Blackburn
The book opened / like a future or a grave.
– Traci Brimhall
He who jumps into the
void owes no explanation to
those who stand and watch.
– Jean-Luc Godard
But I am, as I say, an amateur. And if that means that I have neglected parts of my large field, devoting myself mainly to those things that I personally like, it does also mean that I have tried to awake liking, to communicate delight in those things that I find enjoyable.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Our innate Buddha nature is awake and yet has no shape or form—it is empty, and therefore cannot be tainted.
– Haemin Sunim
People cut off feeling by entering the rarefied world of intellect without extending down to contact the rest of the body that drags along like a unacknowledged guest.
– John P. Conger
Don’t chase the man away too quickly from the cabin where his childhood was spent.
– Friedrich Hölderlin
May your vibration, aura, and heart be so full of love, that any unkind or untrue criticisms or judgments from those that claim to love you (and those that don’t), never reach you. And may your grace protect you always.
– Nyle Beck
All a poet can do today is warn.
– Wilfred Owen
Lies cannot nourish or protect you. Only freedom from fear, freedom from lies, can make us beautiful, and keep us safe.
– Anne Lamott
Just be very careful about whose lead you’re following into the future. The majority of people leading, are lost.
– Nika Solé
winter stars
our meeting
un-arranged
– Tom Clausen
Each book creates its own system, because each comes from a different obsession, a different question that needs to be answered.
– Javier Cercas
When inward life dries up, when feeling decreases and apathy increases, when one cannot affect or even genuinely touch another person, violence flares up as a daimonic necessity for contact, a mad drive forcing touch in the most direct way possible.
– Rollo May
the shortest straw
in his hand
winter solstice
– El Coyote
Whatever your bar is for working with people, raise it.
– @naval
Never get discouraged when you lose awareness. Every time you recognize that you have lost awareness, be happy. The fact that you have recognized that you lost awareness means that you are now aware. Just keep looking at this process of losing and regaining awareness and learn from it.
– Sayadaw U Tejaniya
Is there anything we can do to alter the flow of things as they are? Whatever is happening is happening independent of us. Our feeling of control is utterly illusory. If we are honest we know this to be true. So we might as well stop resisting and accept it.
– Plato
Fasting focuses the mind – it replaces all desires with a single desire.
– @naval
The reading public bothers me, though. They don’t want to read about the blood and bones and guts of an issue. They want to read about something they’re not going to have to think about, and if it does hurt them… it won’t last very long. What has happened in this country is a failure of the imagination.
– Harry Crews
Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming … an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.
– John O’Donohue
Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming?
– Sylvia Plath
Compassion is not weakness and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism.
– Hubert Humphrey
At any point as an artist—like the universe itself—if you’re not expanding, you’re contracting.
– Jim Harrison
I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fade out, the real world evaporates. I’m alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world.
– Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Oppy, where
do we go when our work is done
and how will we know when it’s time?
– Neil Hilborn
Hate, it appears to me, is the heresy.
– Madeleine L’Engle
A writer or any artist can’t expect to be embraced by the people. I’ve done records where it seemed like no one listened to them. You write poetry books that maybe 50 people read. And you just keep doing your work because you have to, because it’s your calling.
– Patti Smith
If absolute truth exists, it must be available to everyone, everywhere, at all times.
Therefore, the path to truth cannot require any knowledge or effort.
– @naval
Any time you pay somebody to tell you what to do you’re going to be a loser. And this includes your psychiatrist, your psychologist, your broker, your workshop teacher and your etc.
There is nothing that teaches you more than regrouping after failure and moving on. Yet most people are stricken with fear. They fear failure so much that they fail. They are too conditioned, too used to being told what to do. It begins with the family, runs through school and goes into the business world.
– Charles Bukowski
Almost everyone has 10,000hr+ mastery of imaginal practice.
Mostly they use it to torture themselves, is the thing.
– River Kenna
I hope June
will bring us together.
– Jane Austen
To create an outside situation, you need the cooperation of other people and forces. To create an inner situation, you only need yourself.
– Sadhguru
Something new is brewing. Times are changing in a massive way. Power is being reclaimed. The real is remembering itself after having been forgotten for so long. The tables have officially turned.
– Nika Solé
My father, I seek no crowns,
But unspoken praise from thee;
For thy people’s good, and thy renown,
I will die to set them free.
– George MacDonald, Phantastes
Certainty lies on the far side of humanity, and to embrace it is to build a fortress that the winds in time will overturn.
– Pico Iyer
pitter/patter
by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes
(for a.g., you & yours)
the night is silver in its silence moon-pop echoes of the day raked up rubble of the hours spent
my, the children slumber a thousand tomorrows bubbling at their lips the dream projections lighting up the clouds’ ample cotton
relish the silence
as you’ll relish tomorrow and the honesty of such raucous noise, thick child feet of our unfeathered breasts, beasts we cherish
hallway run, sprints to smash the mash of food tumbling, rolling right into these arms charmed in their amnesia regarding where one begins or ends
reminding us of the joy of first step and the storm after the holler: mama see, mama watch
pitter/patter
pitter/patter
thunder on a hardwood, heartbeat this sole and counted rhythm
every generation a temporal fugitive running from the death grip every death ship’s watch, yesterdays we weren’t meant to make it through relish the memory ingrained in the sound how these tiny, tiny feet grip the floor, say
tomorrow, tomorrow
I make you
tomorrow
If your potential doesn’t make you at least a little bit nervous, you’re not looking at it closely enough.
– Nika Solé
Spirituality needs a beer and a loud burp. Sensuality needs a rough blanket and a hard bed and a cold night with the stars.
– Alan Watts
People think too much about eating.
Always ready to stuff something into their mouths.
Making pictures of their meals.
Even talking of food pron.
But when it comes to moving they have no clue what to do.
Tell someone to “just move”.
See what happens.
– @moveorperish
But when the great fall, the less must lead.
– Aragorn (Tolkien, The Two Towers)
To know how much there is to know is the beginning of learning to live.
– Dorothy West
Misfortune allows us to grow tired of beautiful things and shows us new ones with its outstretched fingers.
– Robert Walser, The Tanners (tr. Susan Bernofsky)
i love saturday night
he said then began
crying into his beer
– Chris Torrance
Germanic men believe that there resides in women an element of holiness and a gift of prophecy; and so they do not scorn to ask their advice, or lightly disregard their replies.
– Tacitus, 98 AD
I think that if at seventeen I’d known there’d be twelve books of poems (at that time I never imagined novels at all), I would feel pretty good. I’d say, ‘You did what was in you to do.’
– May Sarton
And it came to him then that it should never be taken lightly, the essential loneliness of people, that the choices they made to keep themselves from that gaping darkness were choices that required respect…
– Elizabeth Strout
Every time I think I have turned the page, he re-enters my life, awkward as a postscript.
– Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Sister of My Heart
He couldn’t seem to get his teeth into anything. Except books. The things in books was darn near more real to him than the things breathing and eating.
– Ken Kesey
This is what families do for each other — hide a few uncomfortable truths, allow a few self-deceptions. Little kindnesses… And little cruelties.
– Anne Tyler, French Braid
One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
– Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
The city shimmered in summertime like gemstone jewelry under a relentless sun.
– A. T. Steel, Honey Buns and Cream Soda in the Stairwell
Books covered every available surface and much of the floor. Leah loved books more than she loved anything in the world, but this . . . this seemed like a sickness, like an infestation of words.
– Jess Walter, So Far Gone
You don’t simply force yourself to become calm and equanimous regardless of events. You first have to find an inner sense of joy that comes from virtue, concentration, and discernment.
– Thānissaro Bhikkhu
Citizens should be governed and lead, not so as to become slaves, but so that they may freely do whatsoever things are best.
– Baruch Spinoza, Ethics
In fact, as you know, the first geisha were men (jesters and drummers). Their risky patter made the guests laugh. But by 1780 ‘geisha’ meant woman and the glamorous business of the tea houses had been brought under government control.
– Anne Carson
At midnight, in the month of June, I stand beneath the mystic moon.
– Edgar Allan Poe
Nothing ever becomes real till experienced – even a proverb is no proverb until your life has illustrated it.
– John Keats
To be true to myself, to be the person that was on the inside of me, and not play games. That’s what I’m trying to do mostly in the whole world, is to not bullshit myself and not bullshit anybody else.
– Janis Joplin
Theory is taught so as to make the student believe that he or she can become a Marxist, a feminist, an Afrocentrist, or a deconstructionist with about the same effort and commitment required in choosing items from a menu.
– Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
– T.S. Eliot
Do not disturb yourself by imagining your whole life at once.
– Marcus Aurelius
Failure can be the information you need to get where you’re going.
– Rick Rubin
No matter how much parents and grandparents may have sinned against the child, the man who is really adult will accept these sins as his own condition which has to be reckoned with. Only a fool is interested in other peoples guilt since he cannot alter it. The wise man learns only from his own guilt. He will ask himself: Who am I that all this should happen to me? To find the answer to this fateful question, he will look into his own heart.
– C.G. Jung
Like everything in life, if you are willing to make the short-term sacrifice, you’ll have the long-term benefit. ‘Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.’
– @naval
Admissions Essay I am a good student. Voted most likely to try harder. Not voted most likely for fairy tales, though I have been both hooded and wolfed. My honors thesis on the role of motherlessness and love hunger brought the candied
house down. I could’ve been valedictorian if the metrics were ardor and potential for transformation. I recognize the chemical structure of serotonin and how to calculate my best chance for a free drink from across the room, and both have strong angles.
I know how it feels when that hormone unlatches my ribs, silks my legs. I don’t confuse that with love, because in each unit of intimacy, I enter slow. Adjust my breath. Recognize the accusations that are confessions. I excelled in the serious ethics of kissing, how it makes the body more image than idea, but I admit that sometimes I like to lick mezcal and grapefruit from a hero’s morally ambiguous mouth. I’m sorry.
That’s how I know I’m a successful candidate. The temptations. The failures. The ever afters of forgiveness I have already lived. For so long, I offered others the love I wanted to receive, the cursive letters and lost slippers. The balanced equations and checkbooks. Years of service in the scales of care. Change my story. Accept me.
– Traci Brimhall
A Supermarket in California
by Allen Ginsberg
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I
walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-
conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the
neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping
at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in
the tomatoes!—and you, García Lorca, what were you doing
down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking
among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork
chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following
you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary
fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and
never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour.
Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add
shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue
automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what
America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you
got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear
on the black waters of Lethe?
You are the temple of God. You are the abode of the ultimate. So the question is not where to find truth, the question is: how have you lost it? The question is not where to go; you are already there – stop going.
– Osho
It’s shocking how many important life decisions I make by scouring Internet forums.
– @naval
Being on your phone in public is the most stupid you can do.
You miss out on potential beauty.
And you let down the only thing that guards you against potential danger.
There is nothing more idiotic than this.
– @moveorperish
Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
– John Updike
Joy is a physical experience. Thoughts may follow, but they are secondary.
– Jon Aaron
It is very dangerous when a wound is so common in a culture that hardly anyone knows that there is a problem. There is general discontent with our way of life but almost no one knows specifically where to look for its origin.
– Robert A. Johnson
Everything that you throw at me I will transform into a blessing, a boon.
– Epictetus
The thing I want and love in art is life force — experience is very nice too, but if you don’t have that yet (too young) it’s life force.
– Elisa Gabbert
Social media is a force multiplier for mass hysteria and mass greed.
– @naval
Ideally, the ultimate retreat is to retreat from the past and the future, to always remain in the present.
– Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche
Problems of passage arise here: magical lore must be forgotten, for it will be deceptive once the cosmic chase begins.
– Ernst Jünger
All a man has to do, is to better what he can.
– George MacDonald, Phantastes
Years ago, I worried that we were beginning to misuse the word “friend” to denote shallow online relations, to name-drop people we’ve met and admire who we wish were actual friends, and to otherwise commodify one of the most sacred relations in life.
I often puzzle over the nature, structure, and function of friendship in human life — a function I have found to be indispensable to my own spiritual survival and, I suspect, to that of most human beings. But during a recent interview on Think Again, I found myself concerned with the commodification of the word “friend” in our culture. We call “friends” peers we barely know beyond the shallow roots of the professional connection, we mistake mere mutual admiration for friendship, we name-drop as “friends” acquaintances associating with whom we feel reflects favorably on us in the eyes of others, thus rendering true friendship vacant of Emerson’s exacting definition. We have perpetrated a corrosion of meaning by overusing the word and overextending its connotation, compressing into an imperceptible difference the vast existential expanse between mere acquaintanceship and friendship in the proper Aristotelian sense.
– Maria Popova
be inspired by poetry
be perfected by music
– Confucius
If one is alive right now and, hopefully, trying to write about being alive right now, one can’t not write about the dark digital ponds into which we’re always looking for answers, diversions, and reassurances of our own beauty.
– Chris Ware
When a man sees his end, he wants to know there was some purpose to his life.
– Richard Harris
If you don’t want to go to the meeting right now, your future self won’t want to go to it later, either.
– @naval
“Measured Silence” … is sometimes what is needed …
– Dr Anish K Gupta
i
am
only
these jangling
night lights
fixed
to a spirit
pleading
for the next
break of dawn
– Dior J. Stephens
Your worldview is your world.
– @naval
They flung a mirror at me,
more magical than a witch’s wand,
more potent than a sorcerer’s hand.
Splintered into infinite cracks of choices
I had made, good or bad-
a door left ajar,
– @g_kotsakis
Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.
– Kurt Vonnegut
The best compete against nature, not against other humans.
– @naval
“competing against nature” is an autoimmune disease
– River Kenna
…Philology rescued the surviving documents from oblivion and ignorance, and presented to lovers of poetry and history fragments of a noble past that without it would have remained for ever dead and dark.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
I am restless and would rather sail a boat than crack a book.
– E. B. White
Greta Thunberg has more courage in her little finger than most Western leaders put together.
– Alan MacLeod
We practice learning that we can show up differently than the way that our habitual patterning often suggests that we should.
– Justin von Bujdoss
after graduation
still fresh
with regret
– Yu Wai
CREDO
after C. Miłosz
What good is poetry
if it doesn’t stand up
against the lies of government,
if it doesn’t rescue us
from the liars that mislead us?
What good is it
if it doesn’t speak out, denounce what’s going on?
It’s nothing
but harmless wordplay
to titillate and distract –
the government knows it,
and can always get rid of us if we step out of line.
That I believed in poetry,
even when I betrayed it,
that I came back to its central meaning
– to save the world –
this and only this
has been my salvation.
– Edward Field
What is a Wanderess? Bound by no boundaries, contained by no countries, tamed by no time, she is the force of nature’s course.
– Roman Payne
Everything you do reverberates throughout a thousand destinies. As you walk, you cut open and create that river bed into which the stream of your descendants shall enter and flow.
– Nikos Kazantzakis
Being a Lake
He has never dreamed of being a lake
in the high mountains, and now he wonders why.
Surely there could be no better, in the way
of dreamy aspirations: to be clear and cold
and swum through by trout. To allow the sunlight
far into your depths, to have depths no one
will ever visit. To be ceilinged by ice
and many feet of snow in winter, to shine pure blue
into the pure blue of the sky, to show the stars
the stars, to be drunk by wild animals.
And to admit an occasional human,
who, because of the memory of having been there,
might dream of being there. Being there.
Not a visitor but a dreamer, dreaming
this very lake is what he’s always wanted to be.
– Robert Wrigley
“I missed you,” she said, “until the day we met.”
– Atticus
Even if you’ve read through countless books
You’re better off sticking to a single phrase
If anyone asks which one, tell him:
‘Know your own mind just as it is.’
– Ryokan
Often it seems we must undertake the longest of journeys to arrive at what has been nearest all along. Mornings rarely find us so astounded at the new day that we are unable to decide between adventures. We take on days with the same conditioned reflex with which we wash and put on clothes each morning. If we could be mindful of how short our time is, we might learn how precious each day is.
– John O’Donohue
You can’t speak anything truly worth hearing until you transcend your humanity and receive words from above.
– Eugene Terekhin
Civilized comfort
attracts barbarian
conquest.
– Will Durant
The older the problem, the older the solution. How to eat well is one of the oldest problems.
– @naval
“Enter eagerly into the treasure-house that lies within you,” wrote St. Isaac the Syrian, “and so you will see the treasure-house of heaven.”
– Pico Iyer
you build a vast apparatus to suppress & malform entire regions of your life-force; over time, this turns your life into a grey little war of you-vs-you
Kali comes along, wrecks the apparatus, liberates all that life force — & you’re what, *scared* of her? *resentful* of her??
– River Kenna
A strait between his heart and mine
is lined with dandelions,
each wish holding us together—
fragile threads of longing.
But it’s only a dream
I see with open eyes.
– @chandanas
I prefer loneliness to alternatives I can envision. […] I’d rather read a book, or better bits and pieces of about ten books.
– Alice Notley
The inner critic wants control, but real transformation arises beyond our grasp.
– Gavin Milne
Most people are unhappy; and they are unhappy because there is no love in their hearts. Love will arise in your heart when you have no barrier between yourself and another, when you meet and observe people without judging them….
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
He thinks history starts fresh every day, every minute, that time itself begins with the feelings he’s having right now. That’s how he keeps betraying us, why he roars at us with such conviction.
– Jane Smiley
I’ve seen far more people’s lives ruined from psychiatric drugs than street drugs. Those who were negatively affected by street drugs could be admitted to rehab centres with endless support. Those facing damage from psychiatric drugs do not have such an outlet, they’re ignored.
– Brad Schipke
It was a fine cry — loud and long — but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.
– Toni Morrison
Well-being is like a virus. One self-assured person at home in this world can infect dozens of others. Wouldn’t you like to see an epidemic of infectious well-being?
– Richard Powers
The educated person lives entirely for the future. His life is struggle; his sustenance and purpose: learning and art. The more one learns to live no longer in moments but in years etc., the nobler one becomes. The hurried unrest, the petty doings of the spirit are transformed into great, calm, simple, and comprehensive activity, and splendid patience arrives.
– Novalis, Last Fragments
If my block is my sangha, then the stoop provides two opportunities for seeking refuge: privacy and participation. Seeking refuge, in this sense, is an emergence into the belief that privacy and participation are sincere and courageous choices that can lead to freedom.
– Lauren Krauze
Mysteries abound where most we seek for answers.
– Ray Bradbury
What I fear is not the enemy’s strategy, but our own mistakes.
– Thucydides
When things seem to have reached that stage, merely say I won’t play any longer, and take your departure; but if you stay, stop lamenting.
– Epictetus
Covid has receded in people’s minds. But not completely in mine. I still grieve for what we all lost during that dark time—a sense of connection, a fabric of community, the feel of a hug or of shaking hands.
– Lewis Richmond
In politics, an absurdity is not a handicap.
– Napoleon Bonaparte
Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man.
– Maurice Merleau-Ponty
My journal has become the journal of
you.
It is full of you – brimming full.
– Anais Nin in a letter to Henry Miller
The student continued, “How long must one remain in the dark” and I replied, “Until one can see in the dark,” and “Casting the burden enables one to see in the dark.”
– Florence Scovel Shinn
Man’s only enemies are within himself.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
The most potent transformations occur in silence, beneath the surface.
– Esoteric Aphorism
Beneath worry, fear, stress, and anger, there is something beautiful waiting to arise and be transformed.
– Hiral Nagda
Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.
– José Saramago
A good conscience is a continual feast.
– Robert Burton
The knight is…not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth.
– C.S. Lewis, The Necessity of Chivalry
It’s ok to want to get into states.
That’s just not awakening.
– @VinceFHorn
It’s also not not awakening, for those that catch the drift.
– @VinceFHorn
Health is
adding a level
of intention to
every area of
your life.
– Miranda Anderson
TO THE QUISLINGS
to the quislings,
to the cowards,
to those thirsting
after power: heaven and history
will record
what you do.
to the obsequious, to the toadies,
to the lackeys, to the yes-men.
to the go-along-to-get-along,
return-on-your-investment,
in the fall of Rome
you call your home
heaven and history
are witnessing
to the Bezos and Zucks
to the Murdochs and Musks
controlling our thoughts
with trolls and bots
to the fascists who would ruin
all the world
to rule the ashes.
to the vote suppressors, disenfranchisers, and Jim-Crow-Juniors:
heaven and history are recording what you do.
to those filled with rage
who can’t tell this will
not
age
well.
to the tuned-out, apathetic,
“both-sides”-ers in the middle
who won’t do a thing
‘cause you can only do a little.
to the 80 million folks
with better things to do than vote
but especially to all of you
in powerful positions.
the editors-in-chief,
the billionaires,
the politicians:
heaven and history are recording
what you do. the whole world is watching
and the little ones, too.
history and heaven
are recording your example
and the downtrodden,
trampled-upon masses
never
stay
trampled.
so, to the powers of the hour:
don’t be shocked to see
a hundred million folks
standing up for democracy.
we can win—
we’ve got to begin, though.
the climate’s cooked—
the window’s closing.
now is the time
we need dreaming—
not dozing
to everyone around the world
who won’t cease
to work for workers, solidarity,
the planet, justice, peace
heaven and history
are supporting
what you do
to those who,
in the spirit of love,
are steadfast and brave,
history and heaven
will remember your name.
– Drew Dellinger
Hippies. They make them out to be bad. I’m not bad. I love everybody. Well, I like everybody.
– Michael J. Pollard
The big thing no one was expecting to happen, that no one had ever imagined could happen, was happening in all the unexpected and unimaginable ways that big things tend to happen.
– Paul Auster
Not everything needed to rise to converge: It could just drift together into the indiscernible middle, and bewilder you.
– Jonathan Lethem
Philosophy is an even more down-trodden occupation than poetry these days. But since every skill-type has its distinct glories, many still philosophize on their own recognizance, groping toward the enduring mysteries of existence, any of which could lead to those revelations of transcendent truth that tend to catalyze identity mutations, both personal and social. All of the living go through identity mutations involving new ways of seeing one’s self or world, whatever you like to call it. Yet such conceptual shifts of perspective are rarely describable in scientific or pragmatic terms. There’s no way to make a clear-cut school or equation for developing these genuine truths, which are not necessarily religious, because, who knows? Not that everything “wise” is intuitive. But we do know that, when lacking the intuitive spirit of wisdom known and valued throughout the ages there is less potential for significant and enduring developments.
As the metaphysical seed of one’s being, one’s intuition is the vision quester, the overarching sense of a continuity that, transcending all the details of impulse, interpretation, desire, memory, and judgment, still ties them together in ways that can never be mapped, a package never packaged, a name that cannot be named. Thus the mystic needs to be free to romance the whole buzzing, blooming cosmos of potentialities still asking to be born from a mustard seed of hope.
– George Gorman
It is time for us to take off our masks and admit we are lovers, engaged in an erotics of PLACE. We love the land. It is a primal affair, and it leads to a politics of place.
– Terry Tempest Williams
At the end of the day, or the end of my life, what will give me the most satisfaction is if I’ve participated in this small piece of heavenly earth in a way that made it healthier, more complex and biodiverse, more of a refuge.
– Helen Whybrow
A Toad, can die of Light –
Death is the Common Right
Of Toads and Men –
Of Earl and Midge
The privilege –
Why swagger, then?
The Gnat’s supremacy is large as Thine –
Life – is a different Thing –
So measure Wine –
Naked of Flask – Naked of Cask –
Bare Rhine –
Which Ruby’s mine?
– Emily Dickinson
The grammar of animacy teaches us that all the world is alive. Rocks and mountains, plants and rivers, fish and birds—all are spoken of with the same respect as humans.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
THE VIEWPOINT OF HEALTH
According to the Buddhist perspective there are problems, but they are temporary and superficial defilements that cover over one’s basic goodness (tathagatagarbha). This viewpoint is a positive and optimistic one. But, again, we should emphasize that this viewpoint is not purely conceptual. It is rooted in the experience of meditation and in the healthiness it encourages. There are temporary, habitual neurotic patterns that develop based on past experience, but these can be seen through. It is just this that is studied in the abhidharma, the Buddhist teachings on psychology: how one thing succeeds another, how volitional action originates and perpetuates itself, how things snowball. And, most importantly, abhidharma studies how through meditation practice this process can be cut through.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The more I wrote, the more I remembered. The more I remembered, the more I returned to myself.
– Zoë Bossiere
People tell you the world looks a certain way. Parents tell you how to think. Schools tell you how to think. TV. Religion. And then at a certain point, if you’re lucky, you realize you can make up your own mind. Nobody sets the rules but you. You can design your own life.
– Carrie-Anne Moss
War is a mere continuation of politics by other means.
– Carl von Clausewitz
Education . . . has become an institution whose purpose in the modern world is not to make culture, not to serve the living cosmos, but to harness humankind to the dead forces of materialism.
– Robert Sardello
The tension here is that a lot of creativity is bound up in some sense of not doing consensus, being a little dangerous, sometimes being blunt. These are also qualities that people worry about giving superintelligence. But you probably can’t get smart, helpful partners if you don’t allow them some level of freedom here in exactly this domain.
– Jack Clark
The rebrand after coming out of a dark night of the soul is the realest one of all. You’re not even in the same lifetime anymore.
– Nika Solé
If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.
– Thomas Ligotti
More important than finding out who you are may be finding out who you are not and in fact cutting through the illusion of a self.
– Pico Iyer
God likes to play hide-n-seek, but because there is nothing outside of God, he has no one but himself to play with! But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself.
– Alan Watts
If you have a body, you are entitled to the full range of feelings. It comes with the package.
– Anne Lamott
Leave the world alone, mentally. Physically you will gravitate to where you’re supposed to be and go through the experiences that you’re supposed to go through. Yet do not react to them, leave everything alone.
– Robert Adams
Art is an instrument of such delicate construction that its hypersensitive and delicate antennae can detect the light that ‘shineth in darkness’, the ‘light that never was on sea or land’.
– Kenneth Grant
I don’t think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.
– Margaret Atwood
Books are a way of learning to feel more acutely.
– Marguerite Yourcenar
It’s not activity that disturbs people, but false conceptions of things that drive them mad.
– Seneca
…as it lightened, a vast and magnificent landscape unfolded. I turned away; it was immensely satisfying.
– J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country
(Distorted memories) keep calling,
like an invisible thread,
and I have no time to understand…
– Land of Iron
stone buddha not the church-going type
– Karma Tenzing Wangchuk
Meditation means
Remaining unrelated with your thought process.
Utterly unrelated, cool, calm.
Watching whatsoever is passing.
– Osho
Those who do not observe the movements of their own minds must of necessity be unhappy.
– Marcus Aurelius
The free market, according to some, is a meritocracy, and unworthy corporations or people get weeded out. To put it another way, only the strong survive.
– Anthony Tshering
We have been taught that the going-away of life is against life, but as a matter of fact, life is entirely something that always goes away. Going away–dissolving–is the same thing as living. But if we are taught that dying is against life, then we can’t live.
– Alan Watts
We are stronger, gentler, more resilient, and more beautiful than any of us imagine.
– Mark Nepo
a quiet kind of love
autumn crocus
– Greg Piko
There is nothing more revealing than to see a thinking person walking, just as there is nothing more revealing than to see a walking person thinking… Walking and thinking are in a perpetual relationship that is based on trust.
– Thomas Bernhard
If only America would realize that the art of Europe is finished – dead – and that America is the country of the art of the future, instead of trying to base everything she does on European traditions!
– Marcel Duchamp
May the wind under your wings bear you where the sun sails and the moon walks…
– Gandalf (Tolkien, The Hobbit)
pouring rain;
the dog looks away
from the open door
– Kurt Brobeck
echoes
from a mountain waterfall
flickering sunlight
– Chen-ou Liu
There are no safe paths in this part of the world. Remember you are over the Edge of the Wild now, and in for all sorts of fun wherever you go.
– Gandalf (Tolkien, The Hobbit)
VALUE
the weapons I purchased
didn’t finish off the fascists
the love I sold my own for
did not put paid to them either
why’d I never think to try
whatever it was I got free
– Bill Knott
hydrangeas
resemble a crowd
of demon faces
– Taijirō Amazawa
No matter what fools one’s children were, as long as they did not slap land deeds on a gambling table they were safe.
– Eileen Chang
If you call yourself a mushroom you must go into the basket.
– Russian proverb
Destiny can extinguish me…
– Tomaž Šalamun
Anger has a peculiar quality of isolation. Like sorrow, it cuts you off, and for the time being, all relationship comes to an end.
– Krishnamurti
Mindfulness helps us slow down, gain awareness, and buffer our reactive tendencies.
– Valerie Brown
Each of us has a so-called masculine task, and each of us has a so-called feminine task. . . Our summons is both to be and to do; it is to nurture and to define; it is to be at home and to journey.
– James Hollis
Freedom ought not to be a declaration of the rights of man; it ought to be a declaration of man’s obligations, of the duty of man to be a personality, to display the strength of the character of personality.
– Nikolai Berdyaev
It’s… amazing to realize I’m the last one left from my little nuclear family. It’s like being a lighthouse keeper on an empty island, trying to keep the flame alive.
– Anderson Cooper
All rivalry is stupid; it looks to the harm of one’s enemy instead of to one’s own advantage.
– Democritus
In the center of an irrational universe governed by an irrational Mind stands rational man.
– Philip K. Dick
I am x in an indeterminate equation.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Within, within. This is where the world’s treasure has always been.
– Lao Tzu
Where the poet can sing, the people can live.
– James Baldwin
Spend your time in the company of geniuses, sages, children, and books.
– Naval Ravikant
Arm yourself with specific knowledge
– Naval Ravikant
Do not argue even when you are right.
– Imam Ali
Regrets are as personal as fingerprints.
– Ernest Hemingway
Fiction writers write — we write — inwardly, as if the novel were, really, the long echo of a repressed poem.
– Alejandro Zambra
America is the only country whose path from barbarism to decadence doesn’t lead through culture.
– George Clemenceau
The reason some people get lost in thought is because it is unfamiliar territory.
– Paul Fix
All culture, whatever significance it may have, just as all education, civilization, development, is absolutely powerless to renew the inner man.
– Herman Bavinck
It is spiritless to think that you cannot attain to that which you have seen and heard the masters attain.
– The Book of the Samurai
Prayer is telephoning to God, and intuition is God telephoning to you.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
I love to go and see all the things I am happy without.
– Socrates on going to the market
The true and solid peace of nations consists not in equality of arms, but in mutual trust alone.
– Pope John XXIII
self-esteem is the reputation that you have with yourself. You’ll always know.
– Naval Ravikant
I write to escape. I haven’t managed it yet, but I’m working on it.
– William Meikle
Virtually everything that is ‘wrong with you’ started as a survival mechanism in childhood. Therefore it deserves nothing but respect and compassion.
– Gabor Mate
If Israel deserves a minute of silence then Palestine deserves the world to never speak again.
– Karim Wafa Al-Hussaini
The opposite of knowledge is not ignorance, but deceit and fraud.
– Post-Modernism: A Graphic Guide
My treasure lies in my friends.
– Alexander the Great
Having a vast amount of unconsidered knowledge is of less value than a smaller, fully considered amount. True comprehension comes from combining knowledge and comparing truths.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
You’re not just a soul in a body. You’re a body in a story …ready to be rewritten by the soul.
– Jared Brandall
If art disappears, people will have to face reality even more. And let me tell you—reality does not care about our feelings. There would be more violence, more pain, more discomfort.
– Frederick Phoenix
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in, some of us just go one god further.
– Richard Dawkins
The want to dominate and diminish is rooted in ignorance of God as Father.
– Rowan Williams
TOGETHER
I remember learning about the underground network of fungi that allows trees to communicate silently, to exchange water and nutrients with one another, to sense when a weakened or sick fellow needs assistance; what look like discrete trees to those of us standing on the soil above is actually one interconnected entity. Are we humans really any different? Do our emotions truly live within each of us, encased in these crenulated blobs of brain like we’ve been told? Or do they pulse and flow and surge between us, in this tumultuous, sensate ocean in which we all swim? I was right all along: I have no individual self.
And what wonderful news that is. We’re born sensitive and vulnerable; this is for a reason. We are designed to tell stories and bear witness and see ourselves in others. To absorb, and reflect, and mimic; to give, and receive, and commune. We need one another to be alive. We’re built for tribes and villages and neighborhoods and potluck dinners. We’re meant to feel it all, and bear it all, together.
– Laura Delano
There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
Purple sadness is the sadness of classical music and egg- plant, the stroke of midnight, human organs, ports cut off for part of every year, words with too many meanings, in- cense, insomnia, and the crescent moon. It is the sadness of play money, and icebergs seen from a canoe. It is possible to dance to purple sadness, though slowly, as slowly as it takes to dig a pit to hold a sleeping giant. Purple sad- ness is pervasive, and goes deeper into the interior than the world’s greatest nickel deposits, or any other sadness on earth. It is the sadness of depositories, and heels echo- ing down a long corridor, it is the sound of your mother closing the door at night, leaving you alone.
– Mary Ruefle
After Many Springs
by Langston Hughes
Now,
In June,
When the night is a vast softness
Filled with blue stars,
And broken shafts of moon-glimmer
Fall upon the earth,
Am I too old to see the fairies dance?
I cannot find them any more.
The Dancing
In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture
and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots
I have never seen a postwar Philco
with the automatic eye
nor heart Ravel’s “Bolero” the way I did
in 1945 in that tiny living room
on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did
then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming,
my mother red with laughter, my father cupping
his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance
of old Ukraine, the sound of his skin half drum,
half fart, the world at last a meadow,
the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us
screaming and falling, as if we were dying,
as if we could never stop – in 1945 –
in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburg, home
of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away
from the other dancing – in Poland and Germany –
oh God of mercy, oh wild God
– Gerald Stern
From my experience I cannot doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrial consciousness, is indeed sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different nature from the life we know, and of which only the slightest and most indistinct memories linger after waking. From those blurred and fragmentary memories we may infer much, yet prove little. We may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.
– H. P. Lovecraft
THE WILD IRIS
At the end of my suffering
there was a door.
Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.
Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.
It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.
Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.
You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:
from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.
– Louise Gluck
BE NOT INHOSPITABLE TO STRANGERS
LEST THEY BE ANGELS IN DISGUISE
This is the upstairs at Shakespeare and Company Bookstore on the left bank in Paris facing Notre Dame. It’s a riff on the Bible’s “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” I was thinking about the inscription the other day, and realizing that I no longer thought it quite so inspiring. Be hospitable to strangers, whether or not they might be angels in disguise, and perhaps if they’re demons your hospitality will disarm them, or perhaps your acts of grace and generosity will make you an angel in disguise yourself. Whoever they are, you have the option of which version of yourself to bring forth.
That is, it’s your own angelic or asshole nature at stake here. We should do what we do because of who we ourselves are rather than who other people are. There are definitely people who are outright menaces approaching, but toward others unknown and known most of how we conduct ourselves is about who we are, not who they are. It is better to be kind than unkind to someone who didn’t deserve it, and it’s not necessarly kindness that makes you a sucker. Hospitality is an old-fashioned virtue and necessary to survival in some of the more remote and harsh parts of the world, but it also exists in everyday interactions, or doesn’t, anywhere and everywhere. Including here, online.
Here’s a version of the great story of Milarepa and his eventual hospitality to demons: O “One day, the yogi Milarepa was chopping firewood in the Red Rock Jewel Valley, high up in the mountains of Tibet. After a long day in the cold, he returned to his cave to find a troop of nasty demons. They were eating his food, sleeping in his bed, and reading his books.”
“Now, Milarepa was a yogi and he understood that these demons were really only projections from his own mind: all of his bad habits, jealousies, and anxieties. So, he sat down on the cave floor and started to preach the Dharma to the demons, but they didn’t listen and continued their mischief. Fed up and tired, Milarepa attacked the demons with his fists and tried to force them from his cave. But, when the yogi’s fists did nothing, the cave echoed with the demon’s laughter.”
“Exhausted, Milarepa sat back down on the cave floor and announced that, since he couldn’t get rid of them, he would let the demons stay and he asked them if they wanted anything to eat. When he said this, all but one of the demons vanished into thin air. Then Milarepa understood.”
“The last demon in the cave was the biggest of the troop. He flashed his pointed teeth and taunted Milarepa. Then, Milarepa said, “Well, you can eat me, then!” and he put his head inside the demon’s mouth. Then, even that demon disappeared and Milarepa enjoyed peace and quiet for the first time in his life.”
– Rebecca Solnit
Then the storm broke, and the dragons danced.
– George R.R. Martin
The wonder of a moment in which there is nothing but an upwelling of simple happiness is utterly awesome. Gratitude is so close to the bone of life, pure and true, that it instantly stops the rational mind, and all its planning and plotting. That kind of let go is fiercely threatening. I mean, where might such gratitude end?
– Regina Sara Ryan
The generally expressed desire of “America first” cannot be criticized. It is a perfectly correct aspiration for our people to cherish. But the problem which we have to solve is how to make America first. It cannot be done by the cultivation of national bigotry, arrogance, or selfishness. Hatreds, jealousies, and suspicions will not be productive of any benefits in this direction. Here again we must apply the rule of toleration. Because there are other peoples whose ways are not our ways, and whose thoughts are not our thoughts, we are not warranted in
drawing the conclusion that they are adding nothing to the sum of civilization. We can make little contribution to the welfare of humanity on the theory that we are a superior people and all others are an inferior people. We do not need to be too loud in the assertion of our own righteousness. It is true that we live under most favorable circumstances. But before we come to the final and irrevocable decision that we are better than everybody else we need to consider what we might do if we had their provocations and their difficulties. We are not likely to improve our own condition or help humanity very much until we come to the sympathetic understanding that human nature is about the same everywhere, that it is rather evenly distributed over the surface of the earth, and that we are all united in a common brotherhood. We can only make America first in the true sense which that means by cultivating a spirit of friendship and good will, by the exercise of the virtues of patience and forbearance, by being “plenteous in mercy,” and through progress at home and helpfulness abroad standing as an
example of real service to humanity.
– Calvin Coolidge
If you think about it seriously, all the questions about the soul and the immortality of the soul and paradise and hell are at bottom only a way of seeing this very simple fact: that every action of ours is passed on to others according to its value, of good or evil, it passes from father to son, from one generation to the next, in a perpetual movement.
– Antonio Gramsci
Everyone, in some small sacred sanctuary of the self, is nuts.
– Leo Rosten
Castilian
by Elinor Wyle
Velasquez took a pliant knife
And scraped his palette clean,
He said, “I lead a dog’g own life
Painting a king and queen.”
He cleaned his palette with oily rags
and oakum from Seville wharves,
“I am sick of painting painted hags
And bad ambiguous dwarves.”
“The sky is silver, the clouds are pearl,
Their locks are looped with rain
I will not paint Maria’s girl
For all the money in Spain”
H washed his face in water cold,
His hands in turpentine;
He squeezed out colour like coins of gold
And colour like drops of wine.
Each cooler lay like a little pool,
On the polished cedar wood,
Clear and pale and ivory-cool
Or dark as solitude
He burnt the rags in the fireplace
and leaned from the windows high;
He said, “I like that gentleman’s face
Who wears his cap awry.”
This is the gentleman, there he stands,
Castilian, sombre-caped,
With arrogant eyes, and narrow hands
Miraculously shaped.
Why did men worship in churches, locking themselves away in the dark, when the world lay beyond its doors in all its real glory?
– Charles de Lint
It’s so interesting that AI is supposedly “getting better at everything” at an exponential rate. Because I haven’t been able to get any of the AI programs I have tested to produce one haiku that would make it past my first cut for any of the challenges or contests that I oversee. And I mean, not one. Even when I told it what to read. Even when I coached it on the basics of “haiku humor,“ the so-called “turn of thought,” and capturing the essential spirit of the “season word” that is the focus of all traditional haiku. It just can’t grasp the basic gestalt of the form.
And so, at least for now, my job seems to be secure. Which is ironic, since more than a few CEO’s of major companies have said their jobs could be on the line in the near future. Who knew it was harder to teach haiku than to be a CEO.
– Clark Strand
If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.
– Michael Crichton
Love is anterior to life,
posterior to death,
initial of creation,
and the exponent of breath.
– Emily Dickinson
The unintended consequence of scrubbing Harvey Milk’s name from a Navy ship is now everyone’s talking about him. Keep talking.
– Dan Rather
I can’t tell you what prayer is,
but I can take the breath
of the meadow into my mouth,
and I can release it for the leaves’
green need. I want to tell you
your life is a blue coal, a slice
of orange in the mouth,
cut hay in the nostrils. The cardinals’
red song dances in your blood
Look, every month the moon
blossoms into a peony,
then shrinks to a sliver of garlic.
And then it blooms again.
– Barbara Crooker
Sometimes love looks like small things. Gentle gestures rich with import. We give such things to one another at times without even realizing it. Tiny soul-saving acts.
– Tracy K. Smith
What Orwell failed to predict was that we’d buy the cameras ourselves, and that our biggest fear would be that nobody was watching.
– Keith Jensen
A heart that loves and
forgives is stronger than one
that hates.
– Anne Frank
You think I asked for
this dream
spanning an entire known world.
– CA Conrad
HOW WE HUNT
Ain’t it silly? How we toil
day & night? Callused hands
cramp for such uncertainty. Ever
the beaver bustling, making dam-
nation, a wall of sticks
meant to stop tsunamis. So
impractical how we hunt
sunken chests with no promise
of glittering insides. Ever seaside
shoveling, cracking clams, we oughta
slow down. Enjoy the song
the ocean sings. Relish
the last breaths
of a planet. The sweetest
death rattle never heard.
– Ty Chapman
If It’s the Last Thing I Do
by Dorianne Laux
This green-lit world in autumn, falling
to red, to rust, Midas-touched, as fuses
are torched and rockets flare into blue
over the Pacific, two grown men squaring
off in the schoolyard, too stupid to fear,
too numbed by power to feel the air
riding over the bare skin of their soft
hands, not a lick of a good day’s work
between them, TV host of sleepless nights,
childhood’s parents fighting in the kitchen,
someone throwing a pot of gold against a wall.
Equal as all get out in giving in to their lesser
angels, those seraphim that tumbled through
clouds of coal ash and acid rain and landed
on their feet, miraculously unscathed, but
with an unworldly ability to hate. Of late,
the trees are turning skeletal in preparation
for the shivery winter, pall of snow
laid down on the earth like a funeral cloth.
We may not live to see another spring,
another yellow summer, another flood,
another famine, another war. Maybe this
is that time when we wished them dead, our
parents, go ahead we thought as we lay
in our beds, just get it over with, and do
what you keep promising with a raised fist
will be the last goddamned thing you ever do.
Concentration of power in a political machine is bad; and an Established Church is only a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and does no good which it could not better do in a split-up and scattered condition.
– Mark Twain
One day the iceman came no more.
Neither did the coalman with his telescopic chute.
– Prartho Sereno
There are people who appear to think only with the brain, while others think with all the body and all the soul, with the blood, with the marrow of the bones, with the heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with the life.
– Miguel de Unamuno
Narcissism denotes an investment in one’s image as opposed to one’s self. Narcissists love their image, not their real self. They have a poor sense of self . . . Their activities are directed toward the enhancement of their image, often at the expense of the self.
– Alexander Lowen
The sins of the ancestors continue down the generations until one person comes to consciousness and redeems the curse.
– Sally Kester
Tell me about despair, yours,
and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
– Mary Oliver
Protocols are great but making some of them (that you deem best for you) into rituals is especially transformative, because it makes them non-negotiable. What are your daily rituals? What do you never fail to do?
– Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D.
Our experience of the world is not the world itself—it’s a perceptual image created by the mind.
– Guo Gu
Isolation and loneliness are not the same. I can be isolated…without being lonely; and I can be lonely…without being isolated.
– Hannah Arendt
sadly
humanity
has not gotten
so bad
that we decide
to do better
– Andy Perrin
People get absolutely intolerable when they have a creative idea in their womb and can’t bring it out. They’re neurotic, aggressive, irritable, and depressed. So then one has to help them bring the child out.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
This season is all about burning the path that ties you to the past and allowing a whole new timeline to wake itself up through you.
– Nika Solé
The body is the medium through which the soul enacts itself. No matter how blocked the medium is, unless it is completely destroyed the body will still register the soul’s activity. [Whether the signals are picked up or rejected is another question.]
– Marion Woodman
This is a Wonderful Poem
by David Wagoner
Come at it carefully, don’t trust it, that isn’t its right name,
It’s wearing stolen rags, it’s never been washed, its breath
Would look moss-green if it were really breathing,
It won’t get out of the way, it stares at you
Out of eyes burnt gray as the sidewalk,
Its skin is overcast with colorless dirt,
It has no distinguishing marks, no I.D. cards,
It wants something of yours but hasn’t decided
Whether to ask for it or just take it,
There are no policemen, no friendly neighbors,
No peacekeeping busybodies to yell for, only this
Thing standing between you and the place you were headed,
You have about thirty seconds to get past it, around it,
Or simply to back away and try to forget it,
It won’t take no for an answer: try hitting it first
And you’ll learn what’s trembling in its torn pocket.
Now, what do you want to do about it?
The future belongs to people who are good at creating things, not people who are good at dividing them up.
– @naval
Arise for our help, and redeem us for thy mercies’ sake.
– Psalm 44:26
in the middle of a field
with nothing to hold onto
a bird sings
– Basho
after a long while
the shade of the bodhi tree
begins to take shape
– Jennifer Howse
a little house
lost in a tangle of
purple morning glories
– Issa
Armed with a mirror,
Opinions to hide my hunger,
I inhabit the stones of the road.
If I keep on going I will reach the end,
My skin falling off,
My bones individually laughing.
– Paul Zweig
Don’t you understand anything? Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done.
– Miss Hardcastle (C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength)
i used to think my husband was exceptionally kind and angelic (even wrote a series of “angel poems” after him) but after visiting Canada i now realize he’s just Canadian.
– @moonandmouth
Just like a low resting heart rate is the byproduct of intense exercise, low anxiety is the byproduct of intense self-examination.
– Naval Ravikant
You grow up hearing two languages. Neither fits your fits
Your mother informs you “moon” means “window to another world.”
– John Yau
…I should say that you need a little thickening of the outer skin, if only as a protection for the more sensitive interior; and if you acquire it, it will be of permanent value in any walk of later life in this tough world (which shows no signs of softening).
– Tolkien
Two Tigers cannot Hide on the Same Mountain
– Chinese Proverb
the cooling air…
nothing as lovely
as the bluebirds blue
– @lafcadiopoetry
When you are traveling on a road, there must be an end; but when astray, your wanderings are limitless.
– Seneca
Your true Self
is the silent observer
behind all experiences.
– Zensho W. Kopp
reincarnation
each raindrop
lost at sea
– Martha Magenta
talking to the tree
outside the window
about rain, about the war
– Marlina Rinzen
It was extinguished but not
extinguished at all—
Who knows what kind
of thirst this is?
Peace even to this very day—is—
neither near nor far from the heart.
– Hasan Kamal
The great viruses of our time spread through minds, not through bodies.
– @naval
I think that a writer who cannot find the right metaphor is not worth the name, neither under a dictatorship nor a democracy.
– Luisa Valenzuela
Democrats, some advice: when the worst person you know gets bitten by a snake, you don’t try to befriend the snake. You observe said biting from a considerable distance and enjoy the schadenfreude.
– Charlotte Clymer, On Elon Musk and Trump Feud
Charisma. Gentleness, a kind of acceptance of people for who they are. That’s rare, you know?
– Lauren Groff
Practice being there while getting there.
– Lama Surya Das
For years I’ve felt I didn’t know what I was doing; I had to watch my activities and deduce, like an outsider, what I was up to. My novels, for example. They are said by readers to depict the same world again and again, a recognizable world. Where is that world? In my head? Is it what I see in my own life and inadvertently transfer into my novels and to the reader?
– Philip K. Dick
Wisdom doesn’t come when we’ve grasped the ladder’s highest rung but when, looking down on our illusions, we no longer need a ladder.
– Kurt Spellmeyer
The victor of the moment feels himself invincible, even though, only a few hours before, he may have experienced defeat; he forgets to treat victory as a transitory thing.
– Simone Weil
When you practice meditative concentration, your thoughts may flow very strongly—like a stream rushing down a steep mountain— and it may be difficult for the mind to be still. At that time, you must not become discouraged.
– Khenpo Sherab Sangpo
the train easing / through the ancient countryside, / into the blackness / of nightfall, Etruscan, unknowable. / Sleet / outside his own window, / he wasn’t afraid now, // he was a part of the performance
– Kevin Prufer
This gentleman is a sage… Life and death are great affairs, and yet they are no change to him. Though heaven and earth flop over and fall down, it is no loss to him. He sees clearly into what has no falsehood and does not shift with things. He takes it as fate that things should change, and he holds fast to the source.
– Zhuangzi
It is easier to turn a mountain into dust than to create love in a heart that filled with hatred.
– Imam Ali
They had no curiousity about him at all. As if they knew all that they needed to know. They stood and watched him pass and watched him vanish upon that landscape solely because he was passing. Solely because he would vanish.
– Cormac McCarthy
If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
– Leo Tolstoy
When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstance, revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help.
– Marcus Aurelius
The devil ain’t a red demon. He’s your indecision. Your delay. Your self-doubt dressed in logic. If hell exists—it’s you never becoming who you came to be.
– @voyageofsource
it is perhaps a psychological one that conscripts the body into its workings. It is as though I was born imprisoned in a block of stone from which it has been both a necessity and an obligation to free myself.
– Rachel Cusk
What’s missing in our world isn’t just justice – it’s the recognition that healing is a collective process, not an individual one.
– Gabor Maté
The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.
– Salvador Dali
He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave.
– Louis de Saint-Just
The more I wrote, the more I realized that fear wasn’t me: fear was a parasite clinging to me for survival, a leech sucking the life from my body.
– Greta Morgan
Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness.
– Walter Brueggemann
The burden of a poet is not explanation, because explanations never satisfy or convince. Rather the burden of a poet is to disclose, to reveal, to show what has not been seen or said until that instant.
– Walter Brueggemann
I do think no story has ever been read properly unless it’s read twice. So it’s a longer book, you see, than you think it is, because it needs to be read twice.
Double the page.
– Claire Keegan
The wicked become even worse when they are tolerated.
– Leo Tolstoy
You will freeze in place if you remain this way. You must not, dear. You have to move.
– Rainer Marie Rilke
The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning, but without understanding.
– Justice Louis
Pure philanthropy is all very well in its way, but philanthropy plus 5 percent is a good deal better.
– Cecil Rhodes
There were two classes of charitable people; one, the people who did a little and made a great deal of noise; the other, the people who did a great deal and made no noise at all.
– Charles Dickens
Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it’s time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.
– Bill Moyers
To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.
– Albert Camus
I can’t explain my work, I just write stories. I’ve never thought about a theme. I never once have. I just think about the text.
– Claire Keegan
Elegance is saying just enough. And I do believe that the reader completes the story.
– Claire Keegan
When you only live in the comfortable, you begin to live life by default, not design.
– Tim Storey
Don’t know how I kept going. You just do. You have to, so you do.
– Elizabeth Wein, Code Name Verity
The whole reason of prosperity is so you can protect people.
– Scott Galloway
Life appears to me too short to be spending nursing animosity, or registering wrongs.
– Charlotte Brontë
Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway.
– J.R.R Tolkien
Sometimes history takes things into its own hands.
– Justice Thurgood Marshall
I don’t like love as a command, as a search. it must come to you, like a hungry cat at the door.
– Charles Bukowski
Anxiety’s like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you very far.
– Jodi Picoult
Knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing; without a story, it’s all just information.
– Jennifer Egan
To be an artist, you have to escape reality now and then, because the average person will tell you everything you want to do is impossible.
– Frederick Phoenix
Poets and writers are witnesses to everything around them. That is why, it’s imperative that they are in happy environments. Otherwise they suffer in witnessing.
– Pushkar Sanyal
It is the glistening and softly spoken lie; the amiable fallacy; the patriotic lie of the historian, the provident lie of the politician, the zealous lie of the partisan, the merciful lie of the friend, and the careless lie of each man to himself, that cast that black mystery over humanity, through which we thank any man who pierces, as we would thank one who dug a well in a desert.
– John Ruskin
There’s so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us that it hardly becomes any of us to talk about the rest of us.
– Vince Stegall, Move Mountains
In truth, what am I looking for? I don’t know.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
The moon rose itself up on its elbows and shook out its long hair.
– Connie Voisine
Permit yourself to change your mind when something is no longer working for you.
– Nedra Glover Tawwab
Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.
– Emile Coue
To the artist, everything can be changed—everything.
– Frederick Phoenix
My words are colours
To paint my feelings for you
Why won’t you listen?
– CJ
I look like every queer barista in Brooklyn merged into one body during a lunar eclipse.
– Emma Willmann
We cannot preach the world to the world to win the world. Nonsense!
– Mark T. Barclay
To dream of the person you wish to be is to waste the one you are.
– Tim Minchin
Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.
– Antonin Artaud
If I could give you one thought, it would be to lift someone up. Lift a stranger up – lift her up. I would ask you, mother and father, brother and sister, lovers, mother and daughter, father and son, lift someone. The very idea of lifting someone up will lift you, as well.
– Maya Angelou
Your writing
may need to be
ruthless or amoral
to be original.
– Rick Bass
‘Finding yourself’ is not really how it works. You aren’t a ten-dollar bill in last winter’s coat pocket. You are also not lost. Your true self is right there, buried under cultural conditioning, other people’s opinions, and inaccurate conclusions you drew as a kid that became your beliefs about who you are. ‘Finding yourself’ is actually returning to yourself, an unlearning, an excavation, a remembering who you were before the world got its hands on you.
– Emily McDowell
The beast in me
Is caged by frail and fragile bars
Restless by day
And by night rants and rages at the stars
God help the beast in me.
– Johnny Cash
No therapist, no medication healed me, I healed myself…and only you can heal yourself.
– Brad Schipke
Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.
– Seneca
Christianity has adjusted itself much too easily to the worship of power.
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer
For us to be fully alive, we must be present, and when we are, we resist hate in ourselves and in the world around us.
– Kaitlin B. Curtice
But here is the nature of life. That we must love things with our whole selves, knowing they will die.
– Charlotte McConaghy
I think that disability and not being disabled—the line between them is so much fuzzier than any of us think…The unpredictability is the one thing we all share.
– Jessica Slice
Psychoanalysis is a terribly efficient instrument, and because it is more and more a prestigious instrument, we run the risk of using it with a purpose for which it was not made for, and in this way we may degrade it.
– Jacques Lacan
The mind wants things not to change, and that’s how the mind and life are in conflict.
– Osho
Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person’s life.
– Eavan Boland
Hopefulness is not a neutral position…It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like… keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so.
– Nick Cave
You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.
– Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes
The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
I think more guys need to assume the position of student than teacher that’s what I think.
– Helena Seleste
We think of the other dimensions as vast
Is it possible that other dimensions
Are very small.
– Dorothea Lasky
I would rather write 10,000 notes than a single letter of the Alphabet.
– Ludwig van Beethoven
It is in
changing
that we find
purpose.
– Heraclitus
In the university they don’t tell
you that the greater part of the
law is learning to tolerate fools.
– Doris Lessing
Such Silence
by Mary Oliver
As deep as I ever went into the forest
I came upon an old stone bench, very, very old,
and around it a clearing, and beyond that
trees taller and older than I had ever seen.
Such silence!
It really wasn’t so far from a town, but it seemed
all the clocks in the world had stopped counting.
So it was hard to suppose the usual rules applied.
Sometimes there’s only a hint, a possibility.
What’s magical, sometimes, has deeper roots
than reason.
I hope everyone knows that.
I sat on the bench, waiting for something.
An angel, perhaps.
Or dancers with the legs of goats.
No, I didn’t see either. But only, I think, because
I didn’t stay long enough.
There was a whole, large vocabulary involved, a conceptual vocabulary that was completely alien to me. I couldn’t comprehend a thing that was said, and my solution to this problem was to stay in bed.
– Deborah Eisenberg
One parent could get my poetry banned from classrooms. And yet one country can’t ban assault rifles from massacring them.
– Amanda Gorman
The sign of a healthy
economy should be a
drinkable river.
– Li An Phoa
Being gay is like being left-handed—some people are, most people aren’t, and nobody really knows exactly why. It’s not right or wrong; it’s just one of the many natural ways to be. The world works best when everyone gets to live as they truly are. So if you ever feel out of place, remember: you’re not broken, you’re just beautifully different—and that’s something the world needs.
– Jodie Foster
If your profession requires mental processing speed or significant analytic capabilities, noticeable decline is probably going to set in earlier than you imagine.
– Arthur Brooks
It is simply this: do not tire, never lose interest, never grow indifferent…lose your invaluable curiosity and you let yourself die. It’s as simple as that.
– Tove Jansson
The most powerful poetry is birthed through cracks in history, through what is broken and unseen.
– Joy Harjo
A system of possible movements, or “motor projects”, radiates from us to our environment. Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument, and when we wish to move about we do not move the body as we move an object. We transport it without instruments as if by magic, since it is ours and because through it we have direct access to space. For us the body is much more than an instrument or a means; it is our expression in the world, the visible form of our intentions. Even our most secret affective movements, those most deeply tied to the humoral infrastructure, help to shape our perception of things.
– Maurice Merleau-Ponty
They looked like people-shaped clay in the moments before God breathed out.
– China Miéville
Everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places.
– Joseph Conrad
Perhaps the easiest way to appreciate Hegel’s point is to imagine situations of greatly heightened alienation. I apply for a job to be a telemarketer. However, my role in the job seems to me more like a theatrical performance. I don’t believe any of the people I call should buy the condo time-share I am supposed to be selling, and it is dispiriting to be hung up on and yelled at so often. In such a case, the actions I undertake are all non-coercively performed by me, but I do not experience them as “mine.” Another form of alienation would be when I find that what I take myself to be doing (say, what I take to be showing hospitality to others, my description of the act I give myself), is shared by none of the others in my new circle, so much so that I begin to doubt I actually understand what I’m doing. Or, even worse, when I am asked why I am doing what I am doing, and I present my reasons, no one understands me, or, if they do, they refuse to believe anyone could have such reasons. This does not mean that a non-alienated situation is one of mass conformism, and therein arises the most controversial point in Hegel: that this relation between individual self-understanding and self-worth and some objective “reflection back” from the social world of such a content is a “dialectical” rather than a disjunctive or reductive one. Meaningful action requires a proper recognition by others, but that condition cannot be directly sought or demanded. An artist whose first goal is to produce what a commercial or critical audience wants would not be genuinely producing “her” work, any more than one with no concern for the intelligibility and impact of her work on others.
The larger point is that this requirement that one’s self-understanding be reflected in the social world—in the way one is seen and treated by others—is not primarily a psychological need (for reassurance, say) but is rather an acknowledgement that the social world is always already implicated in the formation and experience of my deeds as “mine”; deeds I can render intelligible and justifiable both to myself and to others; that is, as freely undertaken. This is the basis of Hegel’s larger worries about a capitalist economy, and of course it has a lot of resonances in what Marx inherited from Hegel, especially the early Marx, for whom the realization of the human species-being and solidarity with fellow workers were so important. (It also underlies a Hegelian principle that is often not well understood: that no one individual can be said to be free unless all are.)
– Robert Pippin
We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer. The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
The most perfect synthesis of theory and practice is the vanishing of thought into the actual course of the world.
– Jean Baudrillard
She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust.
– Simone de Beauvoir
Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there.
That is the banality of evil.
– Hannah Arendt
Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles
and pulls you back into childhood
and you are passing a crumbling mansion
completely hidden behind old willows
or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks
and giant firs standing hip to hip,
you know again that behind that wall,
under the uncut hair of the willows
something secret is going on,
so marvelous and dangerous
that if you crawled through and saw,
you would die, or be happy forever.
– Lisel Mueller
For all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Every time we train our most sophisticated tools upon the central questions of our existence – Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? – the answer comes back clearer: Everyone and Everywhere.
– James Bridle
No poetry concerning the people is authentic if fatigue does not figure in it, and the hunger and thirst which come from fatigue.
– Simone Weil
Beyond a given point man is not helped by more “knowing,” but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way. As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes.
– Ernest Becker
Not so much because many occupations would not permit of a loving attitude, but because the spirit of a production-centered, commodity-greedy society is such that only the non-conformist can defend himself successfully against it. Those who are seriously concerned with love as the only rational answer to the problem of human existence must, then, arrive at the conclusion that important and radical changes in our social structure are necessary, if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon.
– Erich Fromm
Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one.
– Ursula LeGuin
Optimism is radical. It is the hard choice, the brave choice. And it is, it seems to me, most needed now, in the face of despair—just as a car is most useful when you have a distance to close. Otherwise it is a large, unmovable object parked in the garage. These days, the safest way for someone to appear intelligent is being skeptical by default. We seem sophisticated when we say “we don’t believe” and disingenuous when we say “we do.” History and fable have both proven that nothing is ever entirely lost. David can take Goliath. A beach in Normandy can turn the tide of war. Bravery can topple the powerful. These facts are often seen as exceptional, but they are not. Every day, we all become the balance of our choices—choices between love and fear, belief or despair. No hope is ever too small.
– Guillermo Del Toro
Every conception that a man can find
is in the stone itself, already there
concealed in excess, but will still require
a hand to free it that obeys the mind.
And you, like marble, lady without peer,
hold possibilities of every kind;
you hold the good I want and pain I fear,
– Michelangelo
Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
– Wendell Berry
River runs always
On its own way, curved or straight
Whether light or dark
– Trailakya Roy
I’ve been thinking about something for a long time, and I keep noticing that most human speech – if not all human speech – is made with the outgoing breath. This is the strange thing about presence and absence. When we breathe in, our bodies are filled with nutrients and nourishment. Our blood is filled with oxygen, our skin gets flush; our bones get harder – they get compacted. Our muscles get toned and we feel very present when we’re breathing in. The problem is, that when we’re breathing in, we can’t speak. So presence and silence have something to do with each other.
– Li-Young Lee
Like the ancient prophets,
we are dispatched back to the good work entrusted to us.
It is the work of peace-making.
It is the work of truth-telling.
It is the work of justice-doing.
It is good work, but it requires our resolve to stay it, even in the face of the forces to the contrary that are sure to prevail for a season.
– Walter Brueggemann
I carry within me
the heart of a warrior,
the mind of a pharaoh,
the soul of a goddess
and the wisdom of
my grandmothers’ grandmothers.
– grace gegenheimer
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
To me it seems that it is madder never to abandon oneself, than often to be infatuated; better to be wounded, a captive, and a slave, than always to walk in armor.
– Margaret Fuller
Once in a while, we all succumb
to the merely personal.
Those glass shards and snipped metal
That glitter and disappear and glitter again
in the edged night light
Of memory’s anxious sky.
– Charles Wright
And in that day […] [Gnosis] is in danger of becoming a burden to all men. Therefore, it will be despised – the beautiful world of God, the incomparable work, the energy that possesses goodness, the man-formed vision. Darkness will be preferred to light, and death will be preferred to life. No one will gaze into heaven. And the pious man will be counted as insane, and the impious man will be honored as wise. The man who is afraid will be considered as strong. And the good man will be punished like a criminal. And concerning the soul, and the things of the soul, and the things of immortality, along with the rest of what I have said to you- not only will they be considered ridiculous, but they will also be thought of as vanity. But believe me (when I say) that people of this kind will be endangered by the ultimate danger to their soul.
– Asclepius
Queueing for an Ice Cream
although he didn’t smoke, grandad never went anywhere
without the old tobacco tin in his pocket
one day me and my brother asked him what he kept in it
some sand, grandad said
why do you keep some sand in a tobacco tin, we asked
where else would I keep it, he said
but why keep sand at all, we asked
it’s special sand, grandad said, it’s come all the way from France
we peered into his tin and stared for a while
French sand didn’t look very special, it looked like ordinary sand to us
why’s it so special, we asked
each grain represents an old friend of mine, he said
grandad must have had a lot of friends, we thought
did you go to the beach with them when you were a boy, we asked
yes, something like that, grandad said, snapping the lid shut,
asking the man for three 99s, two with red sauce
– Brian Bilston
Strive for work so good
that someone will care
about it 20 years from
now.
– Rick Rubin
You want to spend all your time either learning, earning, or relaxing.
– @naval
If you think the world is selfish and rotten, go to the cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer overlooking Omaha Beach. See what one group of men did for another on D-Day, June 6th, 1944.
– Andy Rooney
I praise my mortal love. I praise their only / violation: being born a pike / who flies among the stars;
– Natasha Oladokun
IDYLL
In the grey summer garden I shall find you
With day-break and the morning hills behind you.
There will be rain-wet roses; stir of wings;
And down the wood a thrush that wakes and sings.
Not from the past you’ll come, but from that deep
Where beauty murmurs to the soul asleep:
And I shall know the sense of life re-born
From dreams into the mystery of morn
Where gloom and brightness meet. And standing there
Till that calm song is done, at last we’ll share
The league-spread quiring symphonies that are
Joy in the world, and peace, and dawn’s one star.
– Siegfried Sassoon, 1918
Times of great transition are, in fact, the best opportunities to renew the search for meaning. As our old stories fall away, we begin to see new possibilities. When most empty, we’re most able to be filled anew.
– Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft
a butterfly joins me
sharing a tree’s shade
like old friends
– Issa
We tend to judge by the past record; by and large, if the thing has a lousy past record and a bright future, we’re going to miss that opportunity.
– Charlie Munger
He’s unfazed and untouchable in the physical world. She’s unfazed and untouchable in the spiritual. Together they’re a fortress.
– Nika Solé
Most of our good ideas have come from the bottom up rather than the top down. And they’ve come from creative people working in some part of the company that no one was paying attention to and were just tinkering. And then stuff evolves out of that.
– Jack Clark
Stop treating your body like you’ve got a spare one in the closet.
– Dan Go
The Sufi masters knew that any great illusionary passion was the unrecognized beginning of the love of God; and we today see it as the vehicle of the process of individuation, as behind all human love lies ultimately the fascination with.. the Self.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
Oblivion is the container from which the inexhaustible, intermediate world in Kafka’s stories presses towards the light.
– Walter Benjamin
Increasing efficiency of communication and of controlling human behavior can, instead of liberating us into the air like birds, fix us to the ground like toadstools.
– Alan Watts
It’s time for initiation reform for young women. We need to institute something like the Artemis bear-clan to protect young girls from the pressures of the junk culture . . . and institute, as well, rituals to honor their associations with the divine world.
– Robert Bly
Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam;
Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know:
Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.
– Hart Crane
Because I love you, I love the whole world and that includes your left shoulder.
– Franz Kafka
i were a wildflower
bloom
unshaken by gusty winds
undaunted by the noise
– Nitu Yumnam
The only spiritual life you need is not to react.
– Robert Adams
Horror is the removal of masks.
– Robert Bloch
You don’t want to damn your characters, but you do keep quite a skeptical distance from them.
– Ann Beattie
Habit is a rope. We weave a thread every day, and eventually we can’t break it.
– Thomas Mann
How you feel in any one moment is more important than anything else, because how you feel right now is creating your life.
– Rhonda Byrne
the more time i spend around inner work/psych/meditation/etc people,
the more certain i am that there’s some critical period where you HAVE to get out of your head, into your body, into practice, out of your rational-brain,,
before a window closes and you’re kinda doomed
– River Kenna
Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
– @naval
Nothing ever happened between us but it was love and it was what made school bearable.
– Chantal Akerman
The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.
– Salvador Dali
Language has both strengthened imagination and been freed by it.
– Tolkien
The mind analyses & remembers, the body experiences & feels, the soul observes & knows.
– Neale Donald Walsch
He would come, sooner or later, ruffled and drenched dark with rain, one wing broken by the storm, his feathers tattered and filthy, his tail black with tar, a castaway crippled by the sea’s fury, a deposed, greedy sovereign: he would return to rule over that shattered realm.
– Monica Pareschi, The Seagulls
It’s not enough for two people to meet; it’s also very important for them to meet at the right time and celebrate deep, silent celebrations where their desires merge, so that they can battle all storms as one.
– Rilke
The waning of any deep interaction with the natural world is the abiding sadness in Anima. It is less the lament for a wounded earth than for human separation from it.
– Colin Thubron
It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses […] more confident, farseeing, capable, and prudent—
– Carl Sagan
It’s entirely possible that the world will have one taxi dispatcher.
– @naval
When you know that every problem is only a false problem, you are dangerously close to salvation.
– Emil Cioran
I hope poetry is a support to ideas of democracy, humanity … That’s why I’m writing poetry.
– Durs Grünbein
I return a can of paint to the store
because I can’t manage any more
pain, I meant paint. I mean pain.
I keep going back for pain samples
I don’t need.
– Deborah Hauser
The cars go by in a bluish light.
– Weldon Kees
Your suffering is designed to awaken you out of your story. Some wake up out the story. But most stay in the story, trying to make it better.
– Leonard Jacobson
The writing experience felt like someone was holding a silver gravy boat and pouring silver liquid down the inside of my spine.
– Suzan-Lori Parks
The stateless state transcends & includes all states.
– Vince Fakhoury Horn
What is an artist. It was her world, then mine, willed into existence through the sheer force of her aim. What she wanted became what I wanted.
That’s how it works: what is yours first belonged to someone else.
– Johanna Hedva
Confusion, anger, depression, violence, and conflict arise when humans forget who they are.
– Eckhart Tolle
The doctrine of human supremacy, which waxes strong in the current administration, portrays life as a hierarchy with humans at the top, rather than a web within which humans are entangled.
– Robert Macfarlane
It has long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sit back and let things happen. They go out and happen to things.
– Leonardo da Vinci
If you are not
personally free to
be yourself in that
most important of
all human
activities-the
expression of love
—then life itself
loses its meaning.
– Harvey Milk
Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.
– Flannery O’Connor
For medieval theologians, it was an essential aspect of divine intention that everything should fit together. It wasn’t a coincidence…that the basic dimensions at the foundation of built things—height, width, and length—were a trinity.
– Lauren Kane
Sacredness is not trying to look on the bright side of life and using that as a stepping-stone, but it is unconditional cheerfulness that has no other side.
– Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Others are bound to have
What we are bound to lose.
Others are apt to find
What in our discoveries
Was found, or not found,
In accord with Destiny.
But what they cannot have
Is the Magic of the Faraway
Which makes it history.
For this reason their glory
Is a tempered brilliance, given
By a borrowed light.
– Fernando Pessoa (tr. Richard Zenith)
the old pond
rippling with sunlight
poets come and go
– Chen-ou Liu
Polycrisis Genesis
Poly-crisis stems from our inability to
balance between mechanistic
methodologies and holistic systems
approach.
The solution?
Comprehensive Anticipatory Design
Science. A practise championed by
late Bucky Fuller.
A practise where you think global and
act local. Engineering “Spaceship
Earth” to work for all it’s inhabitants
Doing more with less.
– @IrthuSuresh
Comics are a complicated ballet of words and images and rhythm and gesture and color and imaginary sound that at their best synesthetically recreate on the page the sensation of life.
– Chris Ware
there are two (complementary) ways of effecting an irreparable scission between the sensory and the spiritual, between the exoteric and the esoteric: namely, by an exclusive attachment to one or the other; the catastrophe is the same in either case.
– Henry Corbin
Karma means positive interdependent connection—good actions lead to good results, bad to suffering.
– Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
It’s becoming easier and easier to be social, but exceptional people are built in solitude.
– @naval
There are no genuine Uruks, that is folk made bad by the intention of their maker; and not many who are so corrupted as to be irredeemable (though I fear it must be admitted that there are human creatures that seem irredeemable short of a special miracle…).
– Tolkien
As for me, I always hung around in the street after school because of love. Love makes you hang around. I used to walk a girl a couple of years above me to the Gare du Luxembourg. We would talk for a long time, she would miss one train, sometimes two, to talk to me for longer, even when it was raining. I can’t remember what we talked about. Whenever it rained her long blonde hair became darker but it didn’t matter. She always ended up getting on a train and I would always return home. I didn’t know what love was at the time. But that was surely it. Nothing ever happened between us but it was love and it was what made school bearable.
I would wake up at the crack of dawn every day to get to school early to meet her. We would rush to meet in- between our classrooms to talk just for five minutes. We had so much to say to each other. So it was worth it, even for five minutes. But it was never enough.
– Chantal Akerman
A poem is essentially embedded in a matrix of silence. So that even if the words celebrate what is, each line end acknowledges what is not.
– Rosmarie Waldrop
Dharma is not something we are fated to, or stoic about, but the very set of practices that can lift us out of our conditioning, out of an assumed set of limits and away from what is often a pervasive resignation.
– Sharon Salzberg
The most important thing in practice is to be natural and spontaneous.
– Master Sheng-Yen
There was a star danced, and under that was I born.
– William Shakespeare
A senior dharma teacher once asked me what I was willing to die for, adding that I couldn’t respond with self-defense or to protect my family. I found it difficult to respond at all.
They then pointed out that modern people generally can’t answer this question.
Well, you know who can?
Greta-fucking-Thunberg.
Respect to anyone willing to put themselves in actual harms way in order to enact their values. Y’all are the high-level bodhisattvas.
– Vince F. Horn
We want our sound to enter the soul of the audience, and see if it can awaken something in their minds…
Because there are a lot of people sleeping.
– Jimi Hendrix
How we hold the simplest of
our tasks speaks loudly
about how we hold life itself.
– Gunilla Norris
As people are learning all over again in the modern world, when people who will not acknowledge their own woundedness are given power, they will make new wounds and possibly wound everyone because of their need to deny their own woundedness. The word heal means to cure and specifically to make whole. It turns out that being a whole person means we have to accept our vulnerable parts, and that we have to accept and learn to face our original inner wounds. For in this old, mythological understanding, the fateful event of being wounded early in life creates the need for a deep healing process that becomes the path of awakening for each person.
The path of the wounded healer leads to a connection to the deep self within, which is our connection to wholeness, which is the root of the human capacity to heal. There’s an old idea that says that in the same way that something greater than ourselves wounds us early on, something greater than ourselves seeks to awaken through the specific wounds we carry. In that sense, denying the inner wound means also denying the presence of the deep soul or the centering self, which holds the exact medicine we are looking for.
In some mythic stories, the wound inside a person is called the sacred affliction, or the holy wound. There’s another play on words in which the wound which can be seen as a hole, can also be seen as a holy element that secretly holds the natural antidote, the inner medicine that we also brought to life.
The wounded healer is ever wounded, and ever able to find ways of healing. It’s an archetypal condition. The point has never been to become perfect, or perfectly healed, or completely whole. The point has always been to become holy. That is to say, complete with our vulnerabilities and our wounds, because the wound becomes a womb from which we are intended to be reborn again and again. And that’s why the old saying was, the afflicted are holy.
– Michael Meade
Marie-Louise von Franz…wrote that individuation makes one ‘capable of choosing its own path and self-reliantly remains true to its own inner law. Especially in times of collective neurosis, the existence of such mature people is of crucial importance.
– Gary Bobroff
What is in the imagination is not a picture, but a picture can correspond to it.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.
– Chuck Palahniuk
Freedom is, both in itself and in its relation to these other goods, the best thing that political and economic conditions can secure.
– Bertrand Russell
Finding a right relation to the unconscious is finding the middle path between extremes.
– David Tacey
The good news, from a Buddhist point of view, is we don’t actually have to be hateful. We don’t have to be prejudiced. We can dissolve our hate, born of ignorance—by bringing in sunshine, education, empathy, and heart connection.
– Waylon Lewis
Let go of everything, but don’t be indifferent. Let go with reason. Be neutral with mindfulness and wisdom.
– Ajaan Suchart Abhijato
There’s no hidden message in anything, no fairy tale ending. There is just disease. And when we’re lucky, a cure.
– Emilie Pascale Beck
It’s so weird to me that people are separating caring about the environment and the climate to caring about humans… There can be no climate justice without social justice.
– Greta Thunberg
To live in community with a place creates a sense of collective coherence….The absence of it: trauma.
– Bridget Crocker
libraries could actually be profitable if they simply sold coffee.
– Karla Mendoza
Some things aren’t supposed to generate a profit. Which is pretty easy to understand for anyone who doesn’t worship money.
– Anna Zarves
Poetry
makes nothing happen.
It survives
in the valley of its saying.
– Maxine Kumin
Praxis precedes theory.
– John Simon
Calmness is the absence of unnecessary complexity.
– Donald Barthelme
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
– Thomas Mann
There is infinite nonsense in the world on all of these matters; hence blame me not if I contribute my mite.
– Herman Melville
Because subjectivity is always alienated, far from mastering the world, it is necessarily in a skewed relation to the world. To be a subject is always to relate to one’s world from a distance.
– Todd McGowan
The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it.
– Terry Pratchett
There is no avant-garde: only some people a bit behind.
– Varèse
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof was to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
– Douglas Adams
We do not serve our children, our friends and partners, our society by living partial lives, and being secretly depressed and resentful. We serve the world by finding what feeds us, and, having been fed, then share our gift with others.
– James Hollis
I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.
– Howard Zinn
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
– Henry David Thoreau
We are infinitely more than we think.
– Khalil Gibran
The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us – the poet – whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.
– Audre Lorde
Boredom’s useful too though, because it’s when you disengage from everything else that you can engage in creativity. Boredom tells you when you should do something different. Boredom teaches you what matters to you.
– Dr. Dacher Keltner
There is only a stream of sensations, perceptions, memories and ideations. The body is an abstraction, created by our tendency to seek unity in diversity….It is like seeing the surface of the ocean and completely forgetting the immensity beneath.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying “there are only facts,” I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.
– E. M. Forster
It is the explanation, the verbalization, whether silent or spoken, that sustains anger, and gives it scope and depth.
– Krishnamurti
The worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its love.
– Henry Scougal
But if you take your stand on the prevalent view, how long do you think it will prevail?… All you can say about my view is that it is old fashioned; yours will soon be the same.
– C.S. Lewis
Sometimes your purpose isn’t in changing the world loudly—it’s in loving deeply, listening closely, and living with gentle intention.
– Prince Ea
I am constantly dealing with people who are not themselves, and I need friends who have a certain degree of ripeness.
– Carl Jung
You’d think the years
would change some first sense
of whatever it is—
but it comes again and again.
– fr. Circle, Robert Creeley
Every person you meet knows something you don’t; Learn from them.
– H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
The unconscious mind sees correctly even when conscious reason is blind and impotent.
– Carl Jung
It is of no importance whether evil is here or there, but one can deal only with the evil in oneself, because it is within one’s reach, elsewhere one trespasses.
– Carl G. Jung
Capitalism runs on consumption, even when it’s consuming itself.
– Tina Campt
When I say work I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs.
– Margaret Laurence
God-consciousness is experienced by how much you love not by how much you believe.
– unkown
In some people, the vice is seen in the same way as in the prize horse – the breed.
– Ernest Hemingway
The spiritual infant should live more in the realm of the will, for we are what we choose, not what we feel.
– J. Oswald Sanders
The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.
– Steve Jobs
Yesterday, we were missing freedom.
Today, we miss love.
I’m afraid of tomorrow for we will miss humanity.
– Mahmoud Darwish
Only one thing worse than Dragons and that’s Americans.
– Gerard Butler
Most people do not mind being surpassed in good fortune, character, or temperament, but no one, especially not a sovereign, likes to be surpassed in intelligence.
– Baltasar Gracián
Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche.
– Carl Jung
We evolved for scarcity but live in abundance.
– Naval Ravikant
The body forgets
what it meant to do.
I lie there,
like an unspoken word.
I don’t rest,
I just stop moving.
– DeanePoetry
At the age of twelve I knew how to lose myself in a book. That’s almost impossible now because I’m always thinking analytically, about how this or that effect is achieved, why it works or doesn’t work. But I think that’s why I write, because writing is such an immersive experience (on the good days). I can leave myself behind.
– Monica Ali
He who wants everything every time will lose everything any time.
– Vikrant Parsai
All delay is a waste of time. You can skip all the preparation and go directly for the ultimate search within.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Work to become, not to acquire.
– Elbert Hubbard
It has been my experience that every dream without exception deals with oneself. Dreams are absolutely self-centred.
– Sigmund Freud
If the only way they can appear innocent is by making you look guilty, they were never innocent.
– Zurayan ittesaf
A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
– Alan Bennett
I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.
– Sir Isaac Newton
Chance is always powerful. Let your hook always be cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be fish.
– Ovid
Before it is born the child is assigned a name and is son or daughter of — ; it has to learn to fit into this already ascribed place. Whatever the child does, whatever the specific accidents of its individual history, all take place within the larger framework of this human order. It is within the Freudian unconscious that the laws of this order speak.
– Juliet Mitchell
Since the meds
and therapy started working we don’t get to
kiss each other goodnight anymore. He is
turning off the light while I’m getting up
to feed the chickens.
– Neil Hilborn
Movies make you think civilization will end fast, like with aliens and explosions, but really it’ll end slow. Ours is already ending, it’s just ending too slow for people to notice.
– Anthony Doerr
What has America become but the Fourth Reich
– Danny Krikorian
I write because I can’t not write. Often it’s more lumbering than loping. But like running, my strength is my need to write. And if I keep putting one foot in front of the other I still cross the finish line at the end.
– Christine Wiese
When you’re outnumbered by trees your perspective shifts.
– Jessica Marie Baumgartner
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil.
– Marcus Aurelius
Is it not an old truth that woman loves the weaknesses of the strong man more than his strength, and the stupidity of the clever man more than his cleverness?
– Carl Jung
The big lie is writers actually know what they’re going to do and they set out to do. They realise that afterwards, after they’ve struggled and like sat there and shaped and reshaped and tried to put some story together.
– Colum McCann
Love is the most sensitive organ of perception. Only love lets you read your own soul and the souls of others. Nothing else will do. It is will be, it is, and it passes, hiding an infinite meaning in itself.
– Carl Jung
This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.
– Philip K. Dick
If you can stand yourself, then you might be
capable of loving somebody else; otherwise,
it is a mere excuse, just a lie. And that cannot
be repeated often enough.
– Carl Jung
We all know that humility is the opposite of pride, but humility is also one of the opposites of fear. Humility is not a lack of confidence, but the utmost expression of confidence, because humility is confidence in God, rather than oneself.
– Steven Elmore
Fruitful introversion is possible only when
there is also a relation to the outside.
– Carl Jung
All people on the planet are children, except for a very few. No one is grown up except those free of desire.
– Rumi
Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.
– Primo Levi
Out of my ignorance, I called you a homeland and I forgot that homelands are taken away.
– Mahmoud Darwish
Nothing can exist without its opposite; the two were one in the beginning and will be one again in the end.
Consciousness can only exist through continual recognition of the unconscious.
– Carl G. Jung
No wonder the Western world feels uneasy, for it does not know how much it plays into the hands of the uproarious underworld and what it has lost through the destruction of its numinosities.
It has lost its moral and spiritual values to a very dangerous degree. Its moral and spiritual tradition has collapsed, and has left a worldwide disorientation and dissociation.
– Carl G. Jung
If nostalgia holds you hostage,
the ransom is the present.
– Khang Kijarro Nguyen
For it is really true that if one creates a better relation to the unconscious, it proves to be a helpful power, it then has an activity of its own, it produces helpful dreams, and at times it really produces little miracles.
– Carl G. Jung
When it comes to the purpose of the Socratic method, Socrates had colossal ambitions. He believed that all of the trouble we have leading our lives, all of our dissatisfactions, all of our failures to progress, all of our moral imperfections, all of the injustices we commit, large and small, stem from one source: ignorance.
– Agnes Callard, Open Socrates
Never, never pin your whole faith on any human being: not if he is the best and wisest in the whole world. There are lots of nice things you can do with sand; but do not try building a house on it.
– C.S. Lewis
Insanity is rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.
– F. W. Nietzsche
We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves.
– Paul Gauguin
Once you have heard certain expressions, sentences, you almost never forget them. It’s like sending a bucket down the well and it always comes up full. You don’t know you’ve remembered, but you have.
– Eudora Welty
Although I have a regular work schedule, I take time to go for long walks on the beach so that I can listen to what is going on inside my head. If my work isn’t going well, I lie down in the middle of a workday and gaze at the ceiling while I listen and visualize what goes on in my imagination.
– Albert Einstein
Our will is a function regulated by reflection; hence it is dependent on the quality of that reflection.
– Carl Jung
Generosity is essential to life. All of life is a generosity. If you get nervous, thinking you’d better nail down who you are, and this is mine and this is mine, then the dance jams up.
– Joanna Macy
I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well.
– Alexander the Great
Everything is changing, everything is interdependent—and there is no one to whom any of it belongs.
– Andrew Olendzki
There is not any kind of existence that is free of suffering.
– Buddhadasa Bhikkhu
No one could look at him without conceiving a strong dislike…. There was such an intolerable air of conceit about this man that it was almost as much as one could do to refrain from running up and affronting him.
– Herman Melville, Omoo
Only a life lived in a certain spirit is worth living. It is a remarkable fact that a life lived entirely from the ego is dull not only for the person himself but for all concerned.
– CG Jung
Trauma is so arresting that traumatized people will focus on it compulsively. Unfortunately, the situation that defeated them once will defeat them again and again.
– Peter A. Levine
It wasn’t that I hadn’t known these things, but that at some point, without realizing it, I had persuaded myself that I was different — that my honesty and non-lameness wouldn’t be punished like that, because I had some special skill, some self-sufficiency, an ability to be alone.
– Elif Batuman, Either/Or
If one doesn’t know his mistakes, he won’t want to correct them.
– Seneca
Whoever is educated by possibility remains with anxiety; he does not permit himself to be deceived by its countless falsifications.
– Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety
It was marvelous to cross borders, to let oneself go within other cultures, discover the provisional nature of what I had taken for absolute.
– Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child
To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth. In the depths, being is not an unconditional persistence but an endlessly slow growth. You think you are standing still like swamp water, but slowly you flow into the sea that covers the earth’s greatest deeps, and is so vast that firm land seems only an island imbedded in the womb of the immeasurable sea.
– C. G. Jung
Those in power write the history, while those who suffer write the songs.
– Frank Harte
The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.
– Walter Benjamin
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
– Jean Cocteau
If you want to be a clear thinker you cannot pay attention to politics because it’ll destroy your ability to think.
– @naval
Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error of judgment.
– Philip Dick
When I radiate love and good wishes, I create an energy field of kindness around me. What I give, I receive — often in even greater measure. Every pure thought sown becomes a blessing returned.
Every thought of goodwill uplifts someone, somewhere.
– Brahma Kumaris
A divine woman will be like, I wanna show you something. And then she supercharges your potential and multiplies your bank account.
– Nika Solé
Attachment can only bear the nice things—when we don’t get what we crave, anger follows.
– Robina Courtin
Let us remember that you don’t have to be lost to be found. Vulnerability is not the only key to the Kingdom.
– Pico Iyer
Who are you if you don’t refer to a single thought or feeling to tell you who you are?
– Adyashanti
a brief stay at
a mountain cabin
restful sleep
– Issa
She was always to be found on the nearest sofa.
– Franz Kafka
Passivity increases exponentially as the educational system turns out ‘products’.
– Robert Bly, Iron John
Education . . . has become an institution whose purpose in the modern world is not to make culture, not to serve the living cosmos, but to harness humankind to the dead forces of materialism.
– Robert Sardello, Facing the World with Soul
Let us go back together to the hills.
Weary am I of palaces and courts,
Weary of words disloyal to my thoughts,—
Come, my belovèd, let us to the hills.
– Vita Sackville-West
We must hurl literature into an abyss of sensuality from which it can emerge only completely regenerated.
– Andre Gide to Andre Ruyters
True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.
– Eckhart Tolle
If the free-traders cannot understand how one nation can grow rich at the expense of another, we need not wonder, since these same gentlemen also refuse to understand how within one country one class can enrich itself at the expense of another.
– Karl Marx
The vocation is to be embarrassing
The vocation is to follow your own embarrassment to beauteous hell
– Alice Notley
Thinking is just a recycling of data that you have gathered in the past.
– Sadhguru
To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron; it burns into you and that is very painful.
– Carl Jung
Precisely because you stand on our shoulders is why you can see further than we did.
– Angela Davis
Being content makes the poor feel rich, and being discontent makes the rich feel poor.
– Benjamin Franklin
bicycle rattles by
tiny speakers tucked in ears
and she’s laughing at a joke
from another continent
– @SeptimusBrown
My idea of writing is of unflinching and continual effort.
– James Salter
I admit I wish for a love
that spreads like a swallow of honey
that you can still feel in your body
long after the first spoonful.
– Chelsea Guevara
The mind I love must have wild places.
– Katherine Mansfield
The greater the practitioner, the smaller their eight worldly concerns.
– Chamtrul Rinpoche
The eight worldly concerns:
Attachment to gain, pleasure, praise, and fame.
Aversion to loss, pain, blame, and bad reputation.
BRAVERY INVOKES MAGIC
The essence of this way or path is transcending cowardice and manifesting bravery. That is the best and only way to invoke drala, or magic, is by creating an atmosphere of bravery. The fundamental aspect of bravery is being without deception. Deception in this case is self-deception, doubting yourself so that you are cut off from the vision of the Great Eastern Sun. The dralas can only desend onto your existence when you have properly prepared the ground. If there is the slightest deception, you will dispel drala. From that point of view, deception is the magic of the setting sun.
Usually if we say someone is brave, we mean that he is not afraid of any enemy or he is willing to die for a cause or he is never intimidated.The Shambhala understanding of bravery is quite different. Here bravery is the courage to be–to live in the world without any deception and tremendous kindness and caring for others. You might wonder how this can bring magic into your life. The idea of magic is that you can conquer the elements so that you can turn earth into fire or fire into water or ignore the law of gravity. But true magic is the magic of reality, as it is – the earth of earth, the water of water–communicating with the elements so that in some sense, they become one with you. When you develop bravery, you make a connection with or ignore the law of gravity and fly. But true magic is the magic of reality, as it is: the earth of earth, the water of water–communicating with the elements so that, is some sense they become one with you. When you develop bravery, you make a connection with the elemental quality of existence. Bravery begins to heighten your existence; that is, to bring out the brilliant and genuine qualities of your environment, and of your being.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The Books May Not Remember This
The blue flying note of the left-out wind
Sang this day like a long-lost sea
Dressed only in its long blue song.
The trees knew well why it sang, what it did
When it stripped the sky of lounging clouds
And the birds, whose sport it was, flew far
And high on the doubtless sound.
And we walked, you and I, to the top of a hill
Speaking softly of what cannot be seen
Though it chills and sings.
The books may not remember this
But you and I will.
– George Gorman
And the air was full of thoughts and things to say. But at times like these, only the small things are ever said. Big things lurk unsaid inside.
– Arundhati Roy
In the labyrinth of the mind,
the shortest distance
between two thoughts
is rarely a straight line.
– Fa Hsing Jeff Miles
Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and with- holds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things; it is as the odor and the color of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the form and splendor of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley
An Open Life: Joseph Campbell in Conversation with Michael Toms
There’s a wonderful question Schopenhauer asks: How is it that an individual can so participate in the danger and pain of another that, forgetting his own self-protection, he moves spontaneously to the other’s rescue, even at the cost of his own life? Schopenhauer’s answer is that a metaphysical realization is showing its force in action, namely, the realization that you and the other are one, and that the sense of separateness is simply a function of the way we experience things in space and time.
All compassion, all sympathy is irrational. That’s the point. Love is irrational. The rational is stressing I-thou opposites. The mind is in the world of separateness and angular structures. It’s a world put together in a way that can be calculated. Compassion, love–these jump mathematics.
There are two ways of living a mythologically grounded life. One way is just to live what I call “the way of the village compound,” where you remain within the sphere of your people. That can be a very strong and powerful and noble life. There are, however, people who feel this isn’t the whole story. And today, all historical circumstances are changing, and we no longer have the enclosing horizons that shut us in from knowledge of other people — new worlds are breaking in on us all the time. It’s inevitable that a person with any sense of openness to new experience will say to himself, “Now, this won’t do, the way we’re living.” Do you see what I mean? And so, one goes out for one’s self to find a broader base, a broader relationship.
On the other hand, there’s plenty of reason for those who don’t have this feeling to remain within the field because our societies today are so rich in the gifts that they can render. But if a person has had the sense of the Call — the feeling that there’s an adventure for him — and if he doesn’t follow that, but remains in the society because it’s safe and secure, then life dries up. And then he comes to that condition in late middle age: he’s gotten to the top of the ladder, and found that it’s against the wrong wall.
If you have the guts to follow the risk, however, life opens, opens, opens up all along the line. I’m not superstitious, but I do believe in spiritual magic, you might say. I feel that if one follows what I call one’s “bliss” — the thing that really gets you deep in the gut and that you feel is your life — doors will open up. They do! They have in my life and they have in many lives that I know of.
The problem of the grail quest is the revivification of what is known as the Waste Land. The Waste Land is a world where people live not out of their own initiative, but out of what they think they’re supposed to do. People have inherited their official roles and positions; they haven’t earned them. This is the situation of the Waste Land: everybody leading a false life. T. S. Eliot used that idea in his poem, The Waste Land, and he actually quotes several lines from Wolfram’s Parzival. The Waste Land is a place where the sense of the vitality of life has gone. People take jobs because they have to live, and then they find in mid-life that the job doesn’t mean a thing.
I don’t know what your impression is, Michael, but mine is that the majority of my friends are living WasteLand lives. In teaching, you have people who haven’t come into the Waste Land yet. They’re at the point of making the decision whether they’re going to follow the way of their own zeal — the star that’s dawned for them — or do what daddy and mother and friends want them to do. The adventure is always in the dark forest, and there’s something perilous about it. Now, since retiring I’ve been lecturing for the most part to adults, many of whom feel they need a new start; they have to find a center in what they do that really meets their lives. And my impression is that many of my friends just are baffled; they’re wandering in the Waste Land without any sense of where the water is — the source that makes things green.
You have to strive every minute to get rid of the life that you have planned in order to have the life that’s waiting to be yours. Move. Move. Move into the transcendent. That’s the whole sense of adventure, I think.
That’s the whole mystery: to have the mind submit. It must serve, not dominate, life. That’s a major point in so many mythologies. The mind dominating life is really Satan, and life speaking through the mind is the power of Christ. That’s basic, that’s the Buddha.
The work of poets and artists is to know what the world-image of today is, and to render it as the old seers did theirs. Today we lack poets and artist who speak of the mystery. The function of the poet to open the mystery dimension has been, with few great exceptions, forgotten. We have science, but we lack poetry that reveals what the heart is ready to recognize.
The human being is a biological phenomenon. He has a body which is like the body of the grass or the tree: a product of this good earth. And, on the other hand, in contrast to the tree and the grass and the little bug, he has this great brain which has a structuring character that is not of nature. It has this rational thinking of the mathematical kind. IT is rectangular, lets say, whereas corporal thinking is circular. One is the wisdom that digests our meals, which brings the grass up, and which we share with the whole world of nature. But then there is this intelligence which has plans for how life should be, and its not always the way life wants to be. So there’s conflict between these two worlds.
There are two aspects of the hero, I think. The hero is somebody whom you can lean on and who’s going to rescue you; he is also an ideal. To live the heroic life is to live the individual adventure, really. One of the problems today is that with the enormous transformations in the forms of our lives, the models for life don’t exist for us. In a traditional society — the agriculturally based city — there were relatively few life roles, and the models were there; there was a hero for each life role. But look at the past twenty years and what has come along in the way of new life possibilities and requirements. The hero — as-model is one thing we lack, so each one has to be his own hero and follow the path that’s no path. It’s a very interesting situation.
As I grow older, more and more of the economic and political details keep pushing in, and I wonder what became of that early inner quietness that allowed me to move out of my own center.
When the world seems to be falling apart, stick to your own trajectory; hang onto you own ideals and find kindred spirits. That’s the rule of life.
Spengler has an image of the ideal when all’s falling apart; he says it’s the soldier in Pompeii who stayed right at his post when the volcanic ash was coming down. Even at the worst moment, if you are holding on to your trajectory, you’ve won. It’s those who get thrown off track who are lost.
The whole thing in marriage is the relationship and yielding. Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair has to do with immediate personal satisfaction. Marriage is an ordeal; it means yielding, time and again. That’s why it is a sacrament: you give up your personal simplicity to participate. And you are not giving to the other person, you are giving to the relationship. Because you are not giving to the other person, it is not impoverishing–it is life building, life fostering, enriching.
The beautiful thing is the growing; each helping the other to flower. We often want to freeze the other person, but you can’t have that and love too. Wherever love takes you, there you are.
I see marriage in two stages. One is that wonderful impulse stage of youth where everything is “coming up roses” and the birds are singing and all of that. Then there comes the time when the vital energies aren’t there, but at the same time there is an awakening of the spiritual relationship. When that doesn’t happen, you see people getting divorced. I’ve been shocked at the number of my friends who brought up a family, everything seems wonderful, the kids are gone, and they get divorced!
The story about the priest, the minister and the rabbi who try to answer the question: When does life begin?
The priest says at conception. The minister says after twenty days or something like that. The rabbi says: When the kids have graduated and the dog has died. That is when people grow apart. With everything gone, what’s next?
The window of time between now / and universal heat death is enough / for one real apology, so we’d better / make it a good one.
– Tom Snarsky
All things are already said; but since no one is listening, you always have to start over.
– Andre Gide
My greatest skill has been to want but little.
– Thoreau
I feel for those of you who don’t see the direct connection between dharma, meditation, awakening, wisdom, & compassion AND raising your voice against governments that are bank-rolling and enacting a live-streamed genocide. Without this connection, you’re just playing spiritual.
– @VinceFHorn
first celebrate
the flowers in
your heart
– Basho
Man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.
– Rachel Carson
Clasp me in your handkerchief like a tear, trumpet
of early afternoon! in the foggy autumn.
– Frank O’Hara
Philosophy is not just about talking or lecturing, it is about action. It is for solving problems and becoming better.
– Ryan Holiday
[Jesus’s] message is that we’re all sort of nuts and suspicious and petty and full of crazy hungers, and everything feels awful a lot of the time, but even so—one’s behavior needs to be better. One needs to be decent.
– Anne Lamott
Poetry outlasts everything. It’s a primeval spirit. It’s probably the first speech. It comes with speech. It’s what children do, when they play with their first words. And it comes from nowhere, and it always goes on. And there’s no way to lose it, but people don’t know how to find it. People think they don’t know how to read it, and that they don’t have any need for it. Maybe they don’t have any need for it. I don’t know. The world has poetry inside it anyway.
– Alice Notley
The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through love — by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him.
– James Baldwin’s essay on Shakespeare
The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life…
The man who cannot create wants to destroy.
– Erich Fromm
deep
rivers
run quiet
– birdie
setting sun . . .
finally
the window AC
goes silent
– @ruralitalics
I’d give a bit for a time-machine.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Tsongkhapa teaches that genuine compassion requires inner strength and leads to joy, not burnout.
– Justin Whitaker
What a story is, is devious.
– Joy Williams
The Lord of the Rings could only have been written in the 20th century and, more important, for the 20th century. The work may draw on ancient myths for its truth but it speaks directly to the modern age
– Verlyn Flieger, Splintered Light
The vocation is to destroy yourself for it over time
The vocation is to destroy time, exactly
The vocation is not to go through time, it is not to be
In a local place It is not to be anything a teacher can pin down
– Alice Notley
I think what you have to do in translation is translate the dynamic, the essential structure that is separate from the words.
– Frank Bidart
Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.
– Aldous Huxley
AI researchers are generally terrible philosophers–ex: by-and-large they reduce all forms of intelligence to cognitive intelligence–so why should I believe a damn word they say about what AGI is and when it will be achieved?
– @VinceFHorn
Early works are always better than anyone thinks they are: they genuinely tremble, and they loom with futurity.
– Alice Notley
book in my lap~
sunlight dapples
the margins
– @joy_pops
The master observes the world but trusts his inner vision. He allows things to come and go. He prefers what is within to what is without.
– Lao Tzu
As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.
– Josh Billings
As the planet gets progressively less innocent, you need a more innocent eye to see it.
– Martin Amis
The Spirit teaches us to read Scripture with a gaze of love. Contemplative practice helps us develop a third eye that reads between the lines and finds the thread always moving toward inclusivity, mercy, and justice.
– Richard Rohr
REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #96
POEM AT DAWN
Empire
is its own
undoing
– Diane di Prima
The better you get at reading, the better you get at writing
The better you get at writing, the better you get at reading
– Brecht De Poortere
Art for the sake of truth, for the sake of what is beautiful and good – that is the creed I seek.
– George Sand
From the FDR in Early Evening the Light Along
the River Seems Like More Than What It Is
The sky, a rectangle, hovers with lit edges.
It is the same all over town. Along Fourth Avenue
the low white walls of gas stations and repair shops
hold the last light while everywhere,
above the cool and uniform green of baseball fields
and parks the streetlights are coming on.
I have told you everything I know.
– Kristen Case
I try to swallow
the rough fragments
of spring
– Tsuno Shiina
Our inability to obtain a particular article does not prevent us from becoming aware of the empty space that it should fill, and by which we perceive its shape while being unable to identify it.
– Jean Cocteau
Going for refuge is placing awakening—not the person of Buddha, but what he attained—at the center of our lives.
– Valerie (Vimalasara) Mason-John
The Cabbage
by Ruth Stone
You have rented an apartment.
You come to this enclosure with physical relief,
your heavy body climbing the stairs in the dark,
the hall bulb burned out, the landlord
of Greek extraction and possibly a fatalist.
In the apartment leaning against one wall,
your daughter’s painting of a large frilled cabbage
against a dark sky with pinpoints of stars.
The eager vegetable, opening itself
as if to eat the air, or speak in cabbage
language of the meanings within meanings;
while the points of stars hide their massive
violence in the dark upper half of the painting.
You can live with this.
A religion is finished in the moment when it no longer generates heresies.
– Emil Cioran
Nobody can be completely honest. You will try, and you’ll have a great deal of success in exploring your motivations and your dark, unconscious depths, but there will be a certain point at which you will say, “Well, I’ve had enough of that!” You know?
– Alan Watts
When with it I give up the insanely hid
The airless secret I strangle not to share
With all the others as others share the air.
– Edwin Denby
The imaginary dual relationship is based on the conviction that it is possible to give/find/get ‘it’. In practice, this turns into…a swing to the other extreme, the conviction that nothing is possible, there is no point in anything, and everything is the same.
– Paul Verhaeghe
A Measuring Worm
This yellow-striped green
Caterpillar, climbing up
The steep window screen,
Constantly (for lack
Of a full set of legs) keeps
Humping up his back.
It’s as if he sent
By a sort of semaphore
Dark omegas meant
To warn of Last Things.
Although he doesn’t know it,
He will soon have wings,
And I too don’t know
Toward what undreamt condition
Inch by inch I go.
– Richard Wilbur
In love, we do not find satisfaction in the other that we aim at, we find it in the space, or gap, between, to put it bluntly, what we see and what we get.
– Alenka Zupancic
Ode to moment following endless reading and study when one finally begins to see what the writer or artist is doing. Ode to the humility that falls on one’s head, knowing that nothing you write can apprehend the work completely. Ode to tentative strolls in the sidereal.
– Alina Stefanescu
Handwriting or typing or word processing—they’re not like sticking your hands into clay.
– Donald Hall
Whose country slaughters foreigners. Who must always appease a stupid deity, follow the dictates of a benighted even stupid male leader. And survive. And take it, take it, take it.
– Alice Notley
Jack you were wrong (or not
the radio is not from Mars
it is sitting here it has
the world
by its short
wavy hairs, home.
– Pierre Joris, (addressing Jack Spicer
in Short Wave Radio #2)
sleepless night
my address book full
of cross-outs
– Chen-ou Liu
It ceased to hurt me, though so slow
I could not see the trouble go –
But only knew by looking back –
That something – had benumbed the Track –
Nor when it altered, I could say,
For I had worn it, every day,
As constant as the Childish frock –
I hung opon the Peg, at night.
But not the Grief – that nestled Close
As Needles – ladies softly press
To Cushions Cheeks –
To keep their place –
Nor what consoled it, I could trace –
Except, whereas ’twas Wilderness –
It’s better – almost Peace –
– Emily Dickinson
st. thomas aquinas, in his poem called “we are fields before each other”, wrote these words: “our hearts irrigate this earth. we are fields before each other.” yes, each one of us is the ground of being for everyone of us, the ground is not in heavens, nor on earth, it is everywhere we embrace the other. we don’t exist except in relationship. there is a field of life on earth where i was born, and i must walk on it. there is a field of life in the sky where i was born, and i must fly in it. and you are this green earth on which i walk, and this blue heavens in which i fly, only through a thou i become an i.
– Hune Margulies
Pruning in Frost
by Alice Oswald
Last night, without a sound,
a ghost of a world lay down on a world,
trees like dream-wrecks
coralled with increments of frost.
Found crevices
and wound and wound
the clock-spring cobwebs.
All life’s ribbon frozen mid-fling.
Oh I am
stone thumbs,
feet of glass.
Work knocks in me the winter’s nail.
I can imagine
Pain, turned heron,
could fly off slowly in a creak of wings.
And I’d be staring, like one of those
cold-holy and granite kings,
getting carved into this effigy of orchard.
You have a part to play in the overall picture. It may be only a very small part; nevertheless it is essential for the completion of the whole.
– Eileen Caddy
what the thief left behind:
my old dog and wall-to-wall
poetry books
– Chen-ou Liu
What did love mean if it was doled out so carelessly, with no thought of consequence?
– Damon Galgut, Arctic Summer
In every life, there are a great number of small emotions and a small number of great emotions. If you make a choice: two lives and two types of literature.
– Albert Camus
If we save the sea, we save our world.
– David Attenborough
Whatever we see could be other than it is. Whatever we can describe at all could be other than it is. There is no a priori order of things.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Love is the very human quality that allows us to welcome everything, not just what we prefer most. Love is the motivation that enables us to move toward fear – not in order to conquer it, but in order to include it so that we might learn from it. In love, there is no separation. Caring for all things is a natural action of love. Nothing remains isolated from its care.
Why is love the quality that allows us to welcome everything? When we view reality from the vantage point of our personalities – from a small separate self – we are constantly looking for what distinguishes us from one another. But when we live from the vantage point of boundless love, we begin to see all the points of connection that join us together.
Love breeds love.
– Frank Ostaseski
Forward! Ever so! Where you were is dangerous! Where you go is dangerous! Different reasons, both to your advantage! Leap! Then leap again! Looking is for witnesses, not the disaster!
– From Of Storms: Notes on the Tempest
in Practice, Dragon Age: Inquisition
The desire to go deep: to the depths of the night, the depths of love.
– Marina Tsvetaeva
To be deeply known is ecstasy.
– Myss Bradley
I love the other, not according to his (accountable) qualities, but according to his existence; by a movement one might well call mystical. I love, not what he is, but that he is.
– Roland Barthes
…We travelers, walking to the sun, can’t see
Ahead, but looking back the very light
That blinded us shows us the way we came,
Along which blessings now appear, risen
As if from sightlessness to sight, and we,
By blessing brightly lit, keep going toward
That blessed light that yet to us is dark…
– Wendell Berry
They did not complain; for those who are down do not complain. Nor did they know they were down. Or, knowing it, they did not admit their downness. For to front so final a fact is to face with naked hands a lion; and to admit is to give in. Is to be washed away. To be lost and drowned. To be anonymous; unhelpable; alive no more; but debris, or a straw which the wind takes and sails, or tears, or drifts, or rots, to powder and forgetfulness.
A bone in a world of bones! And they gnawed these bones until it seemed that nothing moved in the world except their teeth.
– James Stephens
The body has been designed to renew itself through continuous self-correction. These same principles also apply to the healing of psyche, spirit, and soul.
– Peter A. Levine
You get beyond the suffering. And you focus on the sweetness of your vision.
– Laura Nyro
Everything that is dead quivers. Not only the things of poetry, stars, moon, wood, flowers, but even a white trouser button glittering out of a puddle in the street … Everything has a secret soul, which is silent more often than it speaks.
– Wassily Kandinsky
Proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you have always known.
– Frank Herbert
The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them.
– P.D. Ouspensky
As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
The ego is a monkey catapulting through the jungle:
Totally fascinated by the realm of the senses,
it swings from one desire to the next,
one conflict to the next,
one self-centered idea to the next.
If you threaten it, it actually fears for its life.
Let this monkey go. Let desires go. Let conflicts go.
Let the fiction of life and death go.
Just remain in the centre, watching.
– Hua Hu Jing
THIS ACCORDING TO Novalis: “The greatest magician would be the one who would cast over himself a spell so complete that he would take his own phantasmagorias as autonomous appearances. Would not this be our case?” I recognize that we are all magicians in some way. We are complicit in all we see and comprehend that what we see will never coincide with absolute reality. As a result, the human brain must make a narrative. This I can say with certainty, and yet each narrative we choose will reach a point at which it no longer suffices. One narrative must inevitably be abandoned for another. In this way, any narrative sequence defers meaning, even beyond the point at which it appears to end.
– Frederick Reiken, Day for Night
Personality encloses us like a shell. We like to believe that inside that shell is our ‘true self’, the ‘real me’. In fact, says Guidjieff, we are full of thousands of little ‘I’s. They could be compared to the crystalline fragments that a windscreen shatters into when struck with a hammer. But every time we make some tremendous effort, two of the crystals fuse together. If we could make enough efforts, we would finally obtain one solid block of crystal. If that could happen, man would be virtually a god.
Our aim, then, is to make the kind of effort that will create enough ‘friction’ to fuse two crystals together. These efforts Gurdjieff calls ‘intentional suffering’. This does not mean flogging ourselves or seeking out misery, but simply making efforts of will instead of drifting along in a robotic or mechanical state.
– Colin Wilson
i see myself thrown heart first into this ruin
not for any crime
but being
– Wanda Coleman
I have been bent and broken, but — I hope — into a better shape.
– Charles Dickens
I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.
– Lillian Hellman
It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble, how hopeless the outlook how muddled the tangle, how great the mistake. A sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all.
– Emmet Fox
The Four Minds
Hawaiians say “na’au” for your gut knowledge.
Science calls na’au the enteric system:
a low sheaf of nerve cells near your stomach
where values are chosen and saved.
So keeping is in your stomach mind
where practicality makes stability.
But morphing is in your head mind
where wonder outgrows itself.
The heart mind is for new beginnings
where instinct dares to be yourself.
And connecting is the genital mind
where empathy keeps getting in touch.
– George Gorman
Note to self:
Take Chances, on purpose /
Them, like all the others,
don’t standa a chance.
– Ebony Stewart
We grow accustomed to the Dark –
When Light is put away –
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Good bye –
A Moment – We uncertain step
For newness of the night –
Then – fit our Vision to the Dark –
And meet the Road – erect –
And so of larger – Darknesses –
Those Evenings of the Brain –
When not a Moon disclose a sign –
Or Star – come out – within –
The Bravest – grope a little –
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead –
But as they learn to see –
Either the Darkness alters –
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight –
And Life steps almost straight.
– Emily Dickinson
the answer is more products.
More candles.
More journals.
More five-step morning routines.
Self-care has been weaponized into a consumer performance,
pitched as the universal fix for a world that is fundamentally sick.
Because as long as we are told to heal alone,
we will forget that healing was always supposed to be collective.
Sometimes what we need isn’t more self-discipline,
or more self-soothing,
or more time alone.
Sometimes what we need is community care.
We need food banks that aren’t begging for donations.
We need childcare that doesn’t cost a second mortgage.
We need neighbors who show up without being asked.
We need mutual aid.
We need networks of care that aren’t built to profit off our exhaustion.
And yet—those structures are disappearing.
Deliberately.
Strategically.
Because a person who thinks she must heal herself in isolation
is a person too tired to organize,
too drained to resist,
too burned out to build anything new.
This is how white supremacy culture sustains itself:
by convincing us that self-responsibility is the only responsibility,
that needing others is weakness,
that suffering in private is noble,
that purchasing healing is the same as receiving care.
It isn’t.
Self-care matters.
But it will not fix what community neglect has broken.
It was never meant to carry the whole weight of our healing.
So yes—take the bath.
Say no.
Rest.
Feed yourself like you are something worth saving—because you are.
But also:
Demand better.
Reach out.
Tear down the lie that healing is a solo act.
Refuse the story that says you must be your own village.
Build new structures of care, messy and human and alive.
Because we were never meant to do this alone.
We survive through each other.
We heal together.
We resist together.
And together is the future they never wanted us to remember.
– Lisa M. Hayes
One cannot level one’s moral lance at every evil in the universe. There are just too many of them. But you can do something; and the difference between doing something and doing nothing is everything.
– Daniel Berrigan
Music is a fantastic friend and reflects, like a mirror, how far you’ve come. You briefly enter a realm which you can’t live in. When you’re lost in it, you discover powers you didn’t know you have. It’s a chance to be more than you might have been.
– Colin Davis
TRADESCANTIA
from the mundane root. an oyster plant.
a spiderwort. its variegated purple across
nearly every flowering inch of the world.
sweet Moses-in-the-cradle-lily. amethyst
Angel of Doubt. o Lucy, Saint of Sight,
blind me to etymology, the perse plum pit
in every story about G-d. what wildflower
deserves this wandering? to be buried in
a grave so violet? a name so violent
it once curbed the crucifixion. yes, cursed
to roam until Christ returns. sisyphean
in our ignorance. my aunt gave cuttings
away each winter as a Hanukkah gift
(we all need a little Jew in our lives)
terracotta exodus. tangles of it end-
lessly growing. creeping across oceans.
spreading over continents. the lurking
of a lesser theology. o Lord, leave us
to our legs, our purple leaves. Lord,
where we grow, so do the conditions
for surrender. look us in the root. o Lord,
Lord, let even the seed of a curse bloom
into a blessing.
– Zach Goldberg
If I accept the lowest in me, I lower a seed into the ground of Hell. The seed is invisibly small, but the tree of life grows from it and conjoins the Below with the Above. At both ends there is fire and blazing embers. The Above is fiery and the Below is fiery. Between the unbearable fires grow your life.
You hang between these two poles. In an immeasurably frightening movement the stretched hanging welters up and down. We thus fear our lowest, since that which one does not possess is forever united with the chaos and takes part in its mysterious ebb and flow. Insofar as I accept the lowest in me — precisely that red glowing sun of the depths, the upper shining sun also rises. Therefore he who strives for the highest finds the deepest.
– Carl Jung
Don’t wait for the light
to appear at the end of the tunnel;
stride down there . . .
and light the bloody thing yourself.
– Sara Henderson
I never was a person that thought because some person was doing one thing, and seemed to be making out better, that I should be doing the same thing… I’ve never wished for anybody else’s job. I enjoy what I do and I’m myself all the time. And I’ll continue to be me.
– Thelonious Monk
Be driven. Be curious. Write to connect. Write to explore. Write to make sense of that which you don’t know or remember. Write to discover. But never think something is good just because you wrote it.
– Kiese Laymon
eruption imminent
quiet for all this time,
i can no longer hold this lava
to scorch my insides
instead of yours.
– Najya Williams
The story is the thing. Without literature — books, blogs, movies, great TV, plays , all of it — the authoritarianisim of the world would crush us all. Keep reading, watching, talking…..
– Steve Saroff
I was so long in the outer brightness,
I am not used to this upheaval:
Being at home in my own soul,
Never to be led elsewhere.
I want nothing, I long for nothing,
I hum gently the sounds of childhood,
And I reach home astounded
In the warm beauty of dreams.
– Hermann Hesse (tr. James Wright)
I quiet the noise within and rest in the power of silence. In that sacred stillness, I find clarity, strength, and the wisdom to respond — not react. Silence is not the absence of sound, but the presence of peace.
– Brahma Kumaris
is everyone’s life just like, intensely following energetic threads, occasionally zooming out and going “what the fuck is going on?” and then going back to the threads? Or is that just everyone I know?
– River Kenna
The fun thing about AI is that it both kills the white collar jobs college students think they are training for and deprives them of the critical thinking necessary to get those jobs in the first place.
– Jonathan Fine
“You don’t realize it,” came the whisper, “but, one day, this too will be the past and you will come to mourn it.”
– Sue Zhao
The practice of ‘metta,’ loving-kindness, tenderizes the heart, soothes the body, and opens the mind. It is not a cop-out or denial by pretending to feel a certain way but rather a commitment to unconditional positive regard no matter the circumstances—a radical and heart-opening way to meet this moment of harshness.
– Zeenat Potia
CAVE PAINTING OF A DUN HORSE
He is stretching on the wall, appears to be in motion.
He cannot turn his head, but you can glean his eye
By candlelight, a catastrophe of ochre hope.
I know little else having shook loose from my own mane
All that would be true if I said it to be so.
White canes humble through the night.
In the years, most of what I made I made up. The etching of your dying is as cutting as it was
That many years ago, when I chose its acid touch for you.
There have been two wars.
I have read religiously, mostly texts which have red spines.
I had dreams that were inhumane to me.
The smaller the light to write to becomes, the more
I have to say to you.
– Lucie Brock-Broido
The Mounting Summer, Brilliant and Ominous
A yellow-headed, gold-hammered, sunflower-lanterned
Summer afternoon: after the sun soared
All morning to the marble-shining heights of the marvellous blue
Like lions insurgent, bursting out of a great black zoo,
As if all radiance rode over and roved and dove
To the thick dark night where the fluted roots clutched and grasped
As if all vividness poured, out poured
Over, bursting and falling and breaking,
As when the whole ocean rises and rises, in irresistible, uncontrollable
motion, shaking:
The roar of the heart in a shell and the roar of the sea beyond the
concessions of possession and the successions of time’s continual
procession.
– Delmore Schwartz
I mourn my other selves / My stupid body in the dirt / This ritual tide this blue myth This / indictment I rent
– Morgan Parker
Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. Make your life worth living.
– Albert Einstein
Who alone are peace and freedom to the river and the stream,
Only another winding will this stream make, only another murmur in this glade,
And then shall I come to you, a boundless drop to a boundless ocean.
– Kahlil Gibran
We may study history and translate historical facts according to our prejudices, but to be certain of the future is to be in illusion.
– Krishnamurti
Spiritual development is a long and arduous journey, an adventure through strange lands full of surprises, difficulties and even dangers. It involves a drastic transmutation of the ‘normal’ elements of the personality, an awakening of potentialities hitherto dormant, a raising of consciousness to new realms, and a functioning along a new inner dimension.
– Roberto Assagioli, Psychosynthesis
In this cold, scary world, whenever possible, we pick up after ourselves and turn up the flame of our lanterns just a smidge.
– Anne Lamott
When waiting to hear about Projects A, B, & C, the only thing to do is work on project D.
– Timothy Boudreau
Sylvia
Across a space peopled with stars I am
laughing while my sides ache for existence
it turns out is profound though the profound
because of time it turns out is an illusion and
all of this is infinitely improbable
given the space, for which I gratefully lie
in three feet of snow making a shallow grave
I would have called an angel otherwise and
think of my own rapturous escape from
living only as dust and dirt, little sister.
– Gerald Stern
THE GODDESS WHO CREATED THIS PASSING WORLD
The Goddess who created this passing world
Said Let there be lightbulbs & liquefaction
Life spilled out onto the street, colors whirled
Cars & the variously shod feet were born
And the past & future & I born too
Light as airmail paper away she flew
To Annapurna or Mt. McKinley
Or both but instantly
Clarified, composed, forever was I
Meant by her to recognize a painting
As beautiful or a movie stunning
And to adore the finitude of words
And understand as surfaces my dreams
Know the eye the organ of affection
And depths to be inflections
Of her voice & wrist & smile
– Alice Notley
The thing that bothers her is the smallness of his mind – not its entirety, just the bit he choose to use.
– E.D. Clarke
Within you now exists the same power that moves oceans.
– Sandy Newbigging
There’s a burning coal inside of us—the poet’s job is to unearth it.
– Edward Hirsch
Haiku [i count the morning]
i count the morning
stars the air so sweet i turn
riverdark with sound.
– Sonia Sanchez
When you perform an act of genuine service, giving your time, energy & resources as an act of love, the universe will multiply what you do.
– Iyanla Vanzant
What if the whole barrel of apples is rotten
– Lisa Lucas
Even people who adhere to different religions should assist one another. We should remember our common humanity and help one another on the human level.
– Ajaan Lee
Many things can fry your nervous system and that doesn’t make them bad. It’s just the chaotic nature of the human experience. Your work is not to avoid chaos. It’s to learn how to hold your energetic frame no matter what’s happening.
– Nika Solé
the neighbourhood’s changed so much
that your heart hesitates
at even the smallest
expectation
– Septimus Brown
Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself profoundly.
– Eckhart Tolle
I want the language to be as pellucid as possible, but the content psychologically complex.
– Henri Cole
… and remember to the last, that while there is life there is hope.
– Charles Dickens
There is grief in accepting someone won’t change.
– Nedra Tawwab
I don’t know who I am. Does one ever?
– Marguerite Yourcenar
Not everyone is given to be kind,
this is the same talent
as an ear for music or clairvoyance,
only more rare.
– Strugatsky brothers
People often say, “Riots aren’t revolutions.” That’s true. The vast majority of riots never become revolutionary. On the other hand, show me the revolution that started without a riot.
– Joshua Clover
The river that once gave life will drown the village that prayed for rain, its mercy will turn to vengeance on the third generation.
– The prophecy
Even if we jokingly type ourselves, it’s another thing to be typed by others.
– B. D. McClay
So, to reiterate our problem: Given that people often say and do different things, and say and want different things, how are we to read them?
– B. D. McClay
bad case of mono
someone smacked the stereo
single speaker left
– @SheilaBDuncan
Limited in his nature,
infinite in his desire,
man is a fallen god who
remembers heaven….
– A. De Lamartine
Ode to the Melting of I.C.E.
Just leave already. You’re too old in your ways.
No one likes you. How do you look yourself in the mirror?
Why do you treat people like that? Have you no conscience?
It is foolish to even suggest you might have one.
You do not own the land. You can never own the land.
Why don’t you melt away in the summer sun?
Why don’t you melt away in the summer sun?
You incite hate in the eyes of your citizens.
You justify murder and rape and cages.
Go away and never come back.
Go away, it’s better like that.
– Jose Hernandez Diaz
Self-Portrait as a Pair of Great Tits
by Chelsea McGlynn
When my friend moved for a season of field work
onto a rocky Galapagos island,
she told everyone she got a boob job,
just to watch their eyes drop down
to her B-cup breasts in confusion.
Red-footed Boobies, specifically,
she would explain.
I’m more fond of peckers myself—
Hairy, Red-Cockaded, or Nuttall—
they all bring me pleasure.
Although, I’ll let you in on my secret:
I believe that the largest one is still out there;
the one that makes even the prudes among us
shout out “Lord God” when they see it.
Scientists may doubt those fine specimens
still exist, after the denuding of their bush
and old-growth forest habitats,
but there’s a chance those birds
still penetrate the bark with their ivory bills
in the deep interior of Cuba.
I’ve yet to check a European Shag
off my life list and now that I’m married,
I’m not sure when I’ll get a chance,
although I think if I help my husband bag
a Horned Screamer, he might just forgive me.
You Came, Too
I came to the crowd seeking friends
I came to the crowd seeking love
I came to the crowd for understanding
I found you I came to the crowd to weep
I came to the crowd to laugh
You dried my tears
You shared my happiness
I went from the crowd seeking you
I went from the crowd seeking me
I went from the crowd forever
You came, too
– Nikki Giovanni
AKRIEL’S CONSOLATION
This morning I wrote a poem
on the sadness of this street:
loud new youths, rude new neighbors,
rot in the walls, ruts in the pavement.
Said my angel Akriel,
invisible, soft-tongued:
“Stop your griping, Bill Pillin!
All things grow old and rotten.
At least your derelict street possesses
a bracing authenticity
unlike the illuminated stage-sets
of the bourgeois boulevards.
You may even grow fond
of rotted planks and decaying plaster
and include them in one
of your mist-ridden night poems
which do, after all, make some sense;
whereas reality is random and misleading
unless changed in the eye: golden
flickers of dust in a lighted window.”
– William Pillin
And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner – no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.
– C.S. Lewis
AS MUCH AS YOU CAN
And even if you cannot make your life the way you
want it, this much, at least, try to do
as much as you can: don’t cheapen it
with too much intercourse with society,
with too much movement and conversation.
Don’t cheapen it by taking it about,
making the rounds with it, exposing it
to the everyday inanity
of relations and connections,
so it becomes like a stranger, burdensome.
– C.P. Cavafy
Rupture precedes revolution.
– Ruth Allen
I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do.
– Haruki Murakami
We are the seeds of a new dawn yet to rise,
Cracked open beneath soft and fluffy skies.
We rise like forests where green grasses lay,
Building tomorrow from the shards of today.
We are the seeds of tomorrow, not waiting to be,
But shaping the world we are destined to see.
– @UtyWrites
OUR BIRTHS
…we—not just poets—
are perhaps agents
of a will to knowing
that walks the universe.
oh, how those nine
months
shine.
– Jack Foley
The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love…just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil.
– Nick Cave
THE WORLD THROUGH YOUR WINDOW
For each of us, home affords a small view onto the great wide world. From the vantage point of your back porch, your kitchen window or from the top of your driveway, your view maybe small but immense. When you look out to the open tree, peer into the garden, or stare into a slice of sky above, you can travel for miles. Like in a Zen garden, a glimpse of stone or an arcing maple branch expresses the truth and order of things. Through the frame of your kitchen window, one single tree stands for the vast forest, the vertical rock in your garden embodies the entire mountain range, a sliver of light, the sun. From your one finite perspective, you get a glimpse of the great beyond.
For this reason you really needn’t go anywhere. The world comes to you, arriving at your doorstep as the call of morning bird song, the passing of cloud and in the ever changing angle of light. How each of us finds contentment and joy in our small and humble patch! We cherish our limited perspective, each day it brings us a feeling of belonging. By looking out the window while washing dishes or gazing outward in a moment of silence between phone calls, we reset our nerves and our mind. We fall into moments of reverie, suspended in time. Each time we pause, we slip into the great beyond where our temporal self and eternal self merge. Whether in a city apartment, a coastal home, or at the end of a suburban cul-de-sac, know that your small line of sight continues with mine and that together we share in the one great body of the world.
– Tias Little
“To dream is to know,” I remember my grandfather telling me on more than one occasion. I realize that this phrase must have meant many things to him, not all of which I’ll ever know. But I do feel the vibration of these words of his in reminding me always that when your existence is poised on various kinds of precarity, the substance of visions is as real as the earth, the air, the water. It is not easy to situate oneself, if even for brief moments, on the other side of time, the other side of somewhere […].
– Carter Mathes
The cosmos is a vast configuration of words telling a coherent story (for those who understand), and hence it is a book. So also the human being is a book, but human beings, by and large, have forgotten the story line (nowadays, many of them exult in their forgetfulness and tell us that all stories are arbitrary anyway, so take your pick).
– William C. Chittick
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
There were so many complex emotions for which poems did not exist. I had to find a secret way to express my feelings. I used to memorize poems. I would say them out; I didn’t use to write them down. I had this long fund of poetry in my head.
– Audre Lorde
But that alone, my speaking, is not even the point; I wanted to be silent with you too.
– Paul Celan
Because there are times when a soul has to leave a body, times that are not death. Some people know this like a hymn.
– Lidia Yuknavitch
Infinite systems! A mentat could not function without realizing he worked in infinite systems. Fixed knowledge could not surround the infinite. Everywhere could not be brought into finite perspective. Instead, he must become the infinite—momentarily.
– Frank Herbert, Dune
Levinas says: The proximity of others is ethics, the proximity of things is poetry.
– Gerard L. Bruns
I longed with all my heart for a fresh green silence between living water and forests.
– Renée Vivien, (tr. Jeanette H. Foster)
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
Flesh both inscribes and incorporates cultural memory and history… Knowing is corporeal. One mimes to understand. We copy the world to understand through our bodies.
– Paul Stoller
We may judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
When the storm is over and night falls and the moon is out in all its glory and all you’re left with is the rhythm of the sea, of the waves, you know what God intended for the human race, you know what paradise is.
– Harold Pinter
Quo magis in dubiis hominem spectare periclis
convenit adversisque in rebus noscere qui sit;
nam very voces tum demum pectore ab imo
eliciuntur et eripitur persona, manet res.
So it is more useful to watch a man in times of peril,
and in adversity to discern what kind of man he is;
for then at last words of truth are drawn from the depths of his heart,
and the mask is torn off, reality remains.
– Titus Lucretius Carus
Where can I free myself of the homeland in my body?
– Mahmoud Darwish
How much do I have left of the loyalty to earth, which human shame, and dislike of our own lives, and others’ deaths that take part of us with them, wear out of us, as we go toward that moment when we find out how we die: clinging and pleading, or secretly relieved that it is all over, or despising ourselves, knowing that death is a punishment we deserve, or like an old dog, off his feed, who suddenly is ravenous, and eats the bowl clean, and the next day is a carcass. There is an unfillableness in us — in some of us, a longing for that blue-shaded black night where the beloved dead, and all those others who suffered and sang and were not defeated — the one who hushed them by singing “Going Home” when they lynched him on Bald Mountain, the klezmer violinists who pressed bows across strings until eyes, by near-starvation enlarged, grew wet and sparkled – have gone. Yet I know more than ever that here is the true place, here where we sit together, out of the wind, with a loaf of country bread, and tomatoes still warm from the distant sun, and wine in glasses that are, one for each of us, the upper bell of the glass that will hold the last hour we have to live.
– Galway Kinnell, The Striped Snake and the Goldfinch
Don’t you know, there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight? Awkwardness and stupidity can. The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn’t do the thing he ought to.
– Mark Twain
You can be sad and clean and pure, if you go far
enough inside yourself you are against yourself, or under
yourself, like the Metro, the train cars tunneling life under life.
– Gillian Cummings
At each moment the state of self is constructed, from the ground up,” writes Antonio Damasio. “It is an evanescent reference state, so continuously and consistently reconstructed that the owner never knows it is being remade unless something goes wrong with the remaking.”
– Gabor Maté
All struggle, all resistance is – must be – concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.
– Susan Sontag
Apostle Town
After your death
It was windy every day.
Every day.
Opposed us like a wall.
We went.
Shouting sideways at one another.
Along the road it was useless.
The spaces between.
Us got hard they are.
Empty spaces and yet they.
Are solid and black.
And grievous as gaps.
Between the teeth.
Of an old woman you.
Knew years ago.
When she was.
Beautiful the nerves pouring
around in her like palace fire.
– Anne Carson
How do you survive even one morning even one day
With no mother to tell you
Time to change
– Kazim Ali
When life is no longer seen from a perspective of beginnings through a fantasy of continuous expansion and growth, but rather from the perspective of ends and of death through a fantasy of fate and limitations, midlife has arrived.
– Murray Stein
It is not you who will speak; let the disaster speak in you, even if it be by your forgetfulness or silence.
– Maurice Blanchot (translated by Ann Smock)
Broken Sonnet
by John Yau
The world weeps. There are no tears
To be found. It is deemed a miracle.
The president appears on screens
In villages and towns, in cities in jungles
And jungles still affectionately called cities.
He appears on screens and reads a story.
Whose story is he reading and why?
What lessons are to be learned from this story
About a time that has not arrived, will not arrive, is here?
Time of fire and images of fire climbing toward the sun
Time of precious and semi-precious liquids
Time of a man and a woman doused in ink
Rolling across streams and down valleys
Trying to leave some string of words behind.
As someone once pointed out to me, when you become conscious, the first thing you discover is why you stayed unconscious all those years. Being conscious means you really have to feel what you feel, which is frequently very vulnerable and raw.
– Pema Chödrön
The problem is, most of us spend our entire life going from one promise of relief to another, never staying with the pain long enough to learn anything from it.
– Pema Chodron
What gets upon cloudes, comes down in water, the earth swallows up all, and like that philosophicall dragon eats her own tayle. The wise poets saw this, and in their mystical language caled the earth Saturne, telling us withal shee did feed on her own children.
– Thomas Vaughan
No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
– Viktor Frankl
Sometimes the people you’re most mad at are actually the ones who executed their role perfectly so that you could learn the lesson that they were sent to you to teach you.
– Nika Solé
Thinking of home sometimes reminded me of the difficult relationships that could make me glad I was so far away.
– Stephanie Colwell
I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!)
– Frank O’Hara
Some people are well adjusted to a spiritually sick society. Others of us are so deep in the quantum reality that we’re building a new society.
– Nika Solé
I have come to accept the bumpy roads of life; they seem to lead to the best places.
– Steve Maraboli
Whether on the cushion or in the laboratory, Buddhism and science resist an easy fit.
– Linda Heuman
Someday
people will see all of this
for what it really is.
Someday.
– Andy Perrin
crayon scrawl
on the back of a bill
spring dusk
– @NituYumnam
If your mind is happy then you are happy anywhere you go. When wisdom awakens within you, you will see truth wherever you look. It’s like when you learned how to read, you can then read anywhere you go.
– Ajahn Chah
People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.
– Saul Bellow
Writing, for me, is almost another way of reading, except one level deeper. Almost as soon as I began to read – and I read very early – I began to write.
– Donna Tartt
With a cluther of limbs and organs, all that is needed to live again, to hold out a little time, I’ll call that living, I’ll say it’s me, I’ll get standing, I’ll stop thinking, I’ll be too busy, getting standing, staying standing, stirring about, holding out, getting to tomorrow, tomorrow week, that will be ample, a week will be ample, a week in spring, that puts the jizz in you.
– Samuel Beckett
Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.
– Arthur Rimbaud
I learned “to cultivate my circle of friends to be mostly creatives
Others just don’t seem to understand the demands of an artist’s call to
explore their field
so it’s best to be around like-minded artists.
– Kim Fahner
We hear endlessly…that we are the richest and strongest nation of all time. If this is true, ought there not to be presumptive respect for the political achievements of the generations whose effort and ingenuity brought us here?
– Marilynne Robinson
You have at any rate paid me the compliment of taking me seriously; though I cannot avoid wondering whether it is not ‘too seriously’, or in the wrong directions.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
I hope that real love and truth
are stronger in the end
than any evil or misfortune
in the world.
– Charles Dickens
Great revolutions are born from countless small miseries,
just as great rivers are born from countless small streams.
– Victor Hugo
Meditation is like placing a vase in a muddy river—over time, the water settles and becomes clear.
– Willa Blythe Baker
is human spiritual evolution speeding up in general out there, or does it just look like that in my social circles?
– River Kenna
Reading and books are medicine.
– River Kenna
aquamarine –
the many facets
of her fantasy world
– Paul Callus
Many people want the feeling of being someone special but don’t want to do the work of becoming someone safe, present, or honest.
– @EarthToGazelle
It may look as if the situation is creating the suffering, but ultimately this is not so – your resistance is.
– Eckhart Tolle
Reflecting on your actions works only if you act on your best intentions.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu
The Romans believed the mind operated like an aqueduct.
Descartes believed the brain was essentially a hydraulic pump.
Contemporaries said it worked like a clock.
Freud compared the mind to a steam engine.
Other Victorians said it was like a telephone.
But of course, this time we’re definitely right – the human mind is in all respects exactly like our most recently invented technology.
No doubt about it.
– @TVachaW
Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
– Martin Luther King Jr.
alone again
making an event
of a sandwich
– John Stevenson
There was something beautifully lonely about Hemingway’s characters, they were like poems trapped in flesh.
– Patti Smith
I can step outside my comfort zone with the knowledge that I kind of know who I am by now and sort of know what I’m doing.
– David Byrne
Human beings are not our enemy. Our enemy is not the other person. Our enemy is the violence, ignorance, and injustice in us and in the other person. When we are armed with compassion and understanding, we fight not against other people, but against the tendency to invade, to dominate, and to exploit.
– Thích Nhất Hạnh
We are all on this wild and beautiful ride together. The truest joy of all existence is this very interconnectedness. And the more we honor it by sharing our stories and our energy and our light with the world, the more our existence is enriched.
– Laura Lynne Jackson
If even one link is off a zipper won’t zip. I’ve come to respect how a small move to be in alignment with something I believe in makes a difference. But the opposite is also true. To stop a takeover many small moves to be out of alignment must be dared. Either way the small and little needs respect for they have power.
– Gunilla Norris
The human heart is like a night bird. Silently waiting for something, and when the time comes, it flies straight toward it.
– Haruki Murakami
The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature; its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos.
– William Irwin Thompson
we scorched the cold metal
of our mental illnesses until
they softened together into
sparkling silver charms on
our friendship bracelets.
– Blythe Baird
Insomnia
by Emily Jo Scalzo
Gravitational brainwaves ripple
& supernova ideas jolt me awake—
my thoughts travel lightyears
through the dusty nebulae of exhaustion
as I lie in the universe of my darkened bedroom
and listen through the white noise of my fan
There’s a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.
– William Adama
The real is what resists symbolization absolutely.
– Jacques Lacan
You must live in a living world
Which you can neither understand,
Nor refrain from loving.
Having survived riots and pogroms,
Hidden in closets and raised by spies,
You think about suing Jesus,
But would rather talk about fuzzy ownership,
Instead of entropy when symbiosis fails.
Enough with parables of knowledge
In which superstition wears cloaks of reason,
And science is the biggest fantasy.
I’d rather explore fuzzier boundaries,
Where entropy yields to symbiogenesis.
The resilience of grass and spirit.
The leap of my heart when you call
And the doves flock around you!
Forget Narcissus and the Zombie.
Everyone has multiple personalities, you whisper.
Water knows its way in the dark,
And love is how we no longer fool one another.
– George Gorman
Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
– Walter Benjamin
one step away
from history
the mosquito
– Shimaneko-kun
The farther and more deeply we penetrate into matter, by means of increasingly powerful methods, the more we are confounded by the interdependence of its parts.
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
We know today that the greatest danger of tyranny is from the executive.
– Hannah Arendt, 1973
When stability (uniformity) is achieved, there is no more harmony.
– Jacques Ellul
It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man’s head, will sometimes act like an obstruction in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty.
– Charles Sanders Peirce
It was a riverside meadow, lush from before the hay harvest,
On an immaculate day in the sun of June.
I searched for it, found it, recognized it.
Grasses and flowers grew there familiar in my childhood.
With half-closed eyelids I absorbed luminescence.
And the scent garnered me, all knowing ceased.
Suddenly I felt I was disappearing and weeping with joy.
– Czeslaw Milosz
There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
– Milan Kundera
Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.
– Wendell Berry
In a life properly lived, you’re a river.
– Jim Harrison
The Afterlife
by Billy Collins
They’re moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
you go to the place you always thought you would go,
the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.
Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.
Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.
Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.
There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals—eagles and leopards—and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,
while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.
There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld
by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.
The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.
Sometimes when I’m asked to describe the Buddhist teachings, I say this: Everything is connected; nothing lasts; you are not alone. This is really just a restatement of the traditional Three Marks of Existence: non-self, impermanence, and suffering.
– Lewis Richmond
Intoxication, like sexual euphoria, is the privilege of the human animal.
– Roman Payne
Of all the things I wondered about on this land, I wondered the hardest about the seduction of certain geographies that feel like home — not by story or blood but merely by their forms and colors. How our perceptions are our only internal map of the world, how there are places that claim you and places that warn you away. How you can fall in love with the light.
– Ellen Meloy
We can think of affect as the universe of our ideas transmuted in feeling, and it is also helpful to think of feelings in music terms. Feelings perform the equivalent of a musical score that accompanies our thoughts and actions.
– António Damásio
Great abuses in the world are begotten, or, to speak more boldly, all the abuses of the world are begotten, by our being taught to be afraid of professing our ignorance, and that we are bound to accept all things we are not able to refute: we speak of all things by precepts and decisions. The style at Rome was that even that which a witness deposed to having seen with his own eyes, and what a judge determined with his most certain knowledge, was couched in this form of speaking: “it seems to me.” They make me hate things that are likely, when they would impose them upon me as infallible.
– Michel de Montaigne
He felt that taking naps was much more beneficial than confronting catastrophes.
– Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow
The most important office is office of citizen.
– Louis D. Brandeis
our sins would wash away in the nearest puddle without the need for verse.
– Alvin Pang
…confusion / is a kind of worldly rigor.
– Mary Helen Callier
All that is made here hides another making;
Even this water shows a magic surface.
Sky is translated; dragonfly and iris
Rise from the grey sheath; unremembered shadows
Cling, where the bloom breaks.
– Vernon Watkins
Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing. Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn’t the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us.
– Henry Miller
I cannot find it,
That very first violet
Seen from my window.
– Richard Wright
Take the word
of my pulse, loving and ordinary
Send out your signals, hoist
your dark scribbled flags
but take
my hand
– Adrienne Rich
Few people have the wisdom to prefer the criticism that would do them good, to the praise that deceives them.
– La Rochefoucauld
When you don’t pay attention to emotional signals, your body says, ‘Okay, here are some physical signals for you.’ If you don’t pay attention to them either, you really are in deep trouble.
– Gabor Maté
If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.
– C.S. Lewis
Tears, sorrow, and disappointment are bitter, but wisdom is the comforter in all psychic suffering.
– C. G. Jung
Just saw a woman walk up to the Angelus Novus painting bow her head make the sign of the cross turn around and leave.
– Samantha Rose Hill
i believe poetry happens to a poet long before they ever write it.
– Enzo Silon Surin
The soul throbs like the sea for
a larger life. No thought
which I have ever had has
satisfied my soul.-‘The Story of my
Heart.’
– Richard Jefferies
The world will try and make you think that what you do is all that matters. That as long as you have the finer things to show for it then you have won. Not realizing that the whole point is who you are while you’re doing it. That’s what really shows.
– Nika Solé
in the forge
the blacksmith
drinks whole milk
– @HaikuDaily575
Stories are written and told by and for people who have been broken, but who have risen up, or will rise, if attention is paid to them. Those people are you and us. Stories and truth are splints for the soul.
– Anne Lamott
Clarity comes easy for a person who knows what they want. Remember this when dealing with those who come with a lot of confusion.
– Nika Solé
Love is misinterpreted as an emotion; in reality, it is a state of consciousness, a way of being in the world, a way of seeing oneself and others.
– Dr. David R. Hawkins
Mediocrity is just not a part of the program.
– Nika Solé
Though there is a great similarity between us all, we are dissimilar, and this dissimilarity gives each of us a sense of importance in being separate.
– Krishnamurti
As I often tell my students, the two most important phrases in therapy, as in yoga, are “Notice that” and “What happens next?” Once you start approaching your body with curiosity rather than with fear, everything shifts.
– Bessel van der Kolk
The moon’s the same old moon,
The flowers exactly as they were,
Yet I’ve become the thingness
Of all the things I see!
– Shidō Bunan
The modern city is ugly not because it is a city but because it is not enough of a city, because it is a jungle, because it is confused and anarchic, and surging with selfish and materialistic energies.
– G.K. Chesterton
Brian Wilson said, Be My Baby by the Ronettes is as important as Einstein’s theory of relativity (he was right).
People really think they’re casting negative energy towards high powered beings and the whole time they’re just making us more abundant and more magnetic.
– Nika Solé
The more you chase after something the more you are indicating to yourself that you do not have it. The key is to move yourself into the vibration of having it. You get there a lot faster.
– Nika Solé
Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.
– Alan W. Watts
It is never late to ask yourself “Am I ready to change my life, am I ready to change myself?”. However old we are, whatever we went through, it is always possible to be reborn. If each day is a copy of the last one, what a pity!
– Shams Tabrizi
For it is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supernatural; whereas they are natural, far more natural than he.
– Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories
This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games. All games are basically hostile. Winners and losers. We see them all around us: the winners and the losers. The losers can oftentimes become winners, and the winners can very easily become losers.
– William S. Burroughs
WORKSONG
The little we know or do doesn’t make the form
and nature of things. The form and nature of things
is something we’ll never know. How shall we show
our respect for something we’ll never know? Let it be
in the nature and form of that little we know and do.
– William Bronk
the darkness came
it confiscated the light
and intentional thoughts
Sweet dreams poets
– @poetscott37
Americano
by Emanuel Xavier
I look at myself in the mirror
trying to figure out what makes me an American
I see Ecuador and Puerto Rico
I see brujo spirits moving
across the backs of Santeros
splattered with the red blood of sacrificed chickens
on their virgin white clothes
and blue beads for Yemaya
practicing religions without a roof
I see my own blood
reddening the white sheets of a stranger
proud American blue jean labels
on the side of the bed
I see Don Rosario in his guayabera
sitting outside the bodega
with his Puerto Rican flag
reading time in the eyes of alley cats
I see my mother trying to be
more like Marilyn Monroe
than Julia De Burgos
I see myself trying to be more like James Dean
than Federico García Lorca
I see Carlos Santana, Gloria Estefan,
Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopez
More than just sporadic Latin explosions
More like fireworks on el Cuatro de Julio
as American as Bruce Springsteen, Janis Joplin,
Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin
I see Taco Bells and chicken fajitas at McDonald’s
I see red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple
I see Chita Rivera on Broadway
You see, I am as American as lemon meringue pie
as American as Wonder Woman’s panties
as American as Madonna’s bra
as American as the Quinteñeros,
the Abduls, the Lees,
the Jacksons, the Kennedys
(Mostly) all of us immigrants to this soil
since none sound American Indian to me
as American as television snow
after the anthem is played
and I am not ashamed
Jose, can you see…
I pledge allegiance
to this country ’tis of me
land of dreams and opportunity
land of proud detergent names and commercialism
land of corporations
If I can win gold medals at the Olympics
If I can sign my life away
to die for the United States
Ain’t no small-town hick
gonna tell me I ain’t an American
because I can spic in two languages
coño carajo y Fuck You
This is my country too
where those who do not believe in freedom and diversity are
the ones who need to get the hell out
I used to carry around the idea of “wouldn’t it be nice to live together in the kind of world where we belong” as a sort of mantra that a better life was possible.
– Brian Wilson
Art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.
– Saul Bellow
Worse, it was traditional to feel this way.
– John Ashbery
I have always made it a point of honor to write as though I had a million dollars; that is, I try to write in the most original way I know how, and that feels like a risk each time you do it.
– Edmund White
white bird—
a distant journey
to myself
– @lafcadiopoetry
I relax and cast aside all mental burdens, allowing God to express through me His perfect love, peace, and wisdom.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
I remember persuading a friend who ended up going into the real estate business to swap me Kafka’s Selected Stories for War and Peace—he calculated that it was a good deal to get four times the amount of book for the price of one.
– Yu Hua
California is a desert and I am a woman inside it.
– Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
There are few people in England I suppose, who have more true enjoyment of music than myself, or a better natural taste. If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.
– Jane Austen, Lady Catherine de Bourgh
Feel better on purpose by shifting your focus and thoughts in the direction of your True-Divine Self.
– Michael LeBlanc
I look for you in everything just to see that you’re still there, in my field of dreams.
– Nika Solé
What fiction does is sneak up on the truth by telling it six different ways and finally releasing it.
– John Gardner
Nothing says fascismo more loudly than this hysterical focus on the “invisible internal enemy” that taints the “purity” of the body politic. This is how American fascism looks. Every fascism is different and this is ours. Neoliberalism helped till the soil for it.
– Alina Stefanescu
Be the Self. That is Bliss.
What is not permanent is not worth striving for. The only ‘goal’ worth seeking is the Supreme Bliss of Self-Awareness.
– Ramana Maharshi
Well, I see that saying and doing are two things, and hereafter I shall better observe this distinction.
– Faithful (John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress)
I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up.
– Frank O’Hara
This culture is not alive, it’s just a televised imitation of a live culture that people just sit around watching. Unable to fully live, people’s minds and bodies atrophy and die in masses–from the weather, from epidemics, I’m not trying to save this broadcast but just keep alive seeds so that some of the people have something from which to regrow some memory of what real culture might and could be and actually how to live knowing and doing something besides just being entertained on a sinking ship. It’s not about trying to get to Shangri-La. It’s the deliciousness of giving heaven to someone else. That is heaven. We’re trying to learn that our health is the health of the whole thing.
– Martin Prechtel, Rescuing The Light
My sadness was at least
sometimes a defense mechanism.
A person couldn’t make you cry
if you were already crying.
– Ollie Schminkey
Jingging asked a monk, “What’s that sound outside?”
The monk said, “The sound of rain drops.”
Jingqing said, “Sentient beings are all topsy-turvy. They
delude themselves pursuing things outside themselves.”
I am circling
the hole in the world of my imagination.
– Cameron Awkward-Rich
Meditative people will find a charm in a certain consonancy between the aspect of the city and its odd and stirring history.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
The world is advanced only by those who more than fill their present places.
– Wallace D. Wattles
The beginning of infinity is the point where we realize explanations can always be improved.
– David Deutsch
It is as much a matter of course to decry the New Town as to exalt the Old; and the most celebrated authorities have picked out this quarter as the very emblem of what is condemnable in architecture.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
Almost all great fortunes are based upon one cracking good idea and the guts to go with it.
– Frederick Forsyth
We’re artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don’t we?
– Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives
Perhaps the way one tells how alive a particular art form is, is by the latitude it gives for making mistakes in it, and still being good.
– Susan Sontag
Someone of note, in the early days, called my work prolix. I had to look it up. It was useful not because I stopped being prolix, but because I realized that a writing teacher could be wrong.
– Jo Ann Beard
Triviality is evil — triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.
– Theodor W. Adorno
Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas.
– Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education
What makes us most human is the possession of a unique and irreproducible story, that we take place over time and leave behind our traces.
– Olga Tokarczuk
Tao endures without a name, yet nothing is left undone.
– Laozi
You get used to it, not in the good way, to the extent of the entire world oftentimes feeling like a place where you weren’t invited. If you’ve been here, you know. If not, must be nice.
– Barbara Kingsolver
A thought-form of self-pity is one of the most dangerous you can have.
The more you pity yourself, the worse things get.
Be above the worry belt, in consciousness, and then you will have instantaneous manifestations.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
The deeper you go, and the closer you get to the final realization, the heavier the resistance. You are coming down to those areas that are the ones that are repressed, and it’s that repression system that you have to pass through.
– Joseph Campbell
Embracing this limited human being and living this life fully is the only way. I don’t think it is different for monks; awakening is fully embracing our ordinary life.
– Anshin Devin Ashwood
The New York of the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s was by no means even close to utopia, especially for folks of color. But there were glimmers of possibility that we can mine for a politics of the utopic.
– Marcos Gonsalez
Our Western inheritance, then: the concept of the deep underground as wasteland, dump, terminus of the unredeemable.
– Justin Hocking
Wisdom is knowledge which has become a part of one’s being.
– Orison Swett Marden
Sometimes you just gotta know stuff.
– Socrates, c. 435 BC
Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.
– John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
An artist discovers his genius the day he dares not to please.
– Max Jacob
When we hold tightly to views without turning to our own wisdom mind, we develop a sort of ego-based faith that you might call patriotic faith. We have faith in ‘my’ country! ‘My” people! ‘My’ religion! ‘My’ teacher and lineage! We have faith in things because they belong to ‘me.’ In truth, such faith doesn’t do much for us personally except give us a stronger identity to flash around. When we fall on hard times, this kind of faith doesn’t serve us, because it’s no more substantial than a puff of smoke in the air. We were so full of ourselves that there really wasn’t any room to respect anyone or anything in the first place, it turns out. We get hit hard with the hollowness of our faith and find ourselves as groundless as ever before. Patriotic faith is divisive and produces a lot of zealots. It doesn’t have much of a connection to our inner intelligence. It just likes to wave a flag.
Genuine faith isn’t based on me and mine. It is an inclusive and open intelligence that is searching for positivity, a sense of ease, an answer to the many questions we have about suffering and happiness. It brings warmth to the heart and makes us feel at home. It is a resting place. It allows us the courage to openly question experience and the world around us. Genuine faith does not require us to put on blinders and believe what we are told. It is an open question. And we can stay open because we trust in something bigger.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, Light Comes Through
My daily activity is not unusual;
I just remain in spontaneous harmony.
Not grasping or rejecting,
nothing left to assert or oppose.
What use are fancy titles
and expensive clothes of vermilion and purple?
This entire mountain is free
of even a speck of dust.
Supernatural powers and miraculous activity:
fetching water and carrying firewood.
– Layman Pang
However apparently insignificant the event, whether it be the ring of tobacco ash surrounding the table, the direction from which the wild geese first appeared, or a series of seemingly meaningless human movements, he couldn’t afford to take his eyes off it and must note it all down, since only by doing so could he hope not to vanish one day and fall a silent captive to the infernal arrangement whereby the world decomposes but is at the same time constantly in the process of self-construction.
– László Krasznahorkai
You’re missing the main point. We don’t arrange things in an order (that’s the function of the utilities). Quite simply, we are facilitating the processes so that anything may happen.
– John Cage
“Under conditions of terror,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her classic treatise on the normalization of evil, “most people will comply but some people will not…No more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.” Under such conditions, counting ourselves among the few who refuse to comply has less to do with whether we believe ourselves to be good than it does with the deliberate protections we must place between unrelenting evil and our own sanity and goodness, for among the most insaning aspects of tyrannical regimes is the Stockholm syndrome of the psyche they inflict upon us — upon ordinary people, not-evil people, people who consider themselves decent and good, but who slowly, through a cascade of countless small concessions, lose sight of the North Star of their native moral compass.
You can make a spiritually irresponsible statement about evil. For example, I’ve heard people say that Hitler was crying out for love. That may be true. But there was a massive anti-ecological, anti-evolutionary act that he brought into existence, and one could call that evil.
There’s a danger in using the deepest level to excuse the other levels. So it seems to me that there is evil. There are acts that oppose the flow of life and growth and human dignity. They must be dealt with courageously. They must be dealt with by warriors.
– Stephen R. Schwartz
Personality encloses us like a shell. We like to believe that inside that shell is our ‘true self’, the ‘real me’. In fact, says Guidjieff, we are full of thousands of little ‘I’s. They could be compared to the crystalline fragments that a windscreen shatters into when struck with a hammer. But every time we make some tremendous effort, two of the crystals fuse together. If we could make enough efforts, we would finally obtain one solid block of crystal. If that could happen, man would be virtually a god.
Our aim, then, is to make the kind of effort that will create enough ‘friction’ to fuse two crystals together. These efforts Gurdjieff calls ‘intentional suffering’. This does not mean flogging ourselves or seeking out misery, but simply making efforts of will instead of drifting along in a robotic or mechanical state.
– Colin Wilson
I’ve always been haunted by choice. I want the city and the forest. Freedom but also babies. A home and the open highway.
I love it when other people choose anything for me— dinner spots, weekend plans, hiking trails. It’s one tiny decision I’m absolved from making. To choose is to be culpable and as a former evangelical kid, there are few things I hate more than being culpable.
But being unable to choose becomes its own choice.
When you don’t decide, a decision still arrives.
– Joy Sullivan
Attention is malleable. We can intensify it, shift it either voluntarily or involuntarily. We can soften it, diffuse it. We can deploy global attention toward tangible external objects, or to their intangible attributes. We can direct attention internally to retrieve items that we have stored in memory. We can sustain attention by infusing a component of motivation, either from the top-down (by intention) or by much more subtler means related to our habitual ongoing attitudes.
– James H. Austin
Those who live nobly, even if in their day they live obscurely, need not fear that they will have lived in vain. Something radiates from their lives, some light that shows the way to their friends, their neighbors—perhaps to long future ages. I find many men nowadays oppressed with a sense of impotence, with the feeling that in the vastness of modern societies there is nothing of importance that the individual can do. This is a mistake. The individual, if he is filled with love of mankind, with breadth of vision, with courage and with endurance, can do a great deal.
– Bertrand Russell
He was moving through a new order of creation, of which few men had ever dreamed. Beyond the realms of sea and land and air and space lay the realms of fire, which he alone had been privileged to glimpse. It was too much to expect that he would also understand.
– Arthur C. Clarke
One day men will learn to think of sanity as an aesthetic achievement.
– Adrian Stokes
Medicine rests upon four pillars—philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and ethics. The first pillar is the philosophical knowledge of earth and water; the second, astronomy, supplies its full understanding of that which is of fiery and airy nature; the third is an adequate explanation of the properties of all the four elements—that is to say, of the whole cosmos—and an introduction into the art of their transformations; and finally, the fourth shows the physician those virtues which must stay with him up until his death, and it should support and complete the three other pillars.
– Paracelsus
I want to sleep for a while, a moment, a minute, a century; but let everyone know that I am not dead.
– Federico Garcia Lorca
The textures of the world are an outline of the infinite. [Wallace] Stevens said, or at least I seem to remember that he said, the thing seen becomes the thing unseen. He also said that the reverse way was impossible. [Theodore] Roethke wrote that all finite things reveal infinitude. What we have, and all we will have, is here in the earthly paradise. How to wring music from it, how to squeeze light out of it, is, as it has always been, the only true question. I’d say that to love the visible things in the visible world is to love their apokatastatic outline in the invisible next.
– Charles Wright
I KNEW AN ECCENTRIC
I once knew an eccentric electrician.
We had a lot in common.
He wrote poetry and I did.
We both liked pasta.
His poems were complex.
Reading them was like riding a funnel-shaped wind inward.
Finally, I said, “Don’t show me any more of them
and don’t keep talking about unknown galaxies
and how small we are.
I already know that,” I said.
“And fragile,” he added.
– Helen Conkling
Jung said in a letter once that life is a short pause between two great mysteries. Beware of those who offer answers. They may be sincere, but their answers are not necessarily yours.
– James Hollis
One minute you’re young and wild, the next you’re searching the house for the pair of glasses that are on top of your head.
– Very British Problems
Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.
– C.S. Lewis
Peace is within oneself to be found in the same place as agitation and suffering. It is not found in a forest or on a hilltop, nor is it given by a teacher. Where you experience suffering, you can also find freedom from suffering.
– Ajahn Chah
Everyone wants the fountain of youth…
No one wants to drink 3 liters of water a day.
– Dan Go
One year / in the middle of my life // I asked how full do I want to be.
– Asa Drake
Soul is resonance. . . . We often use the language of soul phenomena without realizing we are doing so. We speak of ‘being in tune’ with someone, or ‘being on the same wavelength’. Something about a connection with another person just feels right. It clicks.
– Robert Sardello
When we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.
– Alan Watts
a journey
for moon viewing
departs at dawn
– Basho
Mindfulness is whole-person awareness—being present in the fathom-long body, not just the mind.
– Sebene Selassie
When you listen, not to the superficial meaning of words of Truth, but in such a way, that the listener in you disappears, along with the speaker, then the real meaning of the words can sink in deep and your misunderstanding will disappear by itself.
– Ramesh Balsekar
beyond the old gate
the wind loses its voice ~
silent shadows
– @joy_pops
The expansion of your own consciousness, capacity for love, humility and compassion—this is the path; this is the way.
– Bryant McGill
This world is not enough.
– Jose Esteban Munoz
I used to think that in order to be a “serious writer” I had to write about trauma all the time. So in case no one has told you, dear writer, you can also write about joy, about wonder, about hope. In fact, the world needs you to! See also: Mary Oliver, Brian Doyle, Ross Gay.
– Bethany Jarmul
The wrong thing takes up so much of your energy, that finding the right thing will have you feeling like a whole new person.
– Nika Solé
Spiritual friendship is the foundation of the holy life—it broadens our perspective and helps us grow.
– Gregory Kramer
It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone.
– Vita Sackville-West
Psychedelics are not suppressed because they are dangerous to users; they’re suppressed because they provoke unconventional thought, which threatens any number of elites and institutions that would rather do our thinking for us.
– Dennis McKenna
Don’t look for me in human shape. I am inside your looking.
– Rumi
All conflicts are economic
disequilibriums shrouded
in ideological conundrums.
– Andy Perrin
I do best on an island in the middle of nowhere where time doesn’t exist and life flourishes and I can luxuriate in peace by the sea.
– Nika Solé
You have everything in you that Buddha has, that Christ has. But only when you start to acknowledge your own beauty.
– Ram Dass
I don’t want to beautify our collective trauma.
…
As your guest, I trained myself
To beautify
Our collective trauma.
…
Hold a funeral for the imagination,
I thought.
– Bhanu Kapil, from How To Wash A Heart
If all your energies are focused in one direction, enlightenment is not far away. After all, what you are seeking is already within you.
– Sadhguru
how fun
to be a dandelion
waiting
for the wind to blow
all your wishes true
– @lafcadiopoetry
There is a principle that says whatever we do to someone else, we actually do to ourselves. Why? Because we are connected by the one Creative source. This source creates a responsibility for, accountability to and dependence on one another.
– Iyanla Vanzant
I feel a fever coming
scrolling through Merriam Webster’s
youngest words—until I hit jorts, remember
June. Soon I’ll shed these wools
of my first winter in Upstate New York,
where cold damp clusters under
skin.
– Jen DeGregorio
The debt to life has to be paid somehow; one has to be a hero in the best and only way that he can.
– Ernest Becker
Description begins in the writer’s imagination but should finish in the reader’s.
– Stephen King
Give us help from trouble,
For the help of man is useless.
Through God we will do valiantly,
For it is He who shall tread down our enemies.
– Psalm 60:11-12
I fill the void
of my heart in exile
with word after word
from a jar of pickles …
the absence breaks in me
– Chen-ou Liu
“It is what you read when you don’t have to,” observed Oscar Wilde, endless source of surreptitious wisdom, “that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.”
– Pico Iyer
If you desire to be good, begin by believing that you are wicked.
– Epictetus
To everyone I ever invited to / a poetry reading, I’m sorry.
– Dobby Gibson
We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self.
– William Gibson
Disgust and passion are intertwined. Our antipathies are simultaneously a record of our desires, our sublimated wishes, our deepest envies.
– Zadie Smith
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
Passions often engender their opposites. Avarice sometimes breeds profligacy, and profligacy avarice: we are often strong out of weakness, and bold out of timidity.
– François de La Rochefoucauld
What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.
– Roland Barthes
The secret of successful living is to build up the mental equivalent that you want; and to get rid of, to expunge, the mental equivalent that you do not want.
– Emmet Fox
Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all his laws.
– John Adams
Narcissists, fascists, and authoritarian rulers never uplift a nation. They leave behind only wreckage, fear, and the ruins of what could have been.
– Michael Perlin
we call it sunrise
but the earth does all the work
by rolling over
– Clark Strand
The great artists always have this ability to start over.
– Naval Ravikant
True intellect lies not in what you know, but in how deeply you observe your own thoughts.
– Albert Camus
The Wilderness holds answers to more questions than we have yet learned to ask.
– Nancy Wynne Newhall
THE WORLD OF WORK
By 2000, the machines will be producing so much that everyone in the U.S. will, in effect, be independently wealthy. With government benefits, even nonworking families will have, by one estimate, an annual income of $30,000-$40,000 (in 1966 dollars). How to use leisure meaningfully will be a major problem.
– Time, February 25, 1966
By the year 2000, people will work no more than four days a week and less than eight hours a day. With legal holidays and long vaca- tions, this could result in an annual working period of 147 days [on] and 218 days off.
– New York Times, October 19, 1967
Whether we know it or not, we transmit the presence of everyone we have ever known, as though by being in each other’s presence we exchange our cells, pass on some of our life force, and then we go on carrying that other person in our body, not unlike springtime when certain plants in fields we walk through attach their seeds in the form of small burrs to our socks, our pants, our caps, as if to say, “Go on, take us with you, carry us to root in another place.” This is how we survive long after we are dead. This is why it is important who we become, because we pass it on.
– Natalie Goldberg
There are things of strange aspect in the world, things that you come upon without expectation, and they are the more meaningful for that.
– N. Scott Momaday
There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.
– Voltaire
No one knows you like a person with whom you’ve shared a childhood. No one will ever understand you in quite the same way.
– Alice Hoffman
Since we tend to see ourselves primarily in the light of our intentions, which are invisible to others, while we see others mainly in the light of their actions, which are all that’s visible to us, we have a situation in which misunderstanding and injustice are the order of the day.
– J.G. Bennett
In many ways, the felt sense is like a stream moving through an ever-changing landscape. It alters its character in resonance with its surroundings. When the land is rugged and steep, the stream moves with vigor and energy, swirling and bubbling as it crashes over rocks and debris. Out on the plains, the stream meanders so slowly that one might wonder whether it is moving at all. Rains and spring thaw can rapidly increase its volume, possibly even flood nearby land. In the same way, once the setting has been interpreted and defined by the felt sense, we will blend into whatever conditions we find ourselves. This amazing sense encompasses both the content and climate of our internal and external environments. Like the stream, it shapes itself to fit those environments.
– Peter A. Levine
The answer to the so-called riddle of the world is ecstatic internalization of the world’s mystery.
– Ludwig Klages
In its true state, mind is naked, immaculate; not made of anything, being of the Voidness; clear, vacuous, without duality, transparent; timeless, uncompounded, unimpeded, colourless; not realizable as a separate thing, but as the unity of all things, yet not composed of them; of one taste, and transcendent over differentiation.
– Padmasambhava
He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.
– Gabriel García Márquez
We are presently dealing with the accumulation of a whole society that has worshiped its light side and refused the dark, and this residue appears as war, economic chaos, strikes, racial intolerance. The front page of any newspaper hurls the collective shadow at us.
– Robert A. Johnson
The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. “I am no such thing, it would say; I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.”
– William James
Today, all time-consuming practices, such as trust, loyalty, commitment and responsibility, are disappearing. […] I think trust is a social practice, and today it is being replaced by transparency and information. Trust enables us to build positive relationships with others, despite lacking knowledge. In a transparency society, one immediately asks for information from others. Trust as a social practice becomes superfluous. The transparency and information society fosters a society of distrust.
– Byung-Chul Han
The work of preservation demands that the feelings playing about in one’s guts not be turned into action. Just watch their passing like cherry blossoms.
– Maxine Hong Kingston
When you find a writer who really is saying something to you, read everything that writer has written and you will get more education and depth of understanding out of that than reading a scrap here and a scrap there and elsewhere. Then go to people who influenced that writer, or those who were related to him, and your world builds together in an organic way that is really marvelous.
– Joseph Campbell
A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns…The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up…In the destructive element immerse.
– Joseph Conrad
I ask god to send a swordsman / and god says ‘look at your hands’
– Melissa Broder
There is no less holiness at this time – as you are reading this – than there was on the day the Red Sea parted, or that day in the 30th year, in the 4th month, on the 5th day of the month as Ezekiel was a captive by the river Cheban, when the heavens opened and he saw visions of god. There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree at the end of your street than there was under Buddha’s bo tree. In any instant the sacred may wipe you with its finger. In any instant the bush may flare, your feet may rise, or you may see a bunch of souls in trees.
– Annie Dillard
Let your loyalty to another human being come about in this way: there will be moments — quickly passing by — when he will seem to you filled and illumined by the true, primal image of his spirit.
Then can come, yes, will come, long stretches of time when your fellow-being seems clouded, even darkened. But learn at these times to say to yourself: The spirit will strengthen me; I will remember the true, unchanging image that I once saw. Nothing at all — neither deception nor disguise — can take it away from me.
Struggle again and again for the true picture that you saw. The struggle itself is your faithfulness.
And in those efforts to be faithful and to trust, a human being will come close to another as if with an angel’s power of protection.
– Rudolf Steiner
A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
responsibility, n. A detachable
burden easily shifted to the
shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune,
Luck or one’s neighbor.
In the days of astrology it was
customary to unload it upon a
star.
– Ambrose Bierce
There are worlds beyond worlds and times beyond times, all of them true, all of them real, and all of them (as children know) penetrating each other.
– P.L. Travers
No longer in a merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art and religion are parts of this universe. They are varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience. No longer can man confront reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face. Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man’s symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself. He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of this artificial medium.
– Ernst Cassirer
I believe that the spirits are your parents and their parents and their parents and their parents and they are in your bloodstream, and they run through your body constantly. Because they want you to live on, because they want to live on. And they’re trying all the time to tell you shit and if you just spend a few minutes listening to yourself, you would hear them.
– Gil Scott-Heron, “Parents,” I’m New Here
Hope devoted to despair,
despair delivered from hope.
The leaves of this sea scattered,
its only tree
buffeted by a gale
that blew from an ancient manuscript.
The sea: hope embroidered with despair,
despair distilled from hope.
– Najwan Darwish
Character in many ways is everything in leadership. It is made up of many things, but I would say character is really integrity. When you delegate something to a subordinate, for example, it is absolutely your responsibility, and he must understand this. You as a leader must take complete responsibility for what the subordinate does. I once said, as a sort of wisecrack, that leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower
Most people are convinced that as long as they are not overtly forced to do something by an outside power, their decisions are theirs, and that if they want something, it is they who want it. But this is one of the great illusions we have about ourselves. A great number of our decisions are not really our own but are suggested to us from the outside; we have succeeded in persuading ourselves that it is we who have made the decision, whereas we have actually conformed with expectations of others, driven by the fear of isolation and by more direct threats to our life, freedom, and comfort.
– Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom
How small life is here and how big nothingness. The sky, tired of light, has given everything to the snow. The two trees bow their heads to each other. Clouds cross the world’s silence in a circle dance.
– Robert Walser
The first revolution is when you change your mind.
– Gil Scott-Heron
Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth–penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.
– Joseph Campbell
We’re in a freefall into future. We don’t know where we’re going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you’re going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It’s a very interesting shift of perspective and that’s all it is… joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes
– Joseph Campbell
No one gives a damn about a poem / until they need a poem.
– Omotara James
Go to the library. Live in the library. Fall in love with old movies. Look closely at everything. Don’t be a snob. Be joyful; writing is not a serious business—it’s a
celebration.
– Ray Bradbury
Psychoanalysis is about what two people say to each other if they agree not to have sex.
– Adam Phillips to Leo Bersani
I enjoy breakfast, the morning light on a church steeple, or on a modern building which looks Grecian against the sky. The summer glow, and my ability to not hear trivial conversation. A sense of space, serenity, and stylization.
– Anais Nin
The next war …
may well bury Western
civilization forever.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Emptiness is a great feminine secret. It is something absolutely alien to man; the chasm, the unplumbed depths, the yin.
– CG Jung
I bless the people that I struggle against. They are in my life to give me the chance to deepen my awareness and love.
– We Are Human Angels
How stupid everything is!, and war multiplies the stupidity by 3 and its power by itself: so one’s precious days are ruled by (3x)² when x = normal human crassitude (and that’s bad enough).
– J.R.R. Tolkien
There are no kings in America
by Aileen Cassinetto
we are not that kind of country.
We are sanctuary for the hungry,
the homeless, the huddled,
held together by an idea
our immigrant fathers believed in.
Rendered, it meant independence.
Pursued, it kindled war, ordinance,
a fighting chance. Forty thousand
musket balls, by themselves, did not
shape the boundaries on which we
map our days. To draw our borders,
we needed more than firecakes.
More than a pound of meat
with bone and gristle,
or salt fish and a gill of peas.
We needed the faith and grit of people
who were not yet Americans.
To be an American is to
recognize the sacrifice
of the widow and the orphan;
it is to understand the weft of tent
cities expecting caravans,
and the heft of a child in a camp
not meant for children, or sitting
before a judge awaiting judgement.
What do we say to the native
whose lands we now inhabit?
What do we say to our immigrant
fathers who held certain truths
to be self-evident?
Do we now still pledge to each
other our lives, our fortunes,
our sacred honor.
There are no kings in America.
Only gilded men we can topple
again and again.
Someone just cancelled plans on me for this evening. I’m wondering if I should send them a thank you card.
– Very British Problems
Fitting in feels like failure to those who have a divine assignment to stand out.
– Nika Solé
all I have ever been––
another long stone
for the sun to point with
– Ian Buckley
No planet knows that this
Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave,
Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss,
Bears, as chief treasure, one forsaken grave.
– Alice Meynell
A mind is a strange place, strange and solitary — the only place where, with all our passions of reason and all our calculations of emotion, we render reality what it is; the only place where truth is won or lost, where beauty means anything, where mathematics, God, and the color of your mother’s eyes exist. That out of such solitude and such strangeness one mind can touch another, touch a constellation of others, touch the spirit of its time and the soul of the future — this is the great miracle that makes the loneliness bearable and life more alive.
– Muriel Rukeyser
[Remember] what happens in fairy tales: The helper always appears in a form that doesn’t look very helpful, yet that’s who’s going to get you out of the woods. In fairy tales you have to stay open to the search, and to goodness and generosity.
– Anne Lamott
a hot sun
taken into the sea
by the river
– Basho
with a new pair of eyes
I will too join the
moon watchers
– Issa
The autotextual is a writing tactic that’s actually been around for a long time, under various names, but if you only get your information about book culture from publicity handouts, it seems that autofiction is a recent trend.
– McKenzie Wark
An enlightened you is still you. Personal uniqueness, preferences, and styles can be developed and accentuated by awakening rather than eliminating them.
– Dale S. Wright
Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence…a way of being fully human.
– Susan Sontag
There are hardly any good poets I don’t like.
– Helen Vendler
Goodbye
The abandoned bonfire kills its own light.
A bird in love lifts up its song.
So many eager creatures in my silence
and this small rain at my back.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
God give us bread; we’ll make the circuses.
– Anthony Hecht
Both poverty and riches are a bondage.
– Krishnamurti
If you as a human being transform yourself you affect the consciousness of the rest of the world.
– J. Krishnamurti
I am not predicting doom. But I am stating that if we ignore evil, we will move closer to doom, and the growth and triumph of evil may well result.
– Rollo May
If the world were ending all I’d know for sure, is that I’d want to be yours in every world that comes next.
– Nika Solé
…set your faces like a flint, you have all power in heaven and earth on your side.
– John Bunyan
I love how you turn your head which turns my head which turns your head.
– Alan Summers
Please explain one ‘woke’ policy that was not intended to further someone’s access to social, economic, civil, and political equality and human dignity.
I’ll be here waiting.
– Andy Perrin
Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not ‘yours,’ not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.
– Eckhart Tolle
…joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live.
– G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
In the words of the great David Byrne…Same as it ever was.
Right now we are creating our tomorrow.
– Vernon Howard
On both fronts, you could say, in the end love won—but at what cost? Austen is a cynic, after all.
– Whitney Mallett
I choose to think of love as the mutual recognition of our vulnerability. It renders despair and joy legible, but it also allows us to partake in something greater than ourselves, [. . .].
– Wes Matthews
Mind is consciousness which has put on limitations. You are originally unlimited and perfect. Later you take on limitations and become the mind.
– Ramana Maharshi
I can tell that some of you are having an emotional response to art, and I want you to know that you’ve angered critical theorists. Hope you’re happy.
– Jonathan Fine
Develop aspirations that support not just personal healing, but the healing of community and society.
– Lama Rod Owens
I think there was a period when external signifiers of dissent (long hair, not wearing a tie) were much clearer than now, and that made it harder for ideas to cross from one milieu into another.
– Hari Kunzru
Universal goodwill is not only possible, it’s necessary for our own survival: the survival of our goodness.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu
I see an effect of light and make a note of it. I see a plant in a meadow and try not to forget it. I make lists of words, I write down phrases I hear on the street.
– Elena Ferrante
Words are partly thoughts, but mostly they re music, deep
down. Thinking itself is, perhaps, orchestral, the mind con-
ducting the world. Conducting it, constructing it. I sense this
instinctively.
There is no language for this, not then, not even now, this
inner glide, articulation of the wordless, plotless truth of exis-
tence. Life is not made up of stories, much as I adore them-
– Patricia Hampl
It is when it destabilizes the global economy. Every war is everyone’s war, unfortunately.
– Andy Perrin
two in the morning
maybe the comments section
will take my side
– Kotone Kikawa
Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that!
– Marilynne Robinson
But This is not a Story by Tommy Dean
They say you can’t start a story with a character waking up, with them crying, or knowing so much about themselves that they would never act against their own interest. But what if this isn’t a story, what if it’s a string of beautiful, covalent adjectives and adverbs, that sound of the bell of a heart chilled by the lack of notice, for him waking, for the first gasp of acknowledged breath in the morning, for the spill of cigarette smoke that blends with an unpolished sunset, that blends wit the smog of molten metal harvested down the street, the one that floods every time that it rains, and we let the kids wade in up to their waists, shoeless, and naïve to the dangers that swirls between their toes, that nature will bite and thrash, to survive in the droughts to come? Don’t ask questions, don’t dwell into the guts of anxiety and fear and loathing, and let us guess and judge, so that we, the dear reader, can feel a moment of mercury on the tongue, that quicksilver succor that keeps us projecting and never reflecting, for the light can never enter, otherwise it would bleach us to bone, and from bone to dust, to earth returned, and we have just awakened, and refuse to sleep, for we can’t admit to ourselves or to others one more death, for the sunsets only appear if we are a witness, the cast across our pupils the victory.
unseasonal heat …
one stray chasing the other
chasing its shadow
– Chen-ou Liu
overheard:
“In a life-time of a regime, a moment arrives when vulgarity isn’t a personal failing — it’s a state policy. Kitsch is armor against ethics; it’s collective anesthesia, pumped through every glowing screen and marching chant.”
– Ilya Kaminsky
I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me.
– Dudley Field Malone
a red light
flashing at the crossroad …
I’ve been living
too long for a single dream
echoes in the winter air
– Chen-ou Liu
The bifurcation of the life we came from and the one we create seems so common in high-achieving artists from dysfunctional backgrounds.
– Nina St. Pierre
Don’t underestimate the importance and power of cultivating an oasis of peace in troubled times.
– Darion Gracen
The best poetry
Isn’t even aware
Of everything it means
– George Gorman
The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!
– Albert Einstein
One time I was visiting with my relatives the clouds,
the mountains,
the sky,
the trees
My relatives touched my spirit nudged it
lovingly
Listen to us impatient one
We are forever
You must remember the gentleness of time
You are struggling to be who you are
You say you want to learn the old ways
Struggling to learn when all you must do is remember
Remember the people
Remember sky and Earth
Remember the people have always struggled to live in harmony in peace
Struggle against selfishness and weakness so the people may live as nations
The old ways are hard
The people have always had to work together
Remember impatient one
Remember and live
Do not be afraid of truth
respect
discipline
Share your life so the people may live
Honor sky and Earth
Honor yourself
Honor your relations
Remember impatient one
the gentleness of time so the people may live
– John Trudell, Living in Reality
America this is quite serious.
– Allen Ginsberg
Overheard:
“In the history of most empires, you end up having two valid complaints, they take all sorts of forms, but in the end always these two: the busses don’t run on time, and the state despises the individual”
– Ilya Kaminsky
There is no therapist, mentor, or friend that can heal you the way you can. The purest form of humanity can reflect back what you deserve, but healing your relationship with you is the goal. Life, past & present, will make more sense when your mind & body feel like home.
– Nate Postlethwait
I skip
a stone of words
across the lake
of another time
another place
– Chen-ou Liu
The West destroyed
the shapes of this world
and we continue
to pay the price.
– Andy Perrin
The distraction disguise keeps us busy, avoiding intimacy with ourselves by chasing one desire after another.
– Ruth King
For Gillian Rose, the work of philosophy was to confront the myths and blind spots that sustain capitalism and dignify injustice. The result was a Marxism hostile to political dogmas of all kinds.
– Robert Lucas Scott
Buddhahood exists without meditation, whether we encounter it or not.
– Zenju Earthlyn Manuel
Performative fascism is still fascism. And the majority of fascists in history since Mussolini first defined his political position and movement have not been Nazis. The populist wannabe fascists (Federico Finchelstein’s term) in the United States as of today have made clear to anyone who doubted that they intend to remove the ‘wannabe’ as soon as possible.
– Clifton Lee
Jung realized that when Westerners try to dissolve their personal ego before they have resolved shadow issues, shadow issues grow to godlike proportions.
– Robin Robertson
All modes of government are failures… High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
– Oscar Wilde
Do not be afraid of demons; it is the living we should fear. Human horrors trump anything that Hollywood or the afterlife can conjure.
– Shehan Karunatilaka
A well governed appetite is the greater part of freedom.
– Seneca
Identify where you came from, where you are, and where you wish to go.
– Russell Chatham, Advice for a Young Painter
In recompense for a mind that was able to retain everything, every memory, perhaps it was necessary that the body gradually fade away.
– Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police
The old men spoke with accents. They had fled pogroms, or ten years of military service, or bad marriages. They checked Other on government forms because they did not consider themselves White. That was for gentiles.
– Edward Hirsch, My First Bookstore
Fairy tales don’t tell children that monsters are real. Children KNOW monsters are real. Fairy tales show them that monsters can be slain.
– G.K. Chesterton
I divide thousands of times into as many times as the number of instants running by, fragmented as I am and the moments so fragile — my only vow is to life born with time and growing along with it: only in time itself is there room enough for me.
– Clarice Lispector
It is not our task to create awareness, awakening, or liberation through practice or meditation. We are not to force these things upon ourselves by manipulating our breath and our bodies. Buddhahood exists without meditation, whether we encounter it or not.
– Zenju Earthlyn Manuel
Just wanted you to know that the No Kings protest in Boston is coinciding with the Pride parade so the city just decided to lump everything together and call it “NO KINGS, but YAAAAS Queen!” and that is why I love my city.
– Beth Santos
It doesn’t matter what spiritual ideas we hold or even what past awakenings we’ve had. It only really matters how we devote ourselves to this moment. The means we use are the ends we achieve.
– Justin Michelson
Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
– Delmore Schwartz
If mankind is to escape its programmed self-extinction the God who saves us will not descend from the machine: he will rise up again in the human soul.
– Lewis Mumford
People who think they are better than others because they happen to have been born in America or their family have been here for generations are the most simple-minded people, really. Go take pride in something you actually had to work at. Random luck of birthplace is just arbitrary and out of our control. Instead, go try to work at something with your entire body, like bending in a sweaty field for the crops of an ungrateful nation. Go read a book at an underfunded library…something that will hopefully open your mind and eyes to empathy, critical thinking, and gratitude.
– Jose Hernandez Diaz
“One person’s loud is another person’s expression of joy,” Xochitl Gonzalez wrote in 2022. “As my grandmother used to say, ‘I’m not yelling, this is just how I tawk!’”
I can’t make the
world be peaceful
I can’t stall tanks
from roaring down roads
I can’t prevent children
from having to hide in bunkers
I can’t convince the news to
stop turning war into a video game
I can’t silence the sound of bombs
tearing neighborhoods apart
I can’t turn a guided missile
into a bouquet of flowers
I can’t make a warmonger
have an ounce of empathy
I can’t convince diplomats
to quit playing truth or dare
I can’t deflect a sniper’s bullet
from turning a wife into a widow
I can’t stave off a schoolyard being
reduced to ash and rubble
I can’t do any of that
the only thing I can do
is love the next person I encounter
without any conditions or strings
to love my neighbor
so fearlessly that
it starts a ripple
that stretches from
one horizon to the next
I can’t force peace
on the world
but I can become a force
of peace in the world
because
sometimes all it takes
is a single lit candle
in the darkness
to start a movement
oh, Spirit,
let me be a candle
of comfort in this world
let me burn with peace
– john roedel
After all, the best plan would probably be in some clever way to raise a certain amount of money, and to go south with you forever to some island or lake.
– Franz Kafka, 1913.
Why does society
boast
about hearts made of stone?
Like something
unfeeling and frozen
is superior
to something
warm and beating.
— I will keep my bleeding beart
– L.E. Bowman
THE WORLD CRUMBLES
And still, we keep it together.
Rebuild, replenish, love, hope, dream.
The weight settles, and still, we keep breathing.
The pain growls, and still, we find ways to quiet the ache.
Open arms, hands reaching for each other.
How are you?
Me too.
I’ll help you carry the day.
– L.E. Bowman
Don’t worry about being a
poet or trying to write great
poems and instead work on
acquiring the mind of a
poet. The mind of a poet is one
that collects anything that might
be useful, even if its use is not
apparent at the time.
– David Kirby
At any given moment
there are at least 2,000 storms happening on Earth,
and today I am one of them.
– L.E. Bowman
Poetry is a way to give the
intensity of a moment its due.
– John Barr
There is nothing
more beautiful than a heart
that stitches its own wounds
and then teaches itself not to flinch
at the sound of new love.
– Lauren Levi
All feelings come and go, and are by their nature ephemeral. But if we don’t train our minds to see that, we end up riding life like the old roller coaster at Coney Island that threatened to hurl people from their seats every now and again.
– Pilar Jennings
The holy person welcomes all that is earthly.
– Hildegard von Bingen
One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these — to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés
All the Dachaus must remain standing.
The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes — all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the earth into a graveyard, into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its rememberance. Then we become the grave diggers.
– Rod Serling
Something inside it reminds me of childhood— it is the light of the stalled time after lunch, when clocks tick, and hearts shut, and fathers leave to go back to work, and mothers stand at the kitchen sink pondering something they never tell.
You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where can I put it down?
She shifted to a question about airports.
– Anne Carson, The Glass Essay
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
– C.G. Jung, Aion
Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.
– C.G. Jung, Psychology and Religion
SHORT TALK ON
LE BONHEUR D’ÊTRE BIEN AIMÉE
Day after day I think of you as soon as I wake
up. Someone has put cries of birds on the
air like jewels.
– Anne Carson
It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.
– Philip K. Dick
If honesty were suddenly
introduced into American
life, everything would
collapse. It would destroy this
country, because our system is
based on an intricate and
delicately balanced system of lies.
– George Carlin
Moonlight in the kitchen is a sign of God.
– Anne Carson
Looking forward to the emergence of a mainstream political movement that is pro-science, pro-technology, and pro-environment.
– @naval
I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.
– C.S. Lewis
My secular father’s only strong spiritual directive: Don’t be an asshole, and make sure everybody eats.
– Anne Lamott
i’ve traveled through more lands than those i set foot in. i’ve seen more landscapes than those i laid eyes on. i’ve experienced more sensations than all the sensations i’ve felt, because however much i felt, i always wanted to feel more.
– Álvaro de Campos
The great problem of consciousness is that all it knows is itself, and only dimly. We can override this elemental self-reference only with constant vigilance, reminding ourselves again and again as we forget over and over how difficult it is — how nigh impossible — to know what it is like to be anybody else. It does not come naturally to us, this recognition that every other consciousness is a different operating system governed by different needs and different responses to the same situations, encoded by different formative experiences. This is why the Golden Rule, a version of which is appears in all major spiritual and ethical traditions, may be the most narcissistic of our moral codes, with its assumption that others want done unto them the same things we ourselves want. One measure of love — perhaps the greatest measure — may be the understanding that another’s needs, as incomprehensible as they may appear to us and as orthogonal to our own, are a fundamental part of who they are; that to love someone is to love whatever they need to be their fullest, truest self rather than a projection of who we imagine or desire them to be.
– Sandol Stoddard
the psychosis in western governmental language and statements is no longer psychotic; it is the language of the zombies, the living dead who seek to turn everyone into them, including their own societies.
– Fady Joudah
It is the desire for success that prevents humility, and without humility how can there be understanding?
– Krishnamurti
You are not always in control of what goes into your mind, but only you can determine what stays there. Nothing has a hold on your mind that you cannot break free of.
– Iyanla Vanzant
The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up.
– Hannah Arendt
The poet is like a mouse in an enormous cheese excited by how much cheese there is to eat.
– Czeslaw Milosz
“Work of the Enemy!” said Gandalf. “Such deeds he loves: friend at war with friend; loyalty divided in confusion of hearts.”
– Tolkien, The Return of the King
Music is the moonlight in the gloomy night of life.
– Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
It is not the still vision and a gold frame, it is not the
measured and treasured sentences of sentiments;
It is cat knowledge, deer knowledge, knowledge of the
Full-grown foliage, of the snowy blossom and the rounding fruit.
– Delmore Schwartz
This afternoon, discomfortable dead
Drift into doorways, lounge, across the bridge,
Whittling memory at the water’s edge,
And watch. This is what you inherited.
– John Berryman
The best men that I know are not serene, a world in themselves. They dwell in form. They flatter and study effect, only more finely than the rest. The world to me appears uninhabited. My neighbors select granite for the underpinning of their houses and barns; they build their fences of stone; but they do not themselves rest on an underpinning of granite. Their sills are rotten. What stuff is the man made of who is not coexistent in your thought with the purest and subtlest truth ? While there are manners and compliments we do not meet. I accuse my finest acquaintances of an immense frivolity. They do not teach me the lessons of honesty and sincerity that the brute beasts do, or of steadiness and solidity that the rocks do. I cannot associate with those who do not understand me.
– Thoreau
my life alone
cold mornings
cold nights
– Issa
nudged
by a spring breeze
I remember
– @lafcadiopoetry
The system is broken. We need to fix the system.
We need to fix the system. The system is broken.
– Keston Sutherland
Knowledge is as lifeless as things of the past—awareness, or presence, is life in its totality.
– Charles Genoud
Sometimes a situation feels confusing only because you’re trying to make it into something it’s not. It is what it is. Look at what it is and meet it there. It just makes it easier.
– Nika Solé
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
his is all part of our circulatory system
light and shadow of blood flow through
life-lines through the celestial interlocking
of flesh and causality
– Don Domanski
Please don’t be like ordinary people, who always act petty and mean. Don’t turn your head when I pass by, and don’t harbor a grudge in your remembrance of me. Let us be like lifelong friends who loved each other a bit when they were children, only to pursue other affections and other paths as adults, but who nevertheless retain, in some corner of the heart, the vivid memory of their old and
useless love.
– Fernando Pessoa, (tr. Richard Zenith)
Each age unwinds the thread another age had wound… all things dying each other’s life, living each other’s death.
– W. B. Yeats
Would I be persuaded by anyone else’s opinion? Fat chance!
– Gordon Lish
Real love doesn’t keep score. It doesn’t hold on to pain or punish with silence. It flows freely, forgives quickly, and remembers that we’re all doing our best.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
Poet, poet, you are the people’s trumpet;
golden and clean, put yourself to their lips,
tear yourself apart to shout their word
so that no gun is louder, no fear is louder,
no frightening bell is louder in its steeple;
till all the sunlight shines on all the people.
– Joy Davidman, Peter the Plowman
All is a play in consciousness.
All divisions are illusory.
You can know the false only.
The true [Truth] you must yourself be.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Do not scorn pity that is the gift of a gentle heart…
– Faramir (Tolkien, The Return of the King)
talking to each other
in English
summer trees
– Ichilow In
I’ve found that there is always some beauty left –
in nature, sunshine, freedom, in yourself;
these can all help you.
– Anne Frank
You know your nervous system best. Listen to it.
– Kathy Cherry
The lie described my life better than the truth… Until it became a kind of truth.
– Ben Lerner
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.
– Thomas Paine
The right response to being treated badly is anger.
Quit smiling through it.
Quit apologizng for it.
Anger is healthy.
– Dr. Bob Beare
My friends who pursued academic careers in English – no more apocalyptically disillusioned class of person exists – feel they are heirs to a ruined inheritance. They were preparing to take possession of great mansions of learning only to find the windows have been smashed, the furniture looted and the electricity cut off.
– James Marriott
blue wisteria
cascades down the bluff
a flash of hummingbird
– Elizabeth Howard
Sometimes you can do things for others that you can’t do for yourself.
– A. M. Homes
Truth is revealed. It cannot ever be told. We cannot tell the truth. It has to appear inside the telling or through the telling. That’s why we listen to what’s not said in psychoanalysis and that’s again what goes wrong in an interview: It focuses too much on what’s said.
– James Hillman
What is true or false is what human beings say; and it is in their language that human beings agree. This is agreement not in opinions, but rather in form of life.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
The generations steeped in the virtual will never have known the Real. But that is not so serious if we accept that the Real is merely a referential illusion.
– Jean Baudrillard
Psychotherapists and psychoanalysts have to be “silence experts.” Through their training and with their third ear, they try to listen to the symphony of what is not being said.
– Henry Abramovitch
Jung says: If God is dead … then God appears in the place where one would expect to find him least, and that is in the shadow,” and the negative qualities of a god denied become the “armour of a new and more terrible god”.
– Russell Lockhart
It’s not even a question of no kings. It’s more a matter of carny barkers and clowns with counterfeit currency dropping out of their pockets impressing fools perched like parrots in pews and on bar stools dreaming they too can someday sit on a gilded shitter.
– Clifton Lee
This eternal way,
a Tao of its own.
Stolen from Kerouac,
who stole it from Buddha.
Who received it from the clouds,
who are made of the Tao.
Without beginning,
without end.
– Words by Andō
I laid awake / in my underwear, upside / down in bed, to stare // at the black lines / of the heifer, the curly-haired / god.
– Emilia Phillips
What he’d never understood about men in his position, in all the books he’d read and movies he’d seen about them, was clearer to him now: you couldn’t keep expecting wholehearted love without, at some point, requiting it. There was no credit to be earned for simply being good.
– Jonathan Franzen, Freedom
Healing is constantly occurring and coming toward us from the earth, and just like the urushi tree, we are also capable of self-healing if we learn how to face our emotions and embrace them with love and compassion.
– Christiana Figueres
The rainbow tints from the colored suns fell upon the glass city softly and gave to the buildings many delicate, shifting hues which were very pretty to see.
– L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Most people cannot reach their destinies anyway without a streak of craziness, and so long as they haven’t, it is better not to exorcize their demons.
– Carl Jung
If a man who has no property refuses but once to earn nine shillings for the State, he is put in prison for a period unlimited by any law that I know, and determined only by the discretion of those who put him there; but if he should steal ninety times nine shillings from the State, he is soon permitted to go at large again.
– Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
Many Americans yearn for the day when we stop fighting each other and realize that diversity is our promise—not our problem.
– Elijah Cummings
Do not try to transform yourself.
Move into yourself.
Move into your human unsuccess.
Perfection blinds the soul.
– Abraham Garcia
How do you define wisdom? Understanding the long-term consequences of your actions.
– @naval
Ironic that the two o’s in “cooperate” insist on having their
own separate sounds.
– Nathan W. Pyle
The most beautiful thing in the world is you
– Alvin Ailey
When the war is over
We will be proud of course the air will be
Good for breathing at last
The water will have been improved the salmon
And the silence of heaven will migrate more perfectly
The dead will think the living are worth it we will know
Who we are
And we will all enlist again
– W.S. Merwin
Human beings must involve themselves in the anguish of other human beings. This, I submit to you, is not a political thesis at all. It is simply an expression of what I would hope might be ultimately a simple humanity for humanity’s sake.
– Rod Serling
Tomorrow is a Place
by Sanna Wani
for Maya
We meet at a coffee shop. So much time has passed and who is time? Who is waiting by the windowsill? We make plans to go to a museum but we go to a bookshop instead. We’re leaning in, learning how to talk to each other again. I say, I’m obsessed with my grief and she says, I’m always in mourning. She laughs and it’s an extension of her body. She laughs and it moves the whole room. I say, My home is an extension of my body and she says, Most days are better with a long walk. The world moves without us—so we tend to a garden, a graveyard, a pot on the windowsill. Death is a comfort because it says, Transform but don’t hurry. There is a tenderness to growing older and we are listening for it. Steadier ways to move through the world and we are learning them. A way to touch your own body. A touch that says, Dig deeper. There, in the ground, there is our memory. I am near enough my roots. Time is my friend. Tomorrow is a place we are together.
So attend wholly to the one thing before you. And the radiance of the entire universe will dwell in that one small thing.
– Gerald Grow
The world suddenly vanished from view like a morning mist. I was left alone with Reality.
– Paul Brunton
A miracle is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A miracle is when one plus one equals a thousand.
– Frederick Buechner
Take it from me: memory is your greatest ally and your primary source material, because memory is your body as it was in the world and the world as it was and will be; memory is the people you have loved or wanted to love in the world, and what are we if not bodies filled with reminiscences about all those ghosts in the sunlight?
– Hilton Als
When it comes to the Dhamma, we have to understand that our opinions are one thing… the Dhamma is something else.
– Ajahn Chah
I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.
– Julian Barnes
Nobody is gonna care
about what you silently
believed in your houses.
– Glennon Doyle
They eyed us dancing under June’s full moon / and said, They must be happy. / Who can blame them for believing / what they saw?
– Arielle Hebert
To me, the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely, who don’t even play the game, who rise above it. Those are the people who have such internal mental and self-control and self-awareness, they need nothing from anybody else.
– @naval
A human being – what is a human being? Everything and nothing. Through the power of thought it can mirror everything it experiences. Through memory and knowledge it becomes a microcosm, carrying the world within itself. A mirror of things, a mirror of facts.
– Guy de Maupassant
Wisdom happily lives with mystery, doubt, and “unknowing,” and in such living, ironically resolves that very mystery to some degree. I have never figured out why unknowing becomes another kind of knowing, but it surely seems to be.
– Richard Rohr
Essentially, you have to go through your life replacing your thoughtless bad habits with good ones, making a commitment to be a happier person. At the end of the day, you are a combination of your habits and the people who you spend the most time with.
– @naval
If you want to know where your heart is, watch where your mind goes when you daydream.
– Walt Whitman
When things appear to us to be only what they appear to be, soon they appear to be even less.
– Nicolás Gómez Davila
in a field of grass
every flower is
an achievement
– Basho
…a father is a young man’s divinely appointed source of wisdom and counsel. If the young man cannot suck a little wisdom from his father, then he is a fool, or the father is (not uncommon), or both are.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
The terrible beauty is more than one could ever hope to assimilate, order, and explain.
– Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
You’re going somewhere that no one has ever been before. It’s important to remember that when other people try to give you directions.
– Nika Solé
In the course of a walk we usually find out something about our companion, and this is true even when we travel alone.
– Thomas A Clark
The machine wants to learn you.
The artist becomes unlearnable.
– Laura Kerr
Our interpretations—not reality—drive our desire to grasp what we want and avoid what we don’t.
– John Dunne
You will have dug deep, blazed a new path, spent years in the fire of self mastery, swam to the edge of your own consciousness, and stretched the comfort zone of humanity. And those who only ever let the tv tell them what to think will say that you got lucky.
– Nika Solé
Style becomes signature.
Signature becomes signal.
And signals can be learned.
remain unlearnable
– Laura Kerr
There is something peculiarly gracious and empriding (to coin a word) about being the father of a daughter.
– Tolkien
But it is difficult for people living in their busy, and troubled homes to understand the position of a refugee, unless, of course, that refugee is a class which cooks or so or looks after children.
– Sylvia Townsend Warner
You need not go to heaven to see God… nor need you speak loud as if he was far away, nor need you cry for wings like a dove so as to fly to Him, settle yourself in solitude and you will come upon God in yourself.
– Teresa of Avila
The sky changes morning to night, energies change, minds change, life changes. Nothing around you is ever the same. And still somehow you remain.
– Nika Solé
I was never capable of writing. Writing is a miracle.
– Aharon Appelfeld
I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.
– J. M. Coetzee
Read a lot of stories, listen to a lot of music, and think about what the stories you encounter mean for your own life and lives of those you love. In that way, you will not be alone with an empty self; you will have a newly rich life with yourself, and enhanced possibilities of real communication with others.
– Martha Nussbaum
The more we seek the light, the more darkness forms in compensation, in an attempt to make us whole.
– Robin Robertson
A work of art can be half-intoxicated — but in a state of complete intoxication the work of art will dissolve.
– Novalis
The world, I’ve come to think is like the surface of a frozen lake. We walk along, we slip, we try to keep our balance and not to fall. One day there is a crack, and so we learn that underneath us is an unimaginable depth.
– James Joyce
There are so many ways to live and die, so many ways to tell that same story, over and over, but everyone keeps trying to find a better way to tell it, a more real way to look into someone else’s face to say, ‘I am alive like you, was born without my consent like you, will someday die and be dead in the same way you’ll be dead’. What did we want from this? What did we really want from it?
– Catherine Lacey
Love is a fever. And when you come out of it you’ll discover whether you’ve been lucky — or not.
– Lorrie Moore
Do not start a plan unless you really think it is worthwhile, and if you are convinced that it is worthwhile, do not rest until you have brought it to fruition.
– Emmet Fox
Why should we constantly demand an explanation to everything from it when we could simply enjoy the nectar of the flowers we can reach.
– Vadim Zeland
Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.
– Bertrand Russell
This meaning of events is the supreme meaning, that is not in events, and not in the soul, but is the God standing between events and the soul, the mediator of life, the way, the bridge and the going across.
– Carl Jung
The god must not enter too far into matter, or the human being perishes. A human being has to walk the narrow path:
“erit via et semita sancta”
– Carl Jung
The psychiatrist knows only too well how each of us becomes the helpless but not pitiable victim of his own sentiments. Sentimentality is the superstructure erected upon brutality.
– Carl Jung
Through excess of longing, man can draw the gods down into the murk of his passions. He seems to be raising himself up to the Divine, but in so doing he abandons his humanity.
– Carl Jung
Shakespeare is the lighthouse in the future of the mind.
– @souzley
When truth is near, it does not shout. It wraps you in silence and sings to your bones.
– Amara Deva
When I gave up needing to be right, the Beloved walked in and handed me peace.
– Jaya Ananda
It doesn’t matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.
– Anne Sexton
Two paradoxes are better than one; they may even suggest a solution.
– Edward Teller
The mystic does not pierce the veil—they become it.
– The Scribe of the Threshold
No man is hindered by another; he is only hindered by himself. No man suffers because of another; he suffers only because of himself.
– James Allen
Reality moves unnoticeably in the alternatives space like the minute hand on a watch, but that does not mean it is not moving!
– Vadim Zeland
SELF-PORTRAIT AS TUNING FORK
I am what continues.
– Joi Sharp
There is, perhaps you’ve felt it,
a moment when the day falls away
and your name falls away and
everything you thought you knew
falls away and for a moment
you know yourself only
as whatever it is
that continues—
your whole body abuzz
with the eternity of it—
and you quiver
as if struck by the great hand
of what is true,
becoming pure tone,
a vibration, a wave,
a human-shaped resonator
tuned to the frequency
of life itself,
and though later you might try
to dissect what happened,
in that moment you’re too abloom
to wonder how or why,
you simply are
this ecstatic unfolding
knowing the self as I am,
so alive and so infinite
you tremble like a song.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Everything had changed suddenly–the tone, the moral climate; you didn’t know what to think, whom to listen to. As if all your life you had been led by the hand like a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself. There was no one around, neither family nor people whose judgment you respected. At such a time you felt the need of committing yourself to something absolute–life or truth or beauty–of being ruled by it in place of the man-made rules that had been discarded. You needed to surrender to some such ultimate purpose more fully, more unreservedly than you had ever done in the old familiar, peaceful days, in the old life that was now abolished and gone for good.
– Boris Pasternak
In our yearning to be perfect, we have mistaken perfection for wholeness. We think we cannot love ourselves until we and others meet some external standard. Depression, anxiety – in fact, most neuroses and compulsions – are ultimately a defence against loving our selves without condition.
We are afraid to look at the damp, dark, ugly yet exquisite roots of being that stretch deep into our survival chakra. We are fearful of finding that the spirit is not there, that our Home is empty, even as our outer home is empty. Yet it is in that place of survival, where the dark mother has been abandoned, that spirit longs to be embodied so that the whole body may become light.
– Marion Woodman
“Everywhere I go,” wrote the great Greek poet, George Seferis, “Greece wounds me.” For Seferis, the wounds were metaphorical, inflicted by longing. But for millions of Iranians, the wounds of loss have been further compounded by 47 years of literal wounds. A nation with 2,500 years of civilization has been reduced to a pariah state-its brightest minds have been executed, assassinated, or are languishing in prisons. Its women have been driven into the shadows or are routinely hauled off into vans by immoral thugs who assume themselves guardians of morality. Its youth, who have peacefully poured into the streets demanding a future other than martyrdom, have been hanged, fled the country, or are plotting their escape. In every other part of the world, the sight of a crane is the sign of new construction. In Iran, it often signals an imminent hanging. All marks of beauty, like music, or the simple joys of life, like pet dogs, are banned.
And yet-and yet—a resilient people have fiercely fought on for decades. For all the wounds the regime has inflicted, it deserves this eve of bloodletting. May it stop quickly to make way for the arrival of the long-awaited season of woman, life, freedom.
– Roya Hakakian
I found that it was all right to have Martians saying things Democrats and Republicans could never say.
– Rod Serling
New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it – once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.
– John Steinbeck
I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.
– Joan Didion
So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn’t like my parents. I didn’t have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philosophical value than in the United States…. and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with it’s lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.
– Kurt Vonnegut
…the Holy Spirit seems sometimes to speak through a human mouth providing art, virtue and insight he does not himself possess: but the occasions are rare.
– Tolkien
Spiritual growth involves giving up the stories of your past so the universe can write a new one.
– Marianne Williamson
We have become a country that you wouldn’t want to leave your children alone with.
– Anne Lamott
With the advancement of technology, suddenly we will start to see what cannot be replaced by machine. Intuition. Human connection. The spiritually gifted. Those who have already been blazing a new path. Mastering the timeline split. The ones who see in advance.
– Nika Solé
May you fall. May you shatter into a million pieces when you hit the ground. May it take you long to regather yourself, relearn redemption.
– Fady Joudah
Have only love in your heart for others. The more you see good in them, the more you will establish good in yourself.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
Are we still
the primordial stew
for what this planet
is truly intended for?
– Andy Perrin
Medicine Buddha asks us to offer what people need, not just what we want to give.
– Lama Rod Owens
Hold no grudges, and practice forgiveness. This is the key to having peace in all your relationships.
– Dr. Wayne W. Dyer
My favorite thing is the sound of my calling when it calls me in a totally new direction. Into the next level we go.
– Nika Solé
I’m always banging my students over the head with Frank O’Connor’s definition of the short story, as the moment after which nothing else is ever the same.
– Alice McDermott
UPS just told me it’d cost $130 to ship a small package to Alaska, so I went to USPS and they did it for $10.
You really have to have God-like faith in “free markets” to think that The Privatization of Everything is a good idea.
– @VinceFHorn
Everything is born from change.
– Marcus Aurelius
I believe that when you come face-to-face with your mortality—whether you’re meditating or not, whether you’re calm or not—you’re actually practicing the Buddha’s core teaching.
– Lewis Richmond
I understand the song when it screams
and I hear the scream when it sighs
– Frank O’Hara
How an older person looks back at their own life, maybe reassessing or reinventing, is a key thing in all biography.
– Richard Holmes
in the corner
a spider weaves its web
morning tai chi
– Mueder Krieger
You have to develop a certain ease of delivery and make your writing agreeable to read.
– James Salter
If Christianity is only a mythology, then I find the mythology I believe in is not the one I like best. I like Greek mythology much better, Irish better still, Norse best of all.
– C.S. Lewis
Our distance from the source of our food enables us to be superficially more comfortable and distantly more ignorant. Eating is a sacrament, the grace that we say clears our hearts and guides the children and welcomes the guest, all at the same time.
– Gary Snyder
It’s not the size of the organization in the fight, but rather the size of the fight in the organization.
– Gary Wockner
there are people with
bombs falling out of the sky
onto their heads and
here I sit
chocolate and vanilla
ice cream for breakfast
– Kathy Watts
We are not headed toward a single goal: we are on a pilgrimage toward the
center of our hearts.
– Barbara Holmes
The old Cartesian idea of a split between an ethereal mind and a mechanistic body is increasingly (and thankfully) going the way of bleeding with leeches. The mind influences both how ill health is experienced and how that illness evolves.
– Dr. Gavin Francis
St. John of the Cross wrote, ‘Beloved, all that is harsh and difficult I want for myself, all that is gentle and sweet for thee.’ Amidst the urgent eternal amidst, it is very good to be in love.
– Kaveh Akbar
I believed that books might save him because I knew they had so far, and because I knew the people books had saved. They were college professors and actors and scientists and poets. They got to college and sat on dorm floors drinking coffee, amazed they’d finally found their soulmates.
– Rebecca Makkai, The Borrower
Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.
– John Keats
Grief is dangerous to empire. Because if we truly felt the heartbreak of disconnection, supremacy, genocide, ancestral harm, and ecological collapse, we would break out of the numbness and the spell of domination would begin to dissolve.
– Holly Truhlar
I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.
I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always.
But today It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.
– Seamus Heaney
fucked up I want to be that stone Buddha
over there in the corner of the garden
– Ikkyū
today’s priests are wooden swords seen in a room look real
but outside in
sunlight split bamboo not good for fighting or anything
– Ikkyū
The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.
– Robert Anton Wilson
You learned to stay small, silent, safe.
As you heal, may you discover and reclaim your right to take up space and speak truth.
– Dr. Thema
The revolution is spiritual. It’s personal. It’s ancestral. It’s vibrational. It’s sick and tired of being used as pawns in their game. It’s us taking the world back.
– Nika Solé
Heat is not
Responsible
For the heart of this
Song unanswerable.
– Virgil Geddes
the leaders of the past were insufficient,
the leaders of the present are unprepared.
we curl up tightly in our beds at night and wait.
it is a waiting without hope, more like
a prayer for unmerited grace.
– Charles Bukowski
Not one person in a hundred knows how to be silent and listen
– Samuel Beckett
I’m against schedules. Write when you feel excited by the prospect. Otherwise, don’t bother.
– Rick Moody
WRONG
I wish to be misunderstood;
that is,
to be understood from your perspective.
– Bill Knott
Feeling compassion is not the end of the path. The next step is love in action.
– Devin Berry
No Kings protest:
chant after chant of fried truth
eggflation
scrambled justice, poached rights,
cracked democracy…Trump, Fuck Off
– Chen-ou Liu
If there were such a society in existence and you or I visited it, I think we should come away with a curious impression. We should feel that its economic life was very socialistic and, in that sense, ‘advanced,’ but that its family life and its code of manners were rather old fashioned – perhaps even ceremonious and aristocratic. Each of us would like some bits of it, but I am afraid very few of us would like the whole thing.
– C.S. Lewis
delicate shades
of blue fluttering
into the night’s embrace
– Ogawa
Back in imagination land rather than working land. I did have an awakening that there are things that we can change, that we can indeed control, and that we can focus on those things and see the positive capability of making changes for the good in our lives and therefore the lives of others. We really are little good to others if we are not taking care of ourselves. Once again, I slipped into fantasy. It seems to be where I go lately, an imaginary world of success and privilege. It is illusory. Power is an illusion, a wound, weakness, a darkness. But empowerment, this is something else.
– Sheryl Luna
you and I will come to an end
somewhere
the most beautiful poem in the world
falls quiet
– Parnia Abbasi
Certainly, when one person in a room is more conscious, it changes the consciousness of everyone in that room. And in a family, if one person is coming into consciousness, everyone in the household is going to be changed.
– Marion Woodman
I keep forgetting to close the doors of my poems. / You keep sneaking in.
– Sarah Mills
The vast bulk of men are not pure individuals, and never will be, for the pure individual is a rarity, almost a kind of freak. The vast bulk of men need to belong to a self-governing group, a tribe, a nation, an empire. It is a necessity like the necessity to eat food.
– D.H. Lawrence
The aspiration to ‘save’ the world is the morbid phenomenon of a people’s youth…The more we are dispossessed, the more intense our appetites and our illusions become.
– Emil Cioran
Remember, happiness doesn’t depend upon who you are or what you have; it depends solely upon what you think. So start each day by thinking of all the things you have to be thankful for. Your future will depend very largely on the thoughts you think today.
– Dale Carnegie
In the long haul, grace will win out over everything, over the misery, the stupidity, the dishonesty.
– Anne Lamott
You are not married to this body. Find yourself outside of it.
– Kenneth Fok
Surely men of low degree are vanity, and men of high degree are a lie: to be laid in the balance, they are altogether lighter than vanity.
– Psalm 62:9
If some day Benjamin lectures on philosophy in a substantial way, not a soul will understand him, but his course could be tremendous if there were true questioning instead of label-sticking.
– Gershom Scholem
Desire is ever transient, it has no fixed abode. It may perpetuate for a time the object to which it clings, but desire in itself has no permanency.
– Krishnamurti
Reading should serve the goal of attaining peace; if it doesn’t make you peaceful, what good is it?
– Epictetus
We are in denial of the sacred today, and as a result, we cut ourselves off from the very forces that can provide perspective, orientation and health. Apparently, to develop our logos, we had to cast mythos aside as we progressed in scientific enlightenment.
– David Tacey
There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
– Anaïs Nin
There is no pleasure as complex as thought, and we surrendered ourselves to it.
– Jorge Luis Borges
These days,
I’m so full of rocks
that the water keeps spilling.
– L.E. Bowman
When we practice deep listening, we can help the person we’re listening to remove the perceptions that are making them suffer. We can restore harmony in our partnerships, our friendships, our family, our community, our nation, and between nations. It is that powerful.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
NEWS
Life isn’t so confusing
when you turn off the news.
Are you afraid you might
miss something?
Maybe your hunger and lack
is what really needs healing.
A goldfinch and his bride
return to my birdbath.
Blossoming forget-me-nots
are fine with the drizzle.
Weeds aren’t choosy.
They welcome both sun and rain.
Brazen rabbits loaf
among the rhododendrons,
mother and babies equally fat.
Stand barefoot in wet grass.
Close your eyes.
This moment is the season
of abundance.
You don’t need information.
A Swanson’s Thrush song
spirals into cedar silence.
And that’s the way it is
this Sabbath morning.
The gentle news
of the earth.
– Alfred K. Lamotte
In Taiji Quan, a gentle martial art that includes much qigong training, there is a saying, ‘A feather cannot be added; a fly cannot alight.’ This means that the posture is held so precisely, so delicately that if a feather rests on the shoulder the knees will need to bend because of added weight. If a fly alights on the extended arm, the arm will drop.
– Ken Cohen
But when first the two black dragons sprang out of the fog upon the small clerk, they had merely the effect of all miracles – they changed the universe. He discovered the fact that all romantics know – that adventures happen on dull days, and not on sunny ones. When the cord of monotony is stretched most tight, it it breaks with a sound like song.
– G. K. Chesterton
We have, all of us, an impulse to improve ourselves, an impulse toward actualizing more of our potentialities, toward self-actualization, or full humanness or human fulfillment, or whatever term you like. Granted this, then what holds us up? What
blocks us?
One such defense against growth that I’d like to speak about specially-because it hasn’t been noticed much-I shall call the Jonah complex.
In my own notes I had at first labeled this defense the “fear of one’s own greatness” or the “evasion of one’s destiny” or the “running away from one’s own best talents.” I had wanted to stress as bluntly and sharply as I could the non-Freudian point that we fear our best as well as our worst, even though in different ways. It is certainly possible for most of us to be greater than we are in actuality. We all have unused potentialities or not fully developed ones. It is certainly true that many of us evade our constitutionally suggested vocations (call, destiny, task in life, mission). So often we run away from the responsibilities dictated (or rather suggested) by nature, by fate, even sometimes by accident, just as Jonah tried-in vain-to run away from his fate.
We fear our highest possibilities (as well as our lowest ones). We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments, under the most perfect conditions, under conditions of greatest courage. We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves in such peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe, and fear before these
very same possibilities.
– Abraham Maslow
In this specific exercise (of self-observation), what was important was to see oneself, to observe one’s mechanical, automatic, reactionary behavior without comment, and without making any attempt to change that behavior. “If change,” he said, “then will never see reality. Will only see change.”
– Fritz Peters
The thousands stand and chant. Around them in the world, people ride escalators going up and sneak secret glances at the faces coming down. People dangle teabags over hot water in white cups. Cars run silently on the autobahns, streaks of painted light. People sit at desks and stare at office walls. They smell their shirts and drop them in the hamper. People bind themselves into num- bered seats and fly across time zones and high cirrus and deep night, knowing there is something they’ve forgotten to do.
The future belongs to crowds.
– Don DeLillo, MAO II
The greater the identification, the more your conflict and pain are covered over, and so there is the everlasting struggle to be identified with something.
– Krishnamurti
Peace is not a utopian ideal. Peace is a humble path made up of daily actions, and is woven with patience, courage, listening, and action. Today more than ever, peace requires our vigilant and creative presence.
– Pope Leo XIV
Let’s not forget that leaders are the embodiment of ideas. Neither the blessing, or curse, of charisma nor the instinctual surety of decisiveness assures a leader of the following necessary for effective accomplishment. What ultimately gives one the power of leadership is a capacity to embody visionary ideas, to be unafraid of ideals. Strong personality traits are given to many, but the representation and
expression of ideals is given to few.
– James Hillman
Stress is not created by other people’s actions, but by our reactions to their actions.
– James Blanchard Cisneros
Your energy alone will open doors that nothing else about you can.
– Nika Solé
It is insane that members of the working class have been convinced that the social safety net has a negative impact on their standard of living.
We are the richest country in the history of the world. We should be doing more to lift the working class.
– Andy Perrin
medicines don’t do the work for me. they help me do the work myself
– daniel brottman
Fasting focuses the mind – it replaces all desires with a single desire.
– @naval
O shit,
I left my heart in the 7th arrondissement
a good bit South of here, apparently.
Forget it. I’ve left my heart everywhere,
walk around collecting bits and shards.
– Paul Blackburn
So now as I’m leavin’
I’m weary as Hell
The confusion I’m feelin’
Ain’t no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
If God’s on our side
He’ll stop the next war.
– Bob Dylan
Humanist critique just keep snapping at the world as if the whole point of being and thinking is just to catch it in a lie.
– Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart
What if your markers for success were how well you slept at night? How many books you read? How easily you laughed? How much time you spent storytelling, feeling warm in the arms and homes of people you adore.
– Emmie Rae
Don’t hope that events will turn out the way you want, welcome events in whichever way they happen: this is the path to peace.
– Epictetus
Beautify your inner dialogue. Beautify your inner world with love light and compassion. Life will be beautiful.
– Amit Ray
If you’re not metabolically healthy you are nowhere near your full potential.
– Dan Go
I am no longer as certain as I used to be about the constituents of attraction and desire; the less certain I become, the more interesting, the more like art-making, the practice of love and lust seems to me.
– Bertha Harris
You sabotage your own vibe when you spend too much time in places you don’t belong and with people who can’t see who you are.
– Nika Solé
The utter stupid waste of war, not only material but moral and spiritual, is so staggering to those who have to endure it. And always was (despite the poets), and always will be (despite the propagandists)…
– J.R.R. Tolkien
The riot, the dialectic, not giving up, showing up.
– Joshua Clover
That’s another prejudice—about cobwebs. They’re actually quite beautiful in a certain light.
– Marguerite Duras; tr. Alison Strayer
Before you can lie to another, you must first lie to yourself.
– @naval
There are two possibilities for thought: either to go outwards in the direction of objects or states, in which case it takes the form of suffering, or to go inwards towards the heart of experience, in which case it dissolves in peace.
– Rupert Spira
Accustomed as I was to observing and studying myself, the whole thing was clear and visible, as though I were watching it happen in someone else; and yet I was aware the whole time that I was being swayed by material subjective factors, that I was transforming purely personal motives into universal reasons.
– Alberto Moravia
We desire passionately that there should be another life in which we would be similar to what we are here below. But we do not reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, but in this one, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we had wanted to remain immortally.
– Marcel Proust
The Albatross’s Sonnet to Western Civilization
as the Madleen Sets Sail for Gaza
by Tishani Doshi
Now that you are coming to an end, how does it feel
lying side by side in the breach with your friends?
When your compass is found malfunctioning in the kitchen
drawer, and the unveiling of the seesaw reveals it was always
rigged, will you show up to court in your sheepskin coat,
and say, I only did what I was told. When we’ve circumnavigated
the globe and seen the extent of the terror fields. When we’ve seen
what we’ve seen what we’ve seen what we’ve seen—
will you still ask, What can one boat do for the besieged?
What can one bird do, except show up in a poem or two,
hang around your neck as a symbol of your tyrants
and transgressions. Remember, when all of this was going on,
there were some who were homesick for the world
and what it could have been, and others who were silent.
It may be necessary to climb back into the heat of the moment.
– August Wilson
In the silence, I can feel the love of our Creator.
That which is a part of me.
That which is a part of you.
We are all connected.
– April Peerless
Healing isn’t about erasing the past. It’s about unwinding from it. It’s about reclaiming the space within us that trauma occupied.
– Maraya Rodostianos
I consider the loss of silence extremely serious. For twenty-five years I lived in hotels in Paris, and the noise! I could have killed someone. I consider the disappearance of silence as one of the symptoms of the end of humanity.
– E.M. Cioran
TO LARRY RIVERS
You are worried that you don’t write?
Don’t be. It’s the tribute of the air that
your paintings don’t just let go
of you. And what poet ever sat down
in front of a Titian, pulled out
his versifying tablet and began
to drone? Don’t complain, my dear.
You do what I can only name.
– Frank O’Hara
Christianity’s condemnation of degradation has also been responsible for the attitude that the whole of eroticism is something evil.
– Georges Bataille
Shore-Bound
Circling sea birds cry:
you’ve been shore-bound in this life –
wade in, take the risk.
– Louise Machen
Realization is the medicine given to the disease of suffering and it’s the only medicine there is.
– Adyashanti
This planet is run by crazy people. Remember what they have to do to get where they are. Their perspective is so narrow, so…brief. A few years. In the best of them a few decades. They care only about the time they are in power.
– Carl Sagan
The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me,
And I cannot, cannot go.
– Emily Brontë
The world needs sensitive, intuitive people—but not ones who are depleted and lost in other people’s pain. The most powerful thing you can do for others is stay in your own energy.
– Christina Lane
I have no plans
No dates
No appointments with anybody
So I leisurely explore
Souls and cities
– Jack Kerouac
I’ve learned over the years to free-fall into what’s happening… Things start to happen under your pencil that you don’t want to happen, or don’t understand. But that’s when the work starts to have a beating heart.
– Andre Dubus III
A few quiet generations in the ‘free world’ have produced leaders who don’t seem to grasp what extraordinarily brutal and ugly things had to be done to make them free, or what must be done to stay that way.
– Matti Friedman
No Kings vs. Tanks
Green-eyed monster, laser-plated,
cloaked in self-importance, gazes on
protesters, complains of crowd size.
– Gayle J. Greenlea
Music is a language. It’s a memory of the cosmic system, a memory of past and future. Above all it’s science not entertainment.
– Vangelis
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
– Frank O’Hara
Writing is thinking; writing is a form of thought. It’s difficult for me to believe that real thought is possible without writing.
– William Langewische
Why won’t you kiss me,
she asked. To which I replied,
self-preservation.
– Septimus Brown
I have a theory that everyone consumed a piece of media between 9-13 years old that is the foundation of their entire worldview. Everything they learnt since was stacked on top of this. It’s a great dinner question to ask people.
– George Mack
My favourite genre of literature is gossip. My second favourite is prayer. But sometimes those are one and the same.
– Aurora Mattia
When I finish my project, if I continue writing, I would love to write sheer nonsense.
– Henry Miller
Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.
– St. Thomas Aquinas
The more that freedom of choice came to be celebrated, the more it generated anxiety. How could society hold together if millions of individuals went about making whatever choices they pleased?
– David Avrom Bell
Those who dwell at earth’s ends will fear Your signs.
The portals of morning and evening You gladden.
– Psalm 65:9
There is a fire in you
older than words
older than prophets
primordial
before the veil of the world
It rises when blood runs hot
when strangers become enemies
and love forgets its own meaning
No hidden light is in this flame
No lesson
No mercy
Only
destruction
– Nils Olsen
day moon
as if Gods could be
mistaken
– Eva Limbach
The second arrow is our reactivity to pain—our disguises, the mad mind, the habit of clinging to suffering.
– Ruth King
when I traced
the spider’s thread
you were there
– hibari katahane
The Dharma must be as relational as it is individual—suffering includes harm from others and family.
– Gregory Kramer
for ten days
onslaught after onslaught
of writer’s block …
I look out the window
at the moon, its fullness
– Chen-ou Liu
Knowledge is the death of learning. If you already know, you’ve stopped listening, and are receding at light speed into the past.
Consider instead that there is no place to plant your feet.
– Kenneth Folk
I didn’t know I was queer, but I also did know, and I started to realize that I needed to find a bohemian milieu of some kind. There was a promise of safety in the beauty of writing and art.
– Robert Glück
In the shadows where silence bides,
You emerge, a radiant tide,
A beacon cutting through the gray,
Illuminating hidden soul ways.
– Amy Christie
We Are Not Responsible
by Harryette Mullen
We are not responsible for your lost or stolen relatives.
We cannot guarantee your safety if you disobey our instructions.
We do not endorse the causes or claims of people begging for handouts.
We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.
Your ticket does not guarantee that we will honor your reservations.
In order to facilitate our procedures, please limit your carrying on.
Before taking off, please extinguish all smoldering resentments.
If you cannot understand English, you will be moved out of the way.
In the event of a loss, you’d better look out for yourself.
Your insurance was cancelled because we can no longer handle
your frightful claims. Our handlers lost your luggage and we
are unable to find the key to your legal case.
You were detained for interrogation because you fit the profile.
You are not presumed to be innocent if the police
have reason to suspect you are carrying a concealed wallet.
It’s not our fault you were born wearing a gang color.
It is not our obligation to inform you of your rights.
Step aside, please, while our officer inspects your bad attitude.
You have no rights we are bound to respect.
Please remain calm, or we can’t be held responsible
for what happens to you.
escaping
an awkward silence
at the singles party
my mind slips outside
to chitchat with the moon
– Chen-ou Liu
A world of grief and pain
Flowers bloom
Even then.
– Kobayashi Issa
I ask myself: is every story that has ever been written in this world, a story of suffering and affliction?
– Clarice Lispector
When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions removed by death, and could I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I should be entirely annihilated…
– David Hume
A man who is unconscious of himself acts in a blind, instinctive way and is in addition fooled by all the illusions that arise when he sees everything that he is not conscious of in himself coming to meet him from outside as projections upon his neighbour.
– CG Jung
I am one of the searchers… I search for love, for identity, for meaning.
– James Kavanaugh, There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves
Anger is what happens when something you value is at stake; it is the voice of your heart saying, ‘This matters.’ Listen before you silence it.
– Dan Allender
Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them.
– Constantin Brâncuși
When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.
– Paulo Coelho
I would rather be a little nobody, then to be an evil somebody.
– Abraham Lincoln
I am both exile and arrival, all at once.
– Warsan Shire
Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.
– Sholom Aleichem
Bravery never goes out of style.
– William Thackeray
I feel like a defective typewriter—I skip a lot of letters.
– Anne Sexton
In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted.
– C. G. Jung
Everyone is still looking for words. Words are meaningless. When you listen to words, you’re essentially giving away your power. You have all the answers. All you have to do is to become still long enough and everything will be revealed to you.
– Robert Adams
I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.
– Virginia Woolf
I do not understand how anyone can live without one small place of enchantment to turn to.
– Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves.
– Henri Frederic Amiel
Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow.
– Janet Fitch
My heart is at stake— but fuck a sticky heart when there’s a shot at a good long talk between a you and me.
– Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart
We are against genocide and the architects of genocide.
We are in favor of poetry and the creators of poetry.
– Zeeshan Jaanam
Self-writing [is] that exercise of thought on itself that reactivates what it knows, calls to mind a principle, a rule, or an example, reflects on them, assimilates them, and in this manner prepares itself to face reality.
– Foucault
We carry our homes within us which enables us to fly.
– John Cage
light of dawn
I inhale and exhale
the silence
– Chen-ou Liu
what’s a sign of very low intelligence?
Government should be run like a business.
– James T Carter
Ah look, there’s the river again.
Reappeared, strong as ever, on
its natural course. Graceless
people believe everything is
racing itself.
– Bud Smith, Shades
new moon
another vow
of silence
– Jenny Mattern
it touches the line
of my fishing pole –
this summer moon
– Chiyo-ni
embracing the boundless —
an empty boat
closer to the moon
– Steliana Cristina Voicu
One who descends is one who is called beyond the known structures of the society in which they live. The one who descends is foraging for another way.
– Carly Mountain
The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at.
– Guy Debord
If you always think about what the worst can happen, you should not fight for ideals.
– Erich Maria Remarque
These seasons of dryness and darkness are not punishments but purifications.
– kenneth boa
I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a Poem and to be given away by a Novel.
– John Keats
There may be times when what is most needed is, not so much a new discovery or a new idea as a different ‘slant’; I mean a comparatively slight readjustment in our way of looking at the things and ideas on which attention is already fixed.
– Owen Barfield
If you want to be rich, don’t allow yourself the luxury of excuses.
– Robert Kiyosaki
Oh Lord, let me not live to be useless.
– John Wesley
The best ideas often look like bad ideas at first.
– Seth Godin
The healing knowledge of ‘Our Ancestress’ is central to our survival. The veneration of our foremothers is essential to our self-respect.
– Luisah Teish
Pain initially stings, igniting transformation within us. It’s a catalyst for evolution.
– Paulo Coelho
You must own equity to gain your financial freedom.
– Naval Ravikant
It is bad when one thing becomes two. One should not look for anything else in the way of the Samurai. It is the same for anything else called a way. If one understands things in this manner, he should be able to hear about all ways and be more and more in accord with his own.
– Hagakure
Black clouds roll in, lightning dances in the sky, torrential rains drench the hillside.
– Marcy Kelly, Seek Higher Ground
Altitude
by Airea D. Matthews
Icarus, he advised,
heed the warning: don’t fly
too near the sun or sea;
stay the path.
But I mistook the sky for an iris,
and entered at the northern horizon,
where map edges blister,
and the compass wasps.
I was dutiful but unwooed
by chisel and bench, contracts
scribbled in fig sap, or watching
Ariadne ungold time.
What awe is there
in earthen labyrinths?
Wax molds itself sublime,
shapes wings each night.
Light refracts my name in
dialect only moths comprehend.
I belong elemental, where trees
chance to become constellations,
where the bar-headed goose flies
past with the heart of a clock and
Zeus is a silver kite tethered
to Olympus by harp strings
trembling an offering.
Of bliss? To remember
the why of it all.
Bliss is a body absconding
warp speed toward
a dwarf star whispering,
Unsee the beheld.
My fall, well, yes,
those depths matter less.
What I learned by height—
that’s the story.
What do gods know of wisdom? Wisdom is the balancing of lacks, and they lack nothing.
– Marc Kannon
No one could call him a liar. And this was mainly because the lie was in his head, and any truth coming from his mouth carried the color of the lie.
– John Steinbeck, East of Eden
I am a collection of dismantled almosts.
– Anne Sexton
so much of a life’s work is about spending an unjustifiable amount of time & energy on something you can *sense* holds a key,,
so that by the time you’re old, you can distill what you found, making sure others can have it without repeating your truly insane effort.
– River Kenna
Refuse to lip sync someone else’s anthem.
Reclaim your melody. Remember your lyrics. Sing your heart’s song.
Remain an original.
– Dr. Thema
The worst way to build a relationship is to try to build a relationship.
– @naval
We don’t stop practice when we make a mistake, we don’t stop to think it should be otherwise. We keep practicing and let go of each mistake—apologizing when necessary.
– Grace Schireson
WEATHER PATTERN
The water in your body is just visiting. It was a thunderstorm a week ago. It will be the ocean soon enough. Most of your cells come and go like morning dew. We are more weather pattern than stone monument. Sunlight on mist. Summer lightning. Your choices outweigh your substance.
– Jarod K. Anderson
I think I grow tensions
like flowers
in a wood where
nobody goes.
Each wound is perfect,
encloses itself in a tiny
imperceptible blossom,
making pain.
Pain is a flower
like that one,
like this one,
like that one,
like this one.
– Robert Creeley
As we begin the healing process we use what is known as the “felt sense,” or internal body sensations. These sensations serve as a portal through which we find the symptoms, or reflections of trauma. In directing our attention to these internal body sensations, rather than attacking the trauma head-on, we can unbind and free the energies that have been held in check. The Felt Sense Our feelings and our bodies are like water flowing into water. We learn to swim within the energies of the (body) senses.
– Tarthang Tulku
The mind seems to grow fidgety and uncomfortable cooped up in a body 24/7. Mentally, dreaming is like taking off a pair of tight shoes at the end of the day: the liberated mind is no longer constrained by somatic sensory and motor processes. [D]reaming unfetters the mind from the world of matter; and, having vacated the body, consciousness is free to pandiculate, ponder and play. The dreaming mind stretches, yawns and reawakens in a strangely familiar place where it can time travel, dialogue with demons, get trapped in a mundane loop of doing dinner dishes or soar with angels.
– Rubin Naiman
The self is a repeatedly reconstructed biological state.
– Antonio R. Damasio
The immune system, the hypothalamus, the ventro-medial frontal cortices, and the Bill of Rights have the same root cause.
– Antonio Damasio
…We talk
Ceaselessly to things that can’t respond
Or won’t respond. What are we talking for?
We’re talking to coax hope and love from zero.
We’re talking so the brain of the geode
Will listen like a garden heliotrope
And open its quartz flowers. We are talking
Because speech is a sun, a kind of making.
– Mark Jarman
Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation.
– Wendell Berry
And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise. Things keep going on, they overlap and blur, your story is part of your sister’s story is part of many other stories, and there is no telling where any of them may lead.
– Erin Morgenstern
Man’s feeling of homelessness, of alienation has been intensified in the midst of a bureaucratized, impersonal mass society. He has come to feel himself an outsider even within his own human society. He is trebly alienated: a stranger to God, to nature, and to the gigantic social apparatus that supplies his material wants. But the worst and final form of alienation, toward which indeed the others tend, is man’s alienation from his own self. In a society that requires of man only that he perform competently his own particular social function, man becomes identified with this function, and the rest of his being is allowed to subsist as best it can – usually to be dropped below the surface of consciousness and forgotten.
– William Barrett
Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death’s face. […] On each one of these days the soul suffers violence. Regularly, every morning, the soul castrates itself of aspiration, for thought cannot journey through time without meeting death on the way. Thus war effaces all conceptions of purpose or goal, including even its own “war aims”. It effaces the very notion of war’s being brought to an end. To be outside a situation so violent as this is to find it inconceivable; to be inside it is to be unable to conceive its end.
– Simone Weil
Your words are you. You are them and not much more. The Description: the fieldness of fields, the weediness of weeds … When is description mere? Never. A freshness in the seeing, an innocency in the vision, the angle of perception, the bringing together of details, not necessarily as metaphors, even, just as objects. Be one of those on whom nothing is lost. Don’t strain for arrangement. Look and put it down and let your sensibility be the sieve.
– Theodore Roethke
Beyond the wall of the unreal city … there is another world waiting for you. It is the old true world of the deserts, the mountains, the forests, the islands, the shores, the open plains. Go there. Be there. Walk gently and quietly deep within it. And then — May your trails be dim, lonesome, stony, narrow, winding and only slightly uphill. May the wind bring rain for the slickrock potholes fourteen miles on the other side of yonder blue ridge. May God’s dog serenade your campfire, may the rattlesnake and the screech owl amuse your reverie, may the Great Sun dazzle your eyes by day and the Great Bear watch over you by night.
– Edward Abbey
The Ancient Desert Fathers, when they were disconsolate and without hope, would repeat one word, over and over, as a kind of soothing mantra. And the word wasn’t “Jesus” or “God” or “Love.” The word was “Today.” It kept them where they needed to be.
– Gregory Boyle
You’ve got to shake your fists at lightning now,
you’ve got to roar like forest fire
You’ve got to spread your light like blazes all across the sky
They’re going to aim the hoses on you, show ‘em you won’t expire
Not till you burn up every passion, not even when you die
Come on now, you’ve got to try, if you’re feeling contempt, well then you tell it
If you’re tired of the silent night, Jesus, well then you yell it
Condemned to wires and hammers, strike every chord that you feel
That broken trees and elephant ivories conceal.
– Joni Mitchell
If I accept the lowest in me, I lower a seed into the ground of Hell. The seed is invisibly small, but the tree of life grows from it and conjoins the Below with the Above. At both ends there is fire and blazing embers. The Above is fiery and the Below is fiery. Between the unbearable fires grow your life. You hang between these two poles. In an immeasurably frightening movement the stretched hanging welters up and down. We thus fear our lowest, since that which one does not possess is forever united with the chaos and takes part in its mysterious ebb and flow. Insofar as I accept the lowest in me — precisely that red glowing sun of the depths, the upper shining sun also rises. Therefore he who strives for the highest finds the deepest.
– Carl Jung
The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.
– R.D. Laing
The most fortunate are those who have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder and even ecstasy.
– Abraham Maslow
These Poems
by June Jordan
These poems
they are things that I do
in the dark
reaching for you
whoever you are
and
are you ready?
These words
they are stones in the water
running away
These skeletal lines
they are desperate arms for my longing and love.
I am a stranger
learning to worship the strangers
around me
whoever you are
whoever I may become.
These wars teach us nothing, not even how to conquer our fears. We are still cave men. Democratic cave men, perhaps, but that is small comfort. Our fight is to get out of the cave. If we were to make the least effort in that direction we would inspire the whole world.
– Henry Miller
True solace is finding none, which is to say, it is everywhere.
– Gretel Ehrlich
No matter how you do it, remember this: Writing your truth in a terrible world is, indeed, resistance. It is how we preserve beauty, resist erasure, and remind ourselves—and the world—that we can do better.
– Susan Muaddi Darraj
Be not sucked into the whirlpool of conflict and distress that is in the world at this time; but find that haven of peace within.
– Eileen Caddy
A large part of the evil that man unleashes on himself and his world stems not from a wickedness in his heart, but from the way he was conditioned to see the world and to seek satisfaction in it. He blindly follows out his unconscious urges in the frantic activity of daily life…He fits himself into the bureaucratic- industrial machines of our day and gives his uncritical allegiance to the nation-states that
run these machines.
– Ernest Becker
How to swallow a colonizer
by No’u Revilla
after Kathleen Lynch
with lines repeating from Haunani-Kay Trask
1. Brindle your throat.
2. Metabolize the twitching
eyes, tongue, feet.
3. Hold your stomach
with both hands while
his teeth dissolve and recite:
you will be undarkened
you will be undarkened.
This acid, medicine.
4. Always rub your piko.
When the settler breaks down
stick your finger in your mouth
to beckon flowers.
5. Kaulana nã pua.]
He stared and talked at the girl’
red hair and amused face for what
seemed to be a few minutes; and
then, feeling that the groups in such a
place should mix, rose to his feet. To
his astonishment, he discovered the
whole garden empty. Everyone had
gone long ago, and he went himself
with a rather hurried apology. He left
with a sense of champagne in his
head, which he could not afterwards
explain. In the wild events which
were to follow this girl had no part at
all; he never saw her again until all
his tale was over. And yet, in some
indescribable way, she kept recurring
like a motive in music through all his
mad adventures afterwards, and the
glory of her strange hair ran like a red
thread through those dark and ill-
drawn tapestries of the night.
– G.K. Chesterton
(The Man Who Was Thursday)
In every man sleeps a prophet,
and when he wakes there
is a little more evil in
the world.
– Emil Cioran
Don’t take kind souls for granted. Behind that softness is a story. A storm. A walk through hell… and a decision to be light in a world that hasn’t always been kind to them.
– Caroline Middelsdorf
We’ll be remembered more
for what we destroy
than what we create.
– Chuck Palahniuk
homesickness—
that bend of the frond
toward its roots
– @NituYumnam
I am saying no to your proposal of marriage as I would say no to any proposal of marriage. This is not a rejection of you. Our illusion systems simply do not coincide.
– William S. Burroughs
The key thing is that there’s nothing interesting about my story. It’s not like I’m a celebrity whose life people are interested in.
– Geoff Dyer
I’ve learned to live simply, wisely.
– Anna Akhmatova
what’s a good way to post poetry online? tweeting it feels off, substack feels off, blog on my website feels off…
some sense that poetry being digital is almost intrinsically non-optimal
– River Kenna
All a woman really needs is a man who’s monitoring the situation, so she can turn her brain off and slip back into her magical fairyland.
– Nika Solé
When I went to war in World War II, we had two fears. One was we would be killed. The other was that we might have to kill somebody. And now killing is Whoopee. It does not seem much anymore. To my generation, it still seemed like an extraordinary thing to do, to kill.
– Kurt Vonnegut
People spend too much time doing and not enough time thinking about what they should be doing.
– @naval
It’s hard enough to be actively awakening in a world that hardly knows what that means. But pair that with having to go up against a system that is intentionally disempowering its own people, and you find yourself on the true hero’s journey.
– Nika Solé
Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering — rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer’s words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.
– Susan Sontag
a cloud waiting
for lightning or
a sign from the Gods
– Basho
Poetry disperses me, unties me from myself and the world.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
I would rather be an authority on myself than on Cicero.
– Michel de Montaigne
Trust because it’s good for you—not because others are consistent enough to earn it.
– Dawa Tarchin Phillips
If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small.
– C.S. Lewis
I hear the ringing of the bluebells, the bobcat said. We are approaching the fairy realm. Stay on the path, or we will be lost in the green.
– @voimaoy
I think the novel has to stay attached to life somehow. It has to share the terrain of life.
– Rachel Cusk
no one colonizes innocently…no one colonizes with impunity either…a civilization which justifies colonization—and therefore force–is already a sick civilization.
– Aimé Césaire
Now shall I praise the cities, those long-surviving
(I watched them in awe) great constellations of earth.
for only in praising is my heart still mine, so violently
do I know the world. And even my lament
turns into a paean before my disconsolate heart.
– Rilke
Our inability to obtain a particular article does not prevent us from becoming aware of the empty space that it should fill, and by which we perceive its shape while being unable to identify it.
– Jean Cocteau
Flow is always there. You’re just in the way.
– @naval
If your mind is liberated, your heart floods with compassion.
– Thich Nhat Nanh
The larger the group, the worse the conversation.
– @naval
Intentions don’t matter. Actions do. That’s why being ethical is hard.
– @naval
Lest there be any doubt: extreme wealth is not a result of nor a corollary to ethical behavior or intellectual cleverness. Nor are inverse circumstances the result of the converse.
Rockets explode. Worlds end. Fortune, luck, etc. play a greater role than most Westerners believe, regardless of the Puritan cultural subconscious that argues the opposite in our sleep.
– Clifton Lee
Flipping the Bird
by Ann-Margaret Lim
Holding his stare in mine, I flip the bird
at a grown man
on a stool in front of the street bar
on the left shoulder of Red Hills Road
where big aluminum pots with crab, or soup
tell you when its Friday, or Wednesday.
He’d just pssst and winked at me—
a 12-year-old in the back seat
of a Buick Skylark
being driven by my Chinese stepmom.
Couldn’t be my hair
—hot-combed for graduation
styled in two limp pigtails
and a too-big bang
my teacher christened a bang-ga-rang
so, of course, me being a kid
I flip the bird at him, telling him
with my eyes, what the finger says.
Don’t think my stepmom—eyes on the road—
sees him, or me, flipping out
and flipping the bird at him.
Don’t think she hears him, flipping out
how a little “black gal” like me
pass mi place, damn renk an’ fiesty.
At a certain point, it’s between you and your conscience. You go as close to the line as your conscience will permit in terms of producing material that pleases you. You’re working at the edge of risk, if you’re lucky.
– Hanif Kureishi
Half of me is filled with bursting words and half of me is painfully shy. I crave solitude yet also crave people. I want to pour life and love into everything yet also nurture my self-care and go gently. I want to live within the rush of primal, intuitive decision, yet also wish to sit and contemplate. This is the messiness of life – that we all carry multitudes, so must sit with the shifts. We are complicated creatures, and ultimately, the balance comes from this understanding. Be water. Flowing, flexible and soft. Subtly powerful and open. Wild and serene. Able to accept all changes, yet still led by the pull of steady tides. It is enough.
– Victoria Erickson
In the preface to their anthology of writing about the weather, Alice Oswald and Paul Keegan describe meteorology as “the art of looking up.” What is the word for the cursed art of looking at the detritus of our violence and our sorrow? The art of contemplating fundamentally human nature, of asking questions, filling voids, imagining and disturbing? Literature.
– Anna Badkhen, Ars Poetica, To See Beyond
Since Utopia was set aside and the unity of theory and practice demanded, we have become all too practical. Fear of the impotence of theory supplies a pretext for bowing to the almighty production process, and so fully admitting the impotence of theory.
– Theodor W. Adorno
I was interested in the fact that you could get words out onto a single page and do stuff with them until they turned into a poem.
– Alice Notley
NO WONDER
If we take the Bible literally in English, we must renounce scholarly studies in Hebrew and Greek that show the ambiguity inherent in any language (not to mention any translation).
No wonder so many Christian believers who slam their minds shut to avoid critical thinking about scripture find it easy to ignore science as well. It is easy for a non-critical thinker to believe ridiculous conspiracy theories about their neighbors. Bad religion has taught them how to fear but not how to love.
If we believe history has been a struggle between good and evil people instead of a clash of needs and interests between the members of our one human family our circle of compassion will get smaller and smaller.
No wonder so many sectarian Christians pray for our troops but never get around to loving and praying for our enemies. No wonder so many sectarian Christians believe the lies told about immigrants and about other religious worldviews. Jesus is not some tribal chieftain to be lifted above every other. Jesus is one culture’s symbol of the tie that binds every sentient being into one common life.
Love is the golden key for translating any text from its original ancient setting and into our current day. Love teaches if scripture seems to call us to repeat some ancient cruelty or superstition, we are reading the text wrong for our day.
Religion should be a mustard seed that grows into a tree capable of giving shelter to all. If your Christianity has not led you to universal love, the seed of your religion died in infancy before yielding its fruit.
– Jim Rigby
It’s not easy to look at the violence in the world clearly. Yes, we need strong and clear judgments about abuse, perpetration, military actions, colonization, decimation of people and Earth.
I ask that of myself.
But, we also need our heart’s compass which often comes in the form of feelings. My heart is regularly less focused on what’s right or wrong. Sometimes it doesn’t even say where to stand.
Sometimes my heart stays quiet. Even the demand to take a side can feel neglectful of my heart’s intelligence.
Sometimes my heart agonizes over the polarized discourse – the war we make with each other on social media where we must “kill” those who disagree with us or declare them evil.
Sometimes my heart bleeds as I feel the way I am the one injured, but other times my heart is filled with fiery blood, murderous blood, vengeful blood. It wants to holler, STOP. STOP EVERYTHING. EVEN DISCOURSE.
Sometimes my heart takes me to a place on the Earth, perhaps the ocean, where the waves soothe and remind me that things come and go.
Sometimes I just weep. Maybe if we all wept, something new could arise.
How about you?
– David Bedrick
Most therapy is grossly and unethically inefficient.
– Brad Schipke
We believe peace can kill us. So we live in a permanent state of war. We no longer can contrive a way to run an economy without war…
We have been at war for over a century now and it has bankrupted our treasury, destroyed our land, corrupted our people, and fouled our bed.
We are creatures of fear, supplicants, and we expect to be taken care of by something and we do not expect to be loved or give love.
– Charles Bowden
It
is a long time
i don’t know how long
since
we were in a room together now i hear
that you are dead but when i think of
you as now i have the Clear impression
that
tenderly smiling you’re alive as ever.
– John Cage
I wrote a pep talk recently to myself on a bar napkin: no matter which road you take, it will be both glorious and unbearable. Every road is lonely. Every road,
holy. The only error is not walking forth.
Yesterday, a friend in California, when giving me directions, told me I could take the trail toward the tall pines or turn left and find a field of poppies, growing
gold and savage at the edge of the valley.
When I asked which to choose, she simply shrugged and said: either way, it’s all heaven.
– Joy Sullivan
The real subject in poetry isn’t the voice. The real subject is silence. It’s like in architecture, where the medium is not really stone or metal, but space. We use materials—brick, glass, whatever— to inflect the immaterial, space. I would say that the real medium of poetry is inner space, the silence of our deepest interior.
– Li-Young Lee
It is not enough for two people to find each other, it is also very important that they find each other at the right moment and hold deep, quiet festivals in which their desires merge so that they can fight as one against storms.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
In the church of my heart the choir is on fire.
– Vladimir Mayakovsky
…and although invisible to the eye of reason it must have been very apparent to the clairvoyance of the human heart.
– John Cowper Powys
…if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think and feel, you don’t think, ‘oh, I love this picture because it’s universal.’ ‘I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.’ That’s not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes, you.
– Donna Tartt
What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become, except in dreams that blow in from out there bearing the fragrance of islands we have not yet sighted in our waking hours, as in voyaging sometimes the first blossoming branches of our next landfall come bumping against the keel, even in the dark, whole days before the real land rises to meet us.
– David Malouf
I have been with God in the dark–
– Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Knowing must therefore be accompanied by an equal capacity to forget knowing. Non-knowing is not a form of ignorance but a difficult transcendence of knowledge.
– Gaston Bachelard
I’m in complete agreement with Simone Weil’s statement that “absolute unmixed attention is prayer.” I am also in complete agreement with Paul Celan’s similar statement that “attentiveness is the natural prayer of the human soul.”
– Gerald Stern
Inside this new love, die. Your way begins on the other side. Become the sky. Take an ax to the prison wall. Escape. Walk out like someone suddenly born into color. Do it now. You’re covered with thick cloud. Slide out the side. Die, and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign that you’ve died. Your old life was a frantic running from silence. The speechless full moon comes out now.
– Rumi
Personality – We have a saying, ‘He stands in his own light’ He can’t see his real self because of his personality.
– Kathryn Hulme
Ordinary man is at the mercy of his organism – at the mercy of the instinctive centre; impressions received by the senses, of appetites, inertia, disease – at the mercy of the feelings; associations connected with people and places past and present, likes and dislikes, fear and anxiety – at the mercy of the mind; imagination, day-dreaming, suggestibility.
– A.R. Orage
When we are lost in darkness and see a distant glimmer of light, who does not dream of a thatched cottage or, to go more deeply still into legend, of a hermit’s hut?… The hut immediately becomes centralized solitude, for in the land of legend, there exists no adjoining hut. And although geographers may bring back photographs of hut villages from their travels in distant lands, our legendary past transcends everything that has been seen, even everything that we have experienced personally. The image leads us on towards extreme solitude. The hermit is alone before God. His hut, therefore, is just the opposite of the monastery. And there radiates about this centralized solitude a universe of meditation and prayer, a universe outside the universe. The hut can receive none of the riches ‘of this world.’ It possesses the felicity of intense poverty; indeed, it is one of the glories of poverty; as destitution increases it gives us access to absolute refuge.
– Gaston Bachelard
Destiny doesn’t mean that your life has been strictly predetermined. Therefore, to leave everything to fate and to not actively contribute to the music of the universe is a sign of sheer ignorance. The music of the universe is all-pervading and it is composed on forty different levels. Your destiny is the level where you will play your tune. You might not change your instrument but how well to play is entirely in your hands.
– Rumi
Like the people on this accursed ship, my boy, they are led by captains who have no charts or compasses, and who deal from minute to minute with no problem more substantial than how to protect their self-esteem.
– Kurt Vonnegut Jr
…we human beings do, in fact, live in two worlds at once, under the sway of both earthly and imaginal reality. We live “where the two seas meet,” in the words of a beautiful Sufi metaphor. On the outside, we belong to the earth realm, with its heavier and more plodding ways. We walk in physical form, think in linear progression, and are always bumping into the hard, solid edges of things. On the inside something in us deeply belongs to imaginal causality, with its far lighter, more intense, and more diffusive aliveness. We dream beyond time, interpenetrate each other’s hearts, and hunger for the absolute. We laugh in the face of death and weep at the beauty of a sunset.
Truly, as Jesus said, we are “in this world but not of it.”
Operationally, this cosmic dual citizenship does not make for an easy time. For the poets and mystics it can evoke that sense of profound world nostalgia — “here is not home” — that yearning for something on the tip of our tongues but always just beyond grasping. From the standpoint of reciprocal feeding, however, it sets up the perfect circumstances for the exchange of energy between the realms. If you know anything about meteorology, you know that where there’s a difference in the pressure gradients the wind begins to blow. Our mixtus orbis seems to be intentionally positioned on an imaginal “front line,” and the winds here do indeed blow hard and strong. But there is huge purpose at work here. For in learning to navigate the pressure differential between these two worlds — both real — we discover at the heart of our own lives the secret alchemy through which these fruits of the spirit are released into this world as living streams of healing energy.
– Cynthia Bourgeault
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
– Marcel Proust
Proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you have always known.
– Frank Herbert
If some resentment or grudge is established in your body, you can take a great deal of the force away from it by not making it go through your mind, not dwelling on it. And in time it will go, but in itself it doesn’t matter. There’s an energy there which you can begin to learn to take to yourself. You can even begin, eventually, to learn to transform it. What we’re discussing is the beginning of this transformation.
– Helen Adie
Every day on the balcony of the sea,
wings open, fire is born,
and everything is blue again like morning.
– Pablo Neruda
Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
You’re going to write about us, but you’re never going to get it right.
– Jacob Wren, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim
O the cunning wiles that creep
In thy little heart asleep!
When thy little heart doth wake,
Then the dreadful night shall break.
– William Blake
And though we need all our natural human courage and guts (the vast sum of human courage and endurance is stupendous, isn’t it?) and all our religious faith to face the evil that may befall us (as it befalls others, if God wills) still we may pray and hope. I do.
– Tolkien
They are still asleep in America.
Nothing has changed, only
more frightened souls.
– Jack Micheline
Black popular culture (written, visual, and audio) has shaped so many of my own personal touches—how I relate to masculinity and femininity, [. . .].
– Jari Bradley
Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that…our divided, schizophrenic worldview, with no mythology adequate to coordinate our conscious and unconscious is what is coming to an end.
– Joseph Campbell
The whole planet is one organism, everybody and everything is connected. It is one consciousness manifesting in so many ways & forms.
– Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
It takes practice, but you can train your mind to crave the feeling you’ll get after you’re done a workout, before even doing it.
– Dan Go
A vacation is a very expensive way to schedule the time to read a book in peace.
– @naval
You deserve to be
in environments that bring out
the softness in you,
not the survival in you.
– Brené Brown
I did what I could, not what I ought to have. That’s what we do, writers. We don’t do what we ought. We do what we can.
– Jane Gardam
Just make sure you’re not trying to fit into a world that doesn’t have the range to understand you.
– Nika Solé
Wanting happiness and not wanting suffering is a sign of basic innate goodness.
– Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
Just sit in silence with your eyes closed. Focus on the breath. Give your mind a chance to correct itself.
– Josh Bulriss
No man is good by chance. Virtue is something which must be learned.
– Seneca
even now
when I light butter lamps
at dawn
I hear father’s murmur …
prayer flags in the wind
– Sonam Chhoki
The more I follow my inner wisdom, the better I am able to care for myself, and the more things just fall into place.
– Shakti Gawain
I call for you cultivation of strength in the dark.
Dark gardening
in the vertigo cold.
in the hot paralysis.
– Gwendolyn Brooks
The modern devil is cheap dopamine.
– @naval
Even once you’re enlightened, no one is kinder than sentient beings.
– Dzigar Kongtrul
There is
only one
true thing:
in the self
a weight,
a small
stone.
– Paul Klee
(translated by Anselm Hollo)
To seek fulfilment is to invite frustration. There is no fulfilment of the self, only the strengthening of the self through possessing what it craves.
– Krishnamurti
I am in a state of constant discomfort and I like this state so much I would like to share it.
– Jamaica Kincaid
… collapse is not an event
but a series of small, careful concessions.
– James Gonda
People think that emotional regulation means never feeling your emotions. That’s actually the opposite of regulation. Regulation means you’re connected to them as they pass through your experience but you don’t let them make decisions for you.
– Nika Solé
You’ve been provided with a perfect body to house your inner invisible being for a few brief moments in eternity. Regardless of its size, shape, color or any imagined infirmities, it’s a perfect creation for the purpose that you were intended here for…
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’
– Simone Weil
Our job is unconditional love. The job of everyone else in our life is to push our buttons.
– Byron Katie
Yes, all kinds of thoughts arise in meditation. It is but right. What lies hidden in you is brought out. Unless they rise up how can they be destroyed? They therefore, rise up spontaneously in order to be extinguished in due course, thus to strengthen the mind.
– Ramana Maharshi
I think what readers feel is lost in American literature right now is that publishing was once a place for individuals, cranks, weirdos, fools, braggarts, liars, freaks and kooks. But no more. The industry now feels hyper professionalized, and it’s as if we’ve lost access to the minds of the losers and oddballs and geniuses writing bizarre things in nooks and garrets across the country. Writers are now judged on whether they live in New York City. Whether they have an MFA. Whether they have a certain level of that special magic called “professionalism,” otherwise known as self-denigrating and instinctual emotional obedience to Ivy educated editors and publishers. But publishing should be vast and welcoming to all sorts, as the personality or outlook of the writer will always mean much less than the work itself.
– @TLiterarian
The simple willingness to be dishonorable destabilizes everything American power affects, instilling anxiety on every side…. Instability, shrewdly managed, is a great multiplier of power.
– Marilynne Robinson
I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn’t all imitation Heinlein or Asimov.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
THIRTEEN
I was thirteen,
my whole leg in a cast.
It was like lugging
a piece of pottery around.
And every human face I knew
took a pen and wrote on me.
I used to lie in bed at night
and read it.
And when I healed
they broke it—
I walked away
without a shard.
Paula? Cari? Whoever you are,
I will not be there to drink the water
beside your bed.
I read three thousand books,
and then I died
– Mary Ruefle
one thing that the unconstitutional ice raids has taught me is: don’t fall in love with presses, magazines, awards, fall in love with poetry, duende, inspiration, craft, expression. for example, none of my publishers have had the courage to denounce the white supremacist ice raids against Latinos and other People of Color, racial profiling, etc.. as the OG Beat Poet Michael McClure (R.I.P.) once said, “It’s a business selling words.”
– Jose Hernandez Diaz
…In our own ways, / we are trying to forget what is no longer here.
– Aiman Tahir Khan
You don’t always need to solve the fear. Sometimes you just need to sit with it. Let it stay in the corner. Over time, your relationship to the fear changes. You grow larger around it.
– Tony Collins
Lean into your spiritual practices now more than ever. Keep your vibration high now more than ever. Hold the Light. Stay the course. Do not let up on your mission.
– Nika Solé
For me, both the Way-Seeking Mind and the Queer-Seeking Mind are a step out into a vast and limitless expanse of possibility.
– River Shannon
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
– Milan Kundera
There is no limit except the one we draw for ourselves.
– Freya Stark
Literature led me to freedom, not the other way round.
– Ismail Kadare
Black nonchalance is a form of grace, which is to say, a way of seeing the long view, a way of surviving the eternal return of white supremacy.
– Namwali Serpell
We are nothing; what we are looking for is everything.
– Friedrich Holderlin
a fluttering moth
pursues my light
but when my light dims
he flies off
just when I need him
the most
– @Iriscapes
Speculation about other people’s attainments is as old as forever. Nowadays, AIs also get to speculate about our attainments. But nothing has changed.
Wriggle your toes right now, and feel your feet. This is happening. The rest was a mirage.
– Kenneth Folk
Zionist critics found Proust’s depictions of failed assimilation “satisfying.” “[But] one could well imagine the opposite: that his synthesis of [French literature] demonstrated just how successfully a “Jewish” writer…had integrated.”
– Maurice Samuels
I’m sorry, but at some point you have to accept that exercise is non-negotiable.
– Mark Sisson
The modern caste system is built around the university diploma.
– @naval
I don’t see any difference between the Tibetan saints and the social activist saints in Black liberation movements. They cared about people, and they wanted people to be free. That’s it.
– Lama Rod Owens
Then might we live together as one life,
And reigning with one will in everything
Have power on this dark land to lighten it,
And power on this dead world to make it
live.
– Arthur (Tennyson, Idylls of the King)
Sitting at the table doesn’t make you a diner. You must be eating some of what’s on that plate. [Just] Being born here in America doesn’t make you an American.
– Malcolm X
hopscotch
I never asked
for the rules
– Asahi
There are so many ways to say “no” to this war and “yes” to life.
– Alina Stefanescu
Why should it not be the whole function of a word to denote many things?
– J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers
What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.
– John Green
Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.
– Walter Benjamin, Berlin Chronicle
Examine the spirits that speak in you. Become critical. The modern man must be fully conscious of the terrific dangers that lie in mass movements. Listen to what the unconscious says.
– CG Jung
Everything has boundaries. The same holds true with thought. You shouldn’t fear boundaries, but you should not be afraid of destroying them. That’s what is most important if you want to be free: respect for and exasperation with boundaries.
– Haruki Murakami
One who descends is one who is called beyond the known structures of the society in which they live. The one who descends is foraging for another way.
– Carly Mountain
While it’s true that, as Tolstoy observed, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and everyone on planet Earth, vale of tears that it is, is certainly entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering, one nonetheless likes to think that literature has the power to render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness. If it can’t do that, what’s it good for?
– Elif Batuman, The Possessed
There is a voice inside of you
That whispers all day long,
‘I feel this is right for me,
I know that this is wrong.’
– Shel Silverstein
Accustom yourself not to be disregarding of what someone else has to say: as far as possible enter into the mind of the speaker.
– Marcus Aurelius
It is said that great literature is tragic…I think tragedy makes one serious. But why is it great? Because our moral being is active only when we become serious.
– Sōseki Natsume
Homo sapiens is sluggish in its movements, as if it had too much superfluous flesh, but at the same time it is pathetically thin. It blinks too often, particularly at decisive moments when it needs to see everything. … Homo sapiens is not made for battle, so it ought to be like rabbits and deer and learn the wisdom and the art of flight. But it loves battle and war. Who made these foolish creatures?
– Yōko Tawada, Memoirs of a Polar Bear
Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.
– Blaise Pascal
I disappear sometimes. It’s my thing.
– Haruki Murakami
I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do.
– Haruki Murakami
The most merciful thing in the world… is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
– H.P. Lovecraft
There are days the silence is a sermon I do not survive.
– Upile Chisala
Loneliness is a kind of tax you pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind.
– Alain de Botton
If people can be taught to hate, they can be taught to love. But we need to know, you can’t erase history. So, let’s learn from it and be damned sure it doesn’t happen again.
– Opal Lee
There is so much to read and the days are so short.
– George Eliot
You are not too sensitive. You are profoundly alive.
– Glennon Doyle
No one warns you about the amount of mourning in growth.
– Te V. Smith
Men think highly of those who rise rapidly in the world; whereas nothing rises quicker than dust, straw, and feathers.
– Lord Byron, From Letter to Thomas Moore
The universe is not short on wake-up calls. We’re just quick to hit the snooze button.
– Brené Brown
I became the silence I never wanted to feel.
– Nayyirah Waheed
Maybe I was born to be both sanctuary and storm.
– Nikita Gill
Sometimes I think I’ve felt everything I’m ever gonna feel. And from here on out, I’m not gonna feel anything new.
– Spike Jonze
The Participatory Imagination
via George Gorman
The innovative lateral thinking of a healthy imagination swerves away from familiar highways of awareness while associating arenas of experience not usually related. Such deeper imaginings may open the Dreamer within us to unusual associations, as when August Kekule dreamed of atoms dancing and forming together in snakelike ways (from which he developed his brilliant understanding of the cyclic structure of the benzene molecule). As the most uninhibited form of imagination, dreaming is as much about “dreaming yourself awake” in the future as it is about playing with networks memory. Suggesting how deeply emotions are related to imagination, my favorite philosopher, Martha C., refers to empathy as “the participatory imagination.”
Imagination becomes participatory when we enjoyably do things together, as when children are playing. Such imaginative cooperation is the thrilling focus of one of the most common kinds of free play loved by children around the world. They decide on an interesting drama, which they pretend to be engaged in together through co-creating a waking dream. Very interesting! As the impulsive spontaneity of free cooperation significantly differs from working for someone or being in the army, this is more like what other social creatures keep doing than what too many human adults do with much of their time these days. We got diverted (considered in more detail in Chapter 12).
More of us have begun to wonder if the diversely astonishing species of life, including their distinctive behavior, owe some of their qualitative uniqueness to the active imaginations of those organisms. Evolution has not been about everyone maintaining themselves in a steady-state. We push the envelope, coming close to extinction, sometimes risking everything on an exciting new opportunity.
Not just an aberration, humans are another in a long line of devil-may-care innovators. Like a player on a football field or in a scientific expedition, we are sometimes rewarded by interesting surprises. Each life knows with a faith eclipsing dogma that being alive is more than any of the masks of identity. Though the urge to see things as dependable and controllable is understandable, especially when fear is aroused, our sensitivity to opportunities makes use of the optative fields of the moment. The chance.
As freedom is essential to good cooperation in the natural world, it makes sense that our children still cherish “the good life,” as all of the living illustrate. Yet modern schools and economies often oppose the free cooperation of a uncontrollably healthy ecosystem, as ancient eco-shaping cultures of the Amazon and other little spots showed. Without imagination, there would be far less shoots of creative affiliation, as Terry Tempest Williams explains when saying, “Imagination shared creates collaboration.”
History is a record of the way things didn’t have to be.
– Clive James
It is only in folk tales, children’s stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them.
– Naom Chomsky
Writing is very difficult, but so is any job carefully executed. What is a privilege, however, is to do a job to your own satisfaction.
– Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A person will sometimes devote all of his life to the devil of one part of his body – the wishbone.
– Robert Frost
I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I placed them.
– Amy Tan
The thing that is worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.
– Frederick Douglass
Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself to it.
– Benjamin Franklin
Stories are a communal currency of humanity.
– Tahir Shah
We can only know where we’re going if we know where we’ve been.
– Maya Angelou
Revolution is about change, and the first place the change begins is in yourself.
– Assata Shakur
Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
I am tired of trying to hold myself together. I would rather let myself fall apart and see what grows there.
– Yasmin Mogahed
I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone.
– Lord Byron
If one really has a feeling of contribution, one will no longer have any need for recognition from others. Because one will already have the real awareness that “I am of use to someone,” without needing to go out of one’s way to be acknowledged by others. In other words, a person who is obsessed with the desire for recognition does not have any community feeling yet, and has not managed to engage in self-acceptance, confidence in others, or contribution to others.
– Ichiro Kishimi
I carry my roots with me all the time rolled up, I use them as my pillow.
– Francisco X. Alarcón
Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable.
– C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?
– Chuck Palahniuk
A gesture, a shape, a throw of light or depth of shadow moves us into another realm, ignites a memory or a vision of a deeper truth.
– Jan Philip
In an age that often equates mental illness with failure, Brian Wilson is a testament to the opposite – that even under the crushing weight of pain, doubt and mental torment, a spirit can endure; and even improve the world.
– John Fugelsang
I’ve noticed something about people who make a difference in the world: They hold the unshakable conviction that individuals are extremely important, that every life matters. They get excited over one smile. They are willing to feed one stomach, educate one mind, and treat one wound. They aren’t determined to revolutionize the world all at once; they’re satisfied with small changes. Over time, though, the small changes add up. Sometimes they even transform cities and nations, and yes, the world.
– Beth Clark
You can’t know how much ease and freedom await you every day until you liberate yourself from living in your head and make a journey that brings you home to the presence of your body. Yet forging that personal journey is thwarted by the values of our culture, which ignore the profound intelligence of the body – dividing us from the breath and the present – and teach us to live in our heads, straining to make sense of it all.
– Philip Shepherd
he was right the scholar of poetry who insisted that the work
of poetry is the work of preserving the fact of the beloved the you of
the beloved the work of poetry is preserving the face of the beloved.
– Rick Barot
I am fifty-two, live alone,
considered some mad freak genius
In reality I am a fucked up poet
who will never come to terms with the world
No matter how beautiful the flowers grow
No matter how children smile
No matter how blue is the bluest sky…
Tomorrow is never better…
– Jack Micheline
The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder.
– St. Augustine
Gatekeepers in media and academia have lost power. On the Internet, a single individual can accomplish anything.
– @naval
The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has its pearls too.
– Vincent Van Gogh
You have to understand the good in things, to detect the real evil.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
The wise man knows that it is better to sit on the banks of a remote mountain stream than to be emperor of the whole world.
– Chuang Tzu
Shamanistic cultures view illness and trauma as a problem for the entire community, not just for the individual or individuals who manifest the symptoms.
– Peter A. Levine, Waking the Tiger
“I am becoming orthodox,” I said, “because I have come, rightly or wrongly, after stretching my brain till it bursts, to the old belief that heresy is worse even than sin. An error is more menacing than a crime, for an error begets crimes…I hate modern doubt because it is dangerous.”
– G. K. Chesterton
Individuation rarely develops in the lives of those who may seek counseling merely because of an ‘interest’ in psychological matters, or to ‘understand’ themselves. Nor does it appear in those who in other ways seek ‘enrichment’ or attempt to ‘maximize their potential’. The real hallmarks of individuation are a genuine and often fearful questioning of one’s attitudes, values, and goals, and a real suffering of conflict, dislocation, and confusion. As the old scriptural saying advises, one must indeed lose one’s life in order to find it.
– John Perkins, The Forbidden Self
I light candles for my chosen family.
What a poor congregation we make.
– Meg Ford
Democracy is doomed when there is not, or is no longer, common agreement at least on the point that political decisions have to be based rather on consent than on force.
– Erich Hula
to live past your myth is a perilous thing…
– Anne Carson
Nature is man’s teacher. She unfolds her treasures to his search, unseals his eye, illumes his mind, and purifies his heart; an influence breathes from all the sights and sounds of her existence.
– Alfred Billings Street
[Trickster gods] are the lords of in-between. A trickster does not live near the hearth; he does not live in the halls of justice, the soldier’s tent, the shaman’s hut, the monastery. He passes through each of these when there is a moment of silence, and he enlivens each with mischief, but he is not their guiding spirit. He is the spirit of the doorway leading out, and of the crossroad at the edge of town. […]
In short, trickster is a boundary-crosser.
Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there, at the gates of the city and the gates of life, making sure there is commerce. He also attends the internal boundaries by which groups articulate their social life. We constantly distinguish—right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead—and in every case trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction.
Trickster is the creative idiot, therefore, the wise fool, the gray-haired baby, the cross-dresser, the speaker of sacred profanities. Where someone’s sense of honorable behavior has left him unable to act, trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action, something right/wrong that will get life going again. Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox. That Trickster is a boundary-crosser is the standard line, but […] there are also cases in which trickster creates a boundary, or brings to the surface a distinction previously hidden from sight. In several mythologies, for example, the gods lived on earth until something trickster did caused them to rise into heaven.
Trickster is thus the author of the great distance between heaven and earth. […] Boundary creation and boundary crossing are related to one another, and the best way to describe trickster is to say simply that the boundary is where he will be found—sometimes drawing the line, sometimes crossing it, sometimes erasing or moving it, but always there, the god of the threshold in all its forms.
– Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art by Lewis Hyde
Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.
– Rebecca Solnit
The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever understand each other at all.
– Kurt Gödel
How I hate all the barbarians who imagine that they are wise because they no longer have a heart!
– Friedrich Hölderlin
Despite its protests to the contrary, the human being is neither a fixed point nor a singularity. It is a concert of desires and metaphyiscal vibrations that are received and interpreted as flesh, form and vision.
– Richard Gavin
The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.
– Milan Kundera
Time as hunger.
Time passing and gazing.
Time as perseverance.
Mountain time.
Time as paper folded to look like a mountain.
Time compared to the wild fantastic silence of stars.
– Anne Carson
The miracle of your mind isn’t that you can see the world as it is, but that you can see the world as it isn’t. We can remember the past and we can think about the future, and we can imagine what it’s like to be some other person in some other place. And we all do this differently.
– Kathryn Schulz
Heartbreak begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot, in other words, it colors and inhabits and magnifies each and every day; heartbreak is not a visitation, but a path that human beings follow through […]. Heartbreak is an indication of our sincerity: in a love relationship, in a life’s work, in trying to learn a musical instrument, in the attempt to shape a better more generous self. Heartbreak is the beautifully helpless side of love and affection and is [an] essence and emblem of care… [W]e use the word heartbreak as if it only occurs when things have gone wrong: an unrequited love, a shattered dream… But heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.
– David Whyte
What my heart will be is a tower, and I will be right out on its rim: nothing else will be there, only pain and what can’t be said, only the world.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
SLUMBER-SONG
Sleep; and my song shall build about your bed
A Paradise of dimness. You shall feel
The folding of tired wings; and peace will dwell
Throned in your silence; and one hour shall hold
Summer, and midnight, and immensity
Lulled to forgetfulness. For where you dream
The stately gloom of foliage shall embower
Your slumbering thought with tapestries of blue.
And there shall be no memory of the sky,
Nor sunlight with its cruelty of swords.
But, to your soul that sinks from deep to deep
Through drowned and glimmering color, time shall be
Only slow rhythmic swaying; and your breath;
And roses in the darkness: and my love.
– Siegfried Sassoon
Those roads were echoes and footsteps,
women, men, agonies, resurrections,
days and nights,
half dreams and dreams,
every obscure instant of yesterday
and of the world’s yesterdays,
the firm sword of the Dane and the moon of the Persian,
the deeds of the dead,
shared love, words,
Emerson and snow and so many things.
Now I can forget them. I reach my center,
my algebra and my key,
my mirror.
Soon I will know who I am.
– Jorge Luis Borges
There are infinite ways to approach meditation practice, but when you drop into it fully, the first thing you experience—when you learn to rest in and take up residency in awareness—is the direct, non-conceptual experience of interconnectedness and belonging. You are whole, and simultaneously part of a larger whole, nested in an even larger whole, and on and on endlessly. This direct experiencing of interconnectedness and non-separation naturally evokes compassion and loving-kindness and a deep sense of intrinsic connection to others.
– Jon Kabat-Zinn
It is the things you cannot see coming that are strong enough to kill you.
– Jodi Picoult
Sensations, from the beginning, involve a sort of doing. This means that, in an important sense, it is your doing self that brings your core self into being. You are responsible at the very deepest level for what it feels like to be you. But then, for your next trick, well, how about spreading some of that soul dust onto the things around you? Remember, too, that it is your mind that projects phenomenal qualities onto external objects. If you only knew it, you yourself are responsible for the feel of the world.
– Nicholas Humphrey
Everything exists—but only temporarily. Emptiness isn’t nothingness, it’s change.
– Rebecca Li
Ajahn Chah said, “I hope you’re not afraid to suffer.” I asked him what he meant. He continued “There are 2 kinds of suffering. There is the suffering you run away from, which follows you everywhere & there is the suffering you face directly and in doing so become free”
– Jack Kornfield
I remember my childhood
as a long wish to be
elsewhere
– Louise Gluck
Our lives
Were fragile, the wind
Could dash them away.
– Anne Carson
It’s fine, I’ll stay here dreaming poems and smiling in italics.
– Fernando Pessoa
War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.
– William Faulkner
There are some words or phrases that ring the heart like a bell…and it was Tolkien’s gift to be able to find these, and…restore to them contexts, or give them explanations…in a manner that seems utterly consonant with the feeling that…they can evoke.
– Raymond Edwards
Wander where you will over all the world, from every valley seeing forever new hills calling you to climb them, from every mountain top farther peaks enticing you… until you stand one day on the last peak on the border of the interminable sea, stopped by the finality of that.
– Rockwell Kent
The ego wants to help —
even in disappearing.
That’s the joke.
– Osho
floating upon
the waves of a lake
summer world
– Basho
Music is the moonlight in the gloomy night of life.
– Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
For there are no variations except for those who know a norm, and no subtleties for those who have not grasped the obvious.
– C.S. Lewis
He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activities in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.
– Cormac McCarthy
The difference between sounding smart and being smart is ‘I don’t know.’
– @naval
To look at the sea is to look at everything.
– Marguerite Duras; tr. Alison Strayer
A new era has begun.
This one is personal.
– Nika Solé
A collection of anecdotes and maxims is the greatest treasure for a man of the world.
– Goethe
And, for a while, between the two of us,
Dying became so very ordinary, like candy or tacos or semantics,
And death itself suddenly just this obnoxious third-wheel…
– Nathaniel Whittemore
Anger is valid. It tells us when boundaries are crossed—ours or someone else’s.
– Mindy Newman
Solstice
by Tess Taylor
How again today our patron star
whose ancient vista is the long view
turns its wide brightness now and here:
Below, we loll outdoors, sing & make fire.
We build no henge
but after our swim, linger
by the pond. Dapples flicker
pine trunks by the water.
Buzz & hum & wing & song combine.
Light builds a monument to its passing.
Frogs content themselves in bullish chirps,
hoopskirt blossoms
on thimbleberries fall, peeper toads
hop, lazy—
Apex. The throaty world sings ripen.
Our grove slips past the sun’s long kiss.
We dress.
We head home in other starlight.
Our earthly time is sweetening from this.
Grow your tree of falsehood
from a small grain of truth.
Do not follow those who
lie in contempt of reality…
A new, humorless generation
is now arising, it takes in deadly
earnest all we receive
with laughter.
– Czeslaw Milosz
Whoa there, that’s enough, whoa there, my book.
Now we’ve the reached the endpapers.
You want to keep going on and on,
And can’t be stopped on the last page,
As if your subject was not exhausted
As it actually was on the first.
The reader is complaining and flagging,
even the publisher is saying:
‘Whoa there, that’s enough, whoa there, my book.’
– Martial
You cannot drop the ego —
you can only watch it.
In that watching, it drops.
– Osho
Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord God: and not that he should return from his ways, and live?
– Ezekiel 18:23
You need Proof of Work to get a meeting with a busy person.
– @naval
When people start acting stupid I usually stop reading. Those people aren’t ready to be characters yet. You can’t have just any figment be a character. They should have to pass a test.
– Renee Gladman, My Lesbian Novel
Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.
– C.S. Lewis
We must open ourselves….. to a higher reality, to view the spirit within the matter, to raise our consciousness to the point where our perception of reality is completely changed, and the divine within all creation is revealed.
– Rav Dovber Pinson
I always wanted to ask people:
“Are you in love?
What are you reading?”
– Françoise Sagan
There are moments
That we free ourself,
Moments when we summit
The jagged mountain range
Of our loneliness and say,
“You no longer rule me.”
There are times we turn and look
Directly in the eyes
Of our past and say,
“This ends here.”
There are times we face the tyrant
That has been our deepest fear
And say,
“I have never been yours.”
And in these moments
The chains are cut.
When we say No
To the comfortable weight
Of old knowns
That have happily
Been killing us
We step into something
Indomitable, eternal
And real.
Something invisible
Is shaken
Ancient contracts
To our smallness
Are annulled
And a force is released
That can never again
Be hidden away
When we are willing to venture
Into the unmapped wilderness
Of a life that cannot
Be controlled
And leave the past
Unapologetically
To its own demise,
This is when we start to live.
This is when we move unthreatened
By fragile empires built
To topple themselves.
Taunt the cavalries of history
With your awakened presence—
They stand no chance
Let the warring stampedes
Kick up their dust.
The more you abide in what’s real,
The more you see what is false
And how the soul
Can dance
When pretend power
Holds no sway.
– Chelan Harkin
Any book that can be easily summarized isn’t worth reading.
– @naval
Lucidity is the wound closest to the sun.
– René Char
Paradox is what takes shape on the sensitized plate of the poem, a negative picture from which positive pictures can be created.
– Anne Carson
and the weight of external heat crushes the heat-hating Puritan
whose self-defeating vice becomes a proper sepulcher at last
that love may live
– Frank O’Hara
I wrote to keep my head above water. I was drowning in my own weirdness, my exclusion from the human race, my hermaphroditic nature.
– Edmund White
And wrong behaviour (if it is really wrong on universal principles) is progressive, always: it never stops at being ‘not very good’, ‘second best’ – it either reforms, or goes on to third-rate, bad, abominable.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
middle of the night
Orion climbing
out of the clouds
– Kathy Watts
When you revise it’s not just fixing or polishing, it’s really pulling it inside out again.
– Sam Lipsyte
The uses and abuses of literary fiction are the sort of gauntlet one can hardly resist on a Saturday when it’s hot.
– Alina Stefanescu
There’s only one way to bring peace to the world. There’s only one way to bring peace to yourself. There’s only one way to overcome problems. There’s only one way to find yourself. And that way is to realize that everything is consciousness.
– Robert Adams
Logic is always defeated by itself, that is to say, by the insignificance of the cases on which it thrives.
– Deleuze and Guattari
I’ve often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us, unless it’s inside a frame.
– Abbas Kiarostami
Hölderlin, a colossally gifted, internally musical man, w/ lyricism that developed into metaphysics, perceiving reality as a chord of cosmic harmony, painfully experienced the fragmentation of surrounding social life. He lived in a dream of a different world.
– Lunacharksy
How can I explain the things and things and things I did wrong?
I was never any good at telling the difference between
what wanted me and what wanted me gone.
– Franny Choi
To censor “misinformation,” first we need to determine what’s true.
Since we can’t agree, it’s then left to “experts” and “scientists.”
“Experts” are credentialed by Universities.
Censoring misinformation is really just a call to put
Universities in charge of free speech.
– @naval
Tell your friends you’re a happy person. Then, you’ll be forced to conform to it. You’ll have a consistency bias. You have to live up to it. Your friends will expect you to be a happy person.
– @naval
Make no mistake about it: We are At War now ― with somebody ― and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives…
This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed ― for anyone.
– Hunter S. Thompson
It’s so simple, so obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. But people don’t see it. So the authority of people is bankrupt.
– Richard Powers
Any attempts to essentialize culture into notions of authenticity only succeed in doing the opposite and revealing the interconnectedness of our societies.
– Bernardine Evaristo
It seems that everything that has ever happened to us is still alive somewhere in the depths of our psyche.
– James Hollis
Eternity asks you and every one of these millions of millions, just one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.
– Søren Kierkegaard
To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.
– Thomas Pynchon, V.
Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
That’s one of the things stories and books can do, they can make more than one time possible at once.
– Ali Smith
To be here now, to see what you have made, humbles me. The good parts and the bad. It doesn’t matter. I thought I was going to save the world, and here you were all along, changing the world day by day, minute by minute.
– Luis Alberto Urrea
What poetry is: a wind, a leaf of grass that ties time and space together.
– Wang Ping
Tonight I will do nothing but to read.
– Mario Vargas Llosa
Perfection belongs to the gods; completeness or wholeness is the most a human being can hope for. It is in seeking perfection by isolating & exaggerating parts of ourselves that we become neurotic. To move toward perfection is to move out of life, or what is worse, never to enter it.
– Marion Woodman
Neurosis is what rises out of the conflict between our instinctual realities and our cultural claims upon us. As Freud pointed out so succinctly, the price of civilization is neurosis.
– James Hollis
Mismanagement and grief
We must suffer them all again…
– W.H. Auden
Philosophical wisdom is the philosophizer’s quite personal affair. It must arise as his wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tending toward universality, a knowledge for which he can answer from the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute insights.
– Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations
Being listened to, and being with somebody who takes genuine pleasure in listening, is really powerful. It really has an effect. And it seems to me – and it isn’t a “cure”, but if it was a “cure”– it’s a listening cure, not a talking cure. And it’s amazing what people will say if they think they’re being listened to.
– Rod Tweedy
The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.
– Franz Kafka
Through all this the sands kept vigil,
harboring blood and bones, harboring the beauty
of the rising sun between seven dunes.
– Romeo Oriogun, Someday the Desert Will Sing
Nothing is easy when you might come apart in the middle at any moment.
– Tove Jansson
A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness.
– Albert Einstein
There are questions we could not get past if we were not set free from them by nature.
– Franz Kafka
To annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism.
– Sylvia Plath
Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.
– Mahmoud Darwish
A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.
– Nietzsche
The future is a fog that is still hanging out over the sea, a boat that floats home or does not.
– Sylvia Plath
He who cannot put his thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of dispute.
– Nietzsche
Wise people are in want of nothing, and yet need many things. On the other hand, nothing is needed by fools, for they do not understand how to use anything, but are in want of everything.
– Chrysippus
Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
– Sylvia Plath
You are the stone and the fire, the question and the transformation.
– Philosopher’s Riddle
It’s a funny thing, but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really what guides them is what they’re afraid of. What they don’t want.
– Khaled Hosseini
Time passes, and the world is a different place. Yet somehow, the dust of your origins clings to your skin.
– Khaled Hosseini
They say the past claws its way out of the ground.
– Khaled Hosseini
My feelings are too loud for words and too shy for the world.
– Dejan Stojanovic
One reads in order to ask, not answer.
– Franz Kafka
Because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.
– Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
I dream too much, work too little.
– Sylvia Plath
I may never be happy, but tonight I am content.
– Sylvia Plath
There is no right way or wrong way. There are a hundred different ways to tell the same story. Whatever works for you is okay.
– Judy Blume
All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.
– Octavia Butler
If your life feels out of control, check your routines first.
– @aprofessormind
My mind is a curtain of spiderwebs.
– Sylvia Plath
You can’t be fully loved unless you are fully seen…
– Jimmy Knowles
I am terrified of getting older. And I’m afraid I’m not growing up at all.
– Sylvia Plath
I am a world that cannot be explored in one day. I am not a place for cowards.
– Caitlyn Siehl
I thought of Jung basically as what I call a noetic archeologist, someone who goes with toothbrush and pick to dig away the detritus from the bones of vanished idea systems.
– Terence Mckenna
Power for poor people will really mean having the ability, the togetherness, the assertiveness, and the aggressiveness to make the power structure of this nation say yes when they may be desirous to say no.
– MLK
Take my hand. We will walk. We will only walk. We will enjoy our walk, without thinking of arriving anywhere.
– Thích Nhất Hạnh
They say, Find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind.
– Khaled Hosseini
She would find herself wondering… if she had merely been a pause in someone else’s story.
– Khaled Hosseini
To resolutely stay human in a world that tells you ‘empathy is toxic’ feels like a hymn of audacity right now.
– Sarah Bessey
You’re hungry and honest. That is very rare in this country.
– Chimamanda Adichie
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.
– Maria Popova
Never let your enemy tell you how many of you there are.
– Malcolm X
Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.
– Laurence J. Peter
Is the individual a thing really, or a multitude of things?
– Alan Watts
There’s always merit to having a debate.
– Ward Churchill
You shall not oppress a sojourner. You know the heart of a sojourner, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.
– Exodus 23:9
Socialism is such elementary common sense and so blatantly obvious that… no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system.
– George Orwell
people run from rain but
sit
in bathtubs full of
water.
it is fairly dismal to know that
millions of people are worried about
the hydrogen bomb
yet
they are already
dead.
– Charles Bukowski
Your intuition is the whisper of Source—gentle, quiet, and always aligned with love. It never shouts. It simply nudges, saying, This way. Trust it.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
That to try and build on hearts is a foolish thing;
That all things crack – love and beauty –
Until Oblivion throws them in his sack
Voiding them to eternity!
– Charles Baudelaire
What the ego wants is tiny
compared to what the soul wants,
and there comes a point when we recognize this,
and we surrender to soul…
– Marion Woodman
Barren branches:
the autumn left behind
a cicada’s hollow cry.
– Kagai
Leave your existence to existence, stop caring for yourself so much and let the universe care for you; it is the best mother.
– Mooji
An eye in a blue face
Saw an eye in a green face.
“That eye is like to this eye”
Said the first eye,
“But in low place
Not in high place.”
– Tolkien
Listen—keep it secret,
our love: sea-music, or sky-roar.
We meet in wild delight,
part with smiles like falling stars.
or waves by shore.
Let us burn, slow as rain-soaked wood,
aching for flame—
Till we meet again,
in some tender, parallel world
or another lifetime.
– @chandanas
Take that sinner boy home
Wrap him up, keep him warm,
He won’t do no harm
– Rory Gallagher
The world is now in a situation not unlike the late Middle Ages where the opponents on all sides are motivated by religious belief.
With one difference, which doesn’t need to be articulated.
– Clifton Lee
I am your spirit. I am the only life you can realize. I am the house of your spirit in the land which is nowhere, the land which is your only remaining home. Without me, the intelligible universe reverts to chaos. Creative and abysmal are inextricably linked in me; only I can mediate between them. Without me, mankind will sink into the mire and vanity of knowing. Through me, you and they will find the only way out of chaos: understanding by living.
– Frank Herbert
We can draw closer to mysticism if we think obliquely, autobiographically, vernacularly, performatively, practically, erotically, and ascetically. Mysticism is a singular form of floating attention—what I call passive activity or active passivity. It is necessary to mobilize simultaneously all seven adverbs if we are to glean mysticism’s meaning, its core, its magma: love.
– Simon Critchley
All will come again into its strength:
the fields undivided, the waters undammed,
the trees towering and the walls built low.
And in the valleys, people as strong and varied as the land.
And no churches where God
is imprisoned and lamented
like a trapped and wounded animal.
The houses welcoming all who knock
and a sense of boundless offering
in all relations, and in you and me.
No yearning for an afterlife, no looking beyond,
no belittling of death,
but only longing for what belongs to us
and serving earth, lest we remain unused.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Everything that happens to us, properly understood, leads us back to ourselves; it is as though there were some unconscious guidance whose aim it is to deliver us from all ties and all dependence and make us dependent on ourselves.
– Carl G. Jung
There are many ways to transcend our blind attachment to life, but only through grace do we not break with its irrational forces; it alone is a futile leap, a disinterested elan which does not spoil life’s naive charm.
Grace is the joy of soaring upward. The undulations of graceful movements bespeak light and immaterial flight. They have the spontaneity of wings beating in the air, of smiles, of pure young dreams. Isn’t dance grace’s best form of expression? In grace, life is a flux of pure vitality, never breaking the harmony of its own rhythms. Life becomes dream, disinterested play, expansion contained in its own borders. Thus it creates a pleasant illusion of freedom, spontaneous abandon, dreams wrought in sunlight.
Despair is the paroxysm of individuation, a painful and unique interiorization. Grace, on the other hand, leads to harmony and naive fulfillment, and the graceful being never experiences feelings of loneliness and isolation. Grace is an illusory state in which life negates its antinomies and transcends its demonic dialectic, in which contradictions, fatality, and the consciousness of the irrevocable temporarily vanish.
– Cioran
I write here, because I am paralyzed
everywhere else.
– Sylvia Plath
Now I’ve shot so many Nazis, Daddy will have to buy me a sable coat.
– Neil Munro “Bunny” Roger
When our movements are limited, so are our possibilities for wholeness.
– Judith Harris, Jung and Yoga
Many of us, in unconsciously trying to be as small and inconspicuous as possible, have shortened and collapsed inward, not only in a vertical direction, but in width as well. Collapsing inward often has to do with terrible feelings of shame about who we are in the world. Such a posture serves only to cramp our breathing apparatus, not allowing us to be fully present in life, therefore not allowing us to utilize our full physical as well as creative potential.
– Judith Harris, Jung and Yoga
Sunday Morning
Tonic water and tatterdemalion lemon, that shirt
you wanted and so, rudimentary as a spoon, I go
Googling for it, but only after skimming the latest
issue of Harper’s, the last sentence of which says
that chimpanzees have a bone in their hearts,
and asking you, who I can’t expect will know
why chimpanzees have a bone in their hearts,
why chimpanzees have a bone in their hearts.
– Graham Foust, Typo magazine
It is because we are all
imposters that we
endure each
other.
– Emil Cioran
Jung recounts that his intense study of mythologies forced him to conclude that without a myth, a human “is like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society.”
– Lance Owens
Friendly reminder that living is meant to be an outdoor activity.
– @moveorperish
Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.
– @naval
What unanimity between the water and the sky! — one only a little denser element than the other. The grossest part of heaven. Think of a mirror on so large a scale! Standing on distant hills, you see the heavens reflected, the evening sky, in some low lake or river in the valley, as perfectly as in any mirror they could be. Does it not prove how intimate heaven is with earth?
We commonly sacrifice to supper this serene and sacred hour. Our customs turn the hour of sunset to a trivial time, as at the meeting of two roads, one coming from the noon, the other leading to the night. It might be [well] if our repasts were taken out-of-doors, in view of the sunset and the rising stars; if there were two persons whose pulses beat together, if men cared for the coopos, or beauty of the world; if men were social in a high and rare sense; if they associated on high levels; if we took in with our tea a draught of the trans- parent, dew-freighted evening air; if, with our bread and butter, we took a slice of the red western sky; if the smoking, steaming urn were the vapor on a thousand
lakes and rivers and meads.
– Thoreau
The world around you is only beautiful when you are at peace with the world within you.
– Paulo Coelho
A traumatized person’s nervous system is not damaged; it is frozen in a kind of suspended animation.
– Peter A. Levine
All this madness, all this rage, all this flaming death of our civilization and our hopes, has been brought about because a set of official gentlemen, living luxurious lives, mostly stupid, and all without imagination or heart, have chosen that it should occur rather than that any one of them should suffer some infinitesimal rebuff to his country’s pride.
– Bertrand Russell
‘Tis wealth enough of joy for me
In summer time to simply be.
– Paul Laurence Dunbar
Death turns us into words…
– Michel Serres
High sang the horns,
helms were gleaming,
shafts were shaken,
shields them answered.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
finally a clear sky
but no moon in sight
summer mountain
– Issa
If in day of Doom
one deathless stands,
who death hath tasted
and dies no more,
the serpent-slayer,
seed of Odin,
then all shall not end,
nor Earth perish.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
The work you do on yourself holds everyone to a higher standard.
– Nika Solé
Softest Sound
Search out the softest sound you can hear. Rest in it.
Find the softest sound you can produce with the materials
in a favorite room.
Explore it, taking an ear-journey inside it.
– Ruth Anderson and Annea Lockwood
It turns out that we have a collective immune system, not just an individual one.
– @naval
The difficulties begin when you understand what it is that the soul will not permit the hand to make.
– Philip Guston
There Were Some Summers
There were some summers
like this: The blue barn steaming,
some cow-birds dozing with their heads
on each other’s shoulders, the electric fences
humming low in the mid-August heat. . .
So calm the slow sweat existing
in half-fictive memory: a boy
wandering from house, to hayloft, to coop,
past a dump where a saddle rots
on a sawhorse, through the still forest
of a cornfield, to a pasture talking to himself
or the bored, baleful Holsteins nodding
beneath the round shade of catalpa, the boy
walking his trail towards the brook
in a deep but mediocre gully,
through skunk cabbage and pop-weed,
down sandbanks (a descending
quarter-acre Sahara), the boy wandering,
thinking nothing, thinking: Sweatbox,
sweatbox, the boy on his way
toward a minnow whose slight beard
tells the subtleties of the current, holding there,
in water cold enough to break your ankles.
– Thomas Lux
huddled
in his jacket
facing the wind,
a lone
beach walker
– John Wisdom
lonely saxophone
burning the midnight oil
across the street
the last notes
stretched out towards dawn
– @hegelincanada
Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.
– Theodor W. Adorno
We are not divine, but we are the stable in which something divine is born.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
The thing about memorizing poetry is…it gets in the bloodstream. I say to graduate students who so resist the thought of having to memorize a poem a week: “I’m doing you a favor. I’m giving you an internal library to draw on when you’re taken political prisoner.”
– Maxine Kumin
The war which is coming
Is not the first one. There were
Other wars before it.
When the last one came to an end
There were conquerors and conquered.
Among the conquered the common people
Starved. Among the conquerors
The common people starved too.
– Bertolt Brecht
Colors are not possessions; they are the intimate revelations of an energy field… deep, resonant mysteries with boundless subjectivity… Our lives, when we pay attention to light, compel us to empathy with color.
– Ellen Meloy
The state of imperfect transformation, merely hoped for and waited for, does not seem to be one of torment only, but of positive, if hidden, happiness. It is the state of someone who, in his wanderings among the mazes of his psychic transformation, comes upon a secret happiness which reconciles him to his apparent loneliness.
In communing with himself he finds not deadly boredom and melancholy but an inner partner; more than that, a relationship that seems like the happiness of a secret love, or like a hidden spring-time, when the green seed sprouts from the barren earth, holding out the promise of future harvests.
– Carl Jung
The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.
– Martin Amis
The moon in the water;
Broken and broken again,
Still it is there.
– Choshu Ueda (tr. R.H.Blyth)
Tell stories, tell stories, until no one else dies. A thousand and one nights, a million and one nights.
– Elias Canetti, The Book Against Death (tr. Peter Filkins)
Thesis on the decline of art:
authors, musicians and filmmakers are, like us, always on their phones, and thus no longer forced to creatively contend with the silence and boredom that used to be an inescapable reality of everyday life.
– Dylan O’Sullivan
Most everything has been done before.
– Rosmarie Waldrop
Nothing can hold you back—not your childhood, not the history of a lifetime, not even the very last moment before now. In a moment you can abandon your past. And once abandoned, you can redefine it.
– Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
bearing down
on a borrowed pen
do not resuscitate
– Yu Chang
all wars
kill children
and bind them
to the hatred
of generations
– Andy Perrin
her face
in my whisky
the moon floats
– Chen-ou Liu
Let us return to our own case, the duel between the visible and the invisible, the reporting of which threatens to carry us away.
– Jean Cocteau
Zwijgen
by Saskia Hamilton
I slept before a wall of books and they
calmed everything in the room, even
their contents, even me, woken
by the cold and thrill, and still
they said, like the Dutch verb for falling
silent that English has no accommodation for
in the attics and rafters of its intimacies.
ALAS, and I have sung
Much song of matters vain,
And a heaven-sweetened tongue
Turned to unprofiting strain
Of vacant things, which though
Even so they be, and thoroughly so,
It is no boot at all for thee to know,
But babble and false pain.
– Francis Thompson
Above the shattered world there stretches a pure blue heaven, which continues to hold it together.
– Elias Canetti
When I returned to my birthplace
my father’s house
and mother’s voice
were gone.
– Abbas Kiarostami
It’s absolutely a
brutal time to be
even remotely
intelligent.
– Davidson Boswell
Always and forever we have stood up against war, because we say that the war going on in the world is for the further enslavement of the people, for the further placing of them under the yoke of military tyranny.
– Emma Goldman
Norse Saga
Let us praise the immigrant
who leaves the tropics
and arrives in Chicago
in the dead of winter.
Let us praise the immigrant
who has never worn coats
who must bundle up
against an unimaginable cold.
For they will write letters home
that speak of it like Norse sagas
with claims that if a frigid hell exists
the entrance is hidden somewhere in this city.
Let us praise the immigrant
who fears the depths of the subway
the disappearance of landmarks
to guide them through the labyrinth.
Let us praise the immigrant
who dreams of the pleasures of sunstroke
who wakes each morning to the alien sight
of their breath suspended in the cold city air.
– Dan Vera
Of course all of this wisdom and experience, this shit and sublimity, is shared, and of course a great deal of what we all think and do and feel and write is no more uniquely had or imagined than the balloon of the bagger…
– William Gass
Someone who goes with half a loaf of bread
to a small place that fits like a nest around him,
someone who wants no more,
who is not himself longed for
by anyone else.
He is a letter to everyone.
You open it.
It says, Live.
– Rumi
Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.
– Victor Frankl
Let your loyalty to another human being come about in this way: there will be moments — quickly passing by — when he will seem to you filled and illumined by the true, primal image of his spirit.
Then can come, yes, will come, long stretches of time when your fellow-being seems clouded, even darkened. But learn at these times to say to yourself: The spirit will strengthen me; I will remember the true, unchanging image that I once saw. Nothing at all — neither deception nor disguise — can take it away from me.
Struggle again and again for the true picture that you saw. The struggle itself is your faithfulness.
And in those efforts to be faithful and to trust, a human being will come close to another as if with an angel’s power of protection.
– Rudolf Steiner
The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbols never perfectly match. Eros is in between.
– Anne Carson
Interview of Leonard Cohen by Anjelica Huston:
HUSTON: Do you think love can last?
COHEN: I think love lasts. I think it’s the nature of love to last. I think it’s eternal, but I think we don’t know what to do with it much of the time. Because of its eternal and powerful and mysterious qualities, our panicked responses to it are inappropriate and often tragic. But the thing itself, when it can be appropriately assimilated into the landscape of panic, is the only redeeming possibility for human beings.
HUSTON: Why do you think it is that when we fall in love, our mouths become dry and we shake and our hearts beat too loud and we’re fools?
COHEN: Because we are awakening from the dream of isolation, from the dream of loneliness, and it’s a terrible shock, you know? It’s a delicious, terrible shock that none of us knows what to do with. Part of the shabbiness of our culture, if indeed it is shabby, is that it doesn’t seem to prepare people. With all the songs about love and all the movies and all the books, there doesn’t seem to be any way that we can prepare the human heart for this experience. Maybe we, the cultural workers like you and I, could apply ourselves. We’re not going to resolve it in this moment or even in this generation, but perhaps as some kind of agenda we could invite our writers and cultural workers to address the problem a little more responsibly, because people are suffering tremendously from a want of data. The psychologists are valiantly trying to provide us with answers, the religious people are trying to provide us with answers. I think it properly falls on the cultural workers to investigate this predicament with a little less concern for the marketplace and a little more concern for their higher calling.
A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space.
– Anne Carson
Lying and error are the same word for the Greeks, which is interesting. That is, “to be wrong” could have various causes: you wanted to lie, or you just didn’t know the truth, or you forgot, and those are all one concept. That interests me, the bundling together and looking at the situation from a point of view of consequences and not motivation.
– Anne Carson
Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is the hole. When I desire you, a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me. So reasons the lover at the edge of eros. The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness. His thoughts turn toward questions of personal identity: he must recover and reincorporate what is gone if he is to be a complete person. […] Most people find something disturbingly lucid and true in Aristophanes’ image of lovers as people cut in half. All desire is for a part of oneself gone missing, or so it feels to the person in love.
– Anne Carson
Neither are the humanistic scholars and artists of any great help these days. They used to be, and were supposed to be, as a group, carriers of and teachers of the eternal verities and the higher life. The goal of humanistic studies was defined as the perception and knowledge of the good, the beautiful, and the true. Such studies were expected to refine the discrimination between what is excellent and what is not (excellence generally being understood to be the true, the good, and the beautiful). They were supposed to inspire the student to the better life, to the higher life, to goodness and virtue. What was truly valuable, Matthew Arnold said, was ‘the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world.’ […] No, it is quite clear from our experience of the last fifty years or so that the pre-1914 certainties of the humanists, of the artists, of the dramatists and poets, of the philosophers, of the critics, and of those who are generally inner-directed have given way to a chaos of relativism. No one of these people now knows how and what to choose, nor does he know how to defend and validate his choice.
– Abraham H. Maslow
Silk speech of eyes, the happiness of hands transcend mere talk of tongue;
– June Owens
…if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think and feel, you don’t think, ‘oh, I love this picture because it’s universal.’ ‘I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.’ That’s not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes, you.
– Donna Tartt
What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become, except in dreams that blow in from out there bearing the fragrance of islands we have not yet sighted in our waking hours, as in voyaging sometimes the first blossoming branches of our next landfall come bumping against the keel, even in the dark, whole days before the real land rises to meet us.
– David Malouf
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
– Gerard Manley Hopkins
Every day on the balcony of the sea,
wings open, fire is born,
and everything is blue again like morning.
– Pablo Neruda
If poets are the keepers of the unsayable, then silence, not language, is a poet’s natural element, the realm where the unsayable lives. Poets fetishize silence as much as words; they are disturbed and comforted by the sounds that interrupt it. This is what John Keats means by Negative Capability, his notion of a poet’s basic qualification, the need for ‘being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.’ This a fancy way of describing ambivalence, also a basic qualification for a poet, the ability to passionately hold two opposing feelings at once. Poets need ambivalence in order to acknowledge the unsayable and speak nonetheless. The hidden subject of all poems is the silence that surrounds them, the things that can’t be, that will never be said; a real poem points to everything beyond it.
– Craig Morgan Teicher
That the branches of poetry are silence and wound.
– Paisley Rekdal
[The struggle of writing] is to intercept silence. Poetry is silence, a silence comparable to an underlying light around me, in me, on the paper. I know that if I lean over my desk, this silence will be summoned to spill forth drop by drop and that, subtly, the sharpened point of the pen will break free of my heart and spread across the expanse the brief trembling of a drawing. Poetry is a drawing that expresses the silence…
– Silvia Baron Supervielle
My poems express more of my silence than of my talking. As music is a kind of silence. Sounds are needed for different layers of silence to be highlighted.
– Anna Kamieńska
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
– Charles Simic
Silence is inside the word as something to be read.
– Edmond Jabès
I love three languages of the universe: music, love and silence.
– Qasim Chauhan
The one who bows and the one who is bowed to are both, by nature, empty.
– Part of a Buddhist Gatha
…you must be patient like someone who is sick, and confident like some one who is recovering; for perhaps you are both.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Everything was there, it is simply that there was no clerk capable of making an inventory of all the constituents; but the realm that existed once — once and once only — had disappeared for ever, ground into infinitesimal pieces by the endless momentum of chaos within which crystals of order survived, the chaos that consisted of an indifferent and unstoppable traffic between things. It ground the empire into carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and sulphur, it took its delicate fibres and unstitched them till they were dispersed and had ceased to exist, because they had been consumed by the force of some incomprehensibly distant edict, which must also consume this book, here, now, at the full stop, after the last word.
– László Krasznahorkai
What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone else’s orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away. Part of what you enjoy in a documentary technique is the sense of banditry. To loot someone else’s life or sentences and make off with a point of view, which is called “objective” because you can make anything into an object by treating it this way, is exciting and dangerous.
– Anne Carson
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
My religion makes no sense
and does not help me
therefore I pursue it.
– Anne Carson
And now time is rushing towards them
where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on
their faces, night at their back.
– Anne Carson
Men are still inclined to project their perfect inner woman onto their partner, so they can’t understand what’s going on when the outer woman does something their inner woman would not do. It comes as a mighty shock and often the man insists, “That’s not who you are.” A projection is a very real thing. It’s real energy. If I’m projecting onto a man my adoration of him, that energy is like crutches holding him up. My energy is supporting him. If I take that projection away, suddenly he’s without crutches, so it’s a terrifying moment in a relationship; he not only loses the image he thinks he loves but loses the powerful support of the projection. Conscious women are pulling back the adoring projection. It hurts but it’s much healthier. It lets a man be who he is, a human being trying to find himself, just as the woman is. It allows for real love.
– Marion Woodman
If you pick a flower, if you snatch a handbag, if you possess a woman, if you plunder a storehouse, ravage a countryside or occupy a city, you are a taker. You are taking. In ancient Greek you use the verb άρπάζειν, which comes over into Latin as rapio, rapere, raptus sum and gives us English rapture and rape — words stained with the very early blood of girls, with the very late blood of cities, with the hysteria of the end of the world. Sometimes I think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks.
– Anne Carson
In myth, women’s boundaries are pliant, porous, mutable. Her power to control them is inadequate, her concern for them unreliable. Deformation attends her. She swells, she shrinks, she leaks, she is penetrated, she suffers metamorphoses. The women of mythology regularly lose their form in monstrosity.
– Anne Carson
The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man. Yet to turn our backs on the destructive forces of the century is of little avail. The trouble is that our period has so strangely intertwined the good with the bad that without the imperialists’ ‘expansion for expansion’s sake,’ the world might never have become one; without the bourgeoisie’s political device of ‘power for power’s sake,’ the extent of human strength might never have been discovered; without the fictitious world of totalitarian movements, in which with unparalleled clarity the essential uncertainties of our time have been spelled out, we might have been driven to our doom without ever becoming aware of what has been happening. And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives), it is also true that without it we might never have known the truly radical nature of Evil.
– Hannah Arendt
how is a Greek chorus like a lawyer
they’re both in the business of searching for a precedent
finding an analogy
locating a prior example
so as to be able to say
this terrible thing we’re witnessing now is
not unique you know it happened before
or something much like it
we’re not at a loss how to think about this
we’re not without guidance
there is a pattern
we can find an historically parallel case
and file it away under
ANTIGONE BURIED ALIVE FRIDAY AFTERNOON
COMPARE CASE HISTORIES 7, 17 AND 49
now I could dig up those case histories
tell you about Danaos and Lykourgos and the sons of Phineus
people locked up in a room or a cave or their own dark mind
it wouldn’t help you
it doesn’t help me
it’s Friday afternoon
there goes Antigone to be buried alive
– Anne Carson
PIANIST IN THE DARK
The music is not in the keys
it has never been seen
the notes set out to find
each other
listening for their way
when they move they are the music
they have always been
waiting for
the leaves stirring in the night air
as it changes around them
the rain arrives in a slow minor
the keys sing to themselves
in their dream of dancing
they make their own music
they make it again
– W. S. Merwin
The more you try to avoid
suffering, the more you
suffer, because smaller and
more insignificant things
begin to torture you, in
proportion to your fear of
being hurt. The one who
does most to avoid suffering
is, in the end, the one
who suffers most.
– Thomas Merton
Only a depraved
nation would hunt the
workers who grow our
food and chase them
through fields they
toil in to provide for
us
– Con Safos
There’s a short list of people I’ll love forever / When they all marry each other I’ll cry for a long time.
– Talin Tahajian
Paper on Humor
Everything sounds funny in a funny magazine.
For years now I have published my poems in funny magazines
so that nobody would notice
how sad they were.
Sad anthologists, however, took my poems out of context
and put them in the sad anthologies and there
they started to shine with tears because
they were the saddest poems in there.
With a liking for funnies
and a following of sadness followers
I arrive in Brazil to get my prize.
The prize consists of the cross, the guillotine
and the hot pepper.
I am collected. Nothing matters to me.
– Andrei Codrescu
PILLOWS
Your intelligence snoozes next to mine.
Poems accumulate between our pillows.
MONARCH
If I were inside you now
I would stay there for ages
Until the last migrating
Monarch butterfly had left.
– Michael Longley, The Weather in Japan
From where does creativity spring?
In my experience: drugs, alcohol and chaos.
In any case: order, sameness, habit and conformity have, since the beginning of time, created but one thing:
Suffering.
– John Mcafee
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
– Sara Teasdale
now the pillow’s hot on both sides.
a second candle dies, the ravens cry endlessly. no sleep all night, too late to think of sleep…how unbearably white the blind’s white deep.
hello, morning!
– anna akhmatova, (tr. a.s.kline)
As far as society is concerned the poet has died and the only one who doesn’t know it is the poet himself. Because of his great vanity or because he has formed a bad habit like masturbation which he finds enjoyable and can’t quit.
– Irving Layton
apparently, feeling oceanic depths of Safety opens up a lot of nervous system stuff that was waiting for a safe environment to surface in. who knew.
– River Kenna
It’s times like these that call forward the artists, alchemists, seers and truth tellers. The revolutionaries.
– Nika Solé
Never comfortable in the immediate, I am lured only by what precedes me, what distances me from here, the numberless moments when I was not: the non-born.
– E. M. Cioran (translated by Richard Howard)
golden anniversary
the chipped coffee cups
she pours into
– Elisa Theriana
Awareness, without any choice, of the ways of the mind, is the beginning of meditation.
– Krishnamurti
Take the anger and sadness out of your heart because these traits will be obstacles to the light. Make every effort to love the people around you and be happy even when not everything goes as you want.
– Rav Chaim Vital
wildflowers
celebrating
the rain
– Ogawa
Ideally, the ultimate retreat is to retreat from the past and the future, to always remain in the present.
– Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche
Every notion in our minds, each perception of the world and sensation in ourselves must go through a psychic organization in order to “happen” at all. Every single feeling or observation occurs as a psychic event by first forming a fantasy-image.
– James Hillman
Not be overwhelmed by what you imagine, but just do what you can.
– Marcus Aurelius
The more one is absorbed in fighting evil,
the less one is tempted to place the
good in question.
– Jean Paul Sartre
Once you get to your soul, then every person you look at is a soul.
– Ram Dass
Buildings will go up into the dizzy air as love itself goes in
and up the reeling life that it has chosen for once or all.
– Frank O’Hara
…when there is a war the years are longer that is to say the days are longer the months are longer the years are much longer but the weeks are shorter that is what makes a war.
– Gertrude Stein
Growing Up
I am reading Li Po. The TV is on
with the sound off.
I’ve seen this movie before.
I turn on the sound just for a moment
when the man says, “I love you.”
Then turn it off and go on reading.
– Linda Gregg
a hill
without a name
veiled in mist
– Basho
Mere fact has no chance of being formally perfect. It will get in the way, it will be all elbows.
– Martin Amis
The wisdom of the seasons is to give us cherry blossoms in the depths of winter, reddening maple leaves in the spring.
– Pico Iyer
Seek the wisdom that will untie your knot; seek the path that demands your whole being. Leave that which is not, but appears to be; seek that which is, but is not apparent.
– Rumi
It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one falls into despair at the first onslaught of affliction.
– Simone Weil
Clinging to ‘me’ divides the world into friend and enemy. It may feel safe, but it isolates us.
– Lama Kathy Wesley
my soul can’t stand the pain
of love’s silences.
– anna akhmatova
The artist who cravenly submits to time, place and space confesses his own limits. The oracles knew not time; the poet’s testament is the oath of the Angel in the Apocalypse that there will be no more time.
– Edward Dahlberg
Forgive me that I ignored the sun
And that I lived in sorrow.
– Anna Akhmatova
Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.
– Ernest Hemingway
When your internal environment is healthy, blessed and successful, your external reality blossoms.
– Nika Solé
Like a white stone deep in a draw-well lying,
As hard and clear, a memory lies in me.
– Anna Akhmatova
It is a divine precedent
you perpetuate! Roll on,
reels of celluloid,
as the great earth rolls on!
– Frank O’Hara
in a world
torn by wars
birdsong
– @EllenKrupich
Having lots of money while not having inner peace is like dying of thirst while bathing in the ocean.
– Yogananda Paramahamsa
Without imagination, all human activity is riddled with unconsciousness and acts out myths that have not been fully appropriated. It takes courage to ‘own’ the myth that has captivated your life.
– Thomas Moore
Experiences are the chemicals of life with which the philosopher experiments.
– Manly P. Hall
You will hear thunder and remember me,
And think: she wanted storms. The rim
Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson,
And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.
– Anna Akhmatova
tho’ not in Paradise yet
this blessing…
fresh sake
– Kobayashi Issa
Where does a thought go when it’s forgotten?
– Sigmund Freud
Everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves to tell what is inside themselves.
– Gertrude Stein
My answer to everything is ‘what are we going to do about it?’ I live in the land of the solutions.
– Nika Solé
Supremacist ideology is fundamentally reactionary: it is born from grievance and status-anxiety. It depends entirely on the threat of the Other for its existence. It has no content or meaning without the myth and guarding of that originary resentment.
– Alina Stefanescu
Knowledge is no guarantee of good behavior, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behavior.
– Martha C. Nussbaum
Hope is the belief that this moment isn’t good enough.
– @naval
Just as the moon only reflects its light in a pool, so the mind, empty and unattached, does not know itself and the outside world as two things.
– Alan Watts
Whatever I take, I take too much or too little; I do not take the exact amount. The exact amount is no use to me.
– Antonio Porchia, (tr. W. S. Merwin)
Guru butterfly
Visits the temple garden
Then leaves for the fields
For every flower’s sacred
The difference in mind only
– Avram Dorado
Freedom that requires the bondage of others is fake freedom.
– @VinceFHorn
Real tenderness can’t be confused,
It’s quiet and can’t be heard.
– Anna Akhmatova
That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.
– Octavia E. Butler
More academic historians certainly ought to acquire the skill of writing for large audiences. To do so gratifies the ego, swells the bank account, and may give pause to those who knowingly or not, distort what actually happened and why.
– Michael Kazin
a smudge
of blackbirds swirling
into evening …
how fluid the shape
of this sorrow
– Debbie Strange
Joy comes to us in moments—ordinary moments. We risk missing out on joy when we get too busy chasing down the extraordinary.
– Brené Brown
to have any distinctive personality at all, one necessarily diverges from the average.
everyone wants to be “normal”– no one wants to be “average.”
– Joyce Carol Oates
I WISH IN THE CITY OF
YOUR HEART
I wish in the city of your heart
you would let me be the street
where you walk when you are most
yourself. I imagine the houses:
It has been raining, but the rain
is done and the children kept home
have begun opening their doors.
– Robley Wilson
I am kin to everyone, and everyone is kin to me. That’s the Heart Sutra in action.
– Ruben Habito
returning home
in fading light
summer days
– Andrew Brindle
The imagination of a good artist or thinker is productive continually, of good, mediocre and bad things, but his power of judgement, sharpened and practised to the highest degree, rejects, selects, knots together; as we can now see from Beethoven’s notebooks how the most glorious melodies were put together gradually and as it were culled out of many beginnings.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.”
– James Baldwin
I’ve always found people love you best if you can laugh at your own foolish misfortunes and keep mum about everyone else’s.
– Barbara Kingsolver
Every man would like to be God, if it were possible; some few find it difficult to admit the impossibility.
– Bertrand Russell
One-dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information. Their universe of discourse is populated by self-validating hypotheses which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hypnotic definitions or dictations.
– Herbert Marcuse
Depending on how you see it, you need either the fullest expert knowledge for philosophy, or none at all.
– Friedrich Schlegel
The natural life span of an emotion—the average time it takes for it to move through the nervous system and body—is only minute and a half. We need thoughts to keep the emotion rolling. We lock into painful emotional states [through] our own endless stream of inner dialogue.
– Tara Brach
It’s easier to remember the deprivation than the joy. One burns. The other fades.
– Viet Thanh Nguyen
I want to live in a world where harm is not systemic, where love organizes society, where the earth is respected, and where life is valued above all else.
– yung pueblo
I know very well that we are not all equal, nor can be so; but it is my opinion that he who deems it important to keep aloof from the so-called rabble in order to maintain their respect is as culpable as a coward who hides himself from his enemy because he fears defeat.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
People do not want immortality, they simply do not want to die. They want to live… They want to feel the ground beneath their feet, see the clouds overhead, love other people, be with them, and think. Nothing more.
– Stanisław Lem
I am still unlearning the art of disappearing every time I’m not understood.
– Fariha Róisín
This is how you make a ghost: you give it everything you are, then watch it leave.
– Richard Siken
You are not too much. You were just never meant to be contained.
– Pavana Reddy
You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever felt, but I’m sorry, I cannot stay.
– Warsan Shire
She made peace with the fire and learned to stop fearing the smoke.
– Nikita Gill
You are not a mess. You are a feeling that the world couldn’t decode.
– Rupi Kaur
I disappear in moments. Not because I want to be gone, but because I want to be found.
– Fariha Róisín
The more hard lessons you can learn vicariously rather than through your own hard experience, the better.
– Charlie Munger
I don’t break down. I break open.
– Alok Vaid-Menon
Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by.
– Mahmoud Darwish
The public is a ferocious beast; one must either chain it or flee from it.
– Voltaire
I’m tired of translating myself into something softer just so I can be heard.
– Danez Smith
I’m not cold. I’m just tired of being burned.
– Nikita Gill
World is decay, life is perception.
– Democritus
A friend’s eye is a good mirror.
– Celtic proverb
Please Describe How You Became a Writer
Possibly I began writing as a refuge from our insulting first grade textbook. Come, Jane, come. Look, Dick, look. Were there ever duller people in the world? You had to tell them to look at things? Why weren’t they looking to begin with?
– Naomi Shihab Nye