I keep my research going, looking for sentiments in the world.
– Renee Gladman
In any society where government does not express or represent the moral community of the citizens, but is instead a set of institutional arrangements for imposing a bureaucratized unity on a society which lacks genuine moral consensus, the nature of political obligation becomes systematically unclear.
– Alasdair MacIntyre
. . There is never a shortage of opportunity to step out of the small self and embrace the universal self of all sentient beings. On our meditation cushion, we always have the chance to practice exchange. And in our lives, there are endless opportunities to benefit others. If we are creative and don’t dismiss any chance as too small or insignificant, we can live like bodhisattvas.
– Dzigar Kongtrul
Genuine philosophical problems are always rooted outside philosophy and they die if these roots decay.
– Karl Popper
Blame it or praise it,
there is no denying
the wild horse in us.
– Virginia Woolf
We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!
– Thomas Merton
Members of labor unions, and un-organized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers – themselves desperately afraid of being downsized – are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for – someone willing to assure them that once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen and post modernist professors will no longer be calling the shots…
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion… All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
– Richard M. Rorty (1931-2007)
The privilege of possessing the earth entails the responsibility of passing it on, the better for our use, not only to immediate posterity, but to the Unknown Future.
– Aldo Leopold
If it’s reality you want, I suggest you look out the window.
– Peter Stamm
We actually contain a built-in ability to rise above restriction, incapacity, or limitation and, as a result of this ability, possess a vital adaptive spirit that we have not yet fully accessed. While this ability can lead us to transcendence, paradoxically it can lead also to violence; our longing for transcendence arises from our intuitive sensing of this adaptive potential and our violence arises from our failure to develop it.
– Joseph Chilton Pearce
The two most salient facts of our reality are ecological collapse and income inequality, and the response by every person with authority is a chaotic swing among denial (“it isn’t real”), defeatism (“it can’t be helped”), and sneering rationalization (“only the unworthy suffer”).
– Gerry Canavan
Something I learned from writing about George Orwell is that authoritarians see truth, fact, history, science as rival powers. They want the only source of information of truth to be themselves, which is why they have to dismantle the deeply democratic nature of fact, truth, history, and science. And so that’s part of what’s going on.
But hope for me has never been optimism. Optimism is “everything will be fine,” which invites people to kick back and wait for “fine” to arrive of its own accord.
Hope for me is always that there are possibilities. And we have a responsibility to try to realize them, and to not realize the worst possibilities. The future is being made in the present. So hope for me is not about prophesying a future that everything will be fine. It’s reminding people that we’ve changed the world before, and that we can again: we know how it works. And in a crisis like this, we better get on with it.
– Rebecca Solnit in an interview with Rachel Maddow
There is a limited elite that understands the secrets of their own techniques, but not necessarily of all techniques. These men are close to the seat of modern governmental power. The state is no longer founded on the ‘average citizen’, but on the ability and knowledge of this elite. The average man is altogether unable to penetrate technical secrets or governmental organization and consequently can exert no influence at all on the state.
– Jacques Ellul
Representative government is artifice, a political myth, designed to conceal from the masses the dominance of a self-selected, self-perpetuating, and self-serving traditional ruling class.
– Giuseppe Prezzolini
To intrust power to the very rich is to court widespread ruin and starvation.
– Bertrand Russell
[W]e have large amounts of unpaid karmic debt, or ‘lenchak’ in Tibetan. In our past lives, and even in the present one, we have harmed countless beings, knowingly and unknowingly. Each harmful action sows a seed in our mind stream. Later – perhaps many lifetimes later – this seed ripens into some form of pain for us when the appropriate conditions come together.
We may think, ‘Why is this person harming me as opposed to harming someone else?’ The reason is that we have inflicted pain on that being in the past. This is the only explanation that could account for why we are now the ‘victim,’ whether or not we can remember what we did. Most likely, we have gone back and forth with each other, alternating as victim and aggressor, over many lifetimes. We are equal in this: both parties are equally at fault, equally vulnerable, and equally ignorant. By acknowledging our part in this drama, we can release ourselves from the need to react with a new round of aggression. This is the only way the mutually harmful cycle will ever come to an end.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, Peaceful Heart
There is no such thing as an experienced meditator. Every breath must be as if it is the first, every step a fresh event. A beginner’s mind leads to a sense of gratitude for everything, whether or not the desires of my ego have been granted or life is going smoothly. A grateful heart for the rushing currents as well as for the still pools puts the ego in its place. This attitude that grows out of increased awareness does not come easily in the face of difficulties, but it is worth cultivating over a lifetime.
– Patricia Hart Clifford
DARK SO DEEP
If deepest grief is hell,
When the animal self
Wants to lie down
In the dark and die also. . .
If deepest grief is hell,
Then the world returning
(Not soon, not easily)
Must be heaven.
The joke you laughed at
Must be heaven
Or the funny thing
The cat did
At its food dish.
Whatever
Guides you back
To the world.
That dark so deep
The tiniest light
Will do.
– Gregory Orr
For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds.
– Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey
People think you’re only supposed to heal good people, but actually you’re supposed to heal everyone. There are no sides in the healing. […] No one’s excluded. It’s a very hard place for people to go because everybody’s on a side. But things have to heal on both sides for anything to happen, really.
– Alice Notley
[…] that peculiar loneliness that comes from knowing and seeing a lot that you can’t do much about.
– John le Carré
If this tree crown didn’t exist, we wouldn’t sit here and talk about God; if the wood didn’t exist, we would never have met […].
– Umberto Eco
[There is a] need for a philosophy that will… set Reason itself in harmony with nature, not by having Reason renounce itself or become an insipid imitator of nature, but by Reason recasting itself into nature out of its own inner strength.”
– Hegel
The person looking for ‘me’ (a fixed identity) is also the same person looking for (a vapory word) ‘God.’ This split search can only be folded into one process of working on something—whether it is writing, digging, planting, painting, teaching—with a wholeheartedness that qualifies as complete attention.In such a state, you find yourself depending on chance or grace…. Your work is practical, but your relationship to it is illogical in the range of its possible errors and failures. You align yourself with something behind and ahead and above you.
People who are destabilized by historical forces are more intelligent than the secure ones who have got the formulas in place. The safety of received tastes and opinions, confirmed in furniture and inherited artworks, stops the true brain, the brain of the seeking blind. When people are uprooted and insecure, their tables are alive with the conversation of prophets—philosophy, music, literature, God. But when the people are safe, the repetition of a formula goes around and around.
– Fanny Howe
Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many painful ways deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world
– Salman Rushdie
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, and germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!
[ FOOL: O nuncle, court holy-water in a dry house is better than this rain-water out o’ door. Good nuncle, in, and ask thy daughters’ blessing: here’s a night pities neither wise man nor fool. ]
Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! Spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children,
You owe me no subscription: then let fall
Your horrible pleasure: here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man:
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That have with two pernicious daughters join’d
Your high engender’d battles ‘gainst a head
So old and white as this. O! O! ‘tis foul!
– William Shakespeare, King Lear
I don’t think anybody ever knows what another person means when they speak, frankly. It’s more than translation, it’s just throwing yourself into the dark. Language is so very, very personal, private. Weird. I guess you could think of it as translation, that seems like a kind of euphemistic metaphor. It’s probably a lot more hopeless than that. But the effort of speaking as a human is the effort to get past that hopelessness with every sentence.
– Anne Carson
Woolf: “Stand at the window and let your rhythmical sense open and shut, boldly and freely until one thing melts into another, until the taxis are dancing with the daffodils, until a whole has been made from all the separate fragments.”
– Break Every Rule, Carole Maso
We say: ‘I enjoy nature’, and what is it in nature that we enjoy? It is its music. Something in us has been touched by the rhythmic movement, by the perfect harmony which is so seldom found in this artificial life of ours. It lifts one up and makes one feel that it is this which is the real temple, the true religion. One moment standing in the midst of nature with open heart is a whole lifetime, if one is in tune with nature.
– Hazrat Inayat Khan
Like the terrestrial crust of the earth / which is proportionately ten times thinner than an eggshell, the skin of the soul / is a miracle of mutual pressures.
– Anne Carson
All men, at one time or another, have fallen in love with the veiled Isis whom they call Truth. With most, this has been a passing passion: they have early seen its hopelessness and turned to more practical things. But others remain all their lives the devout lovers of reality: though the manner of their love, the vision which they make to themselves of the beloved object varies enormously. Some see Truth as Dante saw Beatrice: an adorable yet intangible figure, found in this world yet revealing the next. To others she seems rather an evil but an irresistible enchantress: enticing, demanding payment and betraying her lover at the last.
Some have seen her in a test tube, and some in a poet’s dream: some before the altar, others in the slime. The extreme pragmatists have even sought her in the kitchen; declaring that she may best be recognized by her utility. Last stage of all, the philosophic skeptic, has comforted an unsuccessful courtship by assuring himself that his mistress is not really there.
– Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism
If her past were your past, her pain your pain, her level of consciousness your level of consciousness, you would think and act exactly as she does. With this realization comes forgiveness, compassion and peace.
– Eckart Tolle
That which secures life from exhaustion lies in the unseen world, deep at the roots of things.
– Rudolf Steiner
Don’t Worry
by Anna Kamienska
Translated by Grażyna Drabik & David Curzon
Don’t worry there’ll still be a lot of suffering
For now you have the right to cling to the sleeve
of someone’s blunt friendship
To be happy is a duty which you neglect
A careless user of time you send days like geese to the meadow
Don’t worry you’ll die many times
Until you learn at the very end to love life
There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged. It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey laws which are constant. It has no rules. Only, in the long years which bring women to the middle of life, a sense of balance develops…when she is beginning to hate her used body, she suddenly finds that she can do it. She can go on living…
– T.H. White
Touching hands are not like pharmaceuticals or scalpels. They are like flashlights in a darkened room. The medicine they administer is self-awareness. And for many of our painful conditions, this is the aid that is most urgently needed.
– Deane Juhan
It is not time or opportunity
that is to determine intimacy;
it is disposition alone. Seven
years would be insufficient to
make some people acquainted
with each other, and seven
days are more than enough
for others.
– Jane Austen
It stung God. They say his spinal cord ran straight out of the sun.
– Anne Carson
Slowly I dance out of the burning house of my head.
– Mark Strand
To all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle — may they never give me peace.
– Patricia Highsmith
What no one ever talks about
is how dangerous hope can be.
Call it forgiveness
with teeth.
– Clementine von Radics
People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Be helpless, dumbfounded,
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace
to gather us up.
So let us rather not be sure of anything…
Then miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,
We shall be saying finally,
With tremendous eloquence,
Lead us.
When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
We shall be a mighty kindness.
– Rumi
Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me.
Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.
– Anne Carson
I believe in pink
— after Audrey Hepburn
Pink, as in protest. Pink like a pussy
hat, circa 2017. Pink blows the whistle.
Pink lights a candle. Writes poetry. Says
their names. Remembers Breonna’s soft
heart and Gianna’s unicorn and Liam’s
fever-bitten, five-year-old cheeks. Pink
as ballet slippers as a form of resistance.
Pink as Midwestern marrow. The kind
that doesn’t shy away from ice and bitter
cold. Pink as a fetal pig. Pink as newborn
skin, freshly thrust from the womb. Pink
as a lung. A tongue. A scream. Pink puts
pressure on the wound. Wants to know
What did you do?
Pink as a Minnesota sunrise. Pink as snow
on pavement and the site of an early grave.
Pink stands at the front lines, armed with
a smart phone and a tattoo that reads
Love thy neighbor. Pink as the eye
of the goddamn storm. Burns sharp as
the light of a northern star. As a woman
in a pink coat who refuses to look away.
– cora finch
How do you know love is gone? If you said that you would be there at seven and you get there by nine, and he or she has not called the police yet – it’s gone.
– Marlene Dietrich
If there is a secret to writing, I haven’t found it yet. All I know is you need to sit down, clear your mind, and hang in there.
– Mary McGrory
There is an ocean where all of our little
nodes of life work through
the language of love.
The price of admission is daring to feel
the truth of being real.
– George Gorman
Because a song is a mountain put into
Words and landscape is the feeling that
Enters something so big in the harmony
We are always in danger of blowing up
With passion.
– Victor Hernández Cruz
It seems like a city built on precipices, a perilous city. Great roads rush down hill like rivers in spate. Great buildings rush up like rockets.
– G.K. Chesterton
The day is winter bright. I blink against it.
Each time the sun glints in my eyes,
each time I close my lids & let them go
orange & freckled with light.
– Maggie Smith
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley
You know, Jews, when they drop a prayer book are supposed to kiss it. This is what they teach you when you’re very little. It seemed entirely reasonable to me that you would do that. When I was a child I would kiss any book I dropped. When I was a very little child, after I’d read a book I really liked, I’d kiss it. Love is really the word. I think Children’s books are a human emotional experience rather than an intellectual one. You have a human relationship with them. Children have emotional relationships with inanimate objects, which it would be wise to carry on into adulthood. The way a child makes a person out of a doll, which I never did, I made people out of books.
– Fran Leibowitz
I converse with the man who is always with me
—he who speaks alone hopes to speak to God one day—;
my soliloquy is a conversation with that good friend
who taught me the secret of philanthropy.
– Antonio Machado
You get used to the dark,
you realize the ghosts
are all friendly…
– Jack Kerouac
Suffering is a universal experience. All living beings are subject to ignorance, karma, and pain. Instead of turning away from this or seeing it as useless, tormenting, or destructive, we can use this pain to develop compassion.
Of course, if we felt only ‘our’ pain and not the pain of others, we would be self-absorbed. If we saw only ‘their’ pain without recognizing our own, our compassion would remain abstract. And if we saw both our own and others’ pain without understanding that suffering is the nature of samsara, we might simply conclude: Life is suffering and the best we can do is help each other get through it. But there is no vision in this approach. Instead, seeing that the nature of samsara is suffering, we must look to the cause.
– Dzigar Kongtrul
Listening to talks about the dharma, or the teachings of Buddha, or practicing meditation is nothing other than studying ourselves. Whether we’re eating or working or meditating or listening or talking, the reason that we’re here in this world at all is to study ourselves. In fact, it has been said that studying ourselves provides all the books we need.
– Pema Chödrön
Dharma talks aren’t the truth. The true Dharma exists in the mind of the students as seeds and the Dharma talks are just like a little cloud that releases rain and causes the seeds in the mind of the practitioners to sprout and manifest.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Like a piece of ice on a hot stove,
the poem must ride on its own melting.
– Robert Frost
I tell people, especially if I’m giving a reading, it’s okay to let the words wash over them, the way one experiences abstract art.
– Carl Phillips
Yoga is a way of moving into stillness in order to experience the truth of who you are.
– Erich Schiffmann
When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you’ve got two new people.
– John Steinbeck
Say what you will about the sweet miracle
of unquestioning faith.
I consider the capacity for it terrifying.
– Kurt Vonnegut
We must recognize that ethics requires us to risk
ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness,
when what forms us diverges from what lies before us,
when our willingness to become undone
in relation to others constitute our chance
of becoming human.
To be undone by another is a primary necessity,
an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance—
to be addressed, claimed,
bound to what is not me,
but also to be moved,
to be prompted to act,
to address myself elsewhere,
and so to vacate the self-sufficient ‘I’
as a kind of possession.
If we speak and try to give an account
from this place, we will not be irresponsible,
or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven.
– Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself
Two years I’ve lived as if in a cul-de-sac,
a flat sun bathing me in cold blue glare,
my griefs orbiting like silt-faced moons.
– Rachael Mead
Perhaps my only real
expertise, my only talent,
is to endure beyond the
endurable.
– Jeff VanderMeer
I feel suddenly very untalented
as I look at my slump of work
in art & writing. Am I destined
to deteriorate for the rest of my life?
– Sylvia Plath
It is much more difficult to explain to yourself what you are than what you are not.
– Mikhail Iossel
And we will lie down together
and we will rise up together
and we will raise the roof together
and we will bring all the rivers
to the door of this great house
– Rebecca Cook
In keeping your awareness inside your body, don’t try to imprison it there. In other words, don’t try to force the mind into a trance, don’t try to force the breath, or hold it to the point where you feel uncomfortable or confined. You have to let the mind have its freedom. Simply keep watch over it to make sure that it stays separate from its thoughts. If you try to force the breath and pin the mind down, your body is going to feel restricted, and you won’t feel at ease in your work. You’ll start hurting here and aching there, and your legs may fall asleep. So just let the mind be its natural self, keeping watch to make sure that it doesn’t slip out after external thoughts.
The mind sheds light in all directions. The breath is radiant, the mind fully radiant, due to the focusing of mindfulness.
The focus is strong; the light, aglow… The mind has power and authority. All four of the frames of reference are gathered into one. There is no sense that, “That’s the body… That’s a feeling… That’s the mind… That’s a mental quality.” There’s no sense that they’re four. This is thus called the great frame of reference, because none of the four are in any way separate.
– Ajahn Lee
If adventures will not befall a
young lady in her own village, she must seek
them abroad.
– Jane Austen
Suffering doesn’t
make my writing
better; it makes it
harder to produce
at all.
– Quinn Que
what is a gentle way
to imagine this reckoning?
We who speak
the language of home
know wildly what we must do.
There is no flowering
into the hereafter
if suddenly we perish
with a calmness. Listen.
– EL WILLIAMS III
Ode to Psyche
by John Keats
O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung
By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear,
And pardon that thy secrets should be sung
Even into thine own soft-conched ear:
Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see
The winged Psyche with awaken’d eyes?
I wander’d in a forest thoughtlessly,
And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise,
Saw two fair creatures, couched side by side
In deepest grass, beneath the whisp’ring roof
Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran
A brooklet, scarce espied:
Mid hush’d, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,
Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian,
They lay calm-breathing, on the bedded grass;
Their arms embraced, and their pinions too;
Their lips touch’d not, but had not bade adieu,
As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber,
And ready still past kisses to outnumber
At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love:
The winged boy I knew;
But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove?
His Psyche true!
O latest born and loveliest vision far
Of all Olympus’ faded hierarchy!
Fairer than Phoebe’s sapphire-region’d star,
Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky;
Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none,
Nor altar heap’d with flowers;
Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan
Upon the midnight hours;
No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet
From chain-swung censer teeming;
No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat
Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming.
O brightest! though too late for antique vows,
Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,
When holy were the haunted forest boughs,
Holy the air, the water, and the fire;
Yet even in these days so far retir’d
From happy pieties, thy lucent fans,
Fluttering among the faint Olympians,
I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir’d.
So let me be thy choir, and make a moan
Upon the midnight hours;
Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet
From swinged censer teeming;
Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat
Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming.
Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,
Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:
Far, far around shall those dark-cluster’d trees
Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep;
And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,
The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull’d to sleep;
And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain,
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign,
Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same:
And there shall be for thee all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
To let the warm Love in!
Fascism is being afraid. Fascism is fear bossing you. Fascism is worse than all these things, and fascism is closer to you than I can make you see. I’m trying to wake you up to tell you that you’re sleeping with something ten times more dangerous than a poison-fang snake in your bed.
– Woody Guthrie
The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.
– Huey P. Newton
The tragedy in the lives of most of us is that we go through life walking down a high-walled lane with people of our own kind, the same economic situation, the same national background and education and religious outlook. And beyond those walls, all humanity lies, unknown and unseen, and untouched by our restricted and impoverished lives.
– Florence Luscomb
You have to write it until it shines.
Until it’s so brilliant that no agent,
no publisher, no reader ever wants
to put it down.
– Dionne Brand
If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen.
– John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes.
– Antisthenes
Film lovers are sick people.
– François Truffaut
Sooner or later people believe writers rather than the government.
– Gabriel García Márquez
Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good.
– Robert Greene
May what is written resound in the stillness, making silence resound at length, before returning to the motionless peace where the enigma still wakes.
– Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster
As social beings we live with our eyes upon our reflection, but have no assurance of the tranquillity of the waters in which we see it.
– Charles Horton Cooley
I believe that the meaning of life lies in elevating our spiritual level in the time we’re given to live. Even if it’s just one iota compared to when we were born, our life won’t have been lived in vain.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
Intellect and love are made of two different materials. Intellect ties people in knots and risks nothing, but love dissolves all tangles and risks everything. Intellect takes you to the door but love takes you inside the house.
– Rumi
Effortless doesn’t mean no effort; effortless means just enough effort to be vivid, to be present, to be here, to be now. To be bright…
My teacher used to call this “effortless effort.” We each need to find out for ourselves what this means…
Too much effort and we get too tight; too little effort and we get dreamy… Somewhere in the middle is a state of vividness and clarity and inner brightness…
– Adyashanti
The goal isn’t to be happy with my voice. What I want is simply to have one.
– Jhumpa Lahiri
My child reminds me there were once whales here in this expanse of sand.
– Matthew Shenoda
Jung said you can cure a psychotic patient if you can make him creative. In other words, if what is destroying him from within can be brought forth in writing or painting or some other form, then he can be cured. What we try to do is to help people bring forth the Self.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
This truly is the sky over things past.
– Rilke
The danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can’t stop.
– Philip Roth
The passing from the ‘black Light,’ from the ‘luminous Night’ to the brilliance of the emerald vision will be a sign … of the completed growth of the subtle organism, the ‘resurrection body’ hidden in the visible physical body.
– Henry Corbin
tea speaks softly
yet insists
on being felt
– @BashoSociety
This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief.
– Rumi
The recognition of our therapeutic limitations reinforces our determination to change other social factors so that men and women shall no longer be forced into hopeless situations.
– Sigmund Freud
Reality is not static—its properties are in constant flux, so perhaps we are as much in the world as we can ever be, and that’s the problem.
– Renee Gladman
At sixteen, I memorized Keats’s odes and wrote them out, to see how it felt to write incontestably great poetry. … His language—it’s right at the edge of the cliff.
– Robert Glück
All Joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still ‘about to be.’
– C.S. Lewis
This is what happens when you write books. There’s not just something that drives you to find out everything—something begins putting everything in your path. There is suddenly no such thing as a back road that doesn’t lead headlong into your obsession.
– Philip Roth
hiding under quilts
even dreams shiver
a cold night pressing close
– Basho
Angel,
Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear
The luminous melody of proper sound.
– Wallace Stevens
The hidden life of love, in its most inward depths, is unfathomable, and still has a boundless relationship with the whole of existence.
– Søren Kierkegaard
Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.
– W. B. Yeats
The real meaning of initiation is that this visible world we live in is a symbol and a shadow, that this life we know through the senses is a death and a sleep, or, in other words, that what we see is an illusion. Initiation is the dispelling.
– Fernando Pessoa
What can we know? What are we all? Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, with the aspirations of angels and the instincts of beasts.
– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you.
You must travel it by yourself.
It is not far. It is within reach.
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know.
Perhaps it is everywhere – on water and land.
– Walt Whitman
Either you think – or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
All attempts to find a way out of the plight of today’s world are fruitless unless we redirect our consciousness, in repentance, to the Creator of all: without this, no exit will be illumined, and we shall seek it in vain.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
How do you make people see that everyone’s story is now a part of everyone else’s story? It’s one thing to say it, but how can you make a reader feel that is their lived experience?
– Salman Rushdie
The price an artist pays for doing what he wants is that he has to do it.
– William S. Burroughs
old tides recede
when inner gravity changes
– @BashoSociety
Good editors are really the third eye. Cool. Dispassionate. They don’t love you or your work.
– Toni Morrison
Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached.
– Simone Weil
The Dharmas,
With no exceptions,
Do not hold to any I or self.
We are all inseparable.
Everyone is equal.
This has nothing to do with our understandings and analyses.
– Tantra on Bodhicitta Meditation
Psychoanalysis has long insisted that psychic change depends not simply on insight, but on relationship—specifically, on the presence of an other who can be affected.
– Karyne E. Messina
God has infinite attention to spare for each one of us. You are as much alone with him as if you were the only being he had ever created.
– C.S. Lewis
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end with doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
– Francis Bacon
Freeing oneself from words is liberation.
– Bodhidharma
We entered alone and we left alone. And most of us lived lonely and frightened and incomplete lives.
– Charles Bukowski
Spirituality is nothing but caring and sharing; offering oneself in service.
– Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
I wrote silences, nights, I noted down the inexpressible. I fixed dizzy spells.
– Arthur Rimbaud
In the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.
– Hermann Hesse
An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.
– Evelyn Waugh
When we engage the present, we engage the whole of our lives. When we plunge into the world, we accept the whole of what is.
– Jack Petranker
Be aware of the ‘I’ so intensely that no other thought can arise. If you are truly watchful, each thought will dissolve at the moment that it appears.
– Annamalai Swami
If the primary purpose of school was education, the Internet should obsolete it.
– @naval
Unless I discover the alchemical trick of turning this muck into gold, I am lost.
– Nietzsche
You may eventually forgive and befriend someone who harmed you, never someone who bored you.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Be courageous & discipline yourself. Work. Keep digging your well. Don’t think about getting off from work. Submit to a daily practice. Your loyalty to that is a ring on the door. Keep knocking, and the joy inside will eventually open a window & look out to see who’s there.
– Rumi
There are a great many poems I love and admire written by poets I personally dislike.
– Bernard T. Joy
Privacy is essential for maintaining a free and independent mind.
– Carl Sagan
The challenges of living life on earth constantly demand heroic behavior of us, the [Beowulf] poet seems to say, even if this means no more than getting up early in the morning to feed the pigs, even if it means no less than going out to fight a fiery dragon.
– Dick Ringler
some apologies
arrive after the tide
has already turned inward
– @BashoSociety
as the moon thins
something quietly releases
without announcement
– @BashoSociety
Love is a travel. All travelers, whether they want or not, are changed. No one can travel into love and remain the same.
– Shams Tabrizi
You don’t ‘observe’ the Earth orbiting the Sun. You infer it from evidence. Evolution works the same way.
– Richard Dawkins
The notion of symptom, as I indicated on several occasions, and it is very easy to locate by reading the one who is responsible for it, namely, Marx.
– Jacques Lacan
If there was a moment when Freud was revolutionary, it was in the way that he highlighted a function that Marx also brought out – it’s even the only element that they had in common: that of considering a certain number of facts as symptoms.
– Jacques Lacan
Thelonious Monk apparently once left the stage in a morose mood. He was very dissatisfied with the music he had just played. On being asked why this was so he replied that he had made all the wrong mistakes.
– Greil Marcus
So you have swept me back I who could have walked with the live souls above the earth, I who could have slept among the live flowers at last.
– H.D.
HORATIO.
O day and night, but this is wondrous strange.
HAMLET.
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
– William Shakespeare
We spend the first year of a child’s life teaching it to walk and talk and the rest of its life to shut up and sit down. There’s something wrong there.
– Neil deGrasse Tyson
If concentration is made with the brain, hot sensations and even headache ensue. Concentration has to be made in the heart, which is cool and refreshing. Relax, and your meditation will be easy.
– Ramana Maharshi
Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.
– Rebecca Solnit
That one is in despair is not a rarity; no, it is rare, very rare, that one is.. not in despair.
– Søren Kierkegaard
A revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is the age of advertisement and publicity. Nothing ever happens but there is immediate publicity everywhere.
– Kierkegaard
It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence.
– Voltaire
The big change is the proximity to death. I am a tidy kind of guy. I like to tie up the strings if I can. If I can’t, that’s OK. But my natural thrust is to finish things that I’ve begun. i don’t think I’ll be able to finish those songs. Maybe, who knows? And maybe I’ll get a second wind, I don’t know. But I don’t dare attach myself to a spiritual strategy. I don’t dare do that. I’ve got some work to do. Take care of business. I am ready to die. I hope it’s not too uncomfortable. That’s about it for me.
– Leonard Cohen
People think of compassion as, like, kindness. The image comes to mind of some nice New Age guy bending to something with a look on his face like he’s about to cry. And I don’t think that’s it. I think of it more as a quality of openness that comes with being in a state of unusual attentiveness.
– George Saunders
Who told you that there is no true, faithful, eternal love in this world! May the liar’s vile tongue be cut out!
– Mikhail Bulgakov
without any assistance or guidance from you
i have loved you assiduously for 8 months 2 wks & a day
i have been stood up four times
i’ve left 7 packages on yr doorstep
forty poems 2 plants & 3 handmade notecards i left
town so i cd send to you have been no help to me
on my job
you call at 3:00 in the mornin on weekdays
so i cd drive 27 ½ miles cross the bay before i go to work
charmin charmin
but you are of no assistance
i want you to know
this waz an experiment
to see how selfish i cd be
if i wd really carry on to snare a possible lover
if i waz capable of debasin my self for the love of another
if i cd stand not being wanted
when i wanted to be wanted
& i cannot
so
with no further assistance & no guidance from you
i am endin this affair
this note is attached to a plant
i’ve been waterin since the day i met you
you may water it
yr damn self
– ntozake shange
When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.
– Louise Erdrich
All of us are prisoners of a rigid conception of what is important and what is not, and so we fasten our anxious gaze on the important, while from a hiding place behind our backs the unimportant wages its guerrilla warfare, which will end in surreptitiously changing the world and pouncing on us by surprise.
– Milan Kundera
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
Two passing temporarinesses developed feelings for one another. Two puffs of smoke became mutually fond.
– George Saunders
The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.
– Rebecca Solnit
Whoever wants to achieve something great must not seek to satisfy or please anyone but himself in his work: as soon as he fishes for the approval of others, it will not be anything great.
– Nietzsche
Always remember that the worst among us will always hate the finest. The Obamas are wonderful people–loving, good, educated, intelligent and classy. So, don’t be surprised when the very worst among us attacks the very best.
– Michael Branda
The Town Who Banned Unpleasant Pie Talk
A story by Krikmöklet Egelanaard
CRAM BROOK PUBLISHING
This story is dedicated to the late Michael Parenti. Bless you forever for your lifelong cri de coeur, nostro amico.
In the days after monarchies fell, town criers, that is, people previously employed by the king or queen, who stood in prominent locations and yelled Royal news, announcements, and decrees so that all townspeople could hear, became either self-appointed, paid for with tax-payer revenues, or funded by either corporate or private interests. The townspeople of Little Cowrie, being out of the way and having little to boast of, were endowed with the self-appointed variety.
Their benevolent crier was not quite old, but not wholly young. He ate with a knife in one hand and a fork in the other, and attended church on Sundays. On that day his hair was washed and combed, and he shouted no news again until Monday.
That crier had a name and it was Tom. When he came to the end of his announcements, Tom liked to bellow out rhymes. Because he loved the s, p, and b sounds, Tom returned to his favorite nursery rhyme day after day, crying little tittles of it until he had the whole thing memorized.
The verses were mysterious: a song that cost sixpence plus a pocket of rye, about a grim baker who baked blackbirds into a pie for a wealthy king who needed pies of such creative magnitude that they would surprise and delight the king and his luminaries, with a queen who ate only bread and honey in the parlor—either forced to, or by her own preference—and a poor maid who, while laboring at some washing, sadly lost her nose to one of those enraged blackbirds who may have had more than a few feathers singed. Despite the vast particulars of the story, no one knew precisely what it meant.
Tom grew more and more pleased with himself the more he cried. His voice boomed so large everyone could hear him, from the townspeople doing their shopping in the high street market, all the way down to the crews and passengers standing on the decks of the vessels docked where the road curved and dipped into the sea. For a while, the people seemed pleased with Tom’s orations. Those inside their apartments, offices, and public houses would step outside in Tom’s familiar lead-up to “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” and could be seen with big grins, clapping and mouthing the words along quietly.
Until one day someone grumbled. A stranger pulled into the parking lot, stepped into the Purple Peacock, and ordered a pint of pale ale. As he sat sipping, slumped slightly and staring through his pint, Tom’s voice rained down on that newcomer’s dry ears. And just like a patch of dry, cracked earth can’t hold a heavy rain, that stranger couldn’t take in dear Tom’s bright, bellowing lines without cracking his face into a twisted grimace.
When all the patrons returned to their tables after watching and listening to Tom, they instantly registered the displeasure on the newcomer’s face, and his tightened, pinned-up shoulders that looked as though if they’d had the ability to be lifted but an inch or two more, they’d have succeeded in sealing off the man’s ears.
“Is something troubling you, friend? You look to be in great discomfort?” Old Barley Biggs, the sign maker, asked the stranger.
“Discomfort and displeasure, sir, to be sure. Why, that upstart’s voice sends a frozen flow of sharp glass through my veins, and I regret terribly, for the first time ever in my life, that I cannot remove my own ears.”
“Do you mean to say that our crier, Tom, his bellowing has brittled your blood so? Oh, get over. He likes to hear himself riddle out the rhymes after he speaks his business.”
“You must be a strange folk here to call that fool “a man of business?” Do you really think that bloke possesses the solemnity needed to broadcast who’s been born and who’s died, and whose old Aunt Mary’s barn burned down, when he goes blabbing on about blackbird pies all ringy-dingy, jingle-jangle like a jarring jester? If you ask me, people don’t want to hear all that noise and weirdo blackbird babble.”
Well, Big Barley, as he was called, had never considered Tom and Tom’s crying in that light. Neither had Janey O’ Cullens, nor Harper Jug, nor Leslie Kessler, nor the publican, Rod Rodigan, who all stood there soaking up the stranger’s insights.
“I dare say,” interposed Barley, “Tom isn’t one of those professional criers who’s well-groomed in the trade. He may just not know how it’s supposed to be done. But a man, such as yourself could bring us up in standards. Why don’t you tell us what we should do?”
A few moments after this was said, Janey, Harper, and Leslie all agreed with nods of their heads in the affirmative. And Rod Rodigan brought out five clean glasses, poured out a thoughtful measure of cherry brandy, and they all raised a welcome to their valued new friend and his authoritative expertise.
It didn’t take long for the new views to spread. Townspeople, who had never once before considered Tom’s crying either a hardship or a nuisance, stopped stepping out when they heard Tom begin to bellow. Instead, they stayed indoors and made uncomfortable side-glances at one another. They were comforted when their new friend nodded in approval, and made an affirming fist over his heart, as if saying “Stay strong. We’ll get through this together.”
Soon, they had no compunction about expressing their critiques openly. Indeed, complaining about Tom became a frequent pastime for townspeople, and everyone seemed eventually to join in in relishing the vitriol.
“I guess any idiot thinks he can yell out, these days.” Chided Earnest Pickering, the ciderist.
“His voice is so grating. Will he ever shut up?” Barked Charlie Torpski, a bus driver.
“Baking blackbirds into a pie—it’s so cruel! He should be fined for inciting cruelty to animals!” Joni Monraker shouted through a bullhorn rallying an enthusiastic handful of picketers outside the courthouse.
“He makes me so uncomfortable. In a public space, can’t he just say nice things? Samantha Weller’s cat just had kittens. He could announce that instead of all this pie claptrap. He’s just so unsavory.” Helen Westbroom thoughtfully posed to all the attendees of the Little Cowrie Elementary PTA meeting.
Gunther Weistheimer, Little Cowrie’s pie monger, was perhaps the most impacted. Between Tom’s unappetizing poesy and the public outcry, Gunther’s pie sales had dropped to next to nothing, and with unpaid bills piling up to his flour-dusted elbows, he was seriously having to consider filing for bankruptcy. Despite his hardships, however, Gunther refrained from criticizing Tom, who was his sole pie-buying customer.
The economic impact of Tom’s crying wasn’t isolated to the pie monger. Steady declines in spending had become apparent everywhere, from the outdoor markets to the high street shops, to the restaurants that lined the pier, people just weren’t coming out to shop or dine. The only establishment that saw an increase in patronage and profits was the Purple Peacock. Rod Rodigan had hung a sign in the pub window that read The only SOUND-OASIS in Little Cowrie! So people flocked inside where they were sheltered from any outside noise by soundproof boards hung on all the walls and ceilings.
Since other businesses in town were flailing, business owners banded together and descended on Town Hall. It was the Town Council’s meeting night, and townspeople, too, flooded into the aisles and sat on the bench seats making such a clamor that no one noticed that Town Hall, too, was, and had always been, soundproofed to the public.
Besides the ten minutes devoted to talking about roadside weeding, the whole of the meeting addressed the issue of town crier. Should anyone be able to say what they want in a public area? Of course there were things one should never say, like “fire!” if there was no fire, or “I’m definitely going to put poisonous snakes in the Town Councilman’s bed tonight, mark my words!” It was against the law to say those things. But what about blackbirds in pies? What about having a voice that rubs some people the wrong way? Or even just not possessing the professional standards that, say, a Town appointed crier would? After all, Tom was a free-lancer and often cried without getting paid. How could he be subject to anything but his own standards?
But clearly, people didn’t like what Tom said or the way he said it. And what’s more is that it was hurting businesses. So, after hearing the testimonies of business owners and townspeople, the town council decided that community standards had to be set. A town crier must have a pleasant voice. He or she must treat births, deaths, and all other matters with appropriate solemnity and so should not mix in trivial rhymes. Matters of public crying of the crier’s discretion should be limited to positive, feel-good news like kittens and ice cream socials, and should never include any mention of cruel acts. And so, new words that absolutely could not be said were added to the list, which had, until then, been comprised only of “fire” and “poisonous snakes” or threatening words of that ilk. The new words were decried and written in the law books. They were as follows:
sing; song; sixpence; pocket; rye; four; twenty; blackbirds; baked; pie
Now that there were more words that could absolutely not be said without fear of punishment, the town council appointed a crier monitor to enforce community standards. And don’t you know it, that new man in town, the stranger that wandered into the Purple Peacock that fortuitous day, was unanimously decided to be the man for the job. The decision met with cheers and hurrahs from townspeople, and much sober handshaking and patting on backs by business owners. Everyone seemed to walk out of the hall happily, except for Gunther, the pie monger, who could no longer ask Tom to announce his pies. His pie shop was doomed. And where was Tom, anyway? Off somewhere practicing for the next day’s crying, no doubt.
Townspeople were filled with confidence that the new crier monitor would enforce the new laws, and that the town square, the uptown markets, the high street shops, all the way down to the docks would be safe spaces to walk freely. Tom was pleased to see so many people out and about that glorious morning that he laid right into “Sing a Song of Sixpence.” Before he finished the first two lines, Tom felt a tug at his left big toe and was hoisted into the air. As he hung there upside down with his crier frills flapping in the breeze and his bell clabber silenced by gravity, two strong men wheeled out a large steaming vat on a plywood trolley.
The vat was positioned directly below Tom. The steam from the boiling water fogged up Tom’s glasses and he could no longer see the gathering crowds. Then, he heard a loud, bellowing voice to rival his own.
The Crier Monitor, though his proclamation was addressed to Tom by name, was clearly spoken, with such a touch of panache they were unaccustomed to, and with perfect formality that was not distant or cold, but carried with it an authoritative air, that it was understood to be expressly for the sake of townspeople.
“Tom, by the power vested in me by the esteemed Town Council of Little Cowrie, in upholding public virtue for the good of the people, I hereby find you in violation of community standards having uttered words that absolutely never must be said without swift retribution of severe punishment!”
And the rope that held poor Tom up by his toe was cut, and Tom plopped into the boiling vat never to cry again.
That evening, the usual customers gathered at their favorite watering hole.
“I never liked that boy. So vulgar! I’m disgusted—I’m actually sickened that we listened to him for so long!” Said Janey O’Cullens to her compatriots who sat round the darts table at the Purple Peacock.
“Yeah. Good riddance,” said Harper Jug, with an involuntary shudder.
“I bet we’ll all sleep easy tonight.” Said Leslie Kessler, with a sigh of relief.
And a shout emanated from the publican, Rod Rodigan, that everyone’s next round was on the house!
For the next few days the Crier Monitor made all the town announcements until a suitable replacement could be found. Townspeople and visitors from ships from other places shopped on the high street and ate at the restaurants that lined the pier. Children played at the park, while their parents sat on benches and gossiped. Millers milled. Bakers baked. Samantha Weller’s cat’s kittens mewed, and Big Barley Biggs’ big dog barked. The sun rose and set, and the Earth rotated on its axis in space, dependably, like an old friend who knew exactly what to do.
Chloe Weller was Samantha Weller’s twelve-year-old daughter. Chloe was tall for her age, was athletic and strong, and had a voice that could fill an auditorium. She had asked her mom if she could, instead of taking jazz dance lessons, audition for town crier. Once it was discussed that Chloe could cry before and after school, once on Saturday mornings before soccer practice, and would have Sundays off, her mother agreed. And when Chloe auditioned she bellowed out her oyesses beautifully, and so impressed the crier monitor with a pronouncement of the grande opening of Little Cowrie’s premier chestnut pudding shoppe, so positively brimming with positivity, that he hired her on the spot.
The Town Council, business owners, and townspeople all were over the moon having Chloe as their new crier. She looked neat, always smiled, and had such a pleasing and bright tone that everyone looked forward to her twice daily announcements—except for once on Saturdays and not again until Mondays—that they’d all run to gather outside along the sidewalks at every first “Oyez!”
Gunther Weistheimer had shuttered his pie shop after Tom’s execution. He’d no reason to stay open since his one repeat customer would return no more. So Gunther packed a small suitcase with only the necessary toiletries, a clean pair of pajamas, and a few changes of clothes, and went to visit his sister, Gilda, in New West Haver.
Chloe’s father was Little Cowrie’s only physician. He was also somewhat of an herbalist and grew many of his own medicinals that he apothecated into remedies. Doctor Weller kept Chloe’s vocal chords healthy with his homemade herbal sprays of horehound root and wild cherry bark extracted in grain alcohol and vegetable glycerin, and sent her with thermoses of slippery elm and chamomile tea to hydrate and sooth her sonorous, hardworking voice.
Most of Chloe’s cries were for daily lunch specials at the newly opened Sweet and Savory Chestnut, where people would wait in lines out the door to experience the various chestnut puddings and specialty coffees on offer. But the town would also pay her for announcing upcoming public meetings, reminders about local ordinances, such as “remember to license your dogs by next Monday,” or “remember all trash must be deposited in a receptacle or you risk a $300 fine,” and reminders about elections. The Classic Motorcycle Collectors Club hired her to remind townspeople of the upcoming classic motorcycles show at Chiffen Park. Because she was so young, too young to legally work, Chloe earned educational credits for her work as crier, and the payments she received from the town, businesses, organizations, and individuals, were put into a trust that she could use only for education expenses when she turned eighteen.
One Saturday morning, as Chloe finished her announcements, she noticed a couple staggering to their car after leaving the Sweet and Savory Chestnut, where they, presumably, had eaten breakfast. A moment later, another couple staggered out toward their car. But before they got there, they both collapsed on the pavement. The man of the first couple stood leaning against his driver’s side door, fumbling with his keys, then collapsed too. His female companion, who had also been leaning herself against the car, emitted a small cry, then down she went.
At that moment, a man with a small suitcase got off the bus at the stop down the street behind her, and Chloe ran after him.
“Stop, stop!” She cried. Her voice bellowed, and the man stopped. “Please call 9-1-1! Do you have a phone?”
The man pulled out his phone, dialed the numbers, and handed it to the panting girl dressed in crier’s livery. Not five minutes later, two ambulances arrived, and both couples were rushed to Little Cowrie Medical Center where they all recovered.
After soccer practice, Chloe went home exhausted after such an eventful morning. The mother cat and kittens, who had grown big and plump, sat licking their paws and slowly blinking in the sun on the front lawn. But once she went inside, Chloe found her mother frazzled answering the house phone and her father’s cell phone, sometimes simultaneously. Her father, her mother said to Chloe with her hand over the house phone receiver, was in his office (that adjoined their house) on the phone with the hospital.
Apparently, the phones had been ringing all morning and afternoon—emergency calls for Doctor Weller with complaints of stomach upset, dizziness, fainting spells, and loss of motor function. Doctor Weller ordered ambulances for those callers who had no one unaffected by the mysterious illness to drive them to the hospital. Not knowing the cause for their suffering, the doctor couldn’t diagnose nor prescribe any remedy, so he urged them to the hospital where they would at least receive fluids and testing. It was only that evening, when the phones stopped ringing, that Chloe was able to tell her father about the four staggering patrons outside the Sweet and Savory Chestnut.
All day Sunday, the Wellers waited for news. A few calls from those who were Doctor Weller’s regular patients, thanked him for his urgent help with getting to the hospital. Everyone said the same thing: the hospital ran tests, but found nothing conclusive—it could have been something they ate, or else a new strain of flu—and after being hydrated, they were sent home for bed rest and broth.
Monday morning, Chloe dressed in her red and gold crier’s livery with frilly jabot flowing from her neck, and rode her bike to the high street. Her leather baldrick holstered her bell, and the side pouch of her backpack held her only announcement for the day:
Today’s lunch specials at the Sweet and Savory Chestnut are maple-braised mandarin orange and sautéed leek and smoked trout chestnut puddings; enjoy half-priced lattés to chase the Monday blues away.
She pulled her bell from the baldrick and gave it a good clappering. She unfurled her scroll. “Oyez, oyez, oyez!” She cried. Then her voice froze. She was unable to cry out the words before her. She swallowed and opened her mouth wide. Nothing but air in the form of a sigh came forth. Chloe looked up and saw, standing across the street watching her, was the man with the suitcase who had lent her his phone. He gave her, what seemed to be, an encouraging smile. But someone was behind her at the top of the concrete steps—she heard his boot scuffing in place, like he was snuffing out a number of miscreant insects.
Without turning to see who it was, Chloe re-rolled and pocketed her scroll. And with a cry that felt like the only true cry she’d ever done, Chloe bellowed out her bold and billowing cri de coeur. Like an elephant mother’s bombardic blow, or the rolling of a storm cloud filled with reverberating thunder, Chloe pronounced:
“On Saturday morning, I saw four people leaving the Sweet and Savory Chestnut collapse with illness! They were rushed to the hospital where they were treated with fluids! All day long Doctor Weller’s phones rang with emergency calls from people experiencing the same symptoms as the four I saw collapse! The hospital could not determine the cause of illness, but my father said the patients he spoke with had all eaten baked chestnut puddings! I repeat, there may be a correlation between the sudden illness afflicting dozens this weekend, and the baked chestnut puddings!”
Huge crowds had formed. Early shoppers, office workers, and civil servants lined the sidewalks, many rubbing their stomachs and nodding their heads in commiseration with their fellow sufferers. Chloe felt a presence close behind her. She saw, in her peripheral vision, two strong men pushing a steaming vat on a plywood trolley. She felt a tug at her left big toe, and found herself hanging upside down in the air from a portable scaffold. Her jabot frills floated in the breeze.
A sudden shout rang out from across the street. It was Gunther Weistheimer, the old pie monger—the man with the suitcase and the warm smile. “She’s just a child!” He shrieked. “Untie her! Let her go!”
An unbearable moment of silence passed. Then a wave of shrieks from the crowds crashed over Chloe and the Crier Monitor, the two strong men, and the steaming cauldron. Their shrieks reached the open windows above the draperies shop, where the owner, Mrs. Rod Rodigan was having her blood pressure measured by Doctor Weller after experiencing prolonged dizziness from her sudden illness over the weekend.
The wave of shrieks flowed into a unified chant. “Untie the child! Untie the child!” Doctor Weller, bent out the window, scanned the scene. His eyes bulged and his heart pulsated dreadfully at the sight of his daughter in her red and gold livery lethally dangling over the boiling vat. “Stop! Stop, I beg you!”
Doctor Weller flew down the flight of stairs and out into the high street, pushing his way through the alert crowds. “Step aside!” Many voices shouted. “Let the man through!” The wave parted like the Red Sea, and Doctor Weller stood before the Crier Monitor and his own dangling daughter.
“Untie Chloe, now!”
“Your daughter has violated community standards by using forbidden speech in a public space. She has forfeited her position as crier, and, by the power vested in me by the Town of Little Cowrie, she will undergo swift punishment befitting her crime.”
Doctor Weller’s arm flew up to meet the Monitor’s, blocking the man’s ability to cut the rope. The Doc struggled to subdue the man’s powerful resistance. Chloe’s father feared his strength would be overcome.
“Isn’t actually harming someone a worse crime than saying some unpleasant things?!” The doctor grunted as he forced all his weight against the Monitor’s. “Aren’t you breaking the law right now, violating my daughter’s sovereignty as a living being free to express herself in this world?! I don’t care what you say is an unlawful word, you sir, are a deviant, murderous felon!”
At these words, a faint cry arose from across the street. “The Monitor’s the real criminal! He already killed Tom! He bullies and kills for money saying it’s all for our sake, but it’s for his own power and profit he does it! He doesn’t make us safe from each other, he puts us in danger from himself!”
“Tie up the man! Tie up the man!” The new wave swelled with fury. Crowds started to rush at the Doctor and the Monitor still standing in their deadlock of wills and quaking muscles. At that moment, a bell rang out, suspended in the air.
“Denizens of Little Cowrie! Take my baldrick, this leather sash, and bind the Monitor!” Chloe’s voice filled the high street and everyone froze. Except for Gunther Weistheimer, who crossed the street, carefully removed Chloe’s baldrick, stepped behind the Monitor still grunting and pressing to overcome the Doctor, and tickled him right in his Town Official armpit.
The Monitor reactively retracted his arm that held the blade to try to block the tickle, but the pie monger had him in his tickling grip. The doctor picked up the fallen baldrick and quickly bound the angry laughing man, cinching up the buckle until his arms were securely pinned. The two strong men had disappeared at the onset of discord in the crowds, so several townspeople rolled the boiling vat out from under her, and Gunther carefully untied Chloe’s toe.
The publican, Rod Rodigan, shouted “boil the Monitor!” And there was a movement in the crowds that seemed like they would make a rush at the bound man and toss him into the cauldron. But Chloe cried again.
“If you all boil him, will someone have to boil you?!”
A hushed murmur of recognition swelled and faded.
Chloe turned to the Crier Monitor and bellowed. “By the power vested in us as free peoples of Little Cowrie, we hereby place you under citizen’s arrest for the murder of poor Tom, my predecessor, for the attempted murder of myself, and for violating the right that every person, free or incarcerated, is endowed—the right to speak, whether or not it suits his or hers, or your liking—you severely warped authoritarian henchman!”
Doctor Weller, with a large group of townspeople, escorted the bound Monitor to the courthouse, where he was arrested on suspicion of the crimes he was accused of, jailed, then arraigned, and held again without bail to await trial, due to the severity of his alleged crimes. Chloe was taken home in the car by her mother, Samantha, who had pushed her way through the crowds to reach her husband and daughter. Gunther unshuttered his pie shop and baked one hundred and thirteen pies for the next day’s lunch crowd.
The Sweet and Savory Chestnut was ordered to cease food service while undergoing an investigation into possible food contamination as the cause of the sudden illness of dozens of denizens of Little Cowrie. After a few days’ rest and a good many pies, Chloe readied herself to return to her post, not as a town appointed crier, but as a free one—she loved the work that much. Oftentimes, passersby and avid listeners would give her cash tips, or sometimes eclairs, or fizzy drinks. And she always felt as if she could see right into the heart of the community from where she stood on the high steps where so many innocent bugs might have been scuffed by the boot of some malfeasant hypocrite down to all of eternity.
In the Purple Peacock, Big Barley babbled to his rosary. Janey O’Cullens sometimes sat sullenly. Harper Jug often drank one too many jugs. Leslie Kessler seemed unaffected, but brooded on her and the town’s ethical transgressions in the silence of her home, and took to watching too much YouTube. Rod Rodigan found business to be steady, but never to surpass the weeks of poor Tom’s ostracization. Nevertheless, he could once again prop the pub door open and invite in the sounds and smells of Little Cowrie, including Chloe’s welcomed bell.
That fall, a cloud of blackbirds descended on Farmer Huskin’s four and twenty hectares of chestnuts and every fruit was devoured. It was Chloe who first broke the news to the Townspeople. The investigation revealed that the food contamination at the Sweet and Savory Chestnut was due to contaminated jars of pre-cracked eggs bought cheaply through a connection of Council Woman Josephine Bow, who was the neighbor of Dustin Cartlow, the owner of the pudding shoppe. It came to light that the Council woman owned stock in the Pergue Poultry Corporation that supplied the eggs. The popular pudding eatery closed, but was reopened under new management. Everyone said they’d eat there again, but then came the trouble with all the blackbirds. So it was that everyone in Little Cowrie that winter ate crow.
Epilogue
Fifteen years later, twenty seven-year-old Chloe Weller sat down with a hot vanilla latté at a small pop-up café near her creative welding class. She opened the newspaper left on the table. She read mostly with disinterest until she came upon this headline:
Small Town Probate Clerk Exposes 16 Year Old Clandestine Federal Social Nudging Program To Encourage Censorship
She read on.
Gilda Weistheimer, a retired probate clerk from West New Haver, spent the last fifteen years filing Freedom of Information Act requests, digging up evidence that a secret government program was conceived almost twenty years ago. The program named Operation Cry Out, proposed using trained agents to infiltrate small town official offices and steer local populations toward embracing censorship. Though she didn’t find evidence the program was in fact ever deployed, Ms. Weistheimer details an almost forgotten incidence that occurred in Little Cowrie that involved the killing of a middle-aged town crier, an unsuspecting town’s people, and an unknown man who came to town.
Chloe closed the paper. She knew the rest of the story.
The End
everything is relative, one man’s absolute belief is another man’s fairy tale;
– Salman Rushdie
…it is natural to feel anxious at the start of a great project, ambition is never easy.
– Sarah Brooks
You need to step outside of your culture to see the shackles it has placed on your thinking.
– Michael Lipsey
The quickest method for understanding and living your purpose is to ask yourself if you’re thinking in loving ways.
– Wayne Dyer
We all find a way to love & live interdependently.
Or we all die.
The whole of humanity.
– Tinu Abayomi-Paul
All too often, it is audacity and not talent that moves an artist to centerstage.
– Julia Cameron
As I face these difficult situations, help me to reject anger that morphs into wrath and welcome the anger that rectifies injustice. Give me discernment that I may not confuse the two.
– Grace Hamman, Ask of Old Paths
Failure to read what is happening in another’s soul is not easily seen as a cause of unhappiness: but those who fail to attend the motions of their own soul are necessarily unhappy.
– Marcus Aurelius
When you’re not sure what side to be on, maintain a bias for the poor, the weak, the persecuted, the marginalized and despised.
– Brian Zahnd
Racism is a theological issue.
It is a denial of the imago Dei, the God-given dignity stamped on every human being.
And when you knowingly align yourself with it, excuse it, minimize it, or strategically ignore it, you are complicit.
– Sean Dreher
They know if we ever stand together their whole system falls apart. Our unity is their greatest fear.
– Malcolm X
We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
There have been times when kindness has opened doors to the core of my existence.
– Myrtle Heery, Tracking Kindness
We are sitting in the audience, still.
Silence, like the bullet that’s missed us, spins.
– Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic
If it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it.
– Charles Bukowski
The recollection that God raised this crucified Christ and made him the hope of the world must lead the churches to break their alliances with the powerful and enter into solidarity with the humiliated.
– Jürgen Moltmann
What comparison between the unbought satisfaction of conversation, society, study, even health and the common beauties of nature, but above all the peaceful reflection on one’s own conduct: What comparison, I say, between these, and the feverish, empty amusements of luxury and expense? These natural pleasures, indeed, are really without price; both because they are below all price in their attainment, and above it in their enjoyment.
– David Hume
Wisdom is a weapon to ward off destruction; it is an inner fortress which enemies cannot destroy.
– Thiruvalluvar, (Indian Poet)
Truth be told there is not one day that has gone by where I have not fallen in love with someone, with something.
– Carole Maso
…you meditate and you got the candles, you got the incense and you’ve been chanting, and all of a sudden you hear this voice: ‘Write this down’
– Carlos Santana
I like revisiting, at certain times, the places where I was once happy; I like to shape the present in the image of the irretrievable past.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Most people in the course of their lives come to realize that they cannot control the external world, but fairly few become conscious that inner psychic processes are not subject to ego control either.
– Murray Stein
Knowing what must be done does away with fear.
– Rosa Parks
Everyone wants to fill the hole in our heart that could draw us back into our inner nature, instead of helping us to make it bigger.
– Peter Kingsley
If only we overcome cruelty to human and animal, with love and compassion, we shall stand at the threshold of a new era in human and spiritual evolution, we may realize, at last, our most unique quality, humanity.
– Jane Goodall
Though winter is represented in the almanac as an old man, facing the wind and sleet, and drawing his cloak about him, we rather think of him as a… warm-blooded youth, as blithe as summer. The unexplored grandeur of the storm keeps up the spirits of the traveler. It does not trifle with us, but has a sweet earnestness. In winter we lead a more inward life. Our hearts are warm and cheery, like cottages under drifts, whose windows and doors are half concealed, but from whose chimneys the smoke cheerfully ascends…We enjoy now, not an Oriental, but a Boreal leisure…
– Henry Thoreau, A Winter Walk
Emily Dickinson is one of the greatest poets we have, and I don’t mean ‘we’ merely in America. I mean she is one of the greatest of poets.
– Susan Howe
The measure of our humanity, we will discover, is not found in isolation, but in relationship.
Not in dominance, but in solidarity.
Not in what we possess, but how we care.
May we actualize this with and through each other.
– Roshi Joan Halifax
The question is no whether there is intelligent life out there, the question is, whether there is intelligent life down here. As long as you have war, police, prisons, crime, you are in the early stages of civilization.
– Jacque Fresco
The society whose modernization has reached the stage of integrated spectacle is characterized by the combined effect of five principal factors: incessant technological renewal, integration of state and economy, generalized secrecy, unanswerable lies, and eternal present.
– Guy Debord
Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Transformation rarely happens where we were taught to look for it. We imagine growth as ascent—clarity, light, resolution, transcendence—but the deeper movements of the soul unfold differently.
They draw us downward, into the places that feel heavy, wet, and dark, into grief that has no clear story, into longing that cannot be solved, into the body’s quiet holding of what was never able to be lived.
From the outside, this descent can look like failure, regression, or falling apart. Yet in the language of the psyche—and in the symbolic vision of alchemy—this is often where real transformation begins.
What has been split off, silenced, or left behind does not heal through escape. It heals through contact, through warmth, through the slow, compassionate willingness to remain.
In this way, the downward movement is not the opposite of awakening. It is one of its most honest forms.
Transformation happens downward. Into the dark, wet, heavy places of the soul.
– Matt Licata
If man is to survive, he will learn to take a delight in the essential differences between cultures. To learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life’s exciting variety, not something to fear.
– Gene Roddenberry
In our unconsciousness we take credit where no credit is due, oblivious to the real source of everything we pretend is ours—the sacred origin not just of religion but also of everything else, of science and technology, education and law, of medicine, logic, architecture, ordinary daily life, the cry of longing, the excruciating ache of the awakening love for wisdom.
– Peter Kingsley
‘Slow’ and ‘down’ are modes of the soul; they are connective modes, ways of keeping connected to oneself and to one’s environment. ‘Slowing downwards’ refers to more than simply moving slowly, it means growing down towards the roots of one’s being. Instead of outward growth and upward climb, life at times must turn inward and downward in order to grow in other ways. There is a shift to the vertical down that re-turns us to root memories, root metaphors, and timeless things that shape our lives from within. Slowing downwards creates opportunities to dwell more deeply in one’s life, for the home we are looking for in this world is within us all along. The lost home that we are seeking is ourselves; it is the story we carry within our soul.
– Michael Meade
No matter how much you keep encouraging someone who is blindfolded to stare through the cloth, he still won’t see a thing.
– Franz Kafka
What is it all for, this poetry,
This bundle of accomplishment
Put together with so much pain?
Twenty years at hard labor,
Lessons learned from Li Po and Dante,
Indian chants and gestalt psychology;
What words can it spell,
This alphabet of one sensibility?
The pure pattern of the stars in orderly progression,
The thin air of fourteen-thousand-foot summits,
Their Pisgah views into what secrets of the personality,
The fire of poppies in eroded fields,
The sleep of lynxes in the noonday forest,
The curious anastomosis of the webs of thought,
Life streaming ungovernably away,
And the deep hope of man.
The centuries have changed little in this art,
The subjects are still the same.
– Kenneth Rexroth
When food brings joy, it reminds you that life can feel good. Finding joy in food isn’t shameful, it’s one of our birthrights as a human living in a body. So enjoy your food, relish it, be grateful for it…
– Marc David
The hermit keeps a window open onto the sky, without which the world would perish from suffocation, ugliness and boredom.
He is the only one, along with the poet, who still speaks the language of the beyond, who makes existence sacred, who gives life this verticality without which humanity is buffeted about beneath itself.
– Jean Ries
It is probably always disastrous not to be a poet.
– Lytton Strachey
Want to know how vicious a system is? Try showing hospitality to someone that the system says you should exclude.
– Brian McLaren
Over and over again I have had to conquer infinite hopelesssness.
– Rilke
There is no true interpretation without embodiment.
– Michael Gorman
Evil is relatively rare. Ignorance is very common. But the most dangerous is when evil meets ignorance and finds no resistance
– Matt Rogers
We know the predator, we see them feed on us, we are aware to starve the beast is our destiny.
– John Trudell
Being human is not a mistake, a test, or a punishment. It is how awareness, or the universe, or God, or Source, whatever you want to call it, becomes personal.
– Colleen Guenther
And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Divine laws are simpler than Human ones, which is why it takes a lifetime to be able to understand them; only love can understand them. Only love can interpret these words as they were meant to be interpreted.
– Benjamin Sisko
Vision is not enough, it must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs.
– Václav Havel
America cannot mend if its wounds are constantly covered and not treated.
– Malika J. Stevely
Our power isn’t in a political system, or a religious system, or in an economic system, or in a military system; these are authoritarian systems… they have power… but it’s not reality. The power of our intelligence, individually or collectively IS the power; this is the power that any industrial ruling class truly fears: clear coherent human beings.
– John Trudell
All good government is life-affirming.
– Dr Bandy Lee
It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
– James Baldwin
You cannot give
your life more
time,
So give your
time more life.
– Healed Life
Whatever we give to our friends, we also receive.
– Seneca
Ignorance does not make you fireproof when the world is burning.
– Nelou Keramati
Democracy is not a gift of power, but a reservoir of knowledge.
– W.E.B. Dubois
Falsehood is not easily exposed when it has had an early start in advance of truth.
– Frederick Douglass
Earthly possessions dazzle our eyes and delude us into thinking that they can provide security and freedom from anxiety. Yet all the time they are the very source of anxiety.
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Whatever we ain’t got, that’s what you want.
– John Steinbeck
There are two insults which no human being will endure: The assertion that he hasn’t a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.
– Sinclair Lewis
We joined social media for connection. What we got was chaos. Deepfakes. Pretence. Truth blurred till lies feel normal. A world performing while burning. Some days it feels pointless, living these borrowed realities, trying to make words mean something. And yet…on real streets, not curated feeds, ordinary people are still fighting to keep the world sane. That’s where hope lives. Not in algorithms, but in human courage. Thank you for reading my poetry. Writing isn’t easy when the world is unravelling, but your presence reminds me why it still matters.
– J. Mann
One of the things I love most about writing is the constraints, the problem solving, the puzzle.
– Kate Milliken
If you live in a country where politics are oppressive and you write-or try to write—you can’t avoid being a political writer.
– Josef Skvoercky
The job is to ask questions— it always was-
and to ask them as inexorably as I can.
And to face the absence of precise answers
with a certain humility.
– Arthur Miller
I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.
– Zora Neale Hurston to Countee Cullen
The mature response to the problem of existence is love.
– Erich Fromm
To those in whom the functions of command are vested it seems to be their duty to defend order, without which no social life can survive; and the only order they conceive is the existing one. Nor are they entirely wrong, for until a different order has been, in fact, established no one can say with certainty that it is possible. It is just for this reason that social progress depends upon a pressure from below sufficient to change effectively the relations of power and thus to compel the actual establishment of new social relationships.
– Simone Weil
Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth… Eyes so used to darkness as ours will hardly be able to tell whether their light was the light of a candle or that of a blazing sun. But such objective evaluation seems to me a matter of secondary importance which can be safely left to posterity.
– Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times
Whenever oligarchs rule the state, the cities fill with beggars, and thieves haunt the neighborhoods and temples. And this is because where the oligarchs rule, all others are impoverished and desperation sets in.
– Plato
The anger was vast and it came out of nowhere. It was the rage of something not fitting; the frustration of trying to put something in a box that is slightly too small. You try moving the shape around in the hope that some angle will make it fit in the box. Slowly comes an apprehension that this might not, after all, be possible. And finally you know it won’t fit, know there is no way it can fit, but this doesn’t stop you using brute force to try to crush it in, punishing the bloody thing for not fitting properly. That was what it was like: but I was the box, I was the thing that didn’t fit, and I was the person smashing it, over and over again, with bruised and bleeding hands.
– Helen Macdonald
People think of compassion as, like, kindness. The image comes to mind of some nice New Age guy bending to something with a look on his face like he’s about to cry. And I don’t think that’s it. I think of it more as a quality of openness that comes with being in a state of unusual attentiveness.
– George Saunders
Truth; that long clean clear simple undeniable unchallengeable straight and shining line, on one side of which black is black and on the other white is white, has now become an angle, a point of view.
– William Faulkner
To experience conflicts knowingly, though it may be distressing, can be an invaluable asset. The more we face our own conflicts and seek out our own solutions, the more inner freedom and strength we will gain. Only when we are willing to bear the brunt can we approximate the ideal of being the captain of our ship. A spurious tranquillity rooted in inner dullness is anything but enviable. It is bound to make us weak and an easy prey to any kind of influence.
– Karen Horney M.D.
Listening is existing in the future of all utterance. So the future is full of listening, wanting, and understanding. But what a speaker intends to say is rarely fulfilled in the sentence; and if it’s attention is over intended, it losses its capacity for arousing attention in the hearer. Part of the force of speech comes with its emotional risk. One hears units or tones more than particular words or facts and attends to these. It is possible that people want to hear poetry whether they like it or not. Their brains and ears want it.
– Fanny Howe
Well, I am sort of ashamed of my way of working, it’s so scrappy. I don’t need a room at all. I know people I admire enormously who have rooms that they go to each day, where they construct their poems like paintings; it’s imagination and literature at work together, and it’s amazing to see that process in action if you are the complete opposite. My room is the road.
– Fanny Howe
If I could say I was assigned something at birth, it would be to keep the soul fresh and clean, and to not let anything bring it down. And that’s the spirit of childhood, usually. Once you know that that’s what you’re doing, even when you’re walking through a war field, you’re carrying something to keep it safe. It’s invisible but you know it’s there, and it’s a kind of vision and a weight.
– Fanny Howe
The reality that I had known no longer existed. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.
– Marcel Proust
If you dislike war, respect your neighbor. And cherish the person who comes from afar. . . Distance is like allusion to the infinite. Love the person in your neighbor. Love God in the person who comes from afar.
– Lanza del Vasto
Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place… Nothing outside you can give you any place… In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.
– Flannery O’Connor
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, (tr. Kareem James Abu-Zeid)
I was always aware that I am a person in the west living in acute privilege compared with the rest of the world, and that there is an excess of information that creates mental suffering. It is almost as if it is created in order to counterbalance the luxury. […] In the old days, a brain was freed by education and information. Now this process has turned on itself. And one must select from all the words the ones that are openings.
– Fanny Howe
In the oldest religion, everything was alive, not supernaturally but naturally alive … For the whole life-effort of man was to get his life into contact with the elemental life of the cosmos, mountain-life, cloud-life, thunder-life, air-life, earth-life, sun-life. To come into immediate felt contact, and so to derive energy, power, and a dark sort of joy. This effort into sheer naked contact, without an intermediary or mediator, is the root meaning of religion.
– D. H. Lawrence
The monk is essentially outside all establishments. He does not belong to an establishment. He is a marginal person who withdraws deliberately to the margin of society with a view to deepening the fundamental human experience.
Consequently, as one of this strange people, I speak to you as a representative of all marginal persons who have done this kind of thing deliberately. Thus I find myself representing perhaps hippies among you, poets, people of this kind who are seeking in all sorts of ways and have absolutely no established status whatever…
Are monks and hippies and poets relevant? No, we are deliberately irrelevant. We live with an ingrained irrelevance which is proper to every human being.
The marginal man accepts the basic irrelevance of the human condition, an irrelevance which is manifested above all by the fact of death. The marginal person, the monk, the displaced person, the prisoner, all these people live in the presence of death, which calls into question the meaning of life.
He struggles with the fact of death in himself, trying to seek something deeper than death; because there is something deeper than death, and the office of the monk or marginal person, the meditative person or the poet is to go beyond death even in this life, to go beyond the dichotomy of life and death and to be, therefore, a witness to life.
– Thomas Merton
The truths Phaedrus began to pursue were lateral truths; no longer the frontal truths of science, those toward which the discipline pointed, but the kind of truth you see laterally, out of the corner of your eye. In a laboratory situation, when your whole procedure goes haywire, when everything goes wrong or is indeterminate or is so screwed up by unexpected results you can’t make head or tail out of anything, you start looking laterally. That’s a word he later used to describe a growth of knowledge that doesn’t move forward like an arrow in flight, but expands sideways, like an arrow enlarging in flight, or like the archer, discovering that although he has hit the bull’s-eye and won the prize, his head is on a pillow and the sun is coming in the window.
Lateral knowledge is knowledge that’s from a wholly unexpected direction, from a direction that’s not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself upon one. Lateral truths point to the falseness of axioms and postulates underlying one’s existing system of getting at truth.
– Robert M. Pirsig
How I Might Sound if I Left Myself Alone
by Lisa Russ Spaar
Turning to watch you leave,
I see we must always walk toward
other loves, river of heaven
between two office buildings.
Orphaned cloud, fish soup poppling,
book spined in the open palm. Unstoppable light.
I think it is all right.
Or do tonight, garden toad
a speaking stone,
young sound in an old heart.
Annul the self? I float it,
a day lily in my wine. Oblivion?
I love our lives,
keeping me from it.
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
None of it was real; nothing was real. Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear. These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy-broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and, in this way, brought them forth. And now must lose them. I send this out to you, dear friends, before I go, in this instantaneous thought-burst, from a place where time slows and then stops and we may live forever in a single instant. Goodbye goodbye good—
– George Saunders
You are not a documentary film. You are a painting. No events are happening here so don’t expect anything. Inside the painting there is another painting and a faint ray of light passes through that frame to fall on a solitary book whose letters are tiny and wide open as your lungs. The same ray lights the knitting needle inserted by a woman into a skein of wool. A spider’s thread shines on a potted cactus; there’s no escaping fragility. There must be a breeze for you to see such tenderness […].
Very slowly the painting moves from screen to screen. The changes are slight. […] Had you slowed down you would have seen all of this. Don’t rush things. Don’t be the one on whom slowness is forced, don’t be the convalescent or the old man. Slow down exactly when you might be hurrying off. Put on your clothes without haste. Do everything in slowness. Perhaps you will find some sort of solution or hope.
– Golan Haji
We must recognize that just as there is a pool of sadness in everyone, so there is a mountain of anger. Anger is a legitimate reaction of the soul to its wounding. We may keep it unconscious precisely because its expression today reactivates the peril its expression once risked. We may turn it upon ourselves by somatising, depressing or damaging ourselves through our contaminated decisions. Or we may transfer this anger to others, thereby wounding those who are the silent surrogates for those we could not confront in the past. Anger, then, is a reflexive response to the constriction of the soul. As such, it is not only part of the defense system of the psyche, it is a vital intimation which, when tracked, may lead to the soul’s healing.
When transformed by consciousness, anger becomes vital energy which is available not only for healing but also for furthering the desires of the soul. As long as we are wound-identified, we remain stuck in our victimage, up to our ears in the sour soup of wrath.
– James Hollis
The simple step of the courageous individual is to not take part in the lie.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls.
– Robert Walser
It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses–and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible that he should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster’s body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost. Having a dark suspicion of these grim possibilities, man turns a blind eye to the shadow-side of human nature. Blindly he strives against the salutary dogma of original sin, which is yet so prodigiously true. Yes, he even hesitates to admit the conflict of which he is so painfully aware.
– Carl Jung
I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.
– Annie Dillard
One of the most powerful examples of socially engaged Buddhism is that of the monks walking peacefully from Texas to DC. Please note… Buddhism in the streets, on the roads and highways, a Buddhism that does not turn away from the social ills of our time.
– Joan Halifax
One thing striking about them is: they are nonwhite, non-Christian immigrants venturing out non-protected being received with love and reverence as they go, and that upends so much that is better upended in this moment. Our walking itself cannot create peace. But when someone encounters us — whether by the roadside, online or through a friend — when our message touches something deep within them, when it awakens the peace that has always lived quietly in their own heart — something sacred begins to unfold.
– Rebecca Solnit
Neither Christ nor Buddha nor Socrates wrote a book, for to do so is to exchange life for a logical process.
– William Butler Yeats
I climb up that ladder onto my room there, and I can just stare out at the hills. I’ve been known to spend weeks up there, looking at how they’ve washed into new shapes. You can go up there and feel how good the world is.
– Georgia O’Keeffe
If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.
– Bertrand Russell
Your entire experience will change when you learn to understand that being able to say “I don’t know” is not only an acceptable answer but is also closer to truth than you have been willing to accept and being able to say “I was wrong” is a sign of growth not weakness.
The shift will begin to heal your perception. Being freed from all your mistaken notions about everything is like crossing a threshold into new territory you could never see while living in the lowlands of certainty that kept you trapped and unable to see.
– Kent Burgess
Darkness could make you forget what was in front of your face. Darkness would swallow the caravan site, the old putting green, and St Rule’s Tower. It would swallow crimes and grieving and remorse. If you gave yourself to darkness, you might start to make out shapes invisible to others, but without being able to define them: the movement behind a curtain, the shadows in an alleyway.
– Ian Rankin, Set in Darkness
Not thinking about anything is zen. Once you know this, walking, standing, sitting, or lying down, everything you do is zen. To know that the mind is empty is to see the buddha…. Using the mind to reality is delusion. Not using the mind to look for reality is awareness. Freeing oneself from words is liberation.
– Bodhidharma
It is a moral imperative for men to be in well-led groups focused on honesty and accountability and to be in spaces that help men holistically heal and grieve to become more whole and safe. It is a social hazard for this to not be an expected norm.
– Chelan Harkin
Ideas are easy. It’s the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats.
– Sue Grafton
Once up against the sky it’s hard
to tell them from the stars—
planets, that is—the tinted ones:
Venus going down, or Mars,
or the pale green one.
– Elizabeth Bishop
Shakespeare wrote: “There is nothing more confining than the prison we don’t know we are in.” In other words, whatever we are not conscious of can have a deep hold on us. In critical moments, we can wind up doing its bidding while believing we are making our own choices in life. We are in just such a prison of our own making when we act as if the common world of fact and figures is not only the “real world,” but also the only world.
The prison of the modern mind is partly created by the common belief that “reality” can be limited to logic, statistics, and provable facts. Not that the literal world is “unreal,” rather that it is the first level of reality and can never depict all that is truly Real. Restricting all modes of presence to a single plane of being leads to being trapped in a narrow view of life and imprisoned in the linear trap of time. Too much “hard reality” and the world becomes as if flat again; we lose touch with all that makes this earth a place of wonder and beauty and hidden possibilities.
Our world is a reflection of our own soul. Because we have learned to deny the world its soul and therefore its connection to the divine, it, too, can seem to be dying. Under the spell of literalism and the tyranny of facts and statistics, the modern legacy becomes an increasingly diminished world that has been overly quantified as well as thoroughly exploited.
The rise of literalism signals the loss of imagination underlying both the fixation with measurable facts and the fundamentalism of fanatic beliefs. Literalism reduces the world to fixed ideas and rigid dogmas while isolating people at extremes of thought, feeling, and belief. Literalism takes the mystery and the natural sense of awe out of the world and eventually takes the meaning out of life. If there is no otherworld of spirit and imagination, there can be nowhere to turn when the real world becomes disorienting, when everything around us becomes both more irrational and increasingly chaotic. When life has lost its wonder and nature has lost its living halo, imagination is the missing ingredient and the necessary remedy for the disease of literalism.
– Michael Meade
There’s some stuff you just can’t know till you are older; till you have lived a bit, realized you are not immortal, and had time to accumulate―if not regrets, then at least a retrospective sense of the determining power of choices and events.
– Lucy Underwood
nobody can save you but
yourself.
you will be put again and again
into nearly impossible
situations.
they will attempt again and again
through subterfuge, guise and
force
to make you submit, quit and/or die quietly
inside.
nobody can save you but
yourself
and it will be easy enough to fail
so very easily
but don’t, don’t, don’t.
just watch them.
listen to them.
do you want to be like that?
a faceless, mindless, heartless
being?
do you want to experience
death before death?
nobody can save you but
yourself
and you’re worth saving.
it’s a war not easily won
but if anything is worth winning then
this is it.
think about it.
think about saving your self.
your spiritual self.
your gut self.
your singing magical self and
your beautiful self.
save it.
don’t join the dead-in-spirit.
maintain your self
with humor and grace
and finally
if necessary
wager your life as you struggle,
damn the odds, damn
the price.
only you can save your
self.
do it! do it!
then you’ll know exactly what
I am talking about.
– Charles Bukowski
I have always been more interested in creating a character that contains something crippled. I think nearly all of us have some kind of defect.
– Tennessee Williams
Oft expectation fails, and most oft there
Where most it promises
– William Shakespeare
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
My only new thing:
The penalty of light forever
Over the heads of those who were there
And back into the night, the cough of the finishing petal.
– John Ashbery, To Redoute
You know, just like mountains stick out of the Earth and there’s a fundamental Earth underneath them, so all of us, as different things, we stick out of reality and there’s a continuity underneath.
– Alan Watts
Look round at the courses of the stars, as if you were going along with them; and constantly consider the changes of the elements into one another; for such thoughts purge away the filth of the earthly life.
– Marcus Aurelius
Death cancels every thing but truth, and strips a man of every thing but genius and virtue.
– William Hazlitt
If you would experience a landscape, you must go alone into it and sit down somewhere quietly and wait for it to come in its own good time.
– Paul Gruchow
Narrative is never a straight line. When it is – it’s something else: manipulation, denial, cowardice or our being on automatic pilot.
– Betsy Warland, Presence of Mind
I knew that I was dying.
Something in me said,
Go ahead, die, sleep, become as them, accept.
Then something else in me said, no,
save the tiniest bit.
It needn’t be much, just a spark.
– Charles Bukowski
To Locke man is his natural body, a mirror or tablet upon which impressions are received from an external world. To Blake ‘the true Man’ is ‘the Poetic Genius’ or ‘the Spirit of Prophecy’
– Kathleen Raine
From arrow flying in the light,
From demon wiles which lurk at noon
And things unclean that move at night
In stealthy mist beneath the moon,
God save, and hold us—waiting, sleeping—
– A. E. Waite
This world, such as it is, is not tolerable. Therefore I need the moon, or happiness, or immortality, I need something which is perhaps demented, but which is not of this world.
– Albert Camus
Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.
– William Shakespeare
One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Grieved like, pined like… Why must there always be a simile? Why must you drive always to first questions, way beyond the goalposts every time. Well, what do you keep sacking our quarterback for, when it comes to that.
– Renata Adler
Through Chance, we are each a ghost to all the others, and our only reality; through Chance, the huge hinge of the world, and a grain of dust; the stone that starts an avalanche, the pebble whose concentric circles widen across the seas.
– Thomas Wolfe
A poem that doesn’t get out of hand isn’t a poem.
– John Hollander
There is a film, an image stored in your consciousness. Every time your mind goes back to the past and you look at that image or watch that film, you suffer again.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
It has already come to pass that the demon of evil, like a whirlwind, triumphantly circles all five continents of the earth…
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
His enemy was time. Or perhaps it was his friend. One never knows for sure.
– Thomas Wolfe
I was conscious that I knew practically nothing
– Plato (Socrates)
The hidden attunement is better than the open.
– Heraclitus
Insofar as the American public creates a monster, they are not about to recognize it.
– James Baldwin
Do I disrespect myself?
I disrespect myself.
Do I self-esteem my ‘self’?
Nah, I don’t esteem that monster of capitalism known as “myself.”
I don’t esteem yr monster either. I just want to write the mirrors that destroy us.
– Alina Stefanescu
Difference and every kind of variety of differentiation is the way through which unity is discovered.
– Alan Watts
We have made this world what it is. The world has not been made by wisdom, by truth, by God; we have made it, you and I.
– Krishnamurti
I am an out-of-control patriotic folklorist in a country of degenerates, lackeys, and bastards!
– Louis-Ferdinand Céline
To expound and propagate concepts is simple, to drop all concepts is difficult and rare.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
I have just realized that the stakes are myself
I have no other
ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life
my spirit measured out, in bits, spread over
the roulette table.
– Diane di Prima
Men need some kind of external activity, because they are inactive within.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.
– Carl Jung
River of Students
Everything in my life seems vague and elusive, yet for the most part,
my sense of impermanence has turned out to be rather solid.
How else is it possible that for almost forty years I’ve been teaching — sitting in any number of nondescript rooms, in front of blackboards I never write on, exchanging pleasantries with the students as if we were simply passing time by talking about books we happen to be reading.
I think of all their names, the papers they’ve handed me, the papers I’ve handed back, and together we form a current – a kind of river that has drawn me – drawn us – forward toward I’m not sure what.
Perhaps the larger ocean of language itself.
– Elaine Equi
We have reached a place of deepest emptiness and sorrow. We look at the destruction around us and perceive our collective poverty. We see that everything truly needed by the world is too large for individuals to give. We find we have only ourselves. Our experience. Our dreams. Our simple art. Our memories of better ways. Our knowledge that the world cannot be healed in the abstract. That healing begins where the wound was made.
Now it seems to me we might begin to understand something of the meaning of earnest speaking and fearless listening; something of the purpose of the most ancient form of beginning to remake the world: remembering what the world we once made together was like.
– Alice Walker, The Way Forward is With A Broken Heart
And if all that is meaningless, I want to be cured
Of a craving for something I cannot find
And of the shame of never finding it.
– T.S. Eliot
Your life is not a cosmic puppet show rigged by a micromanaging deity. You’re here to inhabit your own skin, claim your own agency, and express the full, unedited truth of who you already are—a conscious being woven into a vast, messy, beautiful web of relationship and responsibility. Your task is not to wait for divinely assigned characters to enter your story, but to engage others in ways that call forth mutual depth, honesty, and dignity. Life is the raw material you were handed. What you sculpt from it is your rebellion against every system that told you you were powerless.
– Jim Palmer
Being a good citizen during hard times
does not mean agreeing with everyone.
It means refusing to abandon one another.
– Marilyn Turkovich
our fingers are fast
on the keyboard
though the music is
just poetry and taxes
– Alec Finlay
I have become the dust on the path of the lovers; this is my highest glory.
– Rumi, Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi
Those who run to long words are mainly the unskillful and tasteless; they confuse pomposity with dignity, flaccidity with ease, and bulk with force.
– Henry Watson Fowler
The genius of the French language, descended from its single Latin stock, has triumphed most in the contrary direction – in simplicity, in unity, in clarity, and in restraint.
– Lytton Strachey
Incredible that anything could happen to take away this bubbling energy, the zest that fills everything I do. It’s as if all the knowledge I’ve soaked in during the past months has coalesced and lifted me to a peak of light and understanding. This is beauty, love, and truth all rolled into one. This is joy.
– Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
“you say ‘amateur’ as if it was a dirty word. ‘amateur’ comes from the latin word ‘amare’, which means to love. to do things for the love of it.”
– Mozart In The Jungle
The truly great writer does not want to write. He wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain.
– Henry Miller, The Rosy Crucifixion
You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen.
– Don DeLillo
If he needs a million acres
to make him feel rich,
seems to me he needs it ’cause
he feels awful poor inside hisself,
and if he’s poor in hisself,
there ain’t no million acres gonna
make him feel rich.
– John Steinbeck
I’M nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell !
They’d banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody !
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
– Emily Dickinson
Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our anti-materialist, otherworldly, New Age, spiritual types. But if the material world is merely illusion, an honest guru should be as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu, and seaweed slime.
– Edward Abbey
All of the Dharmas,
Just as they appear,
Are broad ideas that cling
To individual enumerations.
We see how we are using
The logic of direct perception
For our ideas,
But no matter how things appear
They are not substantial.
– Tantra on Bodhicitta Meditation
Within each of us there is something that is big enough to solve our problem.
– Manly P. Hall
Active men are usually lacking in higher activity — I mean individual activity. They are active as officials, businessmen, scholars, that is, as generic beings, but not as quite particular, single and unique men. In this respect they are lazy.
– Nietzsche
we waste days like mad blackbirds and pray for alcoholic nights.
– Charles Bukowski
Being nice counts the most when you are nice to people ignored by others.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.
– Walter Benjamin
If you want to find an example to copy, look for it among simple, humble people. True greatness, which not only refrains from putting itself on display but isn’t even conscious of its own greatness, is only found among such people.
– Leo Tolstoy
If a man is to be liked, he must really be inferior in point of intellect.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
– Roland Barthes
Any asshole can chase a skirt,
art takes discipline.
– Charles Bukowski
Meditation is intermittent fasting for the mind.
Too much sugar leads to a heavy body, & too many distractions lead to a heavy mind.
Time spent undistracted & alone, in self-examination, journaling, meditation,
resolves the unresolved & takes us from mentally fat to fit.
– @naval
Regret is for your own sake, compassion is for the sake of others.
– Venerable Robina Courtin
The genre is dead. Invent something new.
a man and a woman
naked in a garden.
Invent a child who saves the world
– Lisel Mueller
Before fixing the world outside, tend to the mind within. Everything else follows its lead.
– Simdha Getul Rinpoche
What I can say for certain is that there is no case study in the world that could capture the whole animal of my brother, that could show how smart and kind and generous he was, how much he wanted to get better, how much he wanted to live. … It’s true that for years before he died, I would look at his face and think, What a pity, what a waste. But the waste was my own, the waste was what I missed out on whenever I looked at him and saw just his addiction.
– Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom
No writer in our time has been more isolated than Kafka, and yet few have achieved communication as well as he did.
– Eugenio Montale
When you’re studying jazz, the best thing you can do is listen to records or live music. It’s not like you’re going to see a teacher. You just listen to everything you can and absorb it all.
– Carla Bley
I am a dreamer. I have so little real life that I look upon such moments as this now, as so rare, that I cannot help repeating these moments in my dreams. I shall be dreaming of you all night, a whole week, a whole year.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Imagine being so hateful that you can’t hear joy, just because it’s in Spanish.
– American Music Society
Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless… They are of the same kind as the question whether the Good is more or less identical than the Beautiful.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
The written word endures, the spoken word disappears.
– Neil Postman
All concerns of men go wrong when
they wish to cure evil with evil.
– Sophocles
I think of life itself, now, as a
wonderful play I’ve written for myself.
My purpose is to have
the most fun playing my part.
– Shirley MacLaine
People over forty can seldom be permanently
convinced of anything. At eighteen our
convictions are hills from which we look; at
forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one’s awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one’s personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.
– Nabokov
I think if I keep working in the way that I am, from the heart and from passion and with love, well, the fruits of that will keep coming.
– Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio
I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.
– Daniel Keyes
Simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies, you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.
– Lao Tzu
The question is, How do you get to an authentic emotional place?
– Claudia Rankine
You normally have to be bashed around a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
– Alain de Botton
Listen. You a wonder. You a
city of a woman. You got a
geography of your own.
Listen. Somebody need a
map to understand you.
Somebody need directions to
move around you. Listen
woman. You’re not a no
place, anonymous girl.
– Lucille Clifton
Freed from my story, I can feel the pulse of the world.
Trapped in my story, I can merely see my own reflection.
Yet silence and story emerge from the same source.
This source is the Deep Self. It is the Dark.
– Carlos G.
They have people repeat “he died for our sins” so often they forget that he actually died for standing up to an oppressive ruling class who used faith and fear to oppress, exploit, influence, and profit.
– Kalen Dion
That is the American story, not the sanitized, gated, English-only version that small and frightened people try to sell us. The REAL one. The messy, beautiful, multilingual, multicolored, courageous one. The one that has always been built by hands that speak every language and pray in every tongue and come from every corner of this hemisphere.
– Michael Garrett
The gold bit on your horse, the gold circlet on the wrist of your slave, the gilding on your shoes, mean that you are robbing the orphan and starving the widow. When you have passed away, each passer-by who looks upon your great mansion will say, ‘How many tears did it take to build that mansion; how many orphans were stripped; how many widows wronged; how many laborers deprived of their honest wages?’ Even death itself will not deliver you from your accusers.
– Chrysostom
What is offered for free is dangerous—it usually involves either a trick or a hidden obligation that enslaves you.
– Robert Greene
A faith of convenience is a hollow faith.
– Father Mulcahy, “M*A*S*H”
So if you like doing something, do it regularly; if you don’t like doing something, make a habit of doing something different.
– Epictetus
To change one’s life: 1. Start immediately, 2. Do it flamboyantly, 3. No exceptions.
– William James
A man is worked on by what he works on.
– Frederick Douglass
The sense of time and space, of separation and sorrow, is born of the process of thought.
– Krishnamurti
So, then, now you know your task: to become what the gods want, not what your parents want, not what your tribe wants, but what the gods want, and what your psyche will support if consciousness so directs.
– James Hollis, What Matters Most
The white man builds large fire and sits far away. The native man builds small fire and sits close.
– Stalking Wolf
Justice is love correcting that which revolts against love.
– Reinhold Niebuhr
Breaking Up
Like the nomadic dollar
I pass to the cashier
behind the register
you are off to other hands.
– Billy Collins
Anything is of course inexhaustible, because at each moment the brain has a different pattern to construct.
– Guido Molinari
If living is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.
– Jane Smiley
Nothing could be counted on in a world where even when you were a solution you were a problem.
– Toni Morrison, Beloved
You must be in good condition in order to create. If you were in training for the Olympics they’d understand. You are.
– Rita Mae Brown
By work, one does not become a noble person; by birth, one does not become a noble person. By one’s deeds and wisdom, one becomes noble.
– Gautama Buddha, Sutta Nipata
The old and rich will live on awhile,
As always,
Eating blood and gold,
Letting kids die.
– Langston Hughes
The vision of a champion is bent over, drenched in sweat, at the point of exhaustion, when nobody else is looking.
– Mia Hamm
Every meaningful life is lived
in the hallway between
who we were and who we dare.
to become.
– Georges Bergès
Grief is an element. It has its own cycle like the carbon cycle, the nitrogen. It never diminishes not ever. It passes in and out of everything.
– Peter Heller
Benefits should be conferred gradually and in that way they will taste better—but obligations from free things taste forever bitter.
– Niccolò Machiavelli
I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe—but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn’t be surprised if poetry—poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs—is how the world works. The world isn’t logical, it’s a song.
– David Byrne
Be like the promontory against which the waves constantly break, but it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it.
– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Man is asleep. He lives in sleep, he dies in sleep, and he is born in sleep.
– G. I. Gurdjieff
An artist spends himself like the crayon in his hand, till he is all gone.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
I went to look up in the dictionary the word beatitude which I hate as a word and saw that it means spasm of the soul. It speaks of calm happiness — I would however call it transport or levitation.
– Clarice Lispector, Água Viva
THE GOAL OF YOGA
(No, it’s not the Handstand).
The yoga pose is not the goal.
Becoming flexible is not the goal.
Standing on your hands is not the goal.
The goal is to create space
where you were once stuck.
To unveil the layers of protection
you’ve built around your heart.
To appreciate your body and become aware
of the mind and the noise it creates.
To make peace with who you are.
The goal is to love, well… You.
Come to your yoga mat to feel; not to accomplish.
Shift your focus and your heart will grow.
– Rachel Brathen
WHOLE
Self is everywhere, shining forth from all beings,
vaster than the vast, subtler than the most subtle,
unreachable, yet nearer than breath, than heartbeat.
Eye cannot see it, ear cannot hear it nor tongue
utter it; only in deep absorption can the mind,
grown pure and silent, merge with the formless truth.
As soon as you find it, you are free; you have found yourself;
you have solved the great riddle; your heart forever is at peace.
Whole, you enter the Whole. Your personal self
returns to its radiant, intimate, deathless source.
As rivers lose name and form when they disappear
into the sea, the sage leaves behind all traces
when he disappears into the light. Perceiving the truth,
he becomes the truth; he passes beyond all suffering,
beyond death; all the knots of his heart are loosed.
– Mundaka Upanishad
Years Later
by David Palmer Grenell
In the dusty triangular attic
a box of old school books.
Inside, a worn volume of poems,
a page turned down at the corner-
my father and I, meeting again,
depending on The Red Wheelbarrow.
[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
The monk is not defined by his task, his usefulness. In a certain sense he is supposed to be ‘useless’ because his mission is not to do this or that job but to BE a person of God. He does not live in order to exercise a special function: his business is Life itself. This means that monasticism aims at the cultivation of a certain quality of life, a level of awareness, a depth of consciousness, an area of transcendence and adoration.
– Thomas Merton
Canada has one of the most accessible currencies in the world and many people do not realize just how thoughtfully it is designed.
Our Canadian bills use large, clear font, making the numbers easier to read for people with low vision and for anyone glancing quickly.
Each denomination is a different colour, which supports colour recognition and reduces confusion when handling money.
Strong colour contrast appears on both sides of the bills, helping the numbers and key features stand out in a variety of lighting conditions.
Braille is built directly into the design. A full braille cell consists of six dots. The $5 bill has one full cell. The $10 bill has two full cells, the $20 bill has three full cells, the $$50 bill has four full cells and the $100 bill has a full cell in the first and fourth position with a 3 cm space between the two cells. This allows people who are blind or have low vision to confidently identify our money independently.
Accessible design like this benefits everyone. When we build with inclusion in mind, we create systems that work better for all of us.
What country are you in and what accessibility features do you have on your currency.
– Gina Martin
The world is full of people suffering from the effects of their own unlived life. They become bitter, critical, or rigid, not because the world is cruel to them, but
because they have betrayed their own inner possibilities.
The artist who never makes art becomes cynical about those who do.
The lover who never risks loving mocks romance.
The thinker who never commits to a philosophy sneers at belief itself.
And yet, all of them suffer, because deep down they know: the life they mock is the life they were meant to live.
– Carl Jung
There is no graded scale of essential worth; there is no divine right of one race which differs from the divine right of another. Every human being has etched in his personality the indelible stamp of the Creator.
– MLK
On the days the world feels louder
than the small courage of the heart,
we should listen to the breathing of flowers,
They do not ask who we were yesterday,
they only open,
petal by soft petal,
and say,
I am colour,
you are day,
together we are enough
to begin again.
– j. mann
Sophisticated minds adopt simplified lifestyles;
simplistic minds are drawn to overly
sophisticated lifestyles.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
But the beauty is in the walking — we are betrayed by destinations.
– Gwyn Thomas
Suffering is the sandpaper of our incarnation. It does its work of shaping us.
– Ram Dass
The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered. It’s unnecessary for them to trouble themselves with what’s happening in the world. In fact, it’s undesirable – if they see too much of reality they may set themselves to change it.
– Noam Chomsky
REWARD
Tired and hungry, late in the day, impelled
to leave the house and search for what
might lift me back to what I had fallen away from,
I stood by the shore waiting.
I had walked in the silent woods:
the trees withdrew into their secrets.
Dusk was smoothing breadths of silk
over the lake, watery amethyst fading to gray.
Ducks were clustered in sleeping companies
afloat on their element as I was not
on mine. I turned homeward, unsatisfied.
But after a few steps, I paused, impelled again
to linger, to look North before nightfall – the expanse
of calm, of calming water, last wafts
of rose in the few high clouds.
And was rewarded:
the heron, unseen for weeks, came flying
widewinged toward me, settled
just offshore on his post,
took up his vigil.
If you ask
why this cleared a fog from my spirit,
I have no answer.
– Denise Levertov
Peace opens the doors of history, lets life pass!
– Natália Correia
But words are beings: the game will bewitch you until you become part of it; you will spend your life defending the right of the game to lure you into the maze, to lure you into humor. You read and you do not understand what you read, and so you read more, enjoying the power of words to differ from the mundane. Words are waves. You learn to swim out of the tempting wave which covers you with foam.
Words have the rhythm of the sea and the call of the mysterious: “Come to me, to me in search of what you know not,” the blue calls to you. Luck and the coastguard saved you from certain death with the sound of words. But the lamp of the sea still scratches, but you have not shunned your love to the sea, the source of the primal rhythm. How is the sea imprisoned in three letters, the second of them overflowing with salt? How do letters expand to make room for all these words? How do words expand to embrace the world?
– Mahmoud Darwish
Town of the Dragon Vein
If you wake up too early listen for it.
A sort of inverted whistling the sound of sound.
Being withdrawn after all where?
Does all the sound in the world.
Come from day after day?
From mountains but.
They have to give it back.
At night just.
As your nightly dreams.
Are taps.
Open reversely.
In.
To.
Time.
– Anne Carson
People are icebergs […]. Beneath the surface lies a huge mass of unspoken words, pains and secrets. No one is really what they seem.
– Bernard Minier
He knew suddenly that nobody, living upon the remotest, most barren crag in the ocean, could complain of a dull landscape so long as he would lift his eyes. In the sky there was a new landscape every minute, in every pool of the sea rocks, a new world.
– T.H. White
Every day on the balcony of the sea,
wings open, fire is born,
and everything is blue again like morning.
– Pablo Neruda
This planet, this solar system, this galaxy is people-ing in exactly the same way that an apple tree apples.
– Alan Watts
Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!
Whoever degrades another degrades me,
And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.
– Walt Whitman
I think now that if I had 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
Psychosis is an attempt at rigor. In this sense, I would say that I am psychotic. I am psychotic for the simple reason that I have always tried to be rigorous.
– Jacques Lacan
If you don’t feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn’t very vital. If you don’t feel like you are writing somewhat over your head, why do it?
– John Irving
The language by which we have been taught to dismiss ourselves and our feelings as suspect is the same language we use to dismiss and suspect each other.
– Audre Lorde
Conversation is when you don’t know what the next thing the person you are with is going to say.
– John Cage
Bolshevescent
You stand far from the crowd, adjacent to power.
You consider the edge as well as the frame.
You consider beauty, depth of field, lighting
to understand the field, the crowd.
Late into the day, the atmosphere explodes
and revolution, well, revolution is everything.
You begin to see for the first time
everything is just like the last thing
only its opposite and only for a moment.
When a revolution completes its orbit
the objects return only different
for having stayed the same throughout.
To continue is not what you imagined.
But what you imagined was to change
and so you have and so has the crowd.
– Peter Gizzi
Trying to be good to others, I often get my soul shredded in a kind of spiritual pasta.
– Charles Bukowski
…when consciousness is insufficiently differentiated from the unconscious, and the ego from the group, the group member finds himself as much at the mercy of group reactions as of unconscious constellations.
– Erich Neumann
Something was going to break, something has broken… the impression of belonging to or of being in the world, is starting to slip away from you.
– Georges Perec, A Man Asleep
Valentine’s
by Sasha Dugdale
I don’t quite say it anymore, now the kids
Are teens and there are sudden wars, threads
Of conversations that no longer want to pass
Through the needle’s eye of how we recast
Ourselves in new politics, new sadnesses, newspapers.
Irritability, like the substance left by vapors
That have long departed the alembic’s lung
And taste with a quetsch’s bitter tongue.
The hours and days mass themselves around
And harden like the filthy, frozen ground
On railway embankments on a mid-February day.
And that is in truth what I never quite say:
Those trashed slopes are home to the foxglove
An ancient restorer of the heart’s beat, my love.
So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be.
– Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Any experience carried out deeply to its ultimate leads you beyond yourself into a larger relation to the experience of others.
– Anaïs Nin
Knowledge is a skyscraper. You can take a shortcut with a fragile foundation of memorization, or build slowly upon a steel frame of understanding.
– @naval
Whoever manages to write a pure comedy on his deathbed has achieved the ultimate success.
– Thomas Bernhard
I had rather hear a brazen canstick turn’d,
Or a dry wheel grate on the axletree;
And that would set my teeth nothing on edge,
Nothing so much as mincing poetry:—
‘Tis like the forced gait of a shuffling nag.
– Shakespeare
The scholar of one candle sees
An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame
Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.
– Wallace Stevens
How much more time will you spend at a wayside inn? Don’t you want to go home? How exquisite it all is….One is, in his own Self, the wanderer, the exile, the homecoming and the home….Oneself is all that there is.
– Anandamayi Ma
The world may be mean, but people don’t have to be, not if they refuse.
– Colson Whitehead
When it was discovered that information is a business, the truth ceased to be important.
– Ryszard Kapuściński
There’s a higher power that knows where your body is supposed to be & what work it’s supposed to do. Trust that power. That power is yourself. I call it, “The current that knows the way.” It’s a beautiful power, it only knows love. It wants you to merge with itself.
– Robert Adams
My great rival is music, it sticks in the bottom of my ear and rots . . . it never stops scolding . . .
– Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Every human mind risks becoming mechanical when it clings to memory, repetition, and habit.
Awareness is the antidote.
– Shai Tubali
A political art, let it be / tenderness
– Amiri Baraka, Short Speech to My Friends
It wasn’t that I thought I could be a good poet—I just knew I couldn’t be a good fiction writer.
– Sharon Olds
The Earth is not a big rock infested with living organisms any more than your skeleton is bones infested with cells. The Earth is geological, yes, but this geological entity grows people. And our existence on the Earth is a symptom of the solar system and its balances as much as the solar system, in turn, is a symptom of our galaxy—and our galaxy, in its turn, is a symptom of the whole company of galaxies. Goodness only knows what that’s in.
– Alan Watts
Not recognizing is the magic of mind.
Recognizing is the magic of pure awareness.
The mind is as different from the state of rigpa
As dreams are from being awake.
– Jigme Losel Wangpo
I hadn’t told them about you. But they saw you bathing in my eyes. I hadn’t told them about you. But they saw you in my written words. The perfume of love cannot be concealed.
– Nizar Qabbani
You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.
– Bukowski
Stress is an ignorant state, it believes that everything is an emergency.
Nothing is that important.
– Zen wisdom
spring leans close
and calls the soul
by its older name
– @BashoSociety
See what you are. Don’t ask others, don’t let others tell you about yourself. Look within and see.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Appear at points which the enemy must hasten to defend. March swiftly to places where you are not expected.
– Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.
– Joan Didion
The point of analysis is to get over yourself.
– Don Carveth
Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly, slowly happen.
– DH Lawrence
What is the point of this leaving and returning, this old circle from the Flats to the peak it doesn’t recognize, and then back?
– Gabeba Baderoon
You haven’t always been the mug you are today, bogged down by circumstances, work, and thirst, the most disastrous of servitudes … Do you think that, just for a moment, you can revive the poetry in you?
– Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Whoever cannot attack the thinking attacks the thinker.
– Paul Valéry
The sky was so full of stars, so bright, that looking at it one could not help but wonder: but is it really possible that under a sky like this so many violent and capricious people can live?
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.
– Sofia Kovalevskaya
Don’t feel qualified? Nobody does.
You can only be qualified to do that which you have already accomplished or trained for.
Anything new is accomplished by unqualified people.
– James Clear
Do not move, do not go. Sink within this moment. Hold it for ever.
– Virginia Woolf
When I met Jung, he told me to be true to myself, and true to my type. And that is what I wish for you. If you go against your typological makeup, you go against your grain, and you will get splinters. Go with it, and your life will have ease, flow, and purpose.
– Robert A Johnson
To revoke a wrong view requires more character than to defend it.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
When your mind is quiet, the world appears peaceful and joyous.
– Haemin Sunim
Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.
– Aristotle
it’s so funny when someone can’t stand you being silly and having fun. and it’s not just jealousy. it’s clear they think you’re not taking life seriously enough, when pure joy is one of the most serious things you can do or be.
– @chenchenwrites
Continuous search for what the mind is results in its disappearance. That is the straight path.
– Ramana Maharshi
I wanted to be a revolutionary, and so I broke with art, which nearly undid me.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
In those regions, that were almost slums, what a modest existence, abject, if you please, but delightful, nourished by tranquillity and happiness, he would have consented to lead indefinitely.
– Marcel Proust
Success lies in doing not what others consider to be great but what you consider to be right.
– John Gray
If I had to boil down creativity, I’d say it’s reaction. I crank out some crap in the morning, doesn’t matter what, and the next day, I look at it, and I react to it with a pencil in my hand. That seems to me where creativity actually happens.
– George Saunders
If you are angry or in pain, separate yourself from anger and pain and watch them. Externalization is the first step to liberation. Step away and look. The physical events will go on happening, but by themselves they have no importance. It is the mind alone that matters.
– Nisarga
A courage which looks easy and yet is rare: the courage of a teacher repeating day after day the same lessons -the least rewarded of all forms of courage.
– Honoré de Balzac
If you want to look into the human soul and know a man, don’t take the trouble to analyze his ways of being silent, of speaking, of crying, to see how much he is moved by noble ideas; you’ll get better results if you just watch him read.
– Dostoyevsky
Courage
by Lee Herrick
I almost stopped believing in the ocean.
Imagine that. I almost stopped believing
in the music of such massive natural splendor.
I had lost sight of it, lost sight of hope
because innocent people were killed
by people in masks, hiding their faces,
their shame parading as providence,
their weakness posing as policy.
But then, I remembered the tides.
I was restored by the courage of poets
whose songs sounded like ocean waves
guided by the moon. Even now, there is music.
Children laughing on the swings, a student
learning the saxophone, a woman reading
her rough draft by the lake, a father whistling
a love song in his native language.
Courage is from the Latin word cor,
which means heart, which means we are a heart of poets.
As in, take courage, take heart. As in, the widow
was grateful for your encouragement, your giving heart.
As in, the heart of your convictions.
What I mean is: we are made of love
and therefore larger than their terror.
As a great poet said, they can cut back all of the flowers,
but they cannot hold back spring.
We are a massive natural splendor, too.
In the end, all we are is love and love and love.
In the end, the ocean and the music might save us.
Meet me at the beach. Bring your light.
Bring your songs. I’ll wait for you.
The Walk for Peace ends on Day 108. Rather than being just another number in the journey, 108 has long been used to describe a range of human experience and mental reaction.
Desires: There are said to be 108 earthly desires in mortals.
Lies: There are said to be 108 lies that humans tell.
Delusions: There are said to be 108 human delusions or forms of ignorance.
Heart Chakra: The chakras are the intersections of energy lines, and there are said to be a total of 108 energy lines converging to form the heart chakra. One of them, sushumna leads to the crown chakra, and is said to be the path to Self-realization.
Sanskrit alphabet: There are 54 letters in the Sanskrit alphabet. Each has masculine and feminine, shiva and shakti. 54 times 2 is 108.
Pranayama: If one is able to be so calm in meditation as to have only 108 breaths in a day, enlightenment will come.
Upanishads: Some say there are 108 Upanishads, texts of the wisdom of the ancient sages.
Sri Yantra: On the Sri Yantra there are marmas where three lines intersect, and there are 54 such intersections. Each intersections has masculine and feminine, shiva and shakti qualities. 54 times 2 equals 108. Thus, there are 108 points that define the Sri Yantra as well as the human body.
Pentagon: The angle formed by two adjacent lines in a pentagon equals 108 degrees.
Marmas: Marmas or marmasthanas are like energy intersections called chakras, except have fewer energy lines converging to form them. There are said to be 108 marmas in the subtle body.
Time: Some say there are 108 feelings, with 36 related to the past, 36 related to the present, and 36 related to the future.
8 extra beads: In doing a practice of counting the number of repetitions of the mala, 100 are counted as completed. The remaining are said to cover errors or omissions. The 8 are also said to be an offering to God and Guru.
Chemistry: Interestingly, there are about 115 elements known on the periodic table of the elements. Most of those, around or higher than the number 100 only exist in the laboratory, and some for only thousandths of a second. The number that naturally exist on Earth is around 100.
Astrology: There are 12 constellations, and 9 arc segments called namshas or chandrakalas. 9 times 12 equals 108. Chandra is moon, and kalas are the divisions within a whole.
River Ganga: The sacred River Ganga spans a longitude of 12 degrees (79 to 91), and a latitude of 9 degrees (22 to 31). 12 times 9 equals 108.
Planets and Houses: In astrology, there are 12 houses and 9 planets. 12 times 9 equals 108.
Goddess names: There are said to be 108 Indian goddess names.
Gopis of Krishna: In the Krishna tradition, there were said to be 108 gopis or maid servants of Krishna.
1, 0, and 8: Some say that 1 stands for God or higher Truth, 0 stands for emptiness or completeness in spiritual practice, and 8 stands for infinity or eternity.
Sun and Earth: The diameter of the Sun is 108 times the diameter of the Earth.
The distance from the Sun to the Earth is 108 times the diameter of the Sun.
Moon and Earth: The average distance of the Moon from the Earth is 108 times the diameter of the Moon.
– Kusala Bhikshu
Too many philosophers posing as wise.
Too many political pundits posting poison.
Not enough poets
…swinging swords.
– Shinzen
The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.
– Neil Gaiman
There’s always that first storytelling impulse: I want to tell you something …
– Grace Paley
Begin the poem like you’re talking to a friend, end it realizing you’re talking to the dead.
– Harmony Holiday
We often complicate things by overthinking techniques and huffing and puffing our way through our practices, but the truth is very simple: the art of meditation is about love.
– Jack Kornfield
morning glories too
out to make money
a transient world
– Issa
The world breaks every one… But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
– Ernest Hemingway
The central law of all organic life is that each organism is intrinsically isolate and single in itself. The moment its isolation breaks down, and there comes an actual mixing and confusion, death sets in. This is true of every individual organism, from man to amoeba.
– DH Lawrence
You think I’m insane, don’t you? I am insane. All American authors are insane. You have to be crazy to be a writer in this country.
– Jack Kerouac
Never Offer Your Heart
to Someone Who Eats Hearts
Alice Walker
Never offer your heart
to someone who eats hearts
who finds heartmeat
delicious
but not rare
who sucks the juices
drop by drop
and bloody-chinned
grins
like a God.
Never offer your heart
to a heart gravy lover.
Your stewed, overseasoned
heart consumed
he will sop up your grief
with bread
and send it shuttling
from side to side
in his mouth
like bubblegum.
If you find yourself
in love
with a person
who eats hearts
these things
you must do:
Freeze your heart
immediately.
Let him—next time
he examines your chest—
find your heart cold
flinty and unappetizing.
Refrain from kissing
lest he in revenge
dampen the spark
in your soul.
Now,
sail away to Africa
where holy women
await you
on the shore—
long having practiced the art
of replacing hearts
with God
and Song.
But I suppose the major English vice is sloth.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Our blustering civilization has completely robbed us of a concentrated inner life, dragged our souls out into a bazaar, whether of commerce or of party politics.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I always say don’t discard the past completely because you have to bring with you the most valuable elements of experience, to be sort of like a flashlight. A flashlight into the unknown.
– Wayne Shorter
Prayer is the Study of Art. Praise is the Practice of Art.
– William Blake
A spiritual practice should overflow into the world and help us to transcend illusion and journey toward enlightenment and truth.
– Ben Okri
We must always change, renew and rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
We cannot change the world unless there is a change in our state of consciousness.
– Eckhart Tolle
Usually, the better someone does their job, the easier it looks. You rarely realize how hard it is until you try it yourself.
– James Clear
The sage with spiritual understanding looks within, distracted by nothing.
Since a clear mind is the Buddha, they attain the understanding of a Buddha without using the mind.
– Bodhidharma
The whole of contemporary politics oppresses me with a continuous physical horror like the feeling of growing madness in one’s brain.
– T.S. Eliot
If nature has made you a bat, you shouldn’t try and be an ostrich.
– Hermann Hesse
The person who cannot set himself down on the crest of the moment, forgetting everything from the past, who is not capable of standing on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without dizziness or fear, will never know what happiness is.
– Nietzsche
All metaphysical discussion is profitless unless it causes us to seek within the Self for the true reality. All controversies about creation, the nature of the universe, evolution, the purpose of God, are useless. They are not conducive to our true happiness.
– Ramana Maharshi
The meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. As children, everything amazes us, but as we grow up, the fear of death steals that purity from us. Life confronts us with loss, with pain, with the indifference of the universe. But if we are strong enough, we can pass through that darkness and be reborn with a purpose of our own. We will not recover the innocence of wonder, but we will build something more solid: a reason to keep going. Because no matter how vast the darkness may be, our mission is to project our own light.
– Stanley Kubrick
You don’t always find closure from talking things through. Sometimes closure comes when you accept that someone isn’t willing or able to really hear you or be honest about their part.
– Lori Deschene
Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.
– Søren Kierkegaard
The imagination… dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
All great literature is one of two stories: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town — but every heart in it is broken.
– Leo Tolstoy
In the evolution of language, metaphor is not a late and ornamental development but the very stuff of which language is made.
– Owen Barfield
For me, writers are what the priest has been throughout history, this person we pay to talk about spirituality.
– Dany Laferrière
Every period in history has its own punishments, and ours has a multitude.
– Cees Nooteboom
Before cancer, God was something I tried to fit into my life as much as possible. After cancer, I feel like a connection to God, whatever that is, is kind of the whole point of this exercise on this planet.
– James Van Der Beek
Sometimes I feel like a caretaker of a museum, a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes, and I’m watching over it for no one but myself.
– Haruki Murakami
Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.
– Sylvia Plath
A meaning is not a thing which is attached to a word like a ticket to a coat.
– Owen Barfield
Man, that strange creature: with his feet in the mud, with his head in the stars.
– Else Lasker-Schüler
I would rather discover one true cause than gain the kingdom of Persia.
– Democritus
Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it.
– C.S. Lewis
One can’t write unless one lives, and living means also dealing with the post-office employees, driving in the rush hour, facing up to the demands of daily life.
– Tahar Ben Jelloun
Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again.
– Sylvia Plath
Books and writing are capable of changing the entire world.
– Alan Moore
Insomnia is when both sides of the pillow feel hot.
– Anna Akhmatova
All these years you’ve been searching and looking and trying to change things, trying to add things onto yourself, trying to acquire things, when you have been the source of everything to begin with. Everything you’ve been looking for has been within yourself.
– Robert Adams
The rewards for being sane may not be very many, but knowing what’s funny is one of them.
– Kingsley Amis
Being that can be understood is language.
– Hans-Georg Gadamer
How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It’s sad, really.
– Philip Larkin
To be a monk is to have time to practice for your transformation and healing. And after that to help with the transformation and healing of other people.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Still I say, Here I am, world! Let’s make relaxation look like a crime we’ll never get busted for. Let’s hyperventilate like it’s 1999.
– Andrea Gibson, Ode to the Public Panic Attack
When one wants to be profoundly oneself, which is the case in a poem, one puts oneself on a plane that is at least partly incommunicable to others.
– Yves Bonnefoy
There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just noise.
– Terry Pratchett
Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.
– Albert Camus
Don’t leave anything for later.
Later, the coffee gets cold.
Later, you lose interest.
Later, the days turn into night.
Later, people grow up.
Later people grow old.
Later, life goes by.
Later, you regret not doing
something when you had a chance.
– T. Kawaguchi
The full meanings of words are flashing, iridescent shapes like flames—ever-flickering vestiges of the slowly evolving consciousness beneath them.
– Owen Barfield
If you really know how to ask the question, ‘Who am I?’ you will be delivered into that state of silence and pure consciousness that is your true Being. The question ‘Who am I?’ will ultimately deliver you into the ‘I am’ that you are.
– Leonard Jacobson
I think that’s the gig for the poet: to stand right in the middle of all these contradictions and resolve all of them. It’s absolutely impossible. But that’s the gig.
– Li-Young Lee
real love
does not confuse you
about yourself
– @BashoSociety
The world opens up only with language.
– Hans-Georg Gadamer
The world impoverishes itself by spending a trillion dollars a year on preparations for war. And by employing perhaps half the scientists and high technologists on the planet in military endeavors. How would we explain all this to a dispassionate extraterrestrial observer? What account would we give of our stewardship of the planet Earth? We have heard the rationales offered by the superpowers. We know who speaks for the nations. But who speaks for the human species?
– Carl Sagan
The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is our ability to accept an inherent messiness in our explanation of what’s going on. Nowhere is it written that human minds should be able to give a full accounting of creation in all dimensions and on all levels. Ludwig Wittgenstein had the idea that philosophy should be what he called ‘true enough.’
I think that’s a great idea. True enough is as true as can be gotten. The imagination is chaos. New forms are fetched out of it. The creative act is to let down the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and then to attempt to bring out of it ideas.
– Rupert Sheldrake
Alliteration and repetition is key to spells because a good spell is a poem just as a good poem is a spell.
– Kapka Kassabova
The stars know everything,
So we try to read their minds.
As distant as they are,
We choose to whisper in their presence.
– Charles Simic
So many of earth’s grievances could be soothed by a little consideration.
– Marilynne Robinson
When asked about the difference between Loving-Kindness and Compassion… Loving Kindness is the thought and compassion is the doing.
– Kusala Bhikshu
To find a new world, maybe you have to have lost one. Maybe you have to be lost. The dance of renewal, the dance that made world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Teeming city, city full of dreams, Where spectres in broad day accost the passer-by! Mystery flows everywhere like sap In the narrow channels of the mighty giant.
– Charles Baudelaire
golden birthday
When there are waterfalls to admire
& dogs to go on long walks.
When there are chords to learn
& friends to kiss on the forehead.
There should be smash cakes for grown-ups.
I want to push my mistakes out like frosting through my fingers.
Healing isn’t linear: It’s a long dandelion making its longer way
towards a rabbit’s mouth. I want to live, I want to live, I want to live.
– Adrienne Novy
The esoteric system is all based upon the ultimate motive. Ultimate motive is the service of Truth itself, a complete dedication to the service of the realities of existence.
– Manly P. Hall
In the Morning, Before
Anything Bad Happens
The sky is open
all the way.
Workers upright on the line
like spokes.
I know there is a river somewhere,
lit, fragrant, golden mist, all that,
whose irrepressible birds
can’t believe their luck this morning
and every morning
I let them riot
in my mind a few minutes more
before the news comes.
– Molly Brodak
Sufis say we are sons and daughters of the moment. The practice of remembrance brings us back to NOW, the only place where we actually are, and in which we have a chance to flourish. Moment by moment aren’t we asked to grow and learn, to be what life meant us to become?
– Gunilla Norris
A crowd in its very concept is the untruth, by reason of the fact that it renders the individual completely impenitent and irresponsible, or at least weakens his sense of responsibility by reducing it to a fraction.
– Soren Kierkegaard
Isn’t it sad that you can tell people that the ozone layer is being depleted, the forests are being cut down, the deserts are advancing steadily, that the greenhouse effect will raise the sea level 200 feet, that overpopulation is choking us, that pollution is killing us, that nuclear war may destroy us – and they yawn and settle back for a comfortable nap. But tell them that the Martians are landing, and they scream and run.
– Isaac Asimov
I have a simple philosophy: Fill what’s empty. Empty what’s full. Scratch where it itches.
– Alice Roosevelt Longworth
The most extraordinary discoveries are made when the artist is overwhelmed by what he has to say. Then he uses the old language in his urgency and the old language is transformed from within.
– Boris Pasternak
in a place so utterly reckless? How
masterful and mad is hope.
– Ada Limón
let me radiate
only love
only light
only healing
– Xan Oku
Nature and God – I neither knew
Yet Both so well knew Me
– Emily Dickinson
There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties. … The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness and misery. Happiness is never better exhibited than by young animals, such as puppies, kittens, lambs, &c., when playing together, like our own children. Even insects play together.
– Charles Darwin
None are so empty as those who are full of themselves.
– Benjamin Whichcote
WHAT TO DO IN THE DARKNESS
Go slowly
Consent to it
But don’t wallow in it
Know it as a place of germination
And growth
Remember the light
Take an outstretched hand if you find one
Exercise unused senses
Find the path by walking it
Practice trust
Watch for dawn.
– Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
HARMONY
My daily affairs are quite ordinary;
but I’m in total harmony with them.
I don’t hold on to anything, don’t reject anything;
nowhere an obstacle or conflict.
Who cares about wealth and honor?
Even the poorest thing shines.
My miraculous power and spiritual activity:
drawing water and carrying wood.
– Layman Pang
Always be joyful, no matter what you are. With happiness you can give a person life. Every day we must deliberately induce in ourselves a buoyant, exuberant attitude toward life. In this manner, we gradually become receptive to the subtle mysteries around us. And if no inspired moments come, we should act as though we have them anyway. If you have no enthusiasm, put up a front. Act enthusiastic, and the feeling will become genuine.
– Rabbi Nachman of Bratslau
…The orthodox presume to know, whereas the marginal person is trying to find out.
…To accommodate the margin within the form, to allow the wilderness to thrive in domesticity, to accommodate diversity within unity – this graceful, practical generosity toward the possible and the unexpected… offers reconciliation by which we might escape the endless swinging between rigidity and revolt.
– Wendell Berry
There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you- a train, say, or the future- has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds.
I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a somber sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne.
– Wallace Stegner
It must be made intelligible to people that they have an implicit but true knowledge of God – perhaps not reflected upon and not verbalized; or better expressed, they have a genuine experience of God ultimately rooted in their spiritual existence, in their transcendentality, in their personality, or whatever you want to call it.
– Karl Rahner
In our happiest moments, what sustains us more than pleasure is the mystery itself, not knowing who this is in us. The blind riddle of existence is what makes it possible to live at all, in darkness, at the heart of dancer. Being full and happy occurs only in a glimmer-spark floating through an eternity of star-masses.
– Richard Grossinger
I think it is frightening. Staying completely open to what might happen and trying not to prefigure what is coming at you is frightening. The imagination is in jeopardy. Belief is bold. There’s a philosopher I like called Gianni Vattimo and he’s written a book called Belief (he is a nihilist) and in it he talks about the secularization of belief and turns it into a positive event, being the collapse of hierarchical structure; and he says that Christ was attempting to secularize belief, to return it to the ground. And one of the terms he uses is infinite plurality, that the relations and contingencies that mark your movement through time are always taking place in ways that are outside judgment and imagination. That is sort of where I would like to stand, without being terrified. It involves an openness.
– Fanny Howe
Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places. Underneath the grid is a field—it was always there—where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more.
– Ocean Vuong
Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history is in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes. Everything you do shows your hand.
– Chuck Palahniuk
Time’s Thought
by Fanny Howe
The ordeal of dying must be memory, so much seeing and losing forms.
Friends whacking at invisible ankles and you.
The action is done in a dream. Who did what?
The closed book, the feet
asleep.
Proof that you lived is that you kept notebooks.
Are you collecting material for dreams, she asked the audience.
None of them remembered collecting or dreaming.
Nothing specific, that is.
For a book, no.
They lay down that night not looking for a real thing but for a way back.
A dream broke time apart.
You’re allowed to fear the coming hallucinations, she added.
You met me at the subway
where tracks led east to
North Station and on
up to Cape Ann.
We were almost romantic
Not knotted but erect side by
side passively waiting f
or an apocalyptic collision to rupture
the grave tension between wholly conscious
ontological thinking
and the steel pebbling motion of tracks
parked into action by a fiery touch.
We smiled our way forward perfectly even.
To be described as a note that separates from a song and blows away.
When you are down to nothing more to call on
OR you can say I walked Manhattan from sundown to dawn.
So I have traveled the world.
I walked by foot all over dungeons to see a film starring friends—Americans.
The ceiling collapsed from heavy rain and artificial colors condensed along the sidewalk.
One puddle looked just like the world-marble.
Time had thinned for gravity and a speeding apple
Since time was lightweight and invisible.
Manifest, unbelievable.
A faraway land And a hotel I never visited
In a ghost-book half-erased
You could tell I was in love with a non-entity.
This was the hardest part assigned to me.
During my brief tenure I loved loving best
One who didn’t exist.
In the early days, it was the opposite.
Nature (all of it)
Did exist and loved itself.
Clouds doted on the sea, amorousness
Was in the air returning every wave and sigh.
The squirrels told the oak
To shake its acorns down
For the poor dirt to eat.
Kiss of the Sun
by Mary Ruefle
If, as they say, poetry is a sign of something
among people, then let this be prearranged now,
between us, while we are still peoples: that
at the end of time, which is also the end of poetry
(and wheat and evil and insects and love),
when the entire human race gathers in the flesh,
reconstituted down to the infant’s tiniest fold
and littlest nail, I will be standing at the edge
of that fathomless crowd with an orange for you,
reconstituted down to its innermost seed protected
by white thread, in case you are thirsty, which
does not at this time seem like such a wild guess,
and though there will be no poetry between us then,
at the end of time, the geese all gone with the seas,
I hope you will take it, and remember on earth
I did not know how to touch it it was all so raw,
and if by chance there is no edge to the crowd
or anything else so that I am of it,
I will take the orange and toss it as high as I can.
Migrating creatures ~
According to the Buddhist tradition, we are on a journey whether we like it or not, because we are always in a state of transition. Sentient beings are referred to as drowa in Tibetan, which means ‘migrating creatures’. This is because we can never be in a particular place without moving physically, psychologically or spiritually. Whether we are thinking or sensing or experiencing emotions, everything is constantly being propelled or drawn forward. Emotions are “emotions in motion”, because even a state of agitation is a form of movement.
However, if we are not in a state of transition, we could not talk about transformation. Our life would be a closed book. But according to the Buddhist teachings, our lives are not closed books because of this constant forward movement. If we feel that we are stuck, that is only our misunderstanding of what is really going on, for something is always happening even if we do not notice it.
– Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche
Better if only the young and beautiful would love.
But love in those aging aspics, those monstrous, flopping bodies, desire housed in the bodies of cripples, the legless, the blind—that is humanity.
– Anna Kamienska
I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.
– Kurt Vonnegut
He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next
– Kurt Vonnegut
The Second Going
Again the
day begins, only
no one wants its sanity
or its blinding clarity. Daylight is
not what we came all this way for. A
pinch of salt, a drop of schnapps in our cup
of tears, the ticket to the life to come, a short life of
long nights & absent dawns & a little mercy in the tea.
– Philip Levine
This goes right to the heart of it. Our culture is fundamentally averse to thinking about systems of power. Every conflict is examined as an interaction between individuals, or groups of individuals. Always about the apples, never the trees, or the orchard.
– Peter Birkenhead
Sacrificed so that I could be uncertain, the dead were not me.
It was the end of the suburbs, Vietnam. Sprinklers on the lawn,
sunlight in large rooms with wooden floors, the anxiety of having
things “just so” — that sweet package was finally opened. But my
dreams will not punish me enough, nor can I blame Calley, who
thought if he could kill them all, he could go home. I think it’s
good to want to go home.
The scare leaks now into little, patient countries where the
U.S. chases ghosts, where heroes fight and heroes refuse. I can’t
imagine the pain: I cannot feel the United States of America. I
know I lost the war, but to what does knowledge bring me? An
open field with no trail and cries for help from all directions? If
bad is only sickness and the wrong are just misunderstood, it was
a war to sap the Big Fear and there will be no answer. Like being
awake all the time.
– Killarney Clary, Who Whispered Near Me?
The real choice isn’t “pragmatism” or “idealism.” It’s either allowing these trends to worsen – destroying what’s left of our democracy and turning our economy into even more of a playground for big corporations, Wall Street, and billionaires – or reversing them. And the only pragmatic way of reversing them is through a “political revolution” that mobilizes millions of Americans.
– Robert Reich
In the creation of comedy, it is paradoxical that tragedy stimulates the spirit of ridicule; because ridicule, I suppose is an attitude of defiance: we must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature – or go insane.
– Charlie Chaplin
You cannot begin to preserve any species of animal unless you preserve the habitat in which it dwells. Disturb or destroy that habitat and you will exterminate the species as surely as if you had shot it. So conservation means that you have to preserve forest and grassland, river and lake, even the sea itself. This is not only vital for the preservation of animal life generally, but for the future existence of man himself – a point that seems to escape many people.
– Gerald Durrell
Unlike other forms of psychological disorders, the core issue in trauma is reality.
– Bessel A. van der Kolk
Close your mouth,
block off your senses,
blunt your sharpness,
untie your knots,
soften your glare,
settle your dust.
This is the primal identity.
– Lao Tzu
There is a certain tone in the things that matter, an architecture of delayed light or slow sounds from long ago. Fragments for the after-silence, the sorting of a garden. Things in their essence. Spiritual forms, an invisible geometry of objects that gives strength to us through music … Whispered petitions to show us the way or to destroy us completely. Every word a last word. Every sound a revenant.
– Herbert Pföstl
One of the greatest human spiritual tasks is to embrace all of humanity, to allow your heart to be a marketplace of humanity, to allow your interior life to reflect the pains and the joys of people not only from Africa and Ireland and Yugoslavia and Russia but also from people who lived in the fourteenth century and will live many centuries forward. Somehow, if you discover that your little life is part of the journey of humanity and that you have the privilege to be part of that, your interior life shifts. You lose a lot of fear and something really happens to you. Enormous joy can come into your life. It can give you a strong sense of solidarity with the human race, with the human condition.
It is good to be human.
– Henri Nouwen
I am a place, a place where things come together, then fly apart. Look at the fields disappearing, look at the distant hills, look at the night, the velvety, fragrant night, which has already come, though the sun continues to stand at my door.
– Mark Strand
Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings.
– Edward O. Wilson
Bless everyone you can think of.
– The Rev. Spencer Reece
The winter is coming when I shall walk the sky. The ice is a solid sky on which we walk. It is the inverted year. There is an annual light in the darkness of the winter night. The shadows are blue, as the sky is forever blue. In winter we are purified and translated. The earth does not absorb our thoughts. It becomes a Valhalla.
– Thoreau’s Journal
If everyone’s a writer, then nobody’s a writer, and I think it’s very evident right now.
– Cristin Culver
I think it’s insane that Christians can have ‘spiritual discernment’ about Bad Bunny but not Trump.
– Yadhira Cordero
[Melville] was a deep, great artist, even if he was rather a sententious man. He was a real American in that he always felt his audience in front of him. But when he ceases to be American, when he forgets all audience, and gives us his sheer apprehension of the world, then he is wonderful, his book commands a stillness in the soul, an awe.
– DH Lawrence
We cannot assuage our cravings by pursuits in the material world, no matter what their nature and scope. Nothing short of the experience of mystical unity with the divine source will quench our deepest longing.
– Stanislav Grof
All things are living because their ‘place’ and their being participates in the life of the Imagination, the supreme Person.
– Kathleen Raine
I can no longer bear the aggressiveness of poetry,
and I do not wish my deeds to be investigated.
I would like to be an opened knife: the inscrutable.
– Szilárd Borbély, (tr. Ottilie Mulzet)
Don’t lie in bed reading as long as you did in Prague! It’s best to read only poems, not novels that keep you awake.
– Franz Kafka, 1913.
Don’t bully yourself. Violence will make you hard and rigid. Do not fight with what you take to be obstacles on your way. Just be interested in them, watch them, observe, enquire. Let anything happen — good or bad. But don’t let yourself be submerged by what happens.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Who knows whether the sea heals or corrodes?:
what the sun burns up of it, the moon puts back.
– Alan Dugan
The vast mass are these middling souls. They have no aristocratic individuality, such as is demanded by Christ or Buddha or Plato. So they skulk in a mass and secretly are bent on their own ultimate self-glorification.
– DH Lawrence
Whitman would not have been the great poet he is if he had not taken the last steps and looked over into death. Death, the last merging, that was the goal of his manhood.
– DH Lawrence
In reality, freedom is aristocratic, not democratic. With sorrow we must recognize the fact that freedom is dear only to those men who think creatively. It is not very necessary to those who do not value thinking.
– Nicholas Berdyaev
Literature rescues language from tyranny’s attempt to empty it of its ability to witness truth. In this way, every story, every poem—even every love note, every word between lovers, every remark about the quietest blossom opening in the morning—is an act of redemptive power.
– Joseph Fasano
He who sleeps in the grave of the millennia dreams a wonderful dream. He dreams a primordially ancient dream. He dreams of the rising sun.
– Jung
People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.
– G. K. Chesterton
I’ve lived to bury my desires,
And see my dreams corrode with rust;
Now all that’s left are fruitless fires
That burn my empty heart to dust.
– Alexander Pushkin
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.
– Joan Didion
The constant desire to have still more things and a still better life and the struggle to attain them imprint many Western faces with worry and even depression.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Know then that the body is merely a garment. Go seek the wearer, not the cloak.
– Rumi
The movement of the poem should be like a canal, with a volta that surprises the reader.
– Henri Cole
Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.
– Alan Watts
I think that overambition kills. I think that trying to be a writer kills. Writing simply has to be a sickness, a drug.
– Charles Bukowski
If you try to hold on to life, you lose it. You can’t hold your breath and stay alive; it becomes extremely uncomfortable to hold your breath. And so in exactly the same way, it becomes extremely uncomfortable to spend all your time holding on to your life.
– Alan Watts
I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days – three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.
– John Keats
Since your mind is with you wherever you go, you need to sit down and start unwinding your ball of yarn.
– Jakusho Kwong-roshi
take the morning
before the world
remembers your name
– @BashoSociety
(…) look at things again and again until they start to speak for themselves.
– Freud quoting Charcot in 1914.
To put it as pithily as possibly—and as accurately—the unconscious is a machine for operating an animal.
– Cormac McCarthy
remember you are free to wander away.
– John Ashbery
I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up.
– Frank O’Hara
A time may come soon, when none will return. Then there will be need of valor without renown, for none shall remember the deeds that are done in the last defense of your homes. Yet the deeds will not be less valiant because they are unpraised.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
what is holy
includes the
broken
– @BashoSociety
When I first read Nabokov I said to myself, Well, you might as well quit.
– James Salter
Words are there to capture thoughts; once the thought is captured, the words fall into oblivion. Where can I find a person who has forgotten the words and yet speaks with me?
– Zhuangzi
Fear is really based on the memory of past experiences and not on the experiences themselves, because those are dead.
– Ramesh Balsekar
We need both the immense beauty and gratitude for blessings in life to keep us afloat, and the deep sadness and grief to urge us to action.
– Oren Jay Sofer
When I read, and really I do not read so much, only a few authors,―a few men that I discovered by accident―I do this because they look at things in a broader, milder and more affectionate way than I do and because they know life better, so that I can learn from them.
– Van Gogh
Of all the animals in creation, man is the only one who drinks without thirst, eats without hunger, and speaks without having anything to say…
– John Steinbeck
All pain needs investigation. The mind is nothing else but the Self. Assumption obscures reality without destroying it. All separation, every kind of estrangement and alienation is false. Your being a person is due to the illusion of space and time.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
The free man is the one who can say ‘no’ when everyone expects him to say ‘yes’; because dignity begins in the act of resisting the pressure of the herd.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
In the name of equalizing personalities, you are ready to destroy every personality, to cut off the possibility of its flowering.
– Nicholas Berdyaev
You must become a fire so fierce that it destroys the fire of your opponent. Otherwise, you will be destroyed.
– Yukio Mishima
It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations. Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence…
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I closed the box and put it in a closet.
There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.
– Joan Didion
Because you imagine yourself to be out of it, you raise the question, “Where is the Source?”
– Ramana Maharshi
If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches, that’s not progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. They haven’t pulled the knife out; they won’t even admit that it’s there.
– Malcolm X
Life is oddly wild, full of miracles as well as horrors.
– Charles Bukowski
I would have liked to tear out the pain, but I had it everywhere.
– Annie Ernaux
The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation.
– Cormac McCarthy
The epochē is no longer an intellectual method, a skilled procedure. It is an anguish that imposes itself on us and that we cannot avoid, it is at one and the same time a pure event of transcendental origin and an accident that is always possible in our daily lives.
– Sartre
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
– H. P. Lovecraft
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
– H.L. Mencken
The unconscious system of guidance is millions of years old, speech less than a hundred thousand. The brain had no idea any of this was coming.
– Cormac McCarthy
Meditation is the art of remembering that you are not what happens — you are the silence in which everything happens.
– Shai Tubali
carry less
and notice
more
– @BashoSociety
There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supersedes all other courts.
– Mahatma Gandhi
Many people are too polite to speak with their mouth full, but they don’t mind doing it with their head empty.
– Orson Welles
It can’t be that we’re here in order not to be.
– Julio Cortázar
Zen is often imagined as strict and serious, but there is a lot of joy underneath it.
– Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara
The mask, when worn for a long time, never wants to be removed from the face.
– Leone Ginzburg
How indeed is it possible for one human being to be sorry for all the sadness that meets him on the face of the earth, for the pain that is endured not only by men, but by animals and plants, and perhaps by the stones?
– E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
– George Eliot
Unless one is happy, one cannot bestow happiness on others.
– Ramana Maharshi
Look, anyone seeking ontological meltdown can easily find it in the attempt to write.
– Jonathan Lethem
When I have been hungry or scared or broke, I called on my friends—agents of the Lord, you might say—and I received from them food and drink, comfort and kindness, money or a bed to sleep in for a time. I would have discarded—as you should also—anyone who heard a plea from a friend or a fellow human and offered only a prayer. We are, as Martha Graham always stated, the answered prayer. We are here to move the mountains and heal the sick and raise the dead—in spirit, of course.
Stop praying, except to call on your God for the strength and the courage to move forward, to help those who need your help, and to fill the space you’re taking up with things of honor and beauty and worth.
We are always capable of doing something to help people, without relying on the spiritual cop-out of a prayer. Talk to someone. Feed someone. Make them laugh. Offer a hand or a shoulder. Pray only when you are exhausted from your efforts and are asking for more strength to keep doing your work.
Do not make prayer an evil thing.
– Tennessee William
Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior’s world.
– Pema Chodron
Tell your story as though you are trying to keep people awake.
– Jesse Lee Kercheval
What the right fears is the blacks, browns, yellows and white uniting ‘kinda like one nation under God’.
– Robert Snow
Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant, and interesting.
– Aldous Huxley
Why go to the mountain or the desert? The one you seek is sitting right in the center of your chest.
– Kabir
Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.
– Thomas Sowell
I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.
– Abraham Lincoln
Unexpressed emotions will never die—find those buried emotions in others and you hold the key to their entire will.
– Sigmund Freud
A leader is a dealer in hope—and hope sold to the heart creates loyalty that rational argument never achieves.
– Napoleon Bonaparte
What did I see? I don’t know what words to use. The words are never there. But between the useless words you’ll see what I saw.
– John Berger
In this age of censorship, I mourn the loss of books that will never be written, I mourn the voices that will be silenced-writers’ voices, teachers’ voices, students’ voices-and all because of fear.
– Judy Blume
That which is not good for the swarm, neither is it good for the bee.
– Marcus Aurelius
The life and power of poetry consist in its ability to step out of itself, tear off a fragment of religion, and then return into itself and absorb it. So too with philosophy.
– Friedrich Schlegel, Ideas
Four thousand volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what the soul is.
– Voltaire
All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses—but movement comes from the heart.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The world belongs to those who understand appearances.
– Niccolò Machiavelli
More and more I come to loathe any dominion of one over another; any leadership, any imposition of the will.
– Virginia Woolf
Much of the evil in this world is due to the fact that man, in general, is hopelessly unconscious.
– CG Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
Society has three stages: savagery, ascendance, decadence. The great rise because of savagery. They rule in ascendance. They fall because of their own decadence.
– Pierce Brown
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear—identify their leader and you know where to strike.
– Sun Tzu
Even the most thorough
change happens one
choice at a time.
– Charles Eisenstein
The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.
– George Orwell
The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced.
– Jean Baudrillard
The Waiting Place…for people just waiting. Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or the waiting around for a Yes or No or waiting for their hair to grow. Everyone is just waiting.
Waiting for the fish to bite or waiting for the wind to fly a kite or waiting around for Friday night or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake or a pot to boil, or a Better Break or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants or a wig with curls, or Another Chance… Everyone is just waiting.
– Dr. Seuss
When your barometric pressure drops
and the thunderheads gather,
he huddles under the overpass and writes me long letters with
the stubby little pencils he steals from the public library.
He asks me to look out for you.
– Vijay Seshadri
Poetry […] it consumed Sappho’s young
years, it nourished Goethe’s old age.
Drug-the Greeks called it-both poison
and medicine.
– Umberto Eco
The most clichéd Native images used to be suggested for the cover design, so I fought to have some say.
– Louise Erdrich
Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Like language itself, a technology predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and accomplishments and to subordinate others. Every technology has a philosophy, which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards.
– Neil Postman
What liars poets and everybody were!
They made one think one wanted sentiment.
When what one supremely wanted was this
piercing, consuming, rather awful sensuality!
– D.H. Lawrence
To be interested in the changing seasons
is a happier state of mind
than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
– George Santayana
At the moment when desire ceases and contemplation, pure seeing, and self-surrender begin, everything changes. Man ceases to be useful or dangerous, interesting or boring, genial or rude, strong or weak. He becomes nature, he becomes beautiful and remarkable as does everything that is an object of clear contemplation. For indeed contemplation is not scrutiny or criticism, it is nothing but love. It is the highest and most desirable state of our souls: undemanding love.
– Hermann Hesse
The foundation of the body is the heart, which is the residence of essence… By assembling essence in its residence, it will by and by enter into the blood …
– Dong Zhongshu
This description of essence as being first assembled in the heart and then passed on into the body allows the concrete understanding of the blood as energy and of the mind as energy in ancient Chinese thought. The mind is consequently thought of as fluid residing in one or the other organ and circulating freely around the body—carried, perhaps, by the energy of the blood.
– Hidemi Ishida
Then the edge asserts itself. You are not a god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.
– Anne Carson
I once had a friend who practiced blackmail: perhaps we have all had one. Mine would sometimes ask me to cancel an engagement in order to type a manuscript for him, then arrive toward midnight, the piece still unwritten, and explain that I could type it between four and six A.M., and why was I pulling that long face; not only upon me but upon anyone who would play along, he made demand after absurd demand. “Just this once,” he would say, hinting darkly at “emergencies,” “deadlines,” “saving my life.” Our occasional protests would draw forth no retractions but only impassioned apologies, colored with vivid intimations of his undiagnosed ulcers. (Other times it was angina, and on his most imaginative days it was cirrhosis.)
Some of us loved him and some of us did not, but whether we did or not we all acquiesced, helpless before the undertone his every plea carried: I need you. We acquiesced neither because he was charming (most of the time he was notably not) nor because he was a good and generous man (I think he probably was), but simply because he was bold enough or amoral enough or scared enough to make use of what exists in almost every heart: the potentially disabling fear of failure—in some cases neurotic, in others well-founded. I can’t count on you, he would complain if thwarted, salting what was for some of us an ugly raw wound. We would see in his reproachful eyes, suddenly, the sister we had failed, the friend we had hurt—all the opportunities for goodness or glory or marks in heaven we had ever muffed, miserably. In brief, he could expose us to ourselves, and we quite flatly bought him off.
– Joan Didion
Resurrection is the magical operation—divine and human at the same time—in which divine love and human love overcome forgetfulness, sleep and death. For love never forgets; it is always vigilant; and it is stronger than death. At the resurrection the human spirit and soul descend from above and unite with their immortal body which ascends to meet them.
– Valentin Tomberg
Last night I heard hints of the coming day in a branch tapping on a drainpipe. What matters is the letters delivered in the space after the period. A message clear beyond the wavering glass: love-alone, love-alone.
– Rachel Dacus
I don’t think a person can live without a philosophy. What is philosophy? ‘Philos’ in Greek means ‘friend’ or ‘love’, ‘love’ and ‘friend’ is synonymous. The study of any ‘ophy’ is the study ‘of’. So it’s the study of love, and to have a philosophy is to know how to love and to know where to put it. Because you can’t put it everywhere you’d walk around; you’d have to be a minister or priest saying ‘yes, my son’ or ‘yes, my daughter’, ‘bless you’.
But people don’t live that way; they live with anger and hostility and problems and lack of money…tremendous disappointments in their life. So what they need is a philosophy. What I think what everybody needs is a way to say: ‘Where and how can I love, can I be in love, so that I can live. So that I can live with some degree of peace.’ And I guess every picture we have ever done has been in a way to try to find some kind of philosophy for the characters in the film. So that’s why I have a need… for the characters to really analyze love: discuss it, kill it, destroy it, hurt each other, do all that stuff, in that war — in that word polemic and picture polemic of what life is. And the rest of the stuff really doesn’t interest me. It may interest other people, but I have a one-track mind. That’s all I’m interested in: is love.
– John Cassavetes, I’m Almost Not Crazy
Think of two people, living together day after day, year after year, in this small space, standing elbow to elbow cooking at the same small stove, squeezing past each other on the narrow stairs, shaving in front of the same small bathroom mirror, constantly jogging, jostling, bumping against each other’s bodies by mistake or on purpose, sensually, aggressively, awkwardly, impatiently, in rage or in love – think what deep though invisible tracks they must leave, everywhere, behind them.
– Christopher Isherwood
To be alive on Earth is to inhabit a paradox so poignant and confounding it threatens to split us open every morning we wake.
The same world that breaks our heart with injustice also staggers us with beauty. The body that will betray us with age and illness is also the instrument of every pleasure and embrace.
We are trapped in time and blessed with consciousness. This cursed blessing is simultaneously the cruelest joke and the most extravagant gift in all of creation.
So we make up names for it. We string together contradictions like prayer beads, fashioning phrases that acknowledge both the impossible burden and the unspeakable privilege of incarnation.
There’s magic in the naming. When we call it “the breathing, bleeding, beautiful mess” or “the glorious carnage of conscious existence,” we’re not trying to solve the paradox. We’re living inside it without going mad.
– Rob Brezsny
Really, this world of ours, the scheme of things as they call it, is quite intolerable. That’s why I want the moon, or happiness, or eternal life — something, in fact, that may sound crazy, but which isn’t of this world.
– Albert Camus
Even without love
Even after all this time
My body continues to generate real, healthy, human emotion.
– Ariana Reines
The world, I started to see, was a different world, depending on what you said about it, and how you said it. By honing the sentences you used to describe the world, you changed the inflection of your mind, which changed your perceptions.
– George Saunders
Music should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise.
– Bill Evans
You notice it first as April ends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warming—in fact not at all a warming—yet suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise. You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the colour blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors. The French called this time of day “l’heure bleue.” To the English it was “the gloaming.” The very word “gloaming” reverberates, echoes— the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows. During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.
– Joan Didion, Blue Nights
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the dust.
– T. S. Eliot
People who don’t organize into tribes get wiped out by people who do.
– @naval
When writing a poem, I feel like I’m translating. And when I’m translating, I feel like I’m writing.
– Peter Cole
Read not the Times. Read the Eternities.
– Henry David Thoreau
To one who thus drinks the nectar of immortality in the shape of Self-knowledge (abidance in pure Consciousness), the delights of sense-pleasures become painful.
– Sage Vasishta
We can complacently watch life from the sidelines, or we can risk our pride, our ideas, and whatever else we use to separate ourselves from others and leap fully into our life.
– Michael Wenger
All modesty is false modesty
when it comes to poems,
or to the silence
in which poems begin
before they are words,
when they are still daisies
at the foot of the dead Christ
– Jim Moore
The Ruling Class are not Human. / But the food they steal from our mouths is real.
– Sean Bonney
Wagner is the first who has recognized the disease of language as a disease of civilization, and who has therefore sought to cure it by returning to the primitive sources of language—music and myth.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The Universe, based exclusively on nerve-stimuli, is a structure of imagination, of image-making in mind, itself forever unknowable, and its very existence at best a conjecture.
– Wei Wu Wei
The traditional literary forms — the novel, the short story, the poem — although they evolve, do not disappear.
– Lydia Davis
Nothing can be done except little by little.
– Charles Baudelaire
My revolution is a one-man revolution and almost everybody is the enemy. I may not be doing a great deal of damage, but at least I’m not bullshitting.
– Charles Bukowski
When you appeared it was as if
magnets cleared the air.
I had never seen that smile before
or your hair, flying silver.
– Rita Dove
In criticism as in art, the false is most often the boring; and after all, the critic’s unforgivable sin is to be dull.
– Leslie Fiedler
Everything good is costly, and the development of the personality is one of the most costly of all things. It will cost you your innocence, your illusions, your certainty.
– Carl Jung
When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.
– Charles Bukowski
Jung believes that alcoholism and drug addiction, for instance, have become such huge problems because we look in vain to drugs to deliver a transcendence that normal life can no longer provide.
– David Tacey
I don’t think any culture ever degraded without damage being done to its language.
I don’t think any culture can be saved without reestablishing the health of its language.
If a people can’t speak to one another then they can build nothing together.
– Bernard T. Joy
I may not have amazing victories, but I can amaze you with defeats that I came out of alive.
– Anton Chekhov
For the thinking person there is no such thing as idleness… By contrast, one might say that the thinking person is at his most active when he is supposedly doing nothing. This is beyond the comprehension of genuinely idle people.
– Thomas Bernhard
Try, as far as you can, to get rid of beliefs which depend solely upon the place and time of your education, and upon what your parents and schoolmasters told you… every approach towards it is a step towards a scientific habit of mind.
– Bertrand Russell
Anyone who enjoys inner peace is no more broken by failure than he is inflated by success.
– Matthieu Ricard
Silence is ever-speaking; it is the perennial flow of ‘language’. It is interrupted by speaking; for words obstruct this mute ‘language’. Lectures may entertain individuals for hours without improving them. Silence is permanent and benefits the whole of humanity.
– Ramana Maharshi
Genius lives only one story above madness.
– Schopenhauer
A half-man (or, rather, half-person) is not someone who does not have an opinion, just someone who does not take risks for it.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Bad times, hard times, this is what people keep saying; but let us live well, and times shall be good. We are the times: Such as we are, such are the times.
– Saint Augustine of Hippo
Few are made for independence, it is the privilege of the strong.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The soul, you see, is a shy and retiring thing. It lurks in dark places and dislikes sunlight. And so, if you do not keep the skylight open at all times, the soul will rot…
– Yukio Mishima
The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.
– Christopher Hitchens
Ask for help. Not because you are weak. But because you want to remain strong.
– Les Brown
Even the slightest thought
immerses a man in sorrow;
when devoid of all thoughts
he enjoys imperishable bliss.
– Yoga Vasishta
I’m a bit like a sponge. When I’m not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little – and out comes, not water but ink.
– Georges Simenon
When you find it hard to find a friend to talk to, speak to your Guardian Angel. He is the most faithful of companions.
– St. Francis de Sales
Everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.
– Baruch Spinoza
you meant
to bloom truthfully
in your own wild season
– @BashoSociety
You appeared to me like a last lifebuoy thrown into the middle of a life that was empty. I clung to it with all my strength and willingly closed my eyes to everything that could put this last hope in danger.
– María Casares to Albert Camus
Everybody loves his body, but few love their real being. Your real being is love itself, and your many loves are its reflections according to the situation at the moment. Love yourself wisely, and you will reach the summit of perfection.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Wise sayings often fall on barren ground; but a kind word is never thrown away.
– Arthur Helps
There is no single ultimate truth to be achieved, after which all the scientists can retire. The world is far more complex than the human mind, and there are far more patterns in Nature than we can ever hope to decipher.
– Carl Sagan
AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more.
– Cory Doctorow
even in your bare seasons
something within you is
preparing to bloom again
– @BashoSociety
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
– Douglas Adams
It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part.
– Voltaire
Reality is simply the loss of ego. Destroy the ego by seeking its identity. Because the ego is no entity, it will automatically vanish, and reality will shine forth by itself.
– Ramana Maharshi
To create, centuries and giants are needed; To destroy, a dwarf and a second.
– St. Augustine
LOST
my lost lamb lovelier than all the wool.
– Michael Longley
It is not the path which is the difficulty; rather, it is the difficulty which is the path.
– Søren Kierkegaard
You expect all kinds of things, but what real life throws up is always more bizarre.
– Georges Simenon
If you would only rid yourselves of the concepts of ordinary and Enlightened, you would find that there is no other Buddha than the Buddha in your own mind.
– Huang Po
Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.
– Henry Ford
We don’t hate anybody. We love our people so much they think we hate the ones who are inflicting injustice against them.
– Malcolm X
I think I always just wanted to live the art life. And for me the art life was drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.
– David Lynch
The city is a pit. The bottom is dark, but the top is light. One struggles to reach the top, but the mud pulls one back.
– Victor Hugo
STRANGE WAY
by Martyn Joseph
[Verse 1]
Strange way to start a revolution
That’s a strange way to get a better tan
Strange way to hold a power breakfast
And a strange way to show your business plan
Yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah
[Verse 2]
Strange way to see if wood would splinter
Strange way to do performance art
Strange way to say “I’ll see you later”
And a strange way to leave behind your heart
[Chorus]
Strange dissident of meekness
And nurse of tangled souls
And so unlike the holy
To end up full of holes
Strange way
[Verse 3]
Strange way to hang around for hours
It’s a strange way to imitate a kite
Strange way to get a view of Auschwitz
That’s a strange way to represent the light
[Verse 4]
Strange way to watch for stormy weather
And a strange way to disprove gravity
Strange way to go around fund-raising
What a strange way to sing I’m liberty
[Chorus]
Strange dissident of meekness
And nurse of tangled souls
And so unlike the holy
To end up full of holes
What a strange way
[Verse 5]
Strange way to test for hemophilia
Strange way to spend a happy hour
Strange way to down a bitter cocktail
Strange way to merchandise your power
[Verse 6]
Strange way to reassure your mother
That’s a strange way to finish your world tour
And a strange way to pose for all those paintings
What a strange way to gather in the poor
[Chorus]
Strange dissident of meekness
And nurse of tangled souls
And so unlike the holy
To end up full of holes
This world is too much with us
Could we not now just elope?
Strange way to hold us closer
Strange way to give us hope
Strange way
[Outro]
Strange way
Strange way
Strange way
People Crazy As Me
by Martyn Joseph
[Verse 1]
I always thought a man should have a dream
To dig himself out when he hit the floor
A fundamental right to some equality
Case some old bigot comes knocking on his door
[Verse 2]
I always thought a woman she should have the same
With equal rights attached to her name
Maybe they could raise a little family
And pass the message onto somebody
[Chorus]
I look around, sometimes I see
People crazy as me
[Verse 3]
Always thought the needy should come first
Lighten their burden, lift the curse
And give the old there something new
Like our grateful hearts for all they went through
[Verse 4]
I never thought that we should see them sick
As they take away the hospitals brick by brick
And build our stadiums up so high
I got a little contradiction here in my eye
[Chorus]
I look around, sometimes I see
The people crazy as me
People crazy as me
[Verse 5]
I always thought a child should have the chance
To be embraced by love and with her dance
To make mistakes but know the touch of grace
And if you beat on them, you’re a disgrace
[Verse 6]
And always give the time of day to anyone
Don’t be ignorant and don’t you poke fun
Don’t just deal with those who can give you gain
You should treat everybody just the same
[Verse 7]
I don’t think we’re supposed to understand
Every card placed in our hand
But I think that we are meant to know
We’re not alone wherever we go
[Verse 8]
And I always thought that we should live with hope
But never trample on those who just can’t cope
And righteousness not far away
Little bit of redemption is gonna save this day
[Chorus]
I look around, sometimes I see
People crazy as me
I look around, sometimes I see
People crazy as me
I see people crazy as me
Crazy as me
The artificial intelligentsia is dragging us into an archaic future where intelligence is quantified, fixed, and ranked, and smartness is fetishized. We would do well to remember that IQ is, above all, a eugenic concept.
– Ruha Benjamin
The role which the artist plays in society is to revive the primitive, anarchic instincts which have been sacrificed for the illusion of living in comfort… It is not the most comfortable life in the world but I know that it is life, and I am not going to trade it for an anonymous life in the brotherhood of man-which is either sure death, or quasi-death, or at the very best cruel
deception.
– Henry Miller
Much of our wounding occurs
before language.
We cannot think our way
out of trauma.
A more tactile, sensitive
alchemy is required.
– Matt Licata
THE LOVERS
I was always afraid
of the next card
the psychic would turn
over for us—
Forgive me
for not knowing
how we were
every card in the deck.
– Timothy Liu
Justified rage is what clears the path for the new to be built. It is what burns old systems to the ground so that we can RISE from the ashes.
– Jaclyn Cherie
The blue sea above,
the green sea below,
and your heart:
the third shore.
– JL Soler
Starting anything new requires an internal sense of its rightness for us or it won’t have enough energy to be taken up and manifested. And then tedious moments come along when we just “don’t feel like doing whatever it is”. Those are key moments when the self-talk needs to be a combination of tough love and compassion. They are the right approach for many things.
– Gunilla Norris
The tangible reality of our everyday lives is really a kind of illusion, like a holographic image. Underlying it is a deeper order of existence, a vast and more primary level of reality that gives birth to all the objects and appearances of our physical world in much the same way that a piece of holographic film gives birth to a hologram.
If the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality, and what is “out there” is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only processes some of the frequencies out of this blur, what becomes of objective reality? Put quite simply, it ceases to exist.
Although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this is an illusion. We are really “receivers” floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency.
– David Bohm
Being a ‘good person’ is something you do, not something you are.
– Luvvie Ajayi
The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains.
– Ray Bradbury, The Long Rain
The Rising Times
These are the rising times,
the rising of the sweet potency
within your soul.
The rising of humanity
to meet its greatest potential.
You know it.
You feel it.
Deep within your root,
there is a quivering.
It’s true.
It’s that uncertainty.
It’s that chaos.
It’s that which you fear
will shake you to your core.
Bless you,
I hope it will.
These are the rising times.
Let your authentic power rise.
Let your voice fly on
impassioned thermals,
high,
like a hawk kettling amidst the gods.
These are the rising times.
Stand up for what you believe in.
Stand up for those who have
been beaten down,
whatever their creed or form.
Stand up because humans are
not designed to crawl indefinitely,
And now is the time.
These are the rising times.
These are the rising times.
Raise your arms high above your head.
Look up.
You’re a vast being in a vast universe.
How lucky you are to be here now.
Be here now.
These are the rising times.
Glory to the phoenix for
teaching us that ashes are not
an end point,
but a bed for consummating that
which is destined to be reborn.
Believe in the heat and glow.
These are the rising times –
and I’ll stand beside you
as we see these times through.
Standing together –
that’s all She has ever wanted for us.
Stand up and stand together.
It’s really that simple for us
to become fully human.
The sun has been showing us how
every morning,
and the moon, every night –
Rising…
Did you realize?
These are the rising times.
– Jamie K. Reaser
Love Minus Zero/ No Limit
by Bob Dylan
My love she speaks like silence,
Without ideals or violence,
She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful,
Yet she’s true, like ice, like fire.
People carry roses,
Make promises by the hours,
My love she laughs like the flowers,
Valentines can’t buy her.
In the dime stores and bus stations,
People talk of situations,
Read books, repeat quotations,
Draw conclusions on the wall.
Some speak of the future,
My love she speaks softly,
She knows there’s no success like failure
And that failure’s no success at all.
The cloak and dagger dangles,
Madams light the candles.
In ceremonies of the horsemen,
Even the pawn must hold a grudge.
Statues made of match sticks,
Crumble into one another,
My love winks, she does not bother,
She knows too much to argue or to judge.
The bridge at midnight trembles,
The country doctor rambles,
Bankers’ nieces seek perfection,
Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring.
The wind howls like a hammer,
The night blows cold and rainy,
My love she’s like some raven
At my window with a broken wing.
Valentine’s Day
by Theodora Goss
This is the coldest day of the year so far —
the kind of cold that hurts you to the bone,
that says to impatient bulbs, stay underground:
the world is dead, there’s nothing for you here.
And yet this is the day we’ve chosen to be
our Valentine, instead of some day in June
when birdsong would wake us, not this bitter cold —
when roses would actually be blooming. Crazy, isn’t it?
The thing is, we like to believe in what we can’t see,
we crazy humans. That bulbs will be daffodils
and crocuses, that those sticks poking out of the ground,
half-covered in burlap, are actually rose bushes,
that the warblers and wrens who are having a grand old time
in Mexico will decide to return again.
We believe in spring, we believe in promises,
we talk about love, that insubstantial notion,
convinced that it will sprout from the cold ground.
We are, all of us, incurable romantics.
And yet, before the snow fell, I could see,
poking out of the ground, a few green shoots.
I know they’re there, just waiting for a finger
of warmth to touch them. And when that delicate girl,
the spring, with sunlit hair, returns again
from wherever she’s been vacationing, they’ll grow,
filling our world with colors and fragrances.
We’ll forget our frostbitten cheeks, the icy sidewalks.
For now? We wrap ourselves in scarves and curse
the wind, and slip on ice, and talk about love,
convinced that it exists although we can’t see it —
hopeful or delusional, which may be
much the same thing. Meanwhile the world around us
lies (at least we hope) not dead but sleeping . . .
I love a lot of people, understand none of them.
– Flannery O’Connor
Checkout
by Caroline Bird
I think “so, this is death” and wonder why
I can still see through my eyes. An angel
approaches with a feedback form asking
how I’d rate my life (very good, good,
average, bad, very bad) and I intend to tick
“average” followed by a rant then I recall
your face like a cartoon treasure chest
glowing with gold light, tick “very good,”
and in the comment box below I write
“nice job.” The angel asks if I enjoyed
my stay and I say “Oh yes, I’d definitely
come again” and he gives me a soft look
meaning “that won’t be possible but thanks
all the same,” clicks his pen and vanishes.
I can’t think of any other time in all of history except the Civil War that the United States government has fought against itself every day. This is absolutely absurd.
– David Salter
Isolated people whom are with few options, and raised in such environments, will begin to believe their immense limitations are infinite possibilities.
– Nolan Elenya
The normal is that which nobody quite is. If you listen to seemingly dull people very closely, you will see that they are all mad in different and interesting ways, and are merely struggling to hide it.
– Robert Anton Wilson
I do love nothing in the world so well as you—is not that strange?
– William Shakespeare
Our society has taught us how to fill up the mind, how to jam it full of ideas, prejudices, regrets, anticipations and expectations.
– Ajahn Sumedho
Your mouth is snow now on my lips, cool, intimate, first kiss, a vow. Time falls and falls through endless space, to when we are.
– Carol Ann Duffy
In order to create, the need to express has to be bigger than the fear.
– Juliette Binoche
If you cannot hear the cry then you have cultivated a life of indifference.
– Rob Bell
Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting—break it through winning their hearts before engaging their minds.
– Sun Tzu
To replace the patriarchy with a matriarchy will only be neurotic in another direction. Valuing the “feminine” and the “masculine” equally is the only path toward greater wholeness and fuller humanity.
– James Hollis
Nobody is purely good or purely evil. Most of us are in-between. There are moths that explore the day and butterflies that play at night. Polarity is an integral part of nature — human or not human.
– Suzy Kassem
All around us lies what we neither understand nor use. Our capacities, our instincts for this our present sphere are but half developed. Let us confine ourselves to that till the lesson be learned; let us be completely natural; before we trouble ourselves with the supernatural.
– Margaret Fuller
Art is the conceptual solution of complicated forms, the perpetual fusion of personality, not humble ornamentation of surface pyrotechnics. Beauty never comes from decorative effects but from structural coherence. Art never grows out of the persuasion of published eclecticism or the inviting momentum of the bandwagon.
– Robert Gwathmey, Painters on Painting
The United States is a powerful country… but it doesn’t run the world, and it should not aspire to run the world. That’s a kind of madness.
– Jeffrey Sachs
The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs.
– John Dewey, How We Think
…it may be that kindness is our best audition for a worthier world.
– Michael Blumenthal
Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. It is, in fact, the one thing that still stands when all else has fallen.
– John Bertram Phillips
Black holes are the seductive dragons of the universe, outwardly quiescent yet violent at the heart, uncanny, hostile, primeval, emitting a negative radiance that draws all toward them, gobbling up all who come too close. Once having entered the tumultuous orbit of a black hole, nothing can break away from its passionate but fatal embrace.
– Robert Coover, A Child Again
Human relationships were strange. I mean, you were with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stopped.
– Charles Bukowski, Women
Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.
– Oscar Wilde
People love other people’s stories. Theories divide people, but stories unite people.
– James H. Billington, 13th Librarian of Congress
Loving practice is not aimed at simply giving an individual greater life satisfaction; it is extolled as the primary way we end domination and oppression.
– bell hooks
Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.
– George Jean Nathan
When a society has no mythological anchor, no soul-affirming rites-of-passage, a society doesn’t know which story it’s in. And as for evil—surely we are too sophisticated for that? When you lose the metaphor, a hand moves briskly to a rusty blade. We are adrift in an epidemic of the literal.
– Martin Shaw
It may seem a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague is with decency.
– Albert Camus
Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.
– Philip José Farmer
Before the year 313, it’s unthinkable that a Christian would be in the army. By the year 400, we ARE the army… and we’re killing the pagans.
– Richard Rohr
Some are made modest by great praise, others insolent.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn
Love Is Always a Radical
It does not speak as the preachers speak;
it comes into the cities like a madman
overturning the money-tables;
it breaks all laws on earth.
Say it:
the mark of a sick age
is the hatred of all that is simple.
In a world of steel and legions
all they will ever do with love
one
another
is nail it in the air among the birds.
– Joseph Fasano
At last, she makes her choice. She turns around, drops her head, and walks toward a horizon she cannot see. After that, she does not look back anymore. She knows that if she does, she will weaken.
– Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
Grace is a short interlude where there is forgiveness, where kindness reigns, where there is bestowing of mercy.
– Carol Edgarian
Nothing is more unfair than to judge men of the past by the ideas of the present. Whatever may be said of morality, political wisdom is certainly ambulatory.
– Denys Winstanley
In a single day there lies open to men of learning more than there ever does to the unenlightened in the longest of lifetimes.
– Seneca
Matter is light, crystallized into the complex idea of this universe, exactly as literature is typeset assembled into the complex ideas of a library.
– Walter Russell
We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.
– Tennessee Williams
The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.
– Ferdinand Foch
Act only according to that maxim that you would will as a universal law.
– Immanuel Kant
Show that you have the spirit of a free man.
– Epictetus, Discourses
Poets can express much more than novelists, this connected sense of something which is simple and lucid and true and non-bogus and at the same time oddly accidental.
– Iris Murdoch
Uniqueness is anomalous; in our oddness is our integrity, our individuality.
– James Hillman, From Types to Images
Amidst radical changes in climate and in culture, creation wishes to continue, yet can only work through the souls of those alive at a given time. There may be no better time than these troubled times to learn the pattern set within the soul and claim the mythic thread that brought each of us to life.
– Michael Meade
Initially the truth might be a specific insight, some connection we make between various elements in our experience. But as the soul gives herself more to the truth, the truth becomes essential truth, and ultimately the absolute truth—the ultimate nature of everything in all its beauty, magnificence, and splendor. When we finally behold the absolute truth and see its beauty and magnificence, we understand. We recognize it as the source of love. We love it because it’s lovable. We love it because we are loving our true self. We love it because it’s natural to love the truth. Not because it’s correct, ethical conduct, but because in some very deep place in us, the truth is the Beloved.
– A. H. Almaas, Spacecruiser Inquiry
For Nature has no knowledge of the past —
Our phantom years do not concern or touch her;
And faced with her we dimly see at last
Ourselves as a mere fantasy of Nature.
– Fyodor Tyutchev (tr. John Dewey)
It is urgently necessary to close my mouth with kisses.
– Franz Kafka, 1912.
I take a piece, a piece of my heart, wrap it carefully in a few written pages, and give it to you.
– Franz Kafka, 1903.
I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
– Pablo Neruda, (tr. Mark Eisner)
The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their downfall: in the labyrinth, in hardness towards oneself and others, in experiment; their delight lies in self-mastery: asceticism is with them nature, need, instinct.
– Nietzsche
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. Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. But in the long run, it comes back on us. You cannot stay away from yourself forever. You have to return, have to come to that experiment, to know whether you really can love. That is the question—whether you can love yourself. And that will be the test.
– Carl Jung
Aloneness is a state of being, whereas loneliness is a state of feeling. It’s like the difference between being broke and being poor.
– Townes Van Zandt
You shouldn’t ask me whether I like him or not. The way you mean it, I don’t suppose I like anybody.
– Dorothy Baker
I consider life as an inn where I must stay until the coach of the abyss arrives. I do not know where it will take me, for I know nothing. And I sing slowly, to myself alone, vague songs I compose while I wait.
– Fernando Pessoa
Many people are caught in a knot of self-destructive behavior and are unable to see it or appreciate how they themselves have tied it. Each believes the problems lie somewhere “out there,” surrounding them but beyond them, rooted in external circumstances.
– James F. Masterson
Nobody will ever induce me to absolve human nature because I know myself.
– Nicolás Gómez Davila
If I can speak in all the languages of men or of angels, but if I do not have love, then I am only a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
– 1st Corinthians 13
Anyone can build a house of wood and bricks, but the Buddha taught that that is not our real home. Our real home is inner peace.
– Ajahn Chah
Cannot please, cannot charm or win
what a poet!
and the clear water is thick
with bloody blows on its head.
– Frank O’Hara
The victim mindset dilutes the human potential. By not accepting personal responsibility for our circumstances, we greatly reduce our power to change them.
– Steve Maraboli
I am not a snob; it is simply that I am not interested with what most people have to say, or what they want to do mostly with my time.
– Charles Bukowski
My ambition is handicapped by laziness.
– Charles Bukowski
People are always looking for the secret to the universe. The secret is there is no secret; it’s all just a fascinating, complicated mess.
– Prof. Feynman
When I run after what I think I want, my days are a furnace of stress and anxiety. If I sit in my own place of patience, what I need flows to me, and without pain. From this, I understand that what I want also wants me, is looking for me and attracting me.
– Rumi
In all institutions from which the cold wind of open criticism is excluded, an innocent corruption begins to grow like a mushroom – for example, in senates and learned societies.
– Nietzsche
If I could only have the experience of meeting a passionate thinker, that is, someone who honestly and honorably expressed in his life what he has understood!
– Søren Kierkegaard
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.
– Edward Lear
What is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?
– Søren Kierkegaard
The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life.
– Eckhart Tolle
I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go,
and the days
go by. I drop in.
– Frank O’Hara
Reality is a great storyteller. It tells stories more surprisingly and violently than all poets.
– Alexander Kluge
Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.
– Carl Sagan
winter seclusion
listening, that evening
to the sound of rain
– Buson
Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.
– Ernest Becker
You can successfully force people to follow a certain course, but you cannot force them to understand it.
– Confucius
I sat facing you for hours but you didn’t speak. Then I finally understood the unspoken meaning. Removed from their covers, books lay scattered about; outside the bamboo screen, rain beats against the plum tree.
– Ryokan
All through life I’ve had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, no one would tell me what it was.
No, said the old man, that’s just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.
– Douglas Adams
With each session of silence the fog lifts a bit more, until one day the ego “I,” with its insistent look-at-me voice, drops away, revealing the true self afloat in a vast blue sky.
– Joan Duncan Oliver
Instead of searching for what you do not have, find out what it is that you have never lost.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
There is no hierarchy of suffering. There’s nothing that makes my pain worse or better than yours.
– Edith Eger
All is a play in consciousness. All divisions are illusory. You can know the false only. The true you must yourself be.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Fixity in the Self is your real nature. Remain as you are. That is the aim.
– Ramana Maharshi
deep in the hedge
a small brown bird
building hope
– @RainyDayRibbons
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
– Plato
I shall show you a love
potion without a drug, without
a herb; without the incantation
of any sorceress: if you wish
to be loved, love.
– Seneca
The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.
– Alan Watts
Emptiness, silence, stillness. This is not a void to be feared, but a sanctuary to be sought.
– Wu Hsin
Life, Love, Libraries, have no future.
– Vladimir Nabokov
Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.
– J. D. Salinger
Opportunities multiply as they are seized.
– Sun Tzu
True merit is like a river, the deeper it is, the less noise it makes.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
I have faith in the unlimited, loving power of the Universe.
– Louise Hay
Become who you are by learning who you are.
– Greek poet Pindar
The object of government in peace and in war is not the glory of rulers or of races, but the happiness of the common man.
– William Beveridge
You are not imagining it.
This world has failed you, radically.
– Bernard T. Joy
There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
Is the scale of an artwork intrinsic to the logic?
Or is scale compensating for lightness?
Is immersion generating the awe?
And does awe generated by immersion endure?
Are we witnessing the emergence of a new cathedral-scale logic?
– Laura Kerr, Scale Integrity Test
You have seen my descent. Now watch my rising.
– Rumi
Corporations take the humanity out of trade – they take the happiness out and replace it with something that is ugly.
– Nassim Taleb
I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.
– Jane Austen
There have always been ignorant people, but they haven’t always had college degrees to make them unaware of their ignorance. Some people imagine that they are well informed because they have memorized a whole galaxy of trendy dogmas and fashionable attitudes.
– Thomas Sowell
falling branch
only after the sound
the sky opens wider
– @BashoSociety
You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.
– Terence McKenna
Anything can happen in life, and above all, nothing
– Michel Houellebecq
in this world of dew
we walk together
brief lovers
– Issa
If you seek the secret of Unity,
Read your own being.
– Niyazi Misri
If a person does not become what he understands, then he does not understand it either.
– Søren Kierkegaard
There is one thing that you can trust everybody to do, and that is to put his interest above yours.
– Milton Friedman
Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
– Douglas Adams
If we cannot go back, it hardly seems worth while to go forward. There is nothing in front but a flat wilderness of standardization either by Bolshevism or Big Business…
– G.K. Chesterton
The word of God spoken in the desert is deprived of roots in the sand, but becomes instead a book of ‘inconsumable fire,’ like the burning bush of Moses’ theophany. God’s word, spoken in the desert, is itself a wanderer and a nomad, like any other desert dweller, and finds its echo only in the word of a wandering people.
– Edmond Jabes
I should tie myself to no particular system of society other than of socialism.
– Nelson Mandela
If many variables exist, many variables must be studied.
– B.F. Skinner
They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?
– Fidel Castro
Democracy? I want nothing to do with a system which operates on the premise that my rights don’t exist simply because I am outnumbered.
– R. Lee Wrights
I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, ‘The Beatles did.’
– Kurt Vonnegut
Right down there, in the thick of things, we discover the love that will not die.
– Pema Chödrön
A woman is a school.
– Céline Semaan
Life is too hard for us to be divided
– Katt Williams
There are no guarantees – except the guarantee that holding back from life instead is a recipe for anguish.
– Oliver Burkeman
Our house is on fire. I am here to say, our house is on fire.
– Greta Thunberg
The girl replies that she was dreaming about her mother, who died not long ago. The dead are at peace, thinks B stretching out in the bed. As if she had read his mind, the girl says that no one who has passed through this world is at peace. Not anymore, not ever, she says with total conviction.
– Roberto Bolaño, Last Evenings on Earth
If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.
– Julian Assange
My only advice is to stay aware, listen carefully, and yell for help if you need it.
– Judy Blume
They said that if I questioned a 6,000-year-old earth, I would question whether other parts of Scripture should be read scientifically and historically. They were right. I did. They said that if I entertained the hope that those without access to the gospel might still be loved and saved by God, I would fall prey to the dangerous idea that God loves everyone, that there is nothing God won’t do to reconcile all things to Himself. They were right. I have. They said that if I looked for Jesus beyond the party line, I could end up voting for liberals. They were right. I do (sometimes). They said that if I listened to my gay and lesbian neighbors, if I made room for them in my church and in my life, I could let grace get out of hand. They were right. It has. They told me that this slippery slope would lead me away from God, that it would bring a swift end to my faith journey, that I’d be lost forever. But with that one, they were wrong. Yes, the slippery slope brought doubts. Yes, the slippery slope brought change. Yes, the slippery slope brought danger and risk and unknowns. I am indeed more exposed to the elements out here, and at times it is hard to find my footing. But when I decided I wanted to follow Jesus as myself, with both my head and heart intact, the slippery slope was the only place I could find him, the only place I could engage my faith honestly. So down I went. It was easier before when the path was wide and straight. But truth be told, I was faking it. I was pretending that things that didn’t make sense made sense, that things that didn’t feel right felt right. To others, I appeared confident and in control, but faith felt as far away as friend who has grown distant and cold. Now, every day is a risk. Now, I have no choice but to cling to faith and hope and love for dear life. Now, I have to keep a very close eye on Jesus, as he leads me through deep valleys and precarious peaks. But the view is better, and, for the first time in a long time, I am fully engaged in my faith. I am alive. I am dependent. I am following Jesus as me—heart and head intact. And they were right. All it took was a question or two to bring me here.
– Rachel Held Evans
The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.
– Corrie Ten Boom
Our wounds and our gifts are next-door neighbors.
– Dr. Alexandra Solomon
You gave too much rein to your imagination. Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master. The simplest explanation is always the most likely.
– Agatha Christie
The unceasing propaganda in our time for ‘the individual’ seems to me deeply suspect, as ‘individuality’ itself becomes more and more a synonym for selfishness. A capitalist society comes to have a vested interest in praising ‘individuality’ and ‘freedom’ — which may mean little more than the right to the perpetual aggrandizement of the self, and the freedom to shop, to acquire, to use up, to consume, to render obsolete.
I don’t believe there is any inherent value in the cultivation of the self. And I think there is no culture (using the term normatively) without a standard of altruism, of regard for others. I do believe there is an inherent value in extending our sense of what a human life can be. If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader and then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other words, other territories of concern.
– Susan Sontag
When we listen to people, our own language softens. Listening may be the cardinal act of giving.
– Paul Hawken
Letting go is not the same as pushing someone else away.
– Damien Rice
If God is compassionate, then certainly those who love God should be compassionate as well.
– Henri J.M. Nouwen
We are rarely proud when we are alone.
– Voltaire
If a normally kind, agreeable person makes an enemy of you, you ought to ask yourself why.
– Joyce Rachelle
We learn to live in mystery, to be supported by ultimate insecurity, and to love the flavor of nonbeing.
– A. H. Almaas, The Inner Journey Home
All we really want is Love’s confusing joy.
– Rumi
Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
Some say water is the mightiest force on earth. But the yearning for freedom is even stronger.
– Carole Weatherford
We are both the authors and the readers of our own lives.
– Lex Fridman
You cannot employ non-hostile, non-destructive technical skill unless you realize basically that you yourself are this whole domain of nature. That’s the real you. You are not in a fight against nature. You’re not here to conquer nature—because there’s nothing to conquer! It’s all you.
– Alan Watts
Integration is not on one or two levels of our existence; it is the coming together of the whole.
– Krishnamurti
What Satan had for sale in the garden was knowledge.
– Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov
WRESTLERS
In the sky of men, the star’s bread seemed to me shadowy and hardened, but in their narrow hands I read the joust of these stars calling others: emigrants from below deck still dreaming; I gathered their golden sweat, and through me the earth ceased to die.
REMANENCE
From what do you suffer? As if in the noiseless house there were to awake the ascendancy of a face that an acrid mirror seemed to have fixed. As if, the high lamp and its radiance inclined over a blind plate, you were to lift toward your anguished throat the old table with its fruits. As if you were reliving your escapades in the morning haze toward the beloved revolt, which better than all tenderness, could succor you and raise you. As if condemning, while your love sleeps, the sovereign portal and the path leading toward it. From what do you suffer?
From the unreal intact in reality laid waste. From their venturesome deviations circled with cries and blood. From that which was chosen and left untouched, from the shore of the leap to the coast attained, from the unreflecting present that disappears. From a star which, foolish, came close and will die before me.
– Rene Char, (tr. Mary Ann Caws)
Bright Bindings
by Countee Cullen
Your love to me was like an unread book,
Bright-backed, with smooth white pages yet unslit;
Fondly as a lover, foolishly, I took
It from its shelf one day and opened it.
Here shall I read, I thought, beauty and grace,
The soul’s most high and awful poetry;—
Alas for lovers and the faith they place
In love, alas for you, alas for me.
I have but read a page or two at most,
The most my horror-blinded eyes may read.
I find here but a windy tapering ghost
Where I sought flesh gifted to ache and bleed.
Yet back you go, though counterfeit you be.
I love bright books even when they fail me.
Love can rebuild the world, they say, so everything’s possible when it comes to love.
– Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
when our every inhale is considered greed
and our every exhale considered pollution
our laughter becomes our liberation
our sighs become our salvation
our hollers become a kind of holy
a praise song to our survival
that brings empires to their knees
– FreeQuency
The telephone runs on electricity and human emotions and samsaric problems run on the mind.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Once, when he and I were discussing his theories of nuclear deterrence, he asked me if I knew what had remained inside Pandora’s box after she had opened it and let out all the evils and ills into the world. “Right there,” he said, “at the bottom of the jar—because it was a large urn or a jar, you know, not a box at all—right there, waiting quietly and obediently was Elpis, which most people like to regard as the daimona of hope and counterpart to Moros, the spirit of doom, but to me, a better and more precise translation of her name and of her nature would be our concept of expectation.
Because we don’t know what comes after evil, do we? And sometimes the deadliest things, those that hold enough power to destroy us, can become, given time, the instruments of our salvation.” I asked him why the gods would let out all the hurts, pains, illnesses, and iniquities to roam free while keeping hope trapped behind the lid of the jar. He winked and said that it was because they know things that we can never know.
– Benjamín Labatut
But not to worry. Those of you who have no need to be worried should not in the least be worried. As for those of you who should be worried, it’s a little late to start worrying now, you should have started months ago, when it could’ve done you some good, because at this point, what’s decided is decided, or would have been decided, if those false rumors we are denying, the rumors about the firings which would be starting this week if they were slated to begin, were true, which we have just told you, they aren’t.
– George Saunders
What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
When you choose to connect with others under stress, you can create resilience.
– Kelly McGonigal
Posthumanism, in my account, can be understood as a thoroughgoing critical naturalism, an approach that understands humans as part of nature and practices of knowing as natural processes of engagement with and as part of the world. In particular, the acknowledgment that humans are part of nature entails the simultaneous recognition that our understanding of nature as that which is disclosed through scientific practices entails an appreciation of the fact that scientific practices are natural processes rather than external impositions on the natural world.
– Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway
… it suddenly felt as if life in its thousand details, twists, and turns had become perfectly clear and transparent. Just like a crystal-clear sea.
– Etty Hillesum
We as humanity are now the disappointment of the hopes of the ages. . . What a catastrophe in heaven and on earth! In the face of such a picture we may well grow humble again. It is true that modern man is a culmination, but tomorrow he will be surpassed. He is indeed the end-product of age-old development, but he is at the same time the worst conceivable disappointment of the hopes of mankind. The modern man is conscious of this. He has seen how beneficent are science, technology and organization, but also how catastrophic . . .
– C. G. Jung
The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
– Alfred North Whitehead
All appearances are verily one’s own concepts, self-conceived in the mind, like a reflection seen in a mirror. The Dharma being nowhere save in the mind, there is no other place of meditation than the mind. Quite impossible is it to find the Buddha… elsewhere than the mind.
– Padmasambhava
I know what the river is like at night. I know how it tongues the dark and swallows the rain and how it never ever sleeps. I know how it sings in its chains, how steadily it backstrokes into eternity, how if you stand beside it in the deeps of its throat it seems to be saying, saying, saying, only what you cannot tell.
– Niall Williams, History of the Rain
What if our religion was each other? If our practice was our life. If prayer, our words. What if the temple was the Earth? If forests were our church. If holy water–the rivers, lakes, and ocean. What if meditation was our relationships? If the teacher was life. If wisdom was self-knowledge. If love was the center of our being.
– Ganga White
As we become sensitive to our soul’s experience, we find the smallest moments, the slightest breezes, can move so much inside us in the stillness. Life’s brief encounters with intimacy have more importance. With the subtle qualities we find in our inner life, the silence leads us. The pure presence always begins inside. From our soul’s quiet recesses we are taken to caverns and gardens and skies above mansions of silence.
Our interior life is full of the ways of the soul. Our dreams, feelings, intuition, and thoughts are just the beginnings of the vast language of our soul in the silence. In our meditations and prayers we hear the small whispers, the perfect presence speak to us, seeking our awareness and appreciation. To value our inner life is to open the doors for the galaxies of stars in the silence to be discovered. These stars turn out to be not so far away but right next to our soul and in the midst of the hearts of those around us.
– Bruce Davis
An anxious brain isn’t overreacting, it’s stuck in survival mode. When the amygdala (your brain’s alarm system) fires too often, it sends constant danger signals, while the anterior cingulate cortex can accidentally turn the volume up even more. At the same time, the prefrontal cortex, the part needed for logic, calm thinking, and good decisions, starts to go offline. That’s why anxious children (and adults) can’t just think their way out of it. Their brain has shifted from reasoning to protecting. The good news is with the right sensory, movement, and regulation, we can help the brain feel safe again, and when safety returns, thinking, learning, and connection come back online too.
– Anthony Goldsmith
Try this Exercise. Lie on your back and slowly hug one knee into the chest while the opposite arm reaches across the body to gently press into that knee, hold for 5 slow breaths, then switch sides. The cross-body pressure plus deep joint compression tells the brain and nervous system “I’m safe.” This movement lights up both sides of the brain, organizes the midline, and helps calm an overfiring amygdala while bringing the prefrontal cortex back online. It’s simple, grounding, and incredibly regulating, especially before work or school, after a meltdown, or anytime the brain feels too busy.
– Anthony Goldsmith
One who, while himself seeking happiness,
oppresses with violence other beings who
also desire happiness, will not attain happiness
hereafter.
– Buddha
As my prayer become more attentive and inward
I had less and less to say.
I finally became completely silent.
I started to listen
– which is even further removed from speaking.
I first thought that praying entailed speaking.
I then learnt that praying is hearing,
not merely being silent.
This is how it is.
To pray does not mean to listen to oneself speaking,
Prayer involves becoming silent,
And being silent,
And waiting until God is heard.
– Søren Kierkegaard
The birdcalls start their praise.
And rightly so. We listen long.
(We behind masks, in costumes!)
What do we hear? a little willfulness,
a little sadness, and tremendous promise,
sawing away at the half-locked future.
And in between, healing in our listening:
the beautiful silence they break.
– Rilke
Teilhard de Chardin once wrote that “my matter,” my body, is not a bit of the universe that I possess totally. It is the whole of the universe possessed by me partially. This strange thought is the modern equivalent of the ancient doctrine of the human person as microcosm, the world in miniature. Love for matter, for the cosmos of God’s mak-ing, like charity, begins at home. How can I love God’s creation if I fail to love that world as it exists summed up in my own body?
When an acquaintance loves someone we do not find attractive we sometimes express puzzlement in the form of the question: “What does she see in him?” If we asked God, “What do you see in me, in my body?” the answers might amaze us indeed.
– Martin Smith
And meanwhile, outside the door, waits my faithful, my lonely night…
– Vladimir Nabokov
It’s a sign of wisdom to avoid believing every thought that enters your mind. It’s a mark of emotional intelligence to avoid internalizing every feeling that enters your heart.
– Adam M. Grant
Only in our doing can we grasp you.
Only with our hands can we illumine you.
The mind is but a visitor:
it thinks us out of our world.
Each mind fabricates itself.
We sense its limits, for we have made them.
And just when we would flee them, you come
and make of yourself an offering.
I don’t want to think a place for you.
Speak to me from everywhere.
Your Gospel can be comprehended
without looking for its source.
When I go toward you
it is with my whole life.
– Rilke
When I began to listen to poetry, it’s when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to other. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else.
– Joy Harjo
Reverence is the process of awakening to being alive. It’s the realization that life is amazing, and every living being is our sibling.
– Paul Hawken
Lord, give me victory,
help me defeat my enemies,
the skin on my body, the verge,
the hours, the years.
– Nichita Stanescu
To be God, naked, solar, in the rainy night, on a field: red, divinely, manuring with the majesty of a tempest, the face grimacing, torn apart, being impossible in tears: who knew, before me, what majesty is?
– georges bataille, story of the eye
Here’s the deal. The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed — to be seen, heard and companioned exactly as it is. When we make that kind of deep bow to the soul of a suffering person, our respect reinforces the soul’s healing resources, the only resources that can help the sufferer make it through. Aye, there’s the rub. Many of us “helper” types are as much or more concerned with being seen as good helpers as we are with serving the soul-deep needs of the person who needs help. Witnessing and companioning take time and patience, which we often lack — especially when we’re in the presence of suffering so painful we can barely stand to be there, as if we were in danger of catching a contagious disease. We want to apply our “fix,” then cut and run, figuring we’ve done the best we can to “save” the other person.
– Parker J. Palmer
Now we have to get back the cosmos, and it can’t be done by a trick. The great range of responses that have fallen dead in us have to come to life again. It has taken two thousand years to kill them. Who knows how long it will take to bring them to life. When I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened. They have lost the cosmos. — It is nothing human and personal that we are short of. What we lack is cosmic life, the sun in us and the moon in us.
– D.H. Lawrence
While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality… true art lies in a reality that is felt.
– Odilon Redon
And as soon as you have renounced that aim of “surviving at any price” and gone where the calm and simple people go—then imprisonment begins to transform your former character in an astonishing way. To transform it in a direction most unexpected to you.
And it would seem that in this situation feelings of malice, the disturbance of being oppressed, aimless hate, irritability, and nervousness ought to multiply. But you yourself do not notice how, with the impalpable flow of time, slavery nurtures in you the shoots of contradictory feelings.
Once upon a time you were sharply intolerant. You were constantly in a rush. And you were constantly short of time. And now you have time with interest. You are surfeited with it, with its months and its years, behind you and ahead of you—and a beneficial calming fluid pours through your blood vessels—patience.
You are ascending…
Formerly you never forgave anyone. You judged people without mercy. And you praised people with equal lack of moderation. And now an understanding mildness has become the basis of your uncategorical judgements. You have come to realize your own weakness—and you can therefore understand the weakness of others. And be astonished at another’s strength. And wish to possess it yourself.
The stones rustle beneath our feet. We are ascending…
With the year, armor-plated restraint covers your heart and all your skin. You do not hasten to question and you do not hasten to answer. Your tongue has lost its flexible capability for easy oscillation. Your eyes do not flash over with gladness over good tidings, nor do they darken with grief.
For you still have to verify whether that’s how it is going to be. And you also have to work out—what is gladness and what is grief.
And now the rule of your life is this: Do not rejoice when you have found, do not weep when you have lost.
Your soul, which formerly was dry, now ripens with suffering. And even if you haven’t come to love your neighbors in the Christian sense, you are at least learning to love those close to you.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
As we age and plasticity declines, it becomes increasingly difficult for us to change in response to the world, even if we want to. We find familiar types of stimulation pleasurable; we seek out like-minded individuals to associate with, and research shows we tend to ignore or forget, or attempt to discredit, information that does not match our beliefs, or perception of the world, because it is very distressing and difficult to think and perceive in unfamiliar ways.
One reason we can change our brains simply by imagining is that, from a neuroscientific point of view, imagining an act and doing it are not as different as they sound. When people close their eyes and visualize a simple object, such as the letter a, the primary visual cortex lights up, just as it would if the subjects were actually looking at the letter a. Brain scans show that in action and imagination many of the same parts of the brain are activated. That is why visualizing can improve performance.
– Norman Doidge, M.D.
A candle of the Lord is the soul of man, but the soul can become a holocaust, a fury, a rage. The only cure is to discover that, over and above the anonymous stillness in the world, there is a Name and a waiting. Many people suffer from a fear of the self. They do not feel at home in their own selves. The inner life is a place of dereliction, a no-man’s-land, inconsolate, weird. The self has become a place from which to flee.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust, the wicked people would have it all their own way: they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should—so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again.
– Charlotte Brontë
Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.
– David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
But if you cannot find
a good companion
of integrity and wisdom,
then, like a king departing
a conquered land,
or an elephant wandering
alone in the forest,
walk alone.
– Dhammapada 329, Ajahn Munindo
Red is holy. Nobody understands it. It goes on, on, without the world’s understanding. Blue is holy. Blue goes on without the world’s understanding. And the heart…the heart can’t wait. Revolts without understanding. Boom. Goes on. Without the world’s understanding.
– Tennessee Williams
Essentially, you say goodbye to something every day without even realizing it.
– Lev Feuchtwanger
We are not meant to stay wounded. We are supposed to move through our tragedies and challenges and to help each other move through the many painful episodes of our lives. By remaining stuck in the power of our wounds, we block our own transformation. We overlook the greater gifts inherent in our wounds — the strength to overcome them and the lessons that we are meant to receive through them. Wounds are the means through which we enter the hearts of other people. They are meant to teach us to become compassionate and wise.
– Caroline Myss
They will only deserve the name of ‘a human’ and can only count on something prepared for them from Above, who have managed to acquire the necessary data to preserve unscathed the wolf and the lamb that have been entrusted to their care.
– G. I. Gurdjieff
Naturally, if what I say has truth in it, this will already have been dealt with by the world’s poets, but the flashes of insight that come in poetry cannot absolve us from our painful task of getting step by step away from ignorance toward our goal.
– Winnicott
I think the world would be a far calmer and more respectful place if more people were seen reading in public.
– @Kulambq
I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed
– T. S. Eliot
Everything is changing constantly, but the awareness, the fact of being aware of sensations and change, does not change. There is always awareness.
– Douglas Penick
We prefer our personal tragedies, because we’re all cowards and bastards.
– William T. Vollmann, Europe Central
Not only higher forms of life but also many of the smallest insects are social beings who, without any religion, law or education, survive by mutual cooperation based on an innate recognition of their interconnectedness.
– Dalai Lama XIV
Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder ‘why, why, why?’
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.
– Kurt Vonnegut
The sage puts himself last and becomes the first, Neglects himself, and is preserved. Is it not because he is unselfish that he fulfills himself?
– Tao Te Ching
Crying as a mode of composition will visit anyone who lives long enough to miss you.
– Laynie Browne
Simply touching a difficult memory with some slight willingness to heal begins to soften the holding and tension around it.
– Stephen Levine
Remember: the enemy is the literal, and the literal is not the concrete flesh but negligence of the vision that concrete flesh is a magnificent citadel of metaphors.
– James Hillman
Grand ideas kill first efforts. Begin with something in your range. Then write it as a secret.
– Louise Erdrich
In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep.
– Socrates
Happiness is permanent. It is always there. What comes and goes is unhappiness.
If you identify with what comes and goes, you will be unhappy. If you identify with what is permanent and always there, you are happiness itself.
– Papaji
The lamentable problem that you can’t believe everything you’re told is not solved by merely believing the polar opposite.
– David Mitchell
Who wants to live to be a hundred? What’s the point of it? A short life and a merry one is far better than a long life sustained by fear, caution and perpetual medical surveillance.
– Henry Miller
The end approaches, but the apocalypse is long lived.
– Jacques Derrida
The power of intuitive understanding will protect you from harm until the end of your days.
– Lao Tzu
I cannot solve your problem by mere words. You have to act on what I told you and persevere. It is not the right advice that liberates, but the action based on it.
– Nisargadatta
Caretake this moment. Immerse yourself in its particulars. Respond to this person, this challenge, this deed. Quit evasions. Stop giving yourself needless trouble. It is time to really live; to fully inhabit the situation you happen to be in now.
– Epictetus
Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.
– Jorge Luis Borges
Eat like you love
yourself. Move like you love
yourself. Speak like you love
yourself. Act like you love
yourself.
– Tara Stiles
The poet always remains true. He endures in the cycle of nature. The philosopher changes within the eternally enduring. The eternally enduring can only be represented in what is changeable. The eternally changeable only in the lasting, whole, present moment. The images of nature are before and after. It alone is reality.
– Novalis, Last Fragments
Faith is, above all, open-ness — an act of trust in the unknown.
– Alan Watts
Know that which has form to be false; that which is formless is eternal.
– Avadhuta Gita
Most people are far too occupied with themselves to be malicious.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
As Jung once put it, we all walk in shoes too small for us. Living within a constricted view of our journey, and identifying with old defensive strategies, we unwittingly become the enemies of our own growth, our own largeness of soul, through our repetitive, history-bound choices.
– James Hollis
So often we are afraid of missing out; but if you allow the World of Honey-Covered Hooks to siphon off your attention, what you will have missed out on is you.
– Frank Inzan Owen
Someone has sure already made this observation but the fact they can convert all those empty warehouses into prison camps means they could have converted them into housing, community centers, job training centers or, hell, libraries or schools all along. It’s always a matter of will not resources.
– Sarah J. Jackson
We are living in the most destructive and, hence, the most stupid period of the history of our species. The list of its undeniable abominations is long and hardly bearable. And these abominations are not balanced or compensated or atoned for by the list, endlessly reiterated, of our scientific achievements. Some people are moved, now and again, to deplore one abomination or another. Others… deplore the whole list and its causes. Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come.
Protesters who hold out longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal.
If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance.
History simply affords too little evidence that anyone’s individual protest is of any use.
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
Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. I mean ‘ecological’ in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions of survival; the same is true if you add caterpillars to an environment that has had none. This is how the ecology of media works as well. A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything.
– Neil Postman
I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.
– James Michener
The fact of knowing how to read is nothing, the whole point is knowing what to read.
– Jacques Ellul
HOPE ALWAYS COMES EASIER
when it’s morning,
when the birds are already
weaving music through the trees.
Easier when the dew
still shines on the leaves
and the world is warming.
In these ripening moments,
it’s hard to remember,
was it only hours ago,
how darkness poured over you
like oil in the ocean.
How nothing seems possible then.
But here, here is the bright red neck
of morning, humming through the shadows
on emerald wings, and here you are,
rising to meet it, not even
because you want to, but
because something in you rises
and carries you with it into the day.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Sometimes the year looks back, lets out a scream,
Looks back, then passes out appalled.
– Miklós Radnóti
This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet—
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space…
You must grieve for this right now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
if you’re going to say ‘I lived’…
– Nazim Hikmet
“Get going,” says my conscience.
“But there is a huge river ahead.”
“Don’t worry—there will be a boat when you get there.”
“Get going,” says my conscience.
“But there is a thick wilderness ahead.”
“Just get going—the Divine will make a way.”
“Get going,” says my conscience.
“But there is pitch darkness out there.”
“Not to worry—take a leap in the darkness and the light will shine.”
– Abiodun Fijabi
Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you’ll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.
– Neil Gaiman
Again, we are daily forced to choose between depression and anxiety. Depression results from the wounding of the individuation imperative; anxiety results from moving forward into the unknown. That path of anxiety is necessary because therein lies the hope of the person to more nearly become an individual. My analyst once said to me, “You must make your fears your agenda.” When we do take on that agenda, for all the anxiety engendered, we feel better because we know we are living in ‘bonne foi’ [good faith] with ourselves. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is the perception that some things are more important to us than what we fear.
– James Hollis
Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place.
– Cormac McCarthy
I work at a bookstore. Teenager came in daily. Read for hours. Never bought anything. Finally asked. “Looking for anything specific?” “Just reading. Can’t afford books. Library’s far. This is closer.” Let him stay. Read whatever.
Whenever. Brought him snacks. Hot chocolate. Safe space. Learned his story. Foster kid. Seventh home. Books were his escape. His education. His hope.
Started giving him books. “Damaged copies. Can’t sell them. You want?” He knew better. Took them anyway. Read everything. Three years of this. He aged out of foster care. Eighteen. Scared. Nowhere to go. Helped him apply to college. Scholarships. Got in. Full ride. English major. Graduated. He’s a teacher now. High school English. Brings his whole class to
the bookstore. Shows them where he spent his teenage years. “Bookstore worker gave me sanctuary. Knowledge. Hope. Taught me one person caring changes trajectories.” He buys books for students. Who can’t afford them. Pays it forward. Every kid in his class reads. Because someone let a foster kid read for free.
– Paula Simmons, bookstore clerk, Rhode Island
I hope you get old.
I hope time is heavy on your bones, draped over you like an embrace from God.
I hope the backs of your hands become deep maps—
Of all the places you have been.
Dark stains where your fingers dipped into clay and dirt and mud.
I hope you get old. I hope time fills your heart with joy and triumph. I hope you have enough obstacles to teach you character and empathy and enough challenges to bestow you with uniqueness.
I hope pain shows you how strong you are and the value of a true friend.
I hope you’ve been alone enough to know yourself.
I hope you find quiet more than you find chaos.
I hope you get old.
That time wraps around your legs like a desperate lover.
I hope you can look into the faces of people you have loved and cherished
and that you leave behind echos of grief,
Because you were loved in turn.
I hope you give thanks for every waking moment,
For what you have and for what you have not.
I hope you get old.
I hope you make things that last.
I hope you’ve inspired people.
I hope you’ve helped someone.
I hope grace rests at your feet.
I hope.
You forgive everything,
You did.
Not
Get
Quite.
Right.
– Jann Arden
The Sweetest Little Song
by Leonard Cohen
You go your way
I’ll go your way too
Don’t strain after more light than you’ve got yet; just wait quietly. God holds you when you cannot hold Him, and when the time comes to jump, He will see to it that you do jump—and you will find you are not frightened then… So just be supple in His hands and let Him mould you (as He is doing) for His own purposes, responding with very simple acts of trust and love.
– Evelyn Underhill
Go
by Kathleen Ossip
It is a cube, it is red, it is mountainous,
it is a bird of fire, it is the bones of the pelvis, it is a walnut,
it is treasured. It is yellow Saturn wobbling in its orbit.
It is danger, squawking.
It is the desire to sit down with strangers in cafes
and then it is the strangers in cafés,
it is the man with the black T-shirt
labeled UNARMED CIVILIAN and it is the blind man with
him
and his painful trembling.
Always it is oxygen and more oxygen. It is the fight in you
and the fight in you dying. It is the need for water
and the water that falls from the sky.
It is desperate for a theory and it is the acts you call evil
when you know there is no evil only desperation.
It is that bravery, that arrogance, that blindness.
It is the pink morning and your smile in the pink morning.
It is a phantom and the thin neck of a tree it
is a little project called loving the world.
It is howling in the dirt it is an extravaganza.
It’s the abandoned sports bra, in the dirt beside howling you.
It’s the windchimes in the thin-necked tree and
it is tonguetied. It is asleep.
It is waking up now. It is a small cat on the bed.
It is the threads of a leaf and it is the Three Graces:
Splendor, Mirth and Good Cheer.
It is their heartfelt advice:
You can’t let it hurt you.
You must let it hurt you.
It is a careless error and the hotel pool blue with chemistry.
It’s a kiss of course it is a kiss.
It’s an old strange book newly acquired
but not yet catalogued, it is crazy.
It is you, crazy with honesty and crazy with ambition.
It’s the sun that stuns over and over again.
It’s your tablet, which is every tablet everywhere.
It’s an explosion it is every explosion everywhere.
It is pavement, mineral and hot and wet with droplets.
It’s the stars that pitch white needles into the pond.
It is provable, it is a lotion, it is a lie.
It is a baby because everyone is a baby.
It talks to you, always to you, it moves
swiftly, it is stuck, it moves swiftly, it is stuck, it moves
swiftly. It’s the impenetrable truth, now clear as ice.
It is serious, it is irreversible, it is going, going.
It is flying now laughing strong enough to know anything.
Forget about your bodymind phenomena. Just observe your body, but never react to it. Observe the world, but never react to it. Observe your thoughts, but never react to them. Allow whatever happens to happen.
– Robert Adams
Observe the arrow on the Parker ballpoint pen. One must write poems that enter easily but are difficult to pull out, like arrows.
– Lee Seong-bok
Our virtues are, most often, only vices disguised.
– La Rochefoucauld
When you encounter a difficulty in your life, an impasse, solve it. If you can solve it, it’s good. If you can’t solve it, it’s still good, as it’s no longer your problem if you can’t solve it.
– Guo Gu
chasing novelty
is drinking from a river
that never quenches
– @BashoSociety
Addiction to novelty as a source of dopamine is a dangerous game.
– Karen Neverland
Wisdom, like genius, is rooted not in the abstract and discursive, but in the intuitive and perceptive faculty. It does not consist in sentences and thoughts one carries ready-made in his head; rather, it is the whole way the world represents itself to him.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
People do not see that the main question is not: “Am I loved?” which is to a large extent the question: “Am I approved of? Am I protected? Am I admired?” The main question is: “Can I love?”
– Erich Fromm
When I see hunger, cold, and degradation, I understand that this is a crime, not committed once but constantly.
– Leo Tolstoy
When you know you’ve hit the right notes, you just sit there and read the same paragraphs over and over and over again.
– Edward P. Jones
Philosophy does not consist in knowing and is not inspired by truth.
– Deleuze and Guattari
Giving up spontaneity and individuality results in a thwarting of life. Psychologically the automaton, while being alive biologically, is dead emotionally and mentally. … Behind a front of satisfaction and optimism modern man is deeply unhappy; as a matter of fact, he is on the verge of desperation.
– Erich Fromm
What a joy it is that life has no point! That means I can grant it one…
– Constantin Noica
If any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone. For God hath made all men to enjoy felicity and constancy of good.
– Epictetus
we don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.
– Charles Bukowski
You want immediate results! We do not dispense magic here. Everybody makes the same mistake: refusing the means, but wanting the ends. You want peace and harmony in the world, but refuse to have them in yourself.
– Nisargadatta
We’re so captive to the moment, we lose sight of what extends beyond all moments. Which means losing touch of what matters, what lasts and what will sustain us in the long run.
– Pico Iyer
I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.
– Michel Foucault
Because school is not important. Work is not important. Nothing is more important than stopping fascism. Because fascism will stop us all.
– Fred Hampton
I’m not sure we have had a truly transgressive piece of art in several decades. We have had art that transgresses the mores of several decades ago, for sure. But when it comes to the sacred cows of the here and now, I think artists are timid, afraid, and divert their energies.
– Bernard T. Joy
I believe in the possibility of love; that is why I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions.
– Franz Fanon
Flicker
What a small flicker is given
To each of us to know.
– Naomi Shihab Nye
You go around all day guarding the flicker
you found again that morning. Cupping a hand
to protect it from wind, holding it close
to the chest, so no wayward breath blows it out.
This flame, shaky and uncertain, is how you
light the rooms behind your eyes that no one
has ever seen. The wick may be frayed,
and the wax will last for just an hour or two
at best, but it is enough. It will always be
enough to look into the eyes of another
and pass the flicker on to them.
– James Crews
Literature is expansive. Reading it opens you to moral and intellectual spaces you could not easily have imagined. It ripples the clearest water.
If the ideologies by which you see the world are brittle or narrow you cannot say you’ve read literature until it shatters them.
– Bernard T. Joy
Why must the gate be narrow? Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened. To come in among these trees you must leave behind the six days’ world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes.
– Wendell Berry
Commonsense, it may be said with some certainty, is always transcendental. It depends upon a certain large grasp of the actual state of the facts, strong enough to resist all of the thousand wiles and sophistries of argument and verbal misrepresentation.
– G. K. Chesterton
All that needs doing can be done in peace and silence. There is no need to get upset.
– Nisargadatta
If you can smuggle all your 3 A.M. self into your 3 P.M.’S you’re an artist.
– Darby Hudson
One road leads home and a thousand roads lead into the wilderness.
– C. S. Lewis
Cry if you have to, you might be harboring a silent storm.
– Goitsemang Mvula
The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
– William Blake
When one setteth about righting a wrong, one driveth not full head against it, for in so doing one getteth naught but hard knocks. Nay, go deftly about it, and then, when the time is ripe, strike the blow.
– Sir James (Howard Pyle, Men of Iron)
To have faith is to trust yourself to the water.
When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown.
Instead you relax, and float.
– Alan Watts
The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply, ‘Create silence’.
– Søren Kierkegaard
Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.
– Giacomo Leopardi
To accuse others for one’s own misfortune is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one’s education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one’s education is complete.
– Epictetus
Gratitude is seeing how someone changed your heart and quality of life, helped you become the good parts of the person you are.
– Anne Lamott
There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We’ll dream of being blind.
– Paul Virilio
The fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Serenity can only be attained by a desperate mind, and to be desperate one must have lived a lot and still love the world.
– Blaise Cendrars
Look at the rain long enough, with no thoughts in your head, and you gradually feel your body falling loose, shaking free of the world of reality. Rain has the power to hypnotize.
– Haruki Murakami
Buster
can you turn the sound down,
she says, just before the
silent movie begins
– Alec Finlay
Dark is a way and light is a place,
Heaven that never was
Nor will be ever is always true
– Dylan Thomas
What the Goddess dismantles
is certainty.
What she protects is truth.
– Matt Licata
So long as the mind is split, life is perpetual conflict, tension, frustration, and disillusion. Suffering is piled on suffering, fear on fear, and boredom on boredom… But the undivided mind is free from this tension of trying always to stand outside oneself and to be elsewhere than here and now. Each moment is lived completely, and there is thus a sense of fulfillment and completeness.
– Alan Watts
Don’t tell me what you believe. Show me how you treat other people, and I’ll tell you what you believe.
– James Talarico
In between is where humans always are—that’s what we have to welcome, a story with an uncertain ending. And this condition is interesting if you inhabit it; it’s alive.
If I’m facing something that I don’t know how to do, the not knowing is what is true and the resources I have, deeply ignorant as I am, will have to be enough.
– John Tarrant
Then, all at once, I felt how great and how small I was; then did those two mighty forces, pride and humility, happily unite …
– Søren Kierkegaard
Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air–moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh–felt as if it were being exhaled into one’s face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing. Honeysuckle, swamp flowers, magnolia, and the mystery smell of the river scented the atmosphere, amplifying the intrusion of organic sleaze. It was aphrodisiac and repressive, soft and violent at the same time. In New Orleans, in the French Quarter, miles from the barking lungs of alligators, the air maintained this quality of breath, although here it acquired a tinge of metallic halitosis, due to fumes expelled by tourist buses, trucks delivering Dixie beer, and, on Decatur Street, a mass-transit motor coach named Desire.
– Tom Robbins
In the spring of 1988, I returned to New Orleans, and as soon as I smelled the air, I knew I was home.
It was rich, almost sweet, like the scent of jasmine and roses around our old courtyard.
I walked the streets, savoring that long lost perfume.
– Anne Rice
The question of meaning in life is, as the Buddha thought, not edifying. One must immerse oneself into the river of life and let the question drift away.
– Irvin Yalom
I don’t think the robots are taking over. I think the men who play with toys have taken over. And if we don’t take the toys out of their hands, we’re fools.
– Ray Bradbury
The paradox of our practice is that the most effective way of transformation is to leave ourselves alone. The more we let everything be just what it is, the more we relax into an open, attentive awareness of one moment after another.
– Barry Magid
He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old Chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination. He took great marching steps into the nothingness, counting them against his return. Eyes closed, arms oaring. Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must.
– Cormac McCarthy
This is not kind of like what the Nazis did.
This is precisely what the Nazis did.
– Fran Lebowitz, 2026
I heard a courageous man
A poet and a man of vision
who spoke of change
and its frustrations
in a voice of reason
of keeping hope alive
and of a rainbow coalition
on our way back home…
– Aztec Two-Step
Pancake Poem
I wrote a pancake poem.
Instead of eggs, I used some nouns.
Poured in verbs in place of milk.
Added adjectives for flour.
I whisked the words together,
and cooked them golden brown.
I tossed my poem in the air;
it landed upside down.
– Brian Bilston
WORDS FOR THE ROAD
Know, now, there is no one
who can guide you.
Know there will be nothing
to return to.
Know, now, that the trial
will be long.
Come, then. You were called to this,
this wild life.
Go in
and lie down in the darkness.
Hear them now, the wild flocks
in the starlight,
thrashing in the vastness of their passing?
If you cannot have a home, become a song.
– Joseph Fasano
We need poetry to keep expanding so that it can account for the actual lives that people are living.
– Edward Hirsch
Don’t bother with churches, government buildings or city squares; if you want to know about a culture, spend a night in its bars.
– Ernest Hemingway
Poetry necessitates that we slow down, deepen our attention, practice care with language and with each other; poetry is an essential language…and it affirms our shared humanity.
– Arthur Sze
The World Is Too Much With Us
by William Wordsworth
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
In the smokiest city the poet will transport us, as if by enchantment, to the fresh air and bright sun, to the murmur of woods and leaves and water, to the ripple of waves upon sand, and enable us, as in some delightful dream, to cast off the cares and troubles of life.
– John Lubbock
Only those who never think are happy, those who limit themselves to what is strictly necessary to survive. True thought resembles a demon that disturbs the origins of life, a disease that attacks its very roots and leaves man face to face with the vertigo of his own lucidity.
– Emil Cioran
Consciousness is the screen on which all the pictures come and go.
The screen is real, but the pictures are mere shadows on it.
– Ramana Maharshi
I like the weight I like the lilt, I like the scene. I don’t like the s here but don’t mind it there. I like the noun to situate hue. A gourd is gourd-colored. It’s extra if its sound value complements its substance, say, for example, hock.
– C. D. Wright
the ego cannot be a vessel for the influx of grace until it has been emptied of its own inflated fullness; and this emptying occurs only through the experience of alienation.
– Edward Edinger
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.
– Carl Jung
Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.
– Nassim Taleb
It is tragic to see how often a man shamelessly entangles his own life, and the lives of others, while remaining completely incapable of seeing how much of the whole tragedy originates from himself, and how he himself constantly nourishes and maintains it.
– C.G. Jung
Sensual pleasure passes and vanishes, but the friendship between us, the mutual confidence, the delight of the heart, the enchantment of the soul, these things do not perish and can never be destroyed.
– Voltaire
The mania for health and optimization is a reflexive response to the lack of being. We try to compensate for the absence of being by extending bare life, and in doing so we become desensitized to life’s intensity. We confuse it with increased production, performance and consumption, but these are merely forms of survival.
– Byung-Chul Han
We know perfectly well that neither love nor peace of mind can be bought with any currency.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
The psychic energy required and used in writing a poem is also a secret. Where did it come from? How did it get here and where is it going?
– Mary Ruefle
The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say.
– Deleuze
Also, it was one of those days when you do something, it works out, and then you wish that you’d known in advance that it was going to work, so you could have enjoyed it while it was happening.
– Julian Cope
Every time a man gives way to vanity, every time he thinks and lives in order to show off, this is a betrayal. We do not need to reveal ourselves to others, but only to those we love. For then we are no longer revealing ourselves in order to seem but in order to give.
– Albert Camus
The wind is rising! … We must try to live!
– Paul Valéry
The Buddha says, ideally, you want to make your mind like a broken gong. People can hit it, but there’s no reverberation.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Virtues lose themselves in self-interest, as rivers lose themselves in the sea.
– La Rochefoucauld
Through this hole
at the bottom of the cavern
of death, the imagination
escapes intact.
– William Carlos Williams
What are we and what could we be? What forms of new subjectivity can we create that will not originate in subjection?
– Foucault
We take that which is unreal to be real and that which is real to be unreal.
– Rupert Spira
Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run best contribution we can do to our fellow man.
– Rollo May
What is meaning? I don’t know, but I may know what its opposite is: thinking that nothingness is easy to bear.
– Mahmoud Darwish
‘Lead us not into temptation’ often means, among other things, ‘Deny me those gratifying invitations, those highly interesting contacts, that participation in the brilliant movements of our age, which I so often, at such risk, desire.’
– C.S. Lewis
Almost none of the poetries I admire stick to their labels, native or adopted ones. Rather, they are vagrant in their identifications. Tramp poets, there you go, a new label for those with unstable allegiances.
– C. D. Wright
Translation is the circulatory system of the world’s literatures.
– Susan Sontag
[Our public discourse] is very impoverished […]. We don’t expect [politicians] have contact with literature, with history, with the richness of descriptive language that the humanities have always stood for. I think that’s a great loss.
– Martha Nussbaum
Our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. The person without a myth is a person without a home…To be a member of one’s community is to share in its myths….
– Rollo May
The first effect of not believing in God, is that you lose your common sense.
– G. K. Chesterton
What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?
Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.
– Dostoevsky
Talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target, as far as which others cannot even see.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
The wheel of time
Turns everything to dust
Root yourself
In the eternal and unchanging.
– @KavijiPoet
I became a psychotherapist because that’s where people will unburden themselves, where they will show what is in their hearts.
– Rollo May
The train whistle makes us see the train, the footstep in the hall reminds us of the family relative. The oranges bring back the breakfast room.
– Delmore Schwartz
Meditation must be continuous. The current of meditation must be present in all your activities.
– Annamalai Swami
Experiment, meditate, and be constantly in touch with things which disturb you. One day nothing will be disturbing, and that will be the day of great rejoicing.
– Osho
Love a river girl. Spend your truth. The grass which hides your love’s gold will never know frost.
– René Char (tr. Nancy Kline)
Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.
– Roger Scruton
When you understand the inside, the outside will be just fine. Get inside the music and listen…
– Thelonious Monk
When an illness is part of your spiritual journey, no medical intervention can heal you until your spirit has begun to make the changes that the illness was designed to inspire.
– Caroline Myss
You are enjoined to pay attention to what’s coming into your mind and to say it out loud.
– Benjamin Y. Fong interview with Jonathan Lear
Change is not merely necessary to life – it is life.
– Alvin Toffler
Explaining poetry is like trying to explain a perfume.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
I entered Paris, which I found worse than ugly, a real insult to my suffering, with a single idea in my head: not to be found out.
– Stendhal
I have read many books but forgot most of them. What remains is a kind of mood, a vague memory of the feeling rather than the facts.
– George Orwell
Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
– Albert Camus
Can I realize that if I were not loved, and if love were not the gift I had to bring, I wouldn’t be here on earth? It is love that brings me here, not karma, not past patterns to work out, but love and the fact that I have love to give.
– David Spangler
This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.
– Anais Nin
Are you a reader? If you aren’t a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.
– Wallace Stegner
Remarkable acts of art-making — bold, perverse, unbeholden, free — have had the side effect of changing the weather in a country, in a people, at a certain historical moment, and finally in me, conferring freedoms for which I am now very grateful.
– Zadie Smith, The I Who Is Not Me
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
– Horace Mann
I don’t think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.
– J. M. Coetzee
Today when I wake up I stay put. I don’t go to the bathroom to weigh myself or to the kitchen to drink a glass of tepid water before preparing the coffeepot. The city doesn’t beckon or lend me a shoulder today. Maybe it knows I’m about to leave.
– Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts
I have put duality away, I have seen that the two worlds are one; One I seek, One I know, One I see, One I call.
– Rumi
Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.
– Blaise Pascal
The sad truth is that man’s real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites—day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other…Life is a battlefield. It always has been, and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end.
– CG Jung
Pseudoscience differs from erroneous science. Science thrives on errors, cutting them away one by one. False conclusions are drawn all the time, but they are drawn tentatively. Hypotheses are framed so they are capable of being disproved. A succession of alternative hypotheses is confronted by experiment and observation. Science gropes and staggers toward improved understanding. Proprietary feelings are of course offended when a scientific hypothesis is disproved, but such disproof are recognized as central to the scientific enterprise.
Pseudoscience is just the opposite. Hypotheses are often framed precisely so they are invulnerable to any experiment that offers a prospect of disproof, so even in principle they cannot be invalidated. Practitioners are defensive and wary. Skeptical scrutiny is opposed. When the pseudoscientific hypothesis fails to catch fire with scientists, conspiracies to suppress it are deduced.
– Carl Sagan
Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to drop back.
– Confucius
In the fields of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind.
– Louis Pasteur
There are a thousand ways to tell a story, and how you tell it can be just as important as what you tell.
– Jane Warren
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
– Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
I am working on counterpoisons… I create a space in which people can breathe, restore their faith and strength to live.
– Anais Nin
The most important part of education — to teach the meaning of to know.
– Simone Weil
It was one of those days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.
– Charles Dickens
Edinburgh pays cruelly for her high seat in one of the vilest climates under heaven. She is liable to be beaten upon by all the winds that blow, to be drenched with rain, to be buried in cold sea fogs out of the east, and powdered with the snow as it comes flying southward from the Highland hills.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
MUM IS THE WORD
The League of Quiet Persons meets
monthly. Its quarters are a cavernous
warehouse away from traffic. Its
business is not to discuss business.
Minutes are read silently and tacitly approved.
Members listen to rain argue with corrugated
iron, a furnace with itself. Glances
are learned. It is not so much refuge
from noise the members seek in such company
as implicit permission not to speak,
not to answer or to answer for,
not to pose, chat, persuade, or expound.
Podium and gavel have been banned,
indeed are viewed as weaponry.
A microphone? The horror.
Several Quiet Persons interviewed
had no comment. A recorded voice
at the main office murmured only, “You
have reached the League of Quiet
Persons. After the tone, listen.”
– Hans Ostrom
Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.
– Toni Morrison
Meaning
When I die, I will see the lining of the world.
The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.
The true meaning, ready to be decoded.
What never added up will add Up,
What was incomprehensible will be comprehended.
– And if there is no lining to the world?
If a thrush on a branch is not a sign,
But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day
Make no sense following each other?
And on this earth there is nothing except this earth?
– Even if that is so, there will remain
A word wakened by lips that perish,
A tireless messenger who runs and runs
Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,
And calls out, protests, screams.
– Czeslaw Milosz
You have a $75,000 degree you never used. You’re not the only one.
Approximately 52% of recent four-year college graduates are underemployed. 61% of individuals with master’s degrees are underemployed two years after graduation.
She has a degree in anthropology, four years of coursework and fieldwork and late nights in the library, $72,000 in loans, and a story she stopped telling. Graduated with honors in 2021, walked across the stage in a polyester gown, believed the promises they made about what came next.
She cleans teeth now, $24 an hour, and she is good at it. Her patients like her.
A patient asks what she studied. The pause lasts two seconds, long enough to decide. “General studies,” she says, arranging instruments on the tray. The patient nods, satisfied. She scrapes plaque from a molar. She has this conversation once a month, and the lie comes easier each time.
She applied to 180 positions, museum curator and research assistant and grant writer and cultural consultant, kept a spreadsheet, color-coded the rejections.
The rejection emails stopped feeling personal around number sixty. By one hundred she stopped reading them. By one-forty she stopped applying.
That was three years ago. She closed the laptop, the spreadsheet still open with its 180 rows and color-coded rejections and formulas calculating her odds. She hasn’t opened it since.
The degree sits in a box in her closet now, cardboard warping in the damp. She took it down last year, couldn’t stand seeing it.
Physics majors working restaurant lines. Film school graduates driving Uber. Music masters who gave up and do accounting now. Teachers at Target, screenwriters who stopped trying, people told they are overqualified and underqualified at the same time.
They all did what they were told. They all have the degrees. They all applied.
They all tried.
If your degree is worthless, then who sold it to you?
In 1958 a British sociologist named Michael Young published a book called The Rise of the Meritocracy, a satire, a dystopian warning.
Young wrote it as if it were a thesis from the year 2034, looking back at how society had sorted people by merit, by test scores and credentials and achievement. In his imagined future the smart ones had risen and the rest had stayed down, and because the system looked fair, inequality had become permanent. No one could complain. After all, you had been given your shot. You just were not good enough.
The elites controlled everything and justified it by denying they controlled anything at all. Merit, not power, had chosen them.
Young set his satire in 2034. We are living it eight years early.
He meant it as warning. They read it as blueprint. By 1980 they were calling it progress.
By the 1960s American policymakers were using “meritocracy” unironically. By the 1980s it was doctrine. The joke became the ideology, the satire became the blueprint.
Now imagine yourself in that future Young warned about. You are eighteen, told to go to college or be left behind, get educated or stay poor, work hard and get qualified and the system will reward you.
So you go. You borrow. You study. You graduate. You did everything right.
And then you cannot find work, because there are more qualified people than jobs requiring qualifications. They produced too many of you.
But when you cannot find work, who gets blamed?
You do.
Should have picked STEM, should have networked better, should have been smarter.
The shame does the work force used to do.
Seventeen percent of Americans held bachelor’s degrees in 1980.
Then came 2008 and President Barack Obama’s explicit goal: by 2020, America would claim the highest proportion of college graduates worldwide. “We used to have the highest proportion of college graduates,” he said. “We now rank ninth. That’s not acceptable.”
What the policy did not mention, what Obama’s education secretary never addressed in those soaring speeches about opportunity, was that we were simultaneously offshoring white-collar jobs, automating knowledge work, consolidating industries. Fewer companies meant fewer positions. And states were cutting funding for public universities by thirty percent per student while enrollment grew.
The message was clear, more degrees, though the infrastructure made them expensive and the job market did not expand to match.
Degree attainment more than doubled, rising from seventeen percent in 1980 to thirty-eight percent today.
Did the number of jobs requiring degrees double?
No.
Did wages for college graduates double?
No. Adjusted for inflation, wages for college graduates have been flat since 2000.
Did the politicians who pushed enrollment explain what happens when supply exceeds demand?
No.
Did the universities who charged $72,000 warn their students?
No.
What did happen?
Credential inflation.
In 2014 a company called Burning Glass Technologies analyzed twenty-five million job postings. What they found was remarkable.
Sixty-seven percent of Production Supervisor postings required a college degree, though only sixteen percent of current Production Supervisors actually had one.
Sixty-five percent of Executive Secretary postings required a bachelor’s degree, though only nineteen percent of current Executive Secretaries had one.
The jobs had not changed. The requirements had.
A hiring manager opens the applicant tracking system. Two hundred seventeen applications for one Production Supervisor position, all of them qualified, all of them desperate. She adds a filter, Bachelor’s degree required, and the number drops to seventy-three. Still too many but manageable now. She doesn’t call it credential inflation. She calls it having options. The degree requirement has nothing to do with the work and everything to do with leverage. Two hundred seventeen people competing makes them grateful for $24 an hour.
When everyone has a degree, when the credential that once signaled exceptional becomes the baseline that signals nothing, employers can demand degrees for work that never needed them. The work did not become more complex. Employers demand it because they can.
Flood the market with qualified workers. Wages fall, power shifts, people accept worse conditions because they are competing against each other.
The same logic as agricultural overproduction keeping food prices low. Except it is human capital.
Nobody needed to conspire. The incentives were already aligned. Politicians wanted to say “more Americans than ever have degrees.” Universities wanted enrollment growth. Banks wanted loan customers. Employers wanted overqualified workers at entry-level wages.
Eight percent of all Americans are working jobs that do not require the degrees they paid for, and that number is rising. One point eight million Americans have been job searching for more than six months.
They did not create the oversupply by accident. They created it by policy.
They produced her perfectly, educated enough to be useful, desperate enough to comply, ashamed enough to blame herself.
She still checks LinkedIn, three times a day, four on weekends. She still believes that if she just tries harder, finds the right connection, proves herself one more time, the promise will finally work.
That belief keeps her applying. She blames herself, keeps trying, never stops.
When you flood the market with qualified workers, wages fall, requirements inflate, power shifts. The worker blames herself.
Why pay more when a hundred qualified applicants are competing for the same job?
Why not demand a bachelor’s for work a high school graduate used to do? You can.
Workers take what they can get, grateful just to be hired. They do not negotiate. They do not organize. They are too busy competing.
And when they cannot find work they blame themselves. Should have picked a better major, should have networked, should have been smarter.
They created the oversupply. The worker absorbed the shame.
This is how you build a compliant workforce without force. You convince people their desperation is their fault, tell them the system is fair, let their failure prove they were not good enough.
You make the meritocracy look real.
Maybe you read this and think anthropology, of course she cannot find work, should have picked something practical.
That voice, the one that says her failure proves her choices were bad, is what keeps this running.
Because if her failure is not her fault, then whose is it?
Who pushed college enrollment while offshoring jobs? Who charged $72,000 while cutting education funding by thirty percent? Who demands degrees for work that does not need them? Who told an entire generation the path to security required debt, then produced more degrees than jobs?
If she did not fail, then they lied.
And the system you believe in does not exist.
The receipts are public. The mechanism is documented.
Degree attainment more than doubled. Jobs did not double. Wages did not double. What doubled was the number of people convinced their inability to find work was personal failure instead of structural design.
The shame. That’s what keeps this running.
Opportunity survives as a word. It still appears in speeches and campaign ads.
Belief is what breaks, belief that working hard matters, that credentials mean something, that the system rewards merit instead of extracting it.
Michael Young tried to warn us in 1958. He wrote a satire about a society that sorted people by credentials and called it fair, a society where inequality became moral verdict, where your failure proved you deserved to fail.
The elites read his warning and adopted it as policy. And now millions of people with degrees work jobs that do not require them, convinced the problem is their choices, not the machine that produced them.
She keeps the box on the top shelf of her closet, behind the winter coats she rarely wears. Sometimes she forgets it’s there. Most days she remembers.
The degree sits inside, cardboard warping in the damp, the seal softening where moisture has worked through. Seventy-two thousand dollars to learn what a British sociologist tried to warn about seventy years ago. The system would create the appearance of fairness while engineering permanent desperation. Credentials would become traps instead of tickets. Meritocracy would be the lie that made inequality feel earned.
Tonight she will clean teeth. Tomorrow she will check LinkedIn out of habit, close it without looking.
She stopped applying three months ago.
The box stays on the shelf. The system already got what it needed from her.
– Jermaine Fowler
Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves.
– Mary Oliver
Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
And let my cry come unto Thee.
– T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday
The wilderness will lead you to your heart where I will speak. Integrity and justice with tenderness you shall know.
– Ash Wednesday reflection from Hosea
Remember that Lent and Ash Wednesday are not just about putting away the bad things. It is more about creating good things and helping the poor and the needy, being kind to people, and much more.
– Jacob Winters
Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions.
– Alexander Calder
Many ‘primitive’ peoples … believe that almost every normal adult has the ability to go into a trance state and be possessed by a god; the adult who cannot do this is a psychological cripple.
– Robert O. Becker and Gary Selden
Feldenkrais called attention to the fact that all negative emotional expressions are accompanied by a shortening of flexor muscles. Therefore, about the time that someone gets overly interested in negative emotion, he begins to get chronic shortening of he flexor muscles. The energy in a chronically flexed body has to work just to hold it up; the man continuously has to add energy to that body to keep it going. Such chronic flexion gives a feeling of tiredness, of “depression.”
– Ida Rolf
Silence, the contemplative knows, is that place just before the voice of God. It is the void in which God and I meet in the center of my soul. It is the cave through which the soul must travel, clearing out the dissonance of life as we go, so that the God who is waiting there for us to notice, can fill us. A day without silence is a day without the presence of the self.
The pressure and pull of a noisy day denies us the comfort of God. It is a day in which we are buffeted by the world around us and left at the mercy of the clatter and jangle of our own hearts. To be a contemplative we must put down the cacophony of the world around us and go inside ourselves to wait for the God who is a whisper not a storm.
Silence not only gives us the God who is stillness but, just as importantly, it teaches the public self of us what to speak. Then we finally understand what Abba Isidore meant when he said: “Living without speaking, is better than speaking without living…if, however, words and life go hand in hand, ah, that is the perfection of life.
– Joan Chittister
THE WORLD HAS NEED OF YOU
everything here
seems to need us
– Rainer Maria Rilke
I can hardly imagine it
as I walk to the lighthouse, feeling the ancient
prayer of my arms swinging
in counterpoint to my feet.
Here I am, suspended
between the sidewalk and twilight,
the sky dimming so fast it seems alive.
What if you felt the invisible
tug between you and everything?
A boy on a bicycle rides by,
his white shirt open, flaring
behind him like wings.
It’s a hard time to be human. We know too much
and too little. Does the breeze need us?
The cliffs? The gulls?
If you’ve managed to do one good thing,
the ocean doesn’t care.
But when Newton’s apple fell toward the earth,
the earth, ever so slightly, fell
toward the apple as well.
– Ellen Bass
The history of the universe…is the handwriting produced by a minor god in order to communicate with a Demon.
– Jorge Luis Borges
The day was returning, and with it the sense of life and light which had been so long absent from the world.
– Elizabeth Gaskell
Paul on the Road to Damascus
for Ash Wednesday
Say you get a second chance.
Say your life had crumbled
into rubble, the cold hands of ghosts
upon your shoulders.
Say, at last, you’d let the dark
be dark.
I tell you
you will fall down, once, in wonder.
It’s your choice
what you do with all that ruin.
I broke. I broke. I opened.
And you there, you there
in this coldness, be still, be still
and give in
Listen. I tell you
you can do this:
In the darkness, in the tatters
of your madness,
you can still go out through the moonlight
and be with it, just be
with all that falling
when the dark departs
and the stars lift up their fires
and they tell you, with the blazing
of their changes, that you will, that you will survive
your childhood, and that someone near
is on their way
to find you—a luck, a love, a wonder-
you there with your hands, your
fast, your ashes,
and what will you do, in those ruins,
what will you do when the moment comes
with the miraculous afterlife you are?
– Joseph Fasano
If this country was truly “pro-life,” we would have Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, gun reform, universal child care, paid sick leave, and a living wage.
– Robert Reich
Jung was not concerned with repairing broken lives to fit into an insane social order, but had to reverse the directions of psychiatry and argue that society was mad and, as such, individual madness is to be expected as a product of a more general madness.
– David Tacey
Still
by A. R. Ammons
I said I will find what is lowly
and put the roots of my identity
down there:
each day I’ll wake up
and find the lowly nearby,
a handy focus and reminder,
a ready measure of my significance,
the voice by which I would be heard,
the wills, the kinds of selfishness
I could
freely adopt as my own:
but though I have looked everywhere,
I can find nothing
to give myself to:
everything is
magnificent with existence, is in
surfeit of glory:
nothing is diminished,
nothing has been diminished for me:
I said what is more lowly than the grass:
ah, underneath,
a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss:
I looked at it closely
and said this can be my habitat: but
nestling in I
found
below the brown exterior
green mechanisms beyond the intellect
awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up
and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe:
I found a beggar:
he had stumps for legs: nobody was paying
him any attention: everybody went on by:
I nestled in and found his life:
there, love shook his body like a devastation:
I said
though I have looked everywhere
I can find nothing lowly
in the universe:
I whirled through transfigurations up and down,
transfigurations of size and shape and place:
at one sudden point came still,
stood in wonder:
moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent
with being!
Democracy depends upon being able to think clearly. Thinking depends almost entirely on memory. And if you have not read and remembered the very best that has been said, thought, written, you will never be able to think. And democracy becomes impossible.
– Harold Bloom
Humankind is bound to suffering—
for from suffering, every treasure emerges.
– Saadi Shirazi
The doubt, like the mosquito, buzzes round my faith. We are all human, Mary, until we are divine, and to some of us, that is far off, and to some as near as the lady ringing at the door…
– Emily Dickinson
The point is to think with your subject’s mind. It’s espionage in a way.
– Stacy Schiff
Every being is more than itself… All things are related to a reality above & beyond themselves; from this reference alone can they be perfected and carried to fulfillment. Failing this reference to the other, all things, all orders of reality become empty shells.
– Roman Guardini
Love is generally confused with dependence; but in point of fact, you can love only in proportion to your capacity for independence.
– Rollo May
Abundance of knowledge does not teach men to be wise.
– Heraclitus
There is a divine source, a powerful force, a perfect order that controls everything. When you recognize it, acknowledge it and surrender to it, you won’t have to struggle to solve problems.
– Iyanla Vanzant
Imagination is not fantasy… Imagination is a quasi-divine faculty that perceives… the intimate and secret relationships of things, their correspondences and analogies.
– Charles Baudelaire
There is but one way to tranquility of mind and happiness, and that is to account no external things thine own, but to commit all to God.
– Epictetus
There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.
– Kurt Vonnegut
You may go where you like; you will never taste supreme peace except through perfect quiescence. Hence abandon all hopes and sense-desires.
– Yoga Vasishta
To be psychologically free is to be confident in our own inner world, responsible for our own strengths and weaknesses, consciously loving ourselves and, therefore, able to love others. Dreams guide us in that direction, however crooked the path may be.
– Marion Woodman
…nurturing an Eden from which I was already exiling myself. After I had left for good, all I really needed to do was to describe the place exactly as it had been. That I could not do, for that was impossible. And that is where poetry might begin.
– Larry Levis, On Hometowns
Is it possible for the mind to be totally free from the vast tradition of centuries?
– Krishnamurti
I can choose either to be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. It’s all a question of how I view my life.
– Paulo Coelho
You’re only making a mess by trying to put things straight.
You’re trying to straighten out a wiggly world and no wonder you’re in trouble.
– Alan Watts
If we never work with uncomfort, we can never transform.
– Scott Tusa
Modern man’s restless inner division, the tormenting chaos he has built up between his desires and capabilities, driving him into self-destruction, arose from a distortion of his inherent nature, caused by a fundamental misunderstanding of what society truly is.
– Richard Wagner
I live in a kind of tension between the will to say yes to my suffering, and my inability to utter this yes with complete sincerity.
– Karl Jaspers
If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.
– Rollo May
Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.
– Paulo Coelho
Only useless things are indispensable.
– Francis Picabia
According to Shantideva, the more we appreciate the complexity of a situation, the less extreme our views and emotions will be.
– Allison Aitken
It’s good to leave each day behind, like flowing water, free of sadness. Yesterday is gone and its tale told. Today new seeds are growing.
– Rumi
It didn’t make much sense for me to start writing. My financial circumstances weren’t such that I could afford to be a writer. I didn’t even have a pen.
– Imre Kertész
The easiest and noblest way is not to be crushing others, but to be improving yourselves.
– Socrates
The bubbles of water and the flames of fire are nothing but the mind. The flowers of the spring and the moon of the autumn are nothing but the mind. Confusions and dangers are nothing but the mind.
– Dogen
You come here to be enlightened. Life is a process of enlightenment. If you live it truly, Buddhahood is bound to happen. It is not some accident; you carry the seed within you. Just give the right soil and the seed will sprout, and a Buddha will flower in you.
– Osho
It is time for us to turn to each other, not on each other.
– Jesse Jackson
In memorizing the poems I loved, I “ate” them in a way. I breathed as the poet breathed to recite the words: someone else’s suffering and passion enters your body to transform you, partly by joining you to others in a saving circle.
– Mary Karr
Your mind is never totally contaminated by your neurosis. Goodness is always there.
– Chögyam Trungpa
I don’t need a friend who changes
when I change and who nods
when I nod; my shadow does that
much better.
– Plutarch
Approach it like a wild deer you would do anything not to startle. If all else fails, approach writing by not approaching it at all,
– Polly Atkin
Those who see worldly life as an obstacle to Dharma see no Dharma in everyday actions… They have not yet discovered that there are no everyday actions outside of Dharma.
– Dogen Zenji
I get angry about things,
then go on and work.
– Toni Morrison
You change the world by being yourself.
– Yoko Ono
Much of life is discovering who you are.
– P.S. Baber
My greatest asset is that I am constantly evolving.
– Jane Fonda
Sometimes I envy the dead poets,
they no longer have “bad days,” they don’t know
“ennui,” they’ve parted ways with “vacancy,”
“rhetoric,” rain, low pressure zones,
they’ve stopped following the “astute reviews,”
yet still keep speaking to us.
Their doubts vanished with them,
their rapture lives.
– Adam Zagajewski
The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations.
– Adam Smith
When asked, Who is the rich man? Epictetus replied, ‘He who is content.’
A city is not adorned by external things, but by the virtue of those who dwell in it.
– Epictetus
None of us knows what might happen even the next minute, yet still we go forward. Because we trust. Because we have faith.
– Paulo Coelho
There are many people who arrive at conclusions in life much the way schoolboys do; they cheat their teachers by copying the answer book without having worked the problem themselves.
– Søren Kierkegaard
When you have rules like only beige or oatmeal, you’re limited to that palette. When you use all the different colors, there are no rules, there is no editor. It’s very freeing.
– Anado McLauchlin
Whatever shakes you should without delay, right away, be incorporated into the path.
– Chögyam Trungpa
A great deal of attention has been paid… to the technical languages in which men of science do their specialized thinking… But the colloquial usages of everyday speech, the literary and philosophical dialects in which men do their thinking about the problems of morals, politics, religion and psychology – these have been strangely neglected. We talk about ‘mere matters of words’ in a tone which implies that we regard words as things beneath the notice of a serious-minded person. This is a most unfortunate attitude. For the fact is that words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest study. The old idea that words possess magical powers is false; but its falsity is the distortion of a very important truth. Words do have a magical effect – but not in the way that magicians supposed, and not on the objects they were trying to influence. Words are magical in the way they affect the minds of those who use them. ‘A mere matter of words,’ we say contemptuously, forgetting that words have power to mould men’s thinking, to canalize their feeling, to direct their willing and acting. Conduct and character are largely determined by the nature of the words we currently use to discuss ourselves and the world around us.
– Aldous Huxley
Fascism is capitalism in decay.
– Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov lenin
…if you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, if you are abnormal, then you are sick. These three categories, not being like everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different but have been reduced to the same thing
– Michel Foucault
Consciousness is under siege. I think that it’s the last frontier for some of these companies that want to sell our time. And of course our time is our mind time, and our consciousnesses are being polluted.
– Michael Pollan
To the evil of monarchy we have added that of hereditary succession; and as the first is a degradation and lessening of ourselves, so the second, claimed as a matter of right, is an insult and imposition on posterity. For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever, and tho’ himself might deserve some decent degree of honours of his contemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them. One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in Kings, is that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule, by giving mankind an ASS FOR A LION.
… But it is not so much the absurdity as the evil of hereditary succession which concerns mankind. Did it ensure a race of good and wise men it would have the seal of divine authority, but as it opens a door to the FOOLISH, the WICKED, and the IMPROPER, it hath in it the nature of oppression. Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent. Selected from the rest of mankind, their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed in the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.
– Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776
A character moves between sky and earth, from a god to a mortal, and back again, in no time at all.
– Ismail Kadare
At such moments, we touch the border of those feelings which only music can express. We can never emulate music, because to arrive at the condition of music would be the annihilation of poetry, and especially of dramatic poetry.
– T. S. Eliot
The books I love the most made it harder for me to live.
– Michael Silverblatt
The reason to draw close to death when we’re younger is to practice finding and living in the soul. This grows our muscles for living.
– Anne Lamott
Unless one understands someone’s unique, personal subjectivity, one cannot infer the best treatment approach for that individual.
– Nancy McWilliams
The industrialism of art, followed by all the base instincts it flatters and caresses, marches at the head of an absurd procession, full of stupid disdain for its vanquished enemies.
– Hector Berlioz
An economy is a system of apparently willing but actually involuntary exchanges.
– Bhanu Kapil
Teach yourselves, teach everyone their real nature, call upon the sleeping soul and see how it awakes. Power will come, goodness will come, purity will come, and everything that is excellent will come when this sleeping soul is roused to self-conscious activity.
– Vivekananda
Fundamentally, not only are we wide open to whatever intellectual garbage comes our way, but we’ve got a big “WELCOME!” sign out.
– Lama Yeshe
Other people’s views and troubles can be contagious. Don’t sabotage yourself by unwittingly adopting negative, unproductive attitudes through your associations with others.
– Epictetus
We need to set our affections on one good man and keep him constantly before our eyes, so that we may live as if he were watching us and do everything as if he saw what we were doing.
– Epicurus
Socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Many patients are so terrified of emotional intimacy that they are driven over and over again to provoke crises that allow them to distance with impunity.
– Nancy McWilliams
Increasingly, people don’t become academics because of intelligence, rather because of lower grasp of disorder.
– Nassim Taleb
A good dynamic formulation will illuminate the ways in which a person thinks happiness can be pursued, and will consequently contain implications for intervention.
– Nancy McWilliams
Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.
– Carson McCullers
If you are on the path to self-awareness and personal growth, criticism can provide you with very profound insights.
– Iyanla Vanzant
Much of what is called ‘social problems’ consists of the fact that intellectuals have theories that do not fit the real world. From this, they conclude that it is the real world which is wrong and needs changing.
– Thomas Sowell
The night kept coming on in and there was nothing I could do.
– Charles Bukowski
All beings are originally Buddha. It is like water and ice: without water there is no ice, outside of beings there is no Buddha.
– Hakuin Ekaku
Contrary to what we believe, we may not be in a position to criticize Shakespeare. He may be the one who criticizes us.
– René Girard
Men are miserable in their manhood, and women have a high-minded loneliness all their own. People are cutting corners in how they feel about each other, about themselves.
– Garielle Lutz
Eventually, the time that was not spent on learning skills will catch up with you, and the fall will be painful.
– Robert Greene
And more than six years have whistled by since you blew your heart out like a porchlight. Reason and meaning don’t step into another lit spot like a well-meaning stranger with a hat.
– C. D. Wright
Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.
– Soren Kierkegaard
The more complex the world, the less you can grasp it from academic studies.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
No more crying out for guitar heroes
Or going back to old loves for the safety.
Let us learn how to leave with clean and empty hearts
Let us escape these attics still mad, still drunk, still raving
– Phoebe Stuckes
Some things just have to get done and you need to hold steady to do them.
– Mary Cappello
To me, saving was as natural as breathing: I knew when I saved $10 I was really saving $100 or $1,000 because of the future growth.
– Charlie Munger
Charity is humiliating because it is exercised vertically and from above; solidarity is horizontal and implies mutual respect.
– Eduardo Galeano
When the inner and the outer have fused into one, you will find Her whom you sought with such anguish, nearer than the nearest, the very breath of life, the very core of every heart.
– Anandamayi Ma
Metalepsis … is a trope-reversing trope, a figure of a figure. In a metalepsis, a word is substituted metonymically for a word in a previous trope, so that a metalepsis can be called, maddeningly but accurately, a metonymy of a metonymy.
– Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading
I don’t know exactly what magic is,
but I know it always begins when you don’t want to leave.
From places,
from thoughts,
from people.
– Cesare Pavese
Once you pick the right thing to work on, and the right people to work with, then work as hard as you can.
– Naval Ravikant
Hotels
In the semidark we take everything off,
love standing, inaudible; then we crawl into bed.
You sleep with your head balled up in its dreams,
I get up and sit in the chair with a warm beer,
the lamp off. Looking down on a forested town
in a snowfall I feel like a novel – dense
and vivid, uncertain of the end – watching
the bundled outlines of another woman another man
hurrying toward the theater’s blue tubes of light.
– C. D. Wright
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray;
Along the cool sequester’d vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
– Thomas Gray
Economists usually understand so little mathematics that they believe that all mathematics must be quantitative.
– Friedrich Hayek
The task of therapy, it appears in the light of these new formulations, is not so much to bring to light what the patient has wanted to keep hidden as to help the patient to overcome the anxiety that made the hiding feel necessary.
– Paul L. Wachtel
Often I remind you that I too have walked
In the land of dreams and have become real.
With this 1 say that reality is signified
Only by how far your soul is allowed
To fly into space.
Listen to what it brings back,
To what it is trying to tell you.
– Noelle Kocot
Every empire tells its subjects a story
of revelation. The trees let down
their aging leaves, listless
in late drought. The children thrive on filtration,
their classroom air and their selfies sanitized.
– Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the energy of a single snowflake hitting the ground.
– Carl Sagan
I am not the one who loves
It is love that takes me
When hate comes with its package
It forbids delivery
– Leonard Cohen
I believe in the Brotherhood of all men, but I don’t believe in wasting Brotherhood on anyone who doesn’t want to practice it with me. Brotherhood is a two-way street.
– Malcolm X
Music isn’t about music, it’s about life.
– Herbie Hancock
Abridged
Valentine’s palette is mostly grey. Next comes blue (borage, cobalt, silk, robe, egg). Then white. Some inherent greens. But she draws most often from the greyer end of the grey scale. It could be manifest in a postmortem jaw, dusty glass, a sky, one degree Fahrenheit, a lone sock under a sickbed; the water is grey, and the long wall where one exits a car. Grey is the intermediate state she inhabits with no apparent effort. In the grey space, the bardo, the spirit starts to find shape, to find internal structure.
– Jean Valentine
Will you forgive
me for my
snowstorms, my
fever, poetry,
gloom and all?
– Alexander Blok
No society wants you to become wise, it is against the investment of all society.
If people are wise, they cannot be exploited.
– Osho
When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.
– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Friend, enough of this. Should you wish to read more,
Go, become yourself the writing
and yourself the meaning.
– Angelus Silesius
When you insist on seeing God in the face of the emperor, no matter how corrupt they are, and refuse to see God in the face of the immigrant being arrested after being falsely accused of being a criminal, you have yet to understand the gospel of Jesus.
– Rev. Benjamin Cremer
There is something maddeningly
attractive about the
untranslatable, about a word that
goes silent in transit.
– Anne Carson
Poetry may be a non-market
genre. But meaning isn’t.
Meaning is not a genre
at all. It’s the iridescent,
flowing substance of any
life worth living.
– Jan Zwicky
Choose your dialogue
and your best word
or your best silence.
Even in silence
and with silence
we dialogue.
– Carlos Drummond de Andrade
THE WEIGHING
The heart’s reasons
seen clearly,
even the hardest
will carry
its whip-marks and sadness
and must be forgiven.
As the drought-starved
eland forgives
the drought-starved lion
who finally takes her,
enters willingly then
the life she cannot refuse,
and is lion, is fed,
and does not remember the other.
So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.
The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.
– Jane Hirshfield
The brain is silent, the brain is dark, the brain tastes nothing, the brain hears nothing. All it receives are electrical impulses—not the sumptuous chocolate melting sweetly, not the tingling caress, not the pastels of peach and lavender at sunset over a coral reef—just impulses.
– Diane Ackerman
The force by which the other draws me toward meaning and toward herself is equally a force which draws me out of myself and back again. It is paralleled by and in dialogue with an active force by which I draw the other out of herself and toward me. We are each exposed to one another, each vulnerable to the other, each soliciting the awareness and attention of the other as that off of which we feed for our sense of self and identity. As the other draws me out of myself toward her, I am already reaching out, extended into the world through my embodiment. Instead of being passively frozen by the other’s activity, I am actively meeting her, taking up and responding to her expressions, attempting to understand her and letting myself be understood by her, drawing her toward me as she draws me toward her.
– Lisa Folkmarson Käll
Self-restraint
We must avoid quick-tempered criticism and furious, power-driven argument.
The same goes for sulking or silent scorn. These are emotional booby traps baited with pride and vengefulness. Our first job is to sidestep the traps.
When we are tempted by the bait, we should train ourselves to step back and think. For we can neither think nor act to good purpose until the habit of self-restraint has become automatic.
– Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions
In this mountain village,
shining in my soup bowl,
the bright moon arrives
– Kobayashi Issa
A flash of lightning… then night! Fleeting beauty, by whose glance I was suddenly reborn, will I see you no more before eternity?
– Charles Baudelaire, To a Passer-by
Writers…are quick to see injustice, and rouse the people to do something about it.
– Madeleine L’Engle
Gratitude is a dialysis of sorts… it flushes the self-pity out of our systems.
– Max Lucado
Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.
– Kahlil Gibran
It never bothers me for people to make a mistake if they had a reason for what they did. If they can tell me, ‘I thought this and reasoned so, and came to that decision,’ if they obviously went through a reasonable thought process to get where they did, even if it didn’t turn out right, that’s OK. The ones you want to watch out for are those who can’t even tell you why they did what they did.
– Frank Gaines
If I could write all my work again, I am convinced that I’d do it better, which is the healthiest condition for an artist. That’s why he keeps on working, trying again; he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off.
– William Faulkner
Despair is the only cure for illusion. Without despair we cannot transfer our allegiance to reality – it’s a kind of mourning period for our fantasies. Some people do not survive this despair, but no major change within a person can occur w/out it.
– Philip Elliot Slater
No wound is unique. Nothing human is unique. Everything becomes terribly banal over time. There’s the conundrum; but somewhere in there, literature has a chance to emerge.
– Mohamed Mbougar Sarr
The experience of speaking from the heart and being taken seriously builds the psychic architecture that supports the capacity to bear life.
– Nancy McWilliams, PhD
Withdraw into yourself, perceive there a silence as old as being, even older…
– E. M. Cioran (tr. Richard Howard)
The capacity to be alone depends on the existence of a good object in the psychic reality of the individual. The good internal relationships are well enough set up and defended for the individual to feel confident about the present and the future.
– Donald Winnicott
If you want to save the world, there is only one way to do it. First save yourself. You save yourself by accepting responsibility for yourself at every level.
– Leonard Jacobson
I have a friend whose grandmother used to say that she couldn’t understand why people got into envy-jealousy because it was the only one of the sins that you could never possibly have any fun at.
– Charlie Munger
The best life is the life
lived out unmeasured.
– Ricardo Reis
(tr. Margaret Jull Costa & Patricio Ferrari)
Probably man’s greatest merit remains this: that he determines his circumstances as much as possible and lets himself be determined by them as little as possible.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Compassion is not something you can feel for this person or that person.
If you don’t feel compassion boundlessly, for everything that lives, then what you’re feeling is not compassion.
– Bernard T. Joy
Mother doesn’t want a dog.
She’s making a mistake.
Because, more than a dog, I think
She will not want this snake.
– Judith Viorst
Stillness is the ground of movement. Movement has meaning only in relation to stillness.
– Bhikkhu Santi
To the degree that you condemn others, and find evil in others, you are to that degree unconscious of the same thing in yourself.
– Alan Watts
tea dissolves
what you thought
was permanent
– @BashoSociety
I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There are no karma molecules. There’s no subatomic particle that’s the Holy Spirit. If we want there to be love and justice and truth in the world, we have to build them.
– Daniel Dennett
Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people. There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
It is one thing to introduce a new doctrine into the world, it is something else to live it.
– Søren Kierkegaard
Let me tell you something. Happiness is bullshit. It’s the great myth of the late 20th century. You think Picasso was happy? You think Hemingway was? Hendrix? They were miserable shits.
No art worth a damn was ever created out of happiness. I can tell you that. Ambition, narcissism, sex, rage.
Those are the engines that drive every great artist, every great man. A hole that can’t be filled. That’s why we’re all such miserable assholes.
– Ed Harris, Kodachrome
When a person’s bodily integrity is compromised by accident, victimization, or illness, mourning is necessary if depression is to be avoided.
– Nancy McWilliams
The metaphysicians of Tlön seek not truth, or even plausibility—they seek to amaze, astound. In their view, metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature.
– Jorge Luis Borges
Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?
– Italo Calvino
We are accustomed to live in hopes of good weather, a good harvest, a nice love-affair, hopes of becoming rich or getting the office of chief of police, but I’ve never noticed anyone hoping to get wiser.
– Anton Chekhov
He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again
– William Shakespeare
Attach yourself to what is spiritually superior, regardless of what other people think or do. Hold to your true aspirations no matter what is going on around you.
– Epictetus
Being insulted offers you an opportunity to practice decency and having a non-response internally.
– Bryant McGill
…I am a pedant devoted to accuracy, even in what may appear to others unimportant matters.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Don’t show all sides of things. A margin of indefiniteness.
– Robert Bresson
It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves.
– Toni Morrison
deep winter
the old well
remembers water
– Basho
Because most analytic practitioners view psychotherapy as essentially an effort to rework previously thwarted processes of development, a good understanding of normal development is essential.
– Nancy McWilliams
Pain is not the stimulation of a nerve-ending. It’s the state of contradiction, made palpable. It’s the knowledge that what is the case ought not to be. It’s the absolute knowledge that things ought to be otherwise.
– Jensen Suther
Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
– G.K. Chesterton
If the eye were not of the same nature as the light, it could never behold the light.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The burden of the poem
is to refrain: all abstinence, all sex.
– Jane Huffman
Live with guest consciousness: enjoy everything, own nothing.
A guest receives life with gratitude, uses what’s needed with respect, and doesn’t cling. When you stop trying to hold people and things, greed drops, fear of loss fades, and peace feels natural.
– Brahma Kumaris
To succeed in the world, we must be foolish in appearance but wise in reality.
– Voltaire
If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.
– Peter Handke
Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.
– Albert Camus
…it is more important for the clinician to understand people than to master specific treatment techniques.
– Nancy McWilliams
My spring-board has always been long walks. I drink a great deal, but I do not associate it with writing.
– Thornton Wilder
It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much… The life we receive is not short but we make it so.
– Seneca
When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation)—sleep, eating, and swilling—buttoning and unbuttoning—how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse.
– Lord Byron
If I am really a part of your dream, you’ll come back one day.
– Paulo Coelho
To whom should I surrender? To your Self. If you begin to do just that, if you always remember to surrender, one day the inner teacher pulls your mind inward to the Source and you awaken. You become your Self.
– Robert Adams
One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything’s fine today, that is our illusion.
– Voltaire
If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.
– Slavoj Žižek
If you aren’t willing to look like a foolish beginner, you’ll never become a graceful master.
– Ed Latimore
If you’re going to kick authority in the teeth, you might as well use two feet.
– Keith Richards
The most important step out of the karmic law is forgiveness.
– Eckhart Tolle
A dynamic formulation should, among other things, establish in the clinician’s mind a clarity about what is feasible and what is not.
– Nancy McWilliams
Given that you are an Individuated Aspect of Divinity itself, you have the ability to create your own experience of life.
– Neale Donald Walsch
your hand pressing all that
riotous black sleep into
the quiet form of daylight
– Frank O’Hara
At the level of the other, there’s nothing but prophecy.
– Jacques Lacan
Alas, Siddhartha, I see you suffering, but you’re suffering a pain at which one would like to laugh, at which you’ll soon laugh for yourself.
– Hermann Hesse
One should never do wrong in return, nor mistreat any man, no matter how one has been mistreated by him.
– Socrates
It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.
– Frank O’Hara
Everything in the world was my Guru.
– Sri Ramana Maharshi
long ago I gave my heart to myself
For safekeeping.
– Angela Jackson
Zen practice is like taking a shower. First, we wash with soap. Then we wash the soap off. This is enormously important and provides training in how to support others in the path of awakening.
– Dosho Port
I think creative-writing courses are a dismal waste of time. In the first place I don’t think creative writing can be taught. I think it’s very good if it makes you work; that’s the only virtue I see in it. But I think to correct a writer’s mistakes in a schoolmasterly way is to short- circuit the process. Writers have to discover their own mistakes and correct them for it to have real meaning. But the David Copperfield experience is with me to this day.
– Shelby Foote
All sins are committed because we do not think of God as really present, but imagine Him as very far off.
– St. Teresa of Avila
If you’ve got a low downside and a big upside, you go for it. If you’ve got a big downside and a small upside, you run away.
– Sam Zell
Nine-tenths of our happiness depends on our health alone.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
He’d read a great deal and it shows in his work. Some of his denials, such as his not having read Ulysses, are utterly absurd. He had read Ulysses to the depths. Once, in an unguarded moment, he expressed a great admiration for Proust, though he would ordinarily say, I’ve never read anything like that. This is foolishness. Faulkner did not like to be questioned by people he didn’t know and who didn’t know him. His reaction was to lie to them — if you’re going to do this, I’ll simply lie to you. The first interview he ever had, so far as I know, was in a publication long gone called The Bookman. This was back in the early thirties. He was making home brew in the kitchen and he was barefoot. A reporter asked him about his family life. He said that his mother was a Negro slave and his father was an alligator. That’s an example of what he was doing
in those days.
– Shelby Foote on William Faulkner
Learning is rooted in repetition and convexity, meaning that the reading of a single text twice is more profitable than reading two different things once.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The unborn dharmakaya has no obscurations
within its inner and outer clarity,
just as the heart of the sun does not obscure
the radiance of its own light, child.
Thoughts, like swords slicing water,
ultimately don’t benefit or harm, child.
– Sera Khandro
Steadfast benevolence,
sustained by the wisdom that
anything other than benevolence is painful,
protects the mind from all afflictions.
– Sylvia Boorstein
If the Minnesota resistance has an overarching ideology, you could call it “neighborism”—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from. The contrast with the philosophy guiding the Trump administration couldn’t be more extreme.
– Adam Serwer
And yet, it was beautiful, what just happened in that pub, and needed. Something lovely in these people rose to the occasion. And overflowing with loveliness, they got totally wasted.
– George Saunders
Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naïve version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?
– Rebecca Solnit
If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust, the wicked people would have it all their own way: they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should—so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again.
– Charlotte Brontë
The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything, and to imagine almost nothing. The royal consciousness that makes it possible to implement anything and everything, is the one that shrinks imagination, because imagination is a danger. Thus, every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king urges as the only thinkable one.
– Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination
Gratitude and reciprocity are the currency of a gift economy, and they have the remarkable property of multiplying with every exchange, their energy concentrating as they pass from hand to hand, a truly renewable resource. I accept the gift from the bush and then spread that gift with a dish of berries to my neighbor, who makes a pie to share with his friend, who feels so wealthy in food and friendship that he volunteers at the food pantry. You know how it goes. To name the world as gift is to feel one’s membership in the web of reciprocity. It makes you happy—and it makes you accountable. Conceiving of something as a gift changes your relationship to it in a profound way, even though the physical makeup of the “thing” has not changed.
A wooly knit hat that you purchase at the store will keep you warm regardless of its origin, but if it was hand knit by your favorite auntie, then you are in relationship to that “thing” in a very different way: you are responsible for it, and your gratitude has motive force in the world. You’re likely to take much better care of the gift hat than the commodity hat, because it is knit of relationships. This is the power of gift thinking.
I imagine if we acknowledged that everything we consume is the gift of Mother Earth, we would take better care of what we are given. Mistreating a gift has emotional and ethical gravity as well as ecological resonance. How we think ripples out to how we behave. If we view these berries, or that coal or forest, as an object, as property, it can be exploited as a commodity in a market economy. We know the consequences of that.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time. I worship each god, I praise each day splintered down, splintered down and wrapped in time like a husk, a husk of many colors spreading, at dawn fast over the mountains split.
– Annie Dillard
Adventures come to the adventurous, and mysterious things fall in the way of those who, with wonder and imagination, are on the watch for them; but the majority of people go past the doors that are half ajar, thinking them closed, and fail to notice the faint stirrings of the great curtain that hangs ever in the form of appearances between them and the world of causes behind. For only to the few whose inner senses have been quickened, perchance by some strange suffering in the depths, or by a natural temperament bequeathed from a remote past, comes the knowledge, not too welcome, that this greater world lies ever at their elbow, and that any moment a chance combination of moods and forces may invite them to cross the shifting frontier.
– Algernon Blackwood
Drop by drop is the water pot filled. Likewise, the wise man, gathering it little by little, fills himself with good.
– Gautama Buddha
God help the culture that pretends that earlier stupidities never happened and tries to eradicate all evidence of them.
– George Saunders
What about the main thing in life, all its riddles? If you want, I’ll spell it out for you right now. Do not pursue what is illusionary — property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life — don’t be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn for happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn’t last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don’t freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don’t claw at your insides. If your back isn’t broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes can see, if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart — and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it may be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted on their memory.
[I got the sun in the morning and the moon at night……]
– Aleksander Solzhenitsyn
Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to find myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?
Two or more hours should tell the story. One way or the other. Either I am right and a catastrophe will occur, or it won’t and I’m crazy. In either case the outlook is not so good.
Here I sit, in any case, against a young pine, broken out in hives and waiting for the end of the world. Safe here for the moment though, flanks protected by the rise of ground on the left and an approach ramp on the right. The carbine lies across my lap.
Just below the cloverleaf, in the ruined motel, the three girls are waiting for me. Undoubtedly something is about to happen.
Or is it that something has stopped happening?
Is it that God has at last removed his blessing from the U.S.A. and what we feel now is just the clank of the old historical machinery, the sudden jerking ahead of the roller-coaster cars as the chain catches hold and carries us back into history with its ordinary catastrophes, carries us out and up toward the brink from that felicitous and privileged siding where even unbelievers admitted that if it was not God who blessed the U.S.A., then at least some great good luck had befallen us, and that now the blessing or the luck is over, the machinery clanks, the chain catches hold, and the cars jerk forward?
– Walker Percy
Suffering is part and parcel of extensive intelligence and a feeling heart.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.
– William James
When the bell rings she hurries up to me with more than twenty sheets of paper. She’s Indian—Hidatsa, maybe, or Sioux—and the other children let her pass as if she were invisible. The morning star dances in a red circle, singing a song about his girlfriend Sheila; the angel Gabriel stands before Mary, his blue wings ablaze with stars. His mouth is open wide and notes are coming out, each one a different color. A woman with green hair holds her hands up to the sky and says: These are secret words, Say them after me. May all the plants and flowers rise And all people rise from death.
I look up from the paper: a dusty shelf, a starfish in a jar caked with dust beside dusty petri dishes. I see shades of blue: the globe cerulean, the sky bleached out. And out the window, above the children’s heads, topsoil, the residue of ancient oceans, swirling like a thumbprint in the playground, wind pushing the empty swings. “So many poems,” I say, smiling at the girl. “You must love to write.” She shifts from foot to foot and weaves her hands in air. “I don’t have paper at home,” she says, “so I keep them in my head. That’s where they live until I write them down.”
– Kathleen Norris
Science fiction is the only kind of literature that’s relevant to the future. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
– Arthur C. Clarke
Imitating the exemplary acts of a god or a mythical hero, or simply recounting his adventures, the man of an ancient society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters Great Time, sacred time.
– Mircea Eliade
Postcard to Baudelaire
by Thomas Lux
It’s still the same, Charles.
Every day dislimned, the heart clicking
erratically—the sound of amateurs
playing billiards. How are you enjoying
the high privileges
of the dead? The double
triple and more turns
of the dark, the delicious
please of quietude? No one,
no thing is different: the oblati swarm,
the poor are formed into lines
leading poorer…There’s one good thing,
Charles: the few beautiful verses
granted you by God
sing. Even though you’re deaf
I want you to know
they sing! You should know that,
Charles, it’s still the same.
One of the misunderstandings that dominate the notion of the library is that people go to the library to look for a book whose title they already know. But the main function of the library is to discover books of whose existence one had no suspicion.
– Umberto Eco
An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it.
– William S. Burroughs
In Love loss and gain are the same
In Love the worlds are the same
In Love autumn and spring are the same
Its down is up and up is down
The earth and heavens are the same
The place of Love is a circle
Each spot is equal to the other
– Farīd ud-Dīn Aṭṭār
If the Beloved scorns you or welcomes you
It’s all the same
In the tradition of Love to die
Is the same as gaining eternal life.
– Farīd ud-Dīn Aṭṭār
Happiness seems to depend on leisure.
– Aristotle
Whoever stepped onto the path of love forgot the way back home.
– Bulleh Shah
In the seen, there is only the seen.
In the heard, only the heard.
In the sensed, only the sensed.
In the cognized, only the cognized.
– The Buddha
The moment you are waiting for something
to happen, you are living in the future —
and therefore missing life.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
Don’t give in to your fears. If you do, you won’t be able to talk to your heart.
– Paulo Coelho
you have to be your own song to be found.
– Joseph Fasano
Feeling glum? Stop thinking about yourself!
There. Fixed that for you.
– Kenneth Folk
Do not look for God in the clouds; look for Him in the kindness of a stranger.
– Rumi
We should infer in the case of a beautiful dwelling – place that it was built for its owners and not for mice; we ought, therefore, in the same way to regard the universe as the dwelling – place of the gods.
– Chrysippus
Without the Guru, the mind remains in the dark; it cannot see the path to the Mansion of the Lord.
– Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji
Where the left hemisphere’s relationship with the world is one of reaching out to grasp, and therefore to use it, the right hemisphere’s appears to be one of reaching out — just that. Without purpose.
– Dr Iain McGilchrist
He who is running a race ought to endeavor and strive to the utmost of his ability to come off victor; but it is utterly wrong for him to trip up his competitor, or to push him aside. So in life it is not unfair for one to seek for himself what may accrue to his benefit; but it is not right to take it from another.
– Chrysippus
I had entered an endless night, and yet there remained, deep within me, there remained something less than a hope, let’s say an uncertainty. One might also say that even when one has personally lost the game, when one has played one’s last card, for some people – not all, not all – the idea remains that something in heaven will pick up the hand, will arbitrarily decide to deal again, to throw the dice again…
– Michel Houellebecq
Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I am permitted to hold for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
– George Bernard Shaw
Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
So many people are external thinkers. What I think is, let your first word be your breath.
– Jefferson Fisher
He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself and not another.
– W.E.B. Dubois
I wish I still knew how to find joy in the pure thrill of the ten minutes before your favorite cartoon comes on, the rush against time, the body so suddenly delayed, cumbersome yet present, the embodiment of coiled anticipation.
– Ocean Vuong
Even the least of our activities ought to have some end in view.
– Marcus Aurelius
Postcard to Edward Abbey in the afterlife:
Hardly an earnest desert, you’d say: scrubland and plateau,
summer rain riding in on wind sweeping the steppe’s
wide floor. But I’ve seen emptiness in the north:
eyes of raccoons in the treetops reflected in my headlamp
that long summer on the great lake dunes, their shape
in the mind an echo, a graph of perfect sleep rising
and falling between dream and darkness. Here, tunnels
run in the earth, and ghosts rise up from the drum
to dance. You swore there’s no lack of water
in the desert, but just the right amount. If hearth means
home, how many clustered sleep-bound around blue
embers, skin piñon-scented, fires a winking mirror
of the winter sky? What’s dangerous is beautiful, what’s
beautiful, dangerous, and those who are sure
there’s no heaven have spent more time imagining it
than those who believe with certainty it’s up there. Reply
post haste. You had the need I have: for sense.
Like any remains, it may be buried, a crease within a fist,
vanishing into the ground or reappearing in flashes of blue,
unwhole, unsearchable as your stubborn heart under dust:
shriveled cob, black husked tongue.
– Corrie Williamson
The only way to change human behavior is to woo, instead of preach.
To make love, instead of threatening disaster.
To point out how glorious something could be, and in some way to live it.
This is the real meaning of “Make Love, Not War”.
– Alan Watts
Hell wasn’t the trouble he saw around him. Hell was turning away from it.
– Zen Master Ma
Mud-Puddling
by James Crews
I don’t want to read another book
or listen to another podcast promising
a better life, the road to happiness.
I just want to love my life as it is—
the cobwebbed corners and rumpled bed,
my sweaty yoga mat still unrolled
across the floor, the color rubbed off
where I rest my head each morning.
Let me love the orderly and the messy—
my unwashed and salt-stained car,
the cracked planter left out in the cold,
this regret that still fills me years after
my mother’s passing because I wasn’t
there at her bedside when she died, because
I didn’t do more to save her. Let me be
like the butterflies, sipping from wet soil,
dung, and carrion, drawing nutrients
from actual blood, sweat, and tears—
what we call mud-puddling. Let me stay
in love with my sorrow today, with anger,
fatigue, and every fruit fly rising up
from the sweet and rotting compost
I forgot to take out.
I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.
– Stanley Kubrick
Literature is born out of a desire to be truthful—not to hide anything and not to present oneself as somebody else.
– Czeslaw Milosz
I dreamed a theory of the universe: that a man could be generated from a snowflake, if only the snowflake would not melt before the process was complete. In the generation of a man is much heat, thus snowflakes tend not to produce men. I see a snowflake with Leonardo’s stretch man floating. Dreams, like snowflakes, melt in the daylight. In this dream the snowflake man, like the Vitruvian man of Leonardo, swirled through space a perfect being, almost to be transmuted into existence. Only upon awakening does the theory of origins, along with its universe, evaporate.
In waketime, the beautiful dream man on the snowflake wheel is a mock recipe calling for irreconcilable temperatures and the miracle of life is slightly askew. In dreams the beautiful and the grotesque are interchangeable; in dreams one can be just a little bit pregnant. This is odd, isn’t it, that dream should spoof creative energy, as a dream is, after all, nothing but creativity? Dream is spontaneous generation with no yield, a biogenesis with no staying power. Dream is poetic energy with disdain for the poem. Dream creates universes and leaves them, like snowflakes, to dissipate upon our pillows.
Daylight dissipates dream imagery—but too late—as dream has already unhinged daylight’s prerogatives. The dream world undoes the sensible one, the suggestive nonsense of dream miraculously sets in motion our conscious capacity to make the world—and maybe love. Although dreams do not bestow convenient meanings to waketime, they do something more—by their very scrambling and scorching and patching scraps of the dependable, daylight world, they remake our own imaginative capacities.
Dreams explode sense with surprising combinations, but unlike myth, dreams do not produce coherent narratives upon which cultures are strung and knotted…
– Tinkering the Universe: The Art of Dream
I suppose most of you have heard of Zen. But before going on to explain any details about it I want to make one thing absolutely clear: I am not a Zen Buddhist, I am not advocating Zen Buddhism, I am not trying to convert anyone to it. I have nothing to sell. I am an entertainer.
That is to say in the same sense that when you go to a concert and you listen to someone play Mozart, he has nothing to sell except the sound of the music. He doesn’t want to convert you to anything, he doesn’t want you to join an organization in favor of Mozart’s music as opposed to, say, Beethoven’s.
I approach you in the same spirit as a musician with his piano or a violinist with his violin. I just want you to enjoy a point of view which I enjoy.
– Alan Watts
Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.
– Susanne Langer
when it comes
to the tattered storybook
of our fractured world
and your own
brokenness too
do yourself a favor
use that sparkly
unicorn brain of yours
to create something new
fold your paperback tears
into origami dreams
and give them flight
shape the wounds
into wings
and send them
into a future
feathered with hope
stop imagining
the apocalypse
and start imagining
the revolution
– Angi Sullins
Whether we regard our situation as heaven or hell depends on our perception.
– Pema Chödrön
I remember reading Rilke’s Duino Elegies again and again and again, until I “got” them, until something burst over me like a flood, and I remember, once again, weeping and weeping with a book in my hands.
– Mary Ruefle
William Faulkner, on the simplest terms, is a combination of Sherwood Anderson and Joseph Conrad. He absorbed what those two men had to give him and he came up with a third thing. Now, it’s a lot more complicated than that. But basically, he found a way to combine those talents.
– Shelby Foote
We are voyagers, discoverers
of the not-known,
the unrecorded;
we have no map;
possibly we will reach haven,
heaven.
– H.D
Narcissistically structured people may use a whole range of defenses, but the ones they depend on most fundamentally are idealization and devaluation..This grandiosity may be felt internally, or it may be projected. Realistic advantages and disadvantages may be completely overridden by concerns about comparative prestige.
– Nancy McWilliams
today, i am a black woman in a body of coal
i am always burning and no one knows my name
i am a nameless fury, i am a blues scratched from
the throat of ms. Nina
– Mahogany L. Browne
To love is not about merging. It is a noble calling for the individual to ripen, to differentiate, to become a world in oneself in response to another.
– Rilke
All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
– Johann Sebastian Bach
I see the quintessential task of the clinician as one of coming to know him-or herself sufficiently to be able to register the experience of the other in progressively more profound and also more useful ways.
– Nancy McWilliams
One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.
– George Orwell
Mouna (silence) is not closing the mouth, it is eternal speech. That state which transcends speech and thought is mouna. Hold some concept firmly and trace it back. By such concentration silence results. When practice becomes natural it will end in silence.
– Ramana Maharshi
Hold some concept firmly & trace it back. By such concentration silence results. When practice becomes natural, it will end in silence. Meditation without mental activity is silence. Subjugation of the mind is meditation. Deep meditation is eternal speech.
– Ramana Maharshi
there where lacuna becomes caesura, then cadence, and perhaps juncture. To articulate the void by a void…
– Blanchot
When we can graciously hold the wholeness of a moment without pitting any of the parts against each other—and then relax there—a sacred alchemy occurs.
– Justin Michelson
It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something.
– Frank O’Hara
Politics does not reflect majorities, it constructs them.
– Stuart Hall
I mean: our stage is that of civilization—a very praiseworthy state no doubt, but also neither was there any doubt that we should have to become very much more barbaric to be capable of culture again.
– Thomas Mann
Tell me some simple
talk, the talk a woman desires
to be told every now and then. Say
that two people, like you and me,
can carry all this resemblance between fog
and mirage, then safely return.
– Mahmoud Darwish
I believe it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who wrote that the central benefit to a monarch sitting on a throne is simply that while they sit there no one else can.
– Bernard T. Joy
Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.
– Honoré de Balzac
Granite of no common variety assuredly. Black as jade the jasper that flecks its whiteness. On its what is the wrong word its uptilted face obscure graffiti.
– Samuel Beckett
All great works were prepared in the desert, including the redemption of the world.
– Antonin Gilbert Sertillanges
Rilke writes somewhere that modern man can no longer die a dramatic death. He dies in a hospital room, like a bee inside a honeycomb cell. That’s how I recall it, at least.
– Yukio Mishima
Ordinary life is even more horrible than war.
– Yukio Mishima
RAINY DAY
Never again this rain
nor that blemish of light
on the rock
nor the edge
of that cloud
nor your motionless smile—
already fleeting.
Never again this moment
that already bids me farewell
from your eyes.
– Claribel Alegría
A man falls in love with a woman by looking at her.
A woman falls in love with a man by listening to him.
– Jovan Dučić
The sensitive suffer more; but they love more, and dream
more.
– Augusto Cury
The brain is the least alluring part of the body for me. I’m far more interested in the face.
– Adam Phillips
I pray Thee, O God, that I may be beautiful within.
– Socrates
It is your own bad strategies, not the unfair opponent, that are to blame for your failures. You are responsible for the good and bad in your life.
– Robert Greene
The first truth: You must choose between your attachment and happiness. You cannot have both.
– Anthony de Mello
Sometimes I lie awake at night and I ask, “Is life a multiple choice test or is it a true or false test?” …Then a voice comes to me out of the dark and says, “We hate to tell you this but life is a thousand word essay.”
– Charles M. Schulz
A poet is one who writes poems
and one who does not write poems
A poet is one who breaks chains
and one who imposes chains on himself
A poet is one who believes
and one who cannot believe
A poet is one who leaves
and one who cannot leave
– Tadeusz Różewicz
Be careful the environment you choose, for it will shape you. Be careful the friends you choose, for you will become like them!
– W. Clement Stone
So much working, reading, thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough.
– Sylvia Plath
The Buddha called conscientious or moral shame a ‘bright guardian of the world,’ since it has the capacity to soothe bruised honor and give rise to beneficial action.
– Wendy Johnson
bamboo shoots suffer—
this crappy world’s
storm
筍に娑婆の嵐のかかる也 takenoko ni shaba no arashi no kakaru nari
The term shaba has Buddhist connotations, suggesting the notion of a depraved world and age (the Latter Days of Dharma in Pure Land Buddhist thought).
– Kobayashi Issa
An awakened woman is the highest teammate and the most formidable opponent.
– Nika Solé
If you do not take risks for your ideas you are nothing. Nothing.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What you repeatedly notice in others becomes your inner habit. If you keep focusing on flaws, the mind learns flaws. If you keep noticing goodness, the mind learns goodness.
– Brahma Kumaris
It takes a long time for society to train the natural care out of people. With some it takes years, with some decades. But eventually it happens and those most responsible for it happening continue complaining about apathy.
– Bernard T. Joy
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
– Schopenhauer
The artist’s job is to be a witness to their time in history.
– Robert Rauschenberg
Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.
– Lucius Annaeus Seneca
withered reeds
the river’s voice
grows thin
– Buson
Outside the grand laws of nature, man’s plans are mere calamities.
– Karl Marx
Science and democracy have very consonant values and approaches, and I don’t think you can have one without the other.
– Carl Sagan
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
I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.
– Simone de Beauvoir
Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.
– George Perkins Marsh
A truce to words, mere empty sound,
Let deeds at length appear, my friends!
While idle compliments you round,
You might achieve some useful ends.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won’t have as much censorship because we won’t have as much fear.
– Judy Blume
Whence but from hills comes nostalgia to fill the eyes with tears?
– John Wheelwright
No intelligent person is interested in dominating others. His first intrest is to know himself.
– Osho
winter rain
listening alone
in the mountains
– Basho
Life is short and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!
– Friedrich Nietzsche
O you who seek the path to the secret,
Turn back!
For it is within yourself that the whole secret is found.
– Ibn ʿArabī
To win true freedom you must be a slave to philosophy.
– Seneca
Everyone is trying to be smart, I’m just trying not to be stupid.
– Charlie Munger
The world is not what it seems – but it isn’t anything else, either.
– Raymond Queneau
They saw you as someone who never really fit in. Whole time you were the prototype.
– Nika Solé
All your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned how to be wretched.
– Seneca
Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.
– Montesquieu
Each person is like a koan I cannot solve with my rational mind. I have to give myself over completely, while staying very much myself, to let their koan and my response to it become one thing.
– Mark Epstein
The paradox of our time: living in both the Information Age and the Dark
Ages simultaneously.
– Dr. Catharine Young
What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.
– Lucius Annaeus Seneca
snowy day
even the lazy cat
looks busy
– Issa
What quantum physics teaches us is that everything we thought was physical is not physical.
– Bruce H. Lipton
A similar stagnancy has settled in at the big movie studios and record labels. Nobody wants to take a risk—but (as I’ve learned through painful personal experience) that’s often the riskiest move of them all. Live by the formula, and you die by the formula.
– Ted Gioia
We are such staff as dreams are made of and our little life is rounded with a sleep.
– William Shakespeare
Forgiveness starts inside you, not with what someone else did.
– Gina Sharpe
Without this playing with fantasy, no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.
– Carl Jung
To ask the mind to kill the mind is like making the thief the policeman.
– Bulleh Shah
The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
– Emile M. Cioran
There is a being on another plane that guides, protects, and helps you. That loves you so incredibly. Does your sense of unworthiness prevent you from being loved as much as this being loves you?
Unworthiness has to go. You have to be able to say, “Christ, God, Baba, let me feel your love. Let me fill up with your love, let me be absorbed into your love.”
Breathe in and out of your heart. With each inhalation, you take in that love a little more. With each exhalation, you get rid of that which keeps you from acknowledging that you are love.
– Ram Dass, Words of Wisdom
The soul is impossible to see in the mirror; it is always a longing.
– Nikolai Gogol
I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.
– Ernest Hemingway
We’re all dying. That’s what defines the condition of living.
– Winston Churchill
My instinct in these situations is to sit back and listen and learn — but they were looking at me like I was supposed to solve it all.
– Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions for You
Imagine for yourself a character, a model personality, whose example you determine to follow, in private as well as in public.
– Epictetus
The true philosopher is a man who says “All right,” and goes to sleep in his armchair.
– P.G. Wodehouse
I adore simple pleasures, they are the last refuge of the complex
– Oscar Wilde
The very man who has argued you down will sometimes be found years later to have been influenced by what you said.
– CS Lewis
Under peaceful conditions, the warlike man attacks himself.
– Nietzsche
When a society gives power to ignorance, ignorance will destroy said society.
– Socrates
It’s gonna take a whole lot of people changing their mind. Come back. Change your mind.
– Brandi Carlile
The a priori reduction to the friend-enemy relationship is one of the primal phenomena of the new anthropology. Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
– Theodor W. Adorno
Am I wrong in thinking that people have become such complete egoists and are so convinced of the normality of their way of life that they have never once doubted themselves?
– Osamu Dazai
Self-actualized people have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy, however stale these experiences may be for other people.
– Abraham Maslow
In finance, everything that is agreeable is unsound and everything that is sound is disagreeable.
– Winston Churchill
The most dangerous thing about ignorance is that it feels exactly like knowledge.
– Bertrand Russell
Reading Kierkegaard is like flying through heavy cloud. Every now and again there’s a break and you get a brief, brilliantly lit view of the ground, and then you’re back in the swirling grey mist again, with not a fucking clue where you are.
– David Lodge, Therapy
We must be highly receptive to what we encounter, approach it without assumptions or judgements, letting the reality reveal itself.
– Robert Sardello
Truth
And if sun comes
How shall we greet him?
Shall we not dread him,
Shall we not fear him
After so lengthy a
Session with shade?
Though we have wept for him,
Though we have prayed
All through the night-years—
What if we wake one shimmering morning to
Hear the fierce hammering
Of his firm knuckles
Hard on the door?
Shall we not shudder?—
Shall we not flee
Into the shelter, the dear thick shelter
Of the familiar
Propitious haze?
Sweet is it, sweet is it
To sleep in the coolness
Of snug unawareness.
The dark hangs heavily
Over the eyes.
– Gwendolyn Brooks
… you could be a water and soft-river your way to freedom.
– Nayyirah Waheed
I will make my mind a place of beauty and peace. I will decorate it with holy thoughts and fragrant memories of Thy presence.
– Sarada Devi
When it comes to our nutritional curiosity, it’s important to be a seeker. And, it’s just as important to be a finder.
– Marc David
The children were meant to remember it
reconnect with it
grow old with it,
grow dreams over
the imprint they made
of what they left behind
a bitter yet beautiful
endangerment of life.
– Brandon Shimoda
Being a monk is something you do, not something you think.
– Thomas Merton
HOLY ORDERS
What counts is that we write it down or paint,
dance, compose, the way we are given to.
So watch and hear and the hell with what we thought
it should do: it doesn’t care about us.
– William Bronk
As our oceans swell with garbage, and our world reverberates with racism and male violence, we must embrace Lilith’s massive energy. I call on Lilith to guide us out of this man-made mess that patriarchy has piled onto for thousands of years. The status quo is no longer acceptable.
– Trista Hendren
Nature loves courage.
You make the commitment
and nature will respond to
that commitment by removing
impossible obstacles.
Dream the impossible dream
and the world will not grind
you under, it will lift you up.
This is the trick.
This is what all these teachers
and philosophers who really
counted, who really touched
the alchemical gold, this is
what they understood.
This is the shamanic dance
in the waterfall. This is how
magic is done. By hurling
yourself into the abyss and
discovering it’s a
feather bed.
And there’s no other way
to do it.
– Terence Mckenna
The Peninsula
When you have nothing more to say, just drive
For a day all round the peninsula.
The sky is tall as over a runway,
The land without marks, so you will not arrive
But pass through, though always skirting landfall.
At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,
The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable
And you’re in the dark again. Now recall
The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log,
That rock where breakers shredded into rags,
The leggy birds stilted on their own legs,
Islands riding themselves out into the fog,
And drive back home, still with nothing to say
Except that now you will uncode all landscapes
By this: things founded clean on their own shapes,
Water and ground in their extremity.
– Seamus Heaney
Late Echo
Alone with our madness and favorite flower
We see that there really is nothing left to write about.
Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things
In the same way, repeating the same things over and over
For love to continue and be gradually different.
Beehives and ants have to be re-examined eternally
And the color of the day put in
Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter
For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic
Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting.
Only then can the chronic inattention
Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory
And with one eye on those long tan plush shadows
That speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge
Of ourselves, the talking engines of our day.
– John Ashbery
We often find ourselves wishing for more hours in the day, but that wouldn’t help anything. The problem, clearly, isn’t that we have a shortage of time. It’s more that we have an overload of everything else.
– Matt Haig
This society traumatizes a lot of people by its standards. The so-called illnesses and dysfunctions are very often normal responses to what fundamentally is an
abnormal culture.
– Gabor Maté
This is our chance to do something different. We’ve spent lifetimes trying to find happiness in ordinary ways. Now, let’s try working straightforwardly with the mind itself. Let’s also recall that our ordinary human suffering has value. It can humble us and teach us compassion. The pain we go through while changing old habits is not only worth tolerating, it’s worth celebrating!
– Pema Chodron
Ascending the mountain of self-knowledge and throwing aside your superfluous luggage as you go, you shall at last arrive at the point… where the various forces of your character-brute energy, keen intellect, desirous heart- long dissipated amongst a thousand little wants and preferences, are gathered into one, and become a strong and disciplined instrument wherewith your true self can force a path deeper and deeper into the heart of Reality.
– Evelyn Underhill
The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Question once asked of the Dalai Lama, “Why didn’t you fight back against the Chinese?” The Dalai Lama looked down, swung his feet just a bit, then looked back up at us and said with a gentle smile, “Well, war is obsolete, you know.” Then, after a few moments, his face grave, he said, “Of course the mind can rationalize fighting back…but the heart, the heart would never understand. Then you would be divided in yourself, the heart and the mind, and the war would be inside you.”
I realize now it was Asherah, the Great Mother, I was seeking. Asherah who was banished from the Judeo-Christian Bible. Banished from what became the religious underpinning of Western civilization as the Patriarchs of Jerusalem created the first monotheistic religion – which uniquely featured a solitary male deity with no female counterpart.
– Lauren Raine
If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, together women ought to be able to turn it rightside up again.
– Sojourner Truth
You must understand, if you want to be a poet, there is no stopping place. We poets go on and on. Stations. Small stops. Sometimes an oasis. That’s it, on and on and on.
– Meena Alexander
It is quite useless to talk about faith or read about it if you do not live by it. It means you have to step off the deep end and swim, not just paddle around in the shallows.
– Eileen Caddy
The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those who have not viewed the world.
– Alexander von Humboldt
i.m. david harding
of how many artists
can you truly say
their greatest Work
Was us
– Alex Finlay
May people think of benefiting one another.
– Shantideva
She is so bright and glorious that you cannot look at her face or her garments for the splendor with which she shines. For she is terrible with the terror of the avenging lightning, and gentle with the goodness of the bright sun; and both her terror and her gentleness are incomprehensible to humans…. But she is with everyone and in everyone, and so beautiful is her secret that no person can know the sweetness with which she sustains people, and spares them in inscrutable mercy.
– Hildegard of Bingen
These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary — how am I to resolve them?
– Richard Flanagan
How, then, to imagine, the expansive heart of this God—greater than God—who takes seven buses, just to arrive at us. We settle sometimes for less than intimacy with God when all God longs for is this solidarity with us. In Spanish, when you speak of your great friend, you describe the union and kinship as being de uña y mugre—our friendship is like the fingernail and the dirt under it. Our image of who God is and what’s on God’s mind is more tiny than it is troubled. It trips more on our puny sense of God than over conflicting creedal statements or theological considerations. The desire of God’s heart is immeasurably larger than our imaginations can conjure. This longing of God’s to give us peace and assurance and a sense of well-being only awaits our willingness to cooperate with God’s limitless magnanimity.
– Gregory Boyle
The self cannot survive without love, and the self, starved of love, dies. The absence of self-love is shame, “just as cold is the absence of warmth.” Disgrace obscuring the son…
Franciscan Richard Rohr writes that “the Lord comes to us disguised as ourselves.”
– Gregory J. Boyle
Let people realize clearly that every time they threaten someone or humiliate or unnecessarily hurt or dominate or reject another human being, they become forces for the creation of psychopathology, even if these be small forces. Let them recognize that every person who is kind, helpful, decent, psychologically democratic, affectionate, and warm, is a psychotherapeutic force.
– Abraham Maslow
Oh men, your destiny.
When all is well a shadow can overturn it.
When trouble comes a stroke of the wet sponge,
and the picture’s blotted out. And that,
I think that breaks the heart.
– Aeschylus
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
Zen is a method for transformation. It’s fierce, you don’t hide out, you appear as yourself. You want freedom, you want to understand the universe. You want to stop building the house of pain.
– John Tarrant
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little,
and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
– Robinson Jeffers
Gatha For All Threatened Beings
Ah Power that swirls us together
Grant us bliss
Grant us the great release
And to all beings
Vanishing, wounded
In trouble on earth,
We pass on this love
May their numbers increase
– Gary Snyder
If any man cannot grasp this matter, let him be idle and the matter will grasp him.
– Henry Suso
I have simply stopped arguing with reality. How do I know the wind should blow? It’s blowing. How do I know this is the highest order? It’s happening. Arguing with ‘what is’ is like teaching a cat to bark. It’s not very fulfilling. I am my friend and no longer confused. The way I know that reality is good is that when I argue the point I experience tension, fear and frustration. I lose – not sometimes, but 100% of the time. It just doesn’t feel natural inside: no balance, no connection. I want reality to change? Hopeless. Let me change my thinking. Some of us mentally argue with ‘what is.’ Others of us attempt to control and change ‘what is,’ and then tell ourselves and others that we actually had something to do with any apparent change that took place. This leaves no connection or room for God in my life. In the peaceful experience of no opposition to God, I remain aware of my nature: clear, vibrant, a friend, a listener.
– Byron Katie
The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects which is itself but an endless circle of mutually reflecting metaphors.
– Pierre Bourdieu
Poets are masters of the concrete. They first pull us into a single similarity between an animal, an object in nature, or an event, before they shock us with the dissimilarity. Then, they leave us there to make the connection between the concrete and the universal. When we make that connection, there’s suddenly a great leap of meaning, an understanding that it’s one world. The very word “metaphor,” which comes from two Greek words, means to “carry across.” A good metaphor carries us across, and we don’t even know how it’s occurred.
– Richard Rohr
Coda
by Jason Shinder
And now I know what most deeply connects us
after that summer so many years ago,
and it isn’t poetry, although it is poetry,
and it isn’t illness, although we have that in common,
and it isn’t gratitude for every moment,
even the terrifying ones, even the physical pain,
though we are halfway through
it, or even the way you describe the magnificence
of being alive, catching a glimpse,
in the store window, of your blowing hair and chapped lips,
though it is beautiful, it is; but it is
that you’re my friend out here on the far reaches
of what humans can find out about each other.
What appears as another’s advantage may be their greatest test. What appears as your disadvantage may be your most potent teacher. The universe is not a competition, it is a school, and each student has a different syllabus.
– Daaji
…we are never done with thinking about our parents… and come to know them better long after they are dead than we ever did when they were alive.
– May Sarton
A spirit of criticism for the sake of…having one’s opinion ready upon demand, is not merely repulsive to all true thinkers, but is, in itself, destructive of all thinking.
– George MacDonald
You’ve been somebody long enough. You spent the first half of your life becoming somebody. Now you can work on becoming nobody, which is really somebody. For when you become nobody there is no tension, no pretense, no one trying to be anyone or anything.
– Ram Dass
“Middling”
Someone recently asked me what I’ve been up to.
I replied, “Middling.”
“Meddling?” they said with surprise.
“Nope. I gave that up a long time ago.
Middling — The Autumn Years, as in midlife.”
Being an astute querent, they asked:
“And what does that mean to you?”
Suddenly I got very clear.
Not the foolish child I used to be,
no longer driven by young-man-energy,
yet not quite the wise man of years I hope to be.
And with that, I closed the brushwood gate
until the Earth Rooster crows.
– Frank LaRue Owen
The wound is not in the absence of the thing. The wound
is in the belief that the thing will make you whole.
– Daaji
The wound heals when you discover that you were never
lacking what you thought you were lacking. You were only looking
in the wrong direction.
– Daaji
We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.
– Edna St. Vincent Millay
We Scots, Rebus thought, we’re not very good at going public. We store up our true feelings like fuel for long winter nights of whisky and recrimination. So little of us ever reaches the surface, it’s a wonder we exist at all.
– Ian Rankin
Inflation is going to impoverish all of us before people get pissed off enough to realize that all of the last hundred years of economic progress was actually a shell game to create billionaires, while the great masses of people saw their
standard of living eroded and destroyed.
– Terence McKenna
The problem’s not that the truth is harsh, but that liberation from ignorance is as painful as being born. Run after truth until you’re breathless. Accept the pain involved in re-creating yourself afresh. These ideas will take a life to comprehend, a hard one interspersed with drunken moments.
– Naguib Mahfouz
It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.
– Italo Calvino
It’s not so much staying alive,
it’s staying human that’s important.
What counts is that we don’t betray each other.
– George Orwell
although lorraine was a
girlfriend, we never talked
about men or clothes or
such inconsequential things
when we got together. it
was always marx, lenin and
revolution – real girls’ talk.
– nina simone
I confess that I consider life to be a thing of the most untouchable deliciousness, and that even the confluence of so many disasters and deprivations, the exposure of countless fates, everything that insurmountably increased for us over the past few years to become a still rising terror cannot distract me from the fullness and goodness of existence that is inclined toward us.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
All of this that is happening to me, and happening to others about me, is it reality or is it fiction? May not all of it perhaps be a dream of God, or of whomever it may be, which will vanish as soon as He wakes? And therefore when we pray to Him, and cause canticles and hymns to rise to Him, is it not that we may lull Him to sleep, rocking the cradle of His dreams? Is not the whole liturgy, of all religions, only a way perhaps of soothing God in His dreams, so that He shall not wake and cease to dream us?
– Miguel de Unamuno
I wished for a system of thought
that would leave my imagination free
to create as it chose
and yet make all that it created,
or could create,
part of the one history,
and that the soul’s.
– W.B. Yeats
VI. Wisdom: The Voice of God
by Mary Karr
Ninety percent of what’s wrong with you
could be cured with a hot bath,
says God through the manhole covers,
but you want magic, to win
the lottery you never bought a ticket for.
(Tenderly, the monks chant,
embrace the suffering.) The voice never
panders, offers no five-year plan,
no long-term solution, no edicts from a cloudy
white beard hooked over ears.
It is small and fond and local. Don’t look for
your initials in the geese honking
overhead or to see through the glass even
darkly. It says the most obvious shit,
i.e. Put down that gun, you need a sandwich.
If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.
– Krishnamurti
I wanted to tell the man that everyone alive on this fluke little planet was on the spectrum. That’s what a spectrum is. I wanted to tell the man that life itself is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow.
– Richard Powers
People think they need to be healed, but the truth is much more beautiful. Even a minute is more than we deserve. No one should be anything but dead. Instead we get honey of out rocks. Miracles from nothing. It’s easy. We don’t need to get better. We’re already us. And everything that is, is ours.
– Richard Powers
And every stone and every star a tongue,
And every gale of wind a curious song.
The Heavens were an oracle, and spoke
Divinity: the Earth did undertake
The office of a priest; and I being dumb
(Nothing besides was dumb) all things did come
With voices and instructions …
– Thomas Traherne
Think always of the universe as one living creature, made of one substance and one soul: how all is absorbed into this one consciousness; how a single impulse governs all its actions; how all things collaborate in all that happens; the very web and mesh of it all.
– Marcus Aurelius
Cognitive Bypassing
by Russell Wilson
I am a physician, neuroscientist, and anxiety expert. Many people I speak with have anxiety because they are trapped in their heads. I’d like to introduce a term here that I have not heard before (at least not in my field of medicine and psychology).
I call it the “Cognitive Bypass.”
I see a lot of [people] instruct others to restructure their thoughts. It’s seen as a way to avoid painful emotions and even heal old traumas and anxieties. We live in a neck-up society; we avoid being in our bodies unless our bodies feel good. Uncomfortable emotions are compulsively explained away or distracted from our minds.
There is no shortage of self-help gurus and coaches out there to help you “process” your traumas by creating new thought processes around them (the positive psychology movement is a good example). “Just think better, and you’ll feel better,” they say.
While this may help in the short-term, it may well be counterproductive in the long-term.
Have you ever tried to think differently than how your body feels? You can do it for a while, but in general, it’s like Sisyphus endlessly pushing a rock up an incline.
There is nothing wrong with using cognitive strategies as part of your emotional well-being. However, when I see [people feeling] that every negative emotion must be restructured or explained cognitively, I cringe. Compulsively adding cognition to emotion ensures your traumas can never fully heal. The uncomfortable truth is that there is a component of painful emotions that simply must be felt, as hard as that may be to hear.
I know this will sound odd from a medical doctor, but healing trauma has more to do with embracing the feeling in the body than holding on to the thoughts of the mind. Human beings are being driven into their heads as a way of avoiding emotion, especially grief.
Grief is constantly pushed aside in our society. So much of our psychopathology is due to unresolved grief over the losses we’ve sustained, especially in childhood. It is not so much grief over deaths of loved ones (although that is certainly a significant cause) as grief over a parental divorce, childhood abuse, neglect, or other great losses.
There are plenty of therapists who will help you with those losses, but how many let you sit in it without the need to compulsively add an explanation? What if not compulsively explaining painful emotions is a critical component in allowing the space to metabolize that emotion? Maybe then the trauma underneath it can resolve and ultimately heal.
“Spiritual Bypassing” was a term coined in the 1980s by Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist John Welwood. He explains it as a “Tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.”
Cognitive Bypassing is the practice of avoiding feelings by detouring into cognitive ideas or beliefs. Cognitive bypassing operates under the assumption that every trauma and emotion can be fixed cognitively or restructuring the way you think. Again, I have no issue with cognitive restructuring, but I most certainly have an issue if every single time an emotion is felt, it must be “worked” or cognitively manipulated.
There are many people (not trained in trauma) who believe they can help others heal by changing cognition. And I believe this is happening more and more with the sheer number of life coaches being turned out each year. Coaches (especially those who are not familiar with emotional trauma) can do more harm than good. “Coaching” people out of their trauma and uncomfortable emotions is a dangerous game.
Some emotions need to be left alone and felt.
Sure, understanding the source of your grief and trauma is important, but there must be some time to simply sit with it and feel it without automatically and compulsively adding thought to it.
I’m filled with a
desire for clarity
and meaning
within a world and
condition that
offers neither.
– Albert Camus
It is only a novel… or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.
– Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Events of the past two years have virtually decreed that I shall wrestle with the literary muse for the rest of my days. And so, having tasted the poverty of one end of the scale, I have no choice but to direct my energies toward the acquisition of fame and fortune. Frankly, I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left me.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Oh no! Reading beautiful books can’t be traumatizing. Seeing awful things can be—but reading? I don’t believe in that at all.
– Marie NDiaye
Ancient goddess traditions understood what modern somatic therapies now affirm: that pleasure, embodiment, and connection to the senses are gateways
to healing and transcendence.
– Dr. Denise Renye
And my mouth falls open like it does when I try to explain things in a language I know, but my mouth has not learned yet.
– Chelsea Guevara
We must especially beware of
that small group of selfish men
who would clip the wings of the
American Eagle in order to
feather their own nests.
– Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1941
If you’re lucky and hang around long enough, you’re going to stumble across situations that are funnier, more dramatic, more tragic, sadder than almost anything, except really great works of literature.
– Frederick Wiseman
I am not sure
which came first—
sadness or the
inability to write.
– Geetha Iyer
It is more important to know the person with the illness than the illness the person has.
– Glen O. Gabbard
Groups are powerfully regressive and provide patients with a window into their most primitive fears.
– Glen O. Gabbard
Like a sailor without a sextant, a psychiatrist who sets out to navigate the dark waters of the unconscious without a theory will soon be lost at sea.
– Glen O. Gabbard
Our choices of marital partners, our vocational interests, and even our leisure-time pursuits are not randomly selected; they are shaped by unconscious forces that are in dynamic relationship with one another.
– Glen O. Gabbard
Do good and throw it into the Tigris;
God will return it to you in the desert.
– Saadi Shirazi
Someday, surely, we will see the principle underlying existence as so simple, so beautiful, so obvious that we will all say to each other, “Oh, how could we have all been so blind, so long!”
– John Wheeler
If we take it seriously, “Love one another” is the least sentimental of all sentences. It is not a Hallmark card. It is not a feel-good social media post. It is work. It is the hardest poetry and the fiercest grace. It sees the raw horror and the blinding beauty and the crushing complexity of this world, and it says, tremblingly, “Yes.”
Those who preach or practice hate are the most sentimental of all. Their vision of love is narrow, reductive, infantile. They weep for their own children but not the children of others. They ponder a flower by the roadside but justify a genocide. They sing holiday carols while the poor freeze outside. They preach victory but refuse to admit, or even to see, that they are pawns in a game that no one can win.
Cynicism is the cheap way out for the wounded heart. The bitter soul remains unchanged. The proud defense refuses to fall.
Pasternak once wrote, “Life is not a walk across a field.” Love is for the ones who love the work—not just love for our “kin” and “kind,” but love for the “other,” every other, the Great Other. And maybe, just maybe, we’re here to do the hardest—and most transformative—thing of all.
– Joseph Fasano
Suffering is how life tells you that you are resisting or misperceiving what is real and true.
– Adyashanti
Wanderer with heart of a blackbird
yours is the solitude at midnight
– Alejandra Pizarnik
People never seemed to notice that, by saving time, they were losing something else. No one cared to admit that life was becoming ever poorer, bleaker and more monotonous… But time is life itself. And the more people saved, the less they had.
– Michael Ende
It is difficult to retain your standards with the pressure of trying to make money… Whatever is popular now—that’s all that counts. I have to constantly re-identify myself to myself, reactivate my own standards, my own convictions about what I’m doing and why.
– Nina Simone
There can be a compassionate way of saying no. Saying no can actually be a generous gesture in the sense of not continuing with an unworkable relationship or situation.
– Laura Bridgman
Ordinary man lives among phantasms; only the recluse dwells among realities… Anyone who does not turn his back on the contemporary world disgraces himself.
– Nicolás Gómez Davila
To Novalis
The holy stranger rests in dark earth.
God received the dirge from his soft modest mouth
as he sank back, in his bloom-time.
One blue flower
sustains his song, in pain’s nocturnal house.
– Georg Trakl, (tr. Stephen Tapscott)
It is within your competence to think and become bound or cease thinking and thus be free.
– Sri Ramana Maharshi
wars are not caused by the fact that there is more than one religion, but by the spirit of intolerance… the spread of which can only be regarded as the total eclipse of human reason.
– Montesquieu
I have more respect for a man who lets me know where he stands, even if he’s wrong, than the one who comes up like an angel and is nothing but a devil.
– Malcolm X
I will not stay, not ever again, in a room or conversation or relationship or institution that requires me to abandon myself.
– Glennon Doyle
SQUIRREL
Every day at the park
the dog goes mad chasing squirrels
that he will never catch. The busyness
of the squirrels is unending,
and so is his pursuit. He has no concern
for sense or safety, would gladly
follow his obsession
in front of an oncoming car.
And so every day we practice
coming back. I call his name,
and mostly, on a good day,
he circles gleefully around to me
before heading out again.
Every day, over and over,
that futile chase and the return.
Every day, a galloping dharma talk
on the discipline of calling out again
to my scattered mind,
to my grasping soul,
that it is time to come home.
– Lynn Ungar
I have never known a closeness like that (…) I guess it never ends. A brother never ends. I prowl him. He does not end.
– Anne Carson
Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate…
– Anne Carson
It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.
– Anne Carson
I make all my decisions on intuition, but then I must know why I made that decision. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.
– Ingmar Bergman
Instead of dirt and poison we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax; thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.
– Jonathan Swift
All you can write is what you see.
– Woody Guthrie, This Land is Your Land
Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.
– Cormac McCarthy
I didn’t know what to say. I felt like crying, Goddammit everybody in the world wants an explanation for your acts and for your very being.
– Jack Kerouac, On the Road
If it is true to say of the lazy that they kill time, then it is greatly to be feared that an era which sees its salvation in public opinion, this is to say private laziness, is a time that really will be killed… How reluctant later generations will be to have anything to do with the relics of an era ruled, not by living men, but by pseudo-men dominated by public opinion.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations
Language thou art too narrow, and too weak
To ease us now
– John Donne
The crisis of modern society is precisely that the youth no longer feel heroic in the plan for action that their culture has set up. They don’t believe it is empirically true to the problems of their lives and times.
– Ernest Becker
Jung said to me: “You can’t analyze people really if you don’t know how they live. If you haven’t gotten a whiff of the country in which they live, if you haven’t gotten a feeling of the atmosphere in which they normally live, you can’t understand them.”
– Marie Louise von Franz
I believe happiness is only possible if you follow your feeling, your intuition, your real desires. Only unhappiness is gained by acting in accordance with duty, or obligation, or guilt, of the desire to please others.
– Hanif Kureishi
I have great faith in all things not yet spoken.
I want my deepest pious feelings freed.
What no one yet has dared to risk & warrant
will be for me a challenge I must meet.
– Rilke
The space-immensities of winter’s clime—
Or great distractions fallen on the sea,
Beyond all deeps of time—
That pasts withdrawn in worlds of memory
– A. E. Waite
When we look to outward reforms to bring about a fundamental change, it is a wrong approach to the problem.
– Krishnamurti
The mode of presence conferred by the imaginative power is by no means an inferior mode or an illusion; it signifies to see directly what cannot be seen by the senses, to be a truthful witness.
– Corbin
True empathy is always free of any evaluative or diagnostic quality. This comes across to the recipient with some surprise. “If I am not being judged, perhaps I am not so evil or abnormal as I have thought.”
– Carl Rogers
The great philosopher of the coming decade will either be no one at all or whoever discovers how to say painfully obvious things in a language people can once again understand.
– Bernard T. Joy
In order not to commit evil acts, you must learn to restrain yourself from unkind conversation and most of all from unkind thoughts.
– Leo Tolstoy
A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt from woman, and it is confirmed only by other men.
– Camille Paglia
Do not put all of your mental thought into this world. For this world will always change. Rather learn to go within. Learn to dive deep within into that Self which is changeless, that is ultimate oneness, the absolute reality.
– Robert Adams
It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way.
– Rollo May
Reality is not simply there, it does not simply exist: it must be sought out and won.
– Paul Celan
The Heart should have fed upon the truth, as Insects on a Leaf—
– Coleridge
The total number of stars in the Universe is larger than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth.
– Carl Sagan
I don’t believe I have the ability to say what is going to work. Rather, I try to eliminate what’s not going to work. I think being successful is just about not making mistakes. It’s not about having correct judgment. It’s about avoiding incorrect judgments.
– @naval
Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am. That I will never fulfill my obligation to surpass myself unless I first accept myself, and if I accept myself fully in the right way, I will already have surpassed myself.
– Thomas Merton
Only he who has experienced both the bright and the dark, the ascent and the decline, has truly lived.
– Stefan Zweig
There exists…a melancholy underlying our very outbursts of gaiety and accompanying us everywhere, without leaving us alone for a single moment. And there is nothing that can rid us of this lethal omnipresence: the self forever confronting itself.
– Emil Cioran
The whole cosmos has come together to create you. You carry the whole cosmos inside you. That is why, to accept yourself and to love yourself is an expression of gratitude.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Enquire, who feels the absence of peace? Turn inwards and seek the source. Then and there, the same peace is available to all, as one’s own inner silence.
– Ramana Maharshi
No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.
– Plato via Socrates
There can be no whole without a thought which grasps it as a whole; and this grasping of what is before the mind as a whole can be effected only by a sort of voluntary halt in a kind of progressive movement of thought.
– Gabriel Marcel
My only relief is to sleep. When I’m sleeping, I’m not sad, I’m not angry, I’m not lonely, I’m nothing.
– Jillian Medoff
You can use a challenge to awaken you, or you can allow it to pull you into even deeper sleep.
– Eckhart Tolle
School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
– Ivan Illich
Let me say to begin with: It is not neurotic to have conflict … Conflicts within ourselves are an integral part of human life.
– Karen Horney
Self-respect begins with soul-consciousness. When I remember I am a pure and powerful soul, I stop seeking validation from others. Inner dignity naturally creates outer respect.
– Brahma Kumaris
Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.
– Aristotle
A child only pours herself into a little funnel or into a little box when she’s afraid of the world — when she’s been defeated. But when a child is doing something she’s passionately interested in, she grows like a tree — in all directions.
– John Holt
No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. And normally he doesn’t know it.
– Paulo Coelho
I am the kind of writer who rewrites and rewrites. I am very eager to correct everything.
– Kenzaburo Oe
It is in changing that we find purpose.
– Heraclitus
As a human being, you should not think about where life will take you. You should only think about where you want to take it.
– Sadhguru
Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.
– Søren Kierkegaard
A failure is not a loss. It’s a gain. You learn. You change. You grow.
– Michael Barata
Evil is whatever distracts.
– Nietzsche
I’1l cry about this earth in
heaven too.
– Marina Tsvetaeva
tea
waits patiently
like someone kind
– @BashoSociety
Forty hour workweeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes – train and sprint, then rest and reassess.
– @naval
We have overheard fountains all our days.
They sound to us almost like time.
But much more closely do they keep pace
with eternity’s subtle rhythm.
The water is strange and the water is yours,
from here and from far below.
You are the fountain-stone, unawares,
and all Things are mirrored in you.
How distant this is, yet deeply akin,
long unriddled and never known,
senseless, then perfectly clear.
Your task is to love what you don’t understand.
It grips your most secret emotion, and
rushes away with it. Where?
– Rilke, (tr. Mitchell)
Cultures cannot change internally, but only in response to outside powers. This accounts for the hopelessness of the contemporary modern world. There will be no barbarian invasions. There is no force that can challenge it. There is nothing external to it. And so, unlike the Europeans of the fifth century, our modern world will irrevocably descend into death.
– Ramon Elani
If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.
– Leo Tolstoy
We all perceive that the other guy has it easier than we do; we all assume that others know our inner doubts.
– David Miller
The true guru does not provide the map; they remind you that you are the one holding the compass.
– Rami Shapiro
But we do not merely protest; we make renewed demand for freedom in that vast kingdom of the human spirit where freedom has ever had the right to dwell:the expressing of thought to unstuffed ears; the dreaming of dreams by untwisted souls.
– W.E.B. DuBois
Because you are good at a thing does not mean that you are obliged to do it.
– Ann Beattie
A gift consists not in what is done or given, but in the intention of the giver or doer.
– Seneca
A true and worthy ideal frees and uplifts a people; a false ideal imprisons and lowers.
– W. E. B. Du Bois
Archaeology has this word, taphonomy—everything that happens to a thing after it dies. Wind, water, animals, time.
People have that too.
We’re not just what happened to us—we’re what happened after, and what we did with the wreckage.
– Eden A Campbell
If you ever feel wholly fulfilled, you have either become a god, or have died.
– James Hollis
There is an element of emotional security that comes from the things that have surrounded us through decades of life events, or even across a lifetime.
– Daniel Glazer
The lotus blooms in the mud, and I have found my Lord in the middle of this messy life.
– Kabir
Not how the world is but that it is, is the Mystery.
– Wittgenstein
The controlling reason, when it is in its natural state, is so pliable that it adapts itself to every event.
– Marcus Aurelius
The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection.
– David Foster Wallace
An uninstructed person will lay the fault of his own bad condition upon others. Someone just starting instruction will lay the fault on himself. Some who is perfectly instructed will place blame neither on others nor on himself.
– Epictetus
Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself.
– Rumi
Love should feel like sunlight on your skin, not chains around your spirit.
– Dede Hawkins
The mouse of the ego is always gnawing at the bag of your good deeds; you must find the cat of the spirit to guard the store.
– Rumi
Happy is he who, having seen these things, goes below the hollow earth; for he knows the end of life and knows its god-sent beginning.
– Pindar
The harmony of natural law reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.
– Albert Einstein
Your purpose is not the thing that you do. It is the thing that happens in others when you do what you do.
– Amanda Grace, She Heals the World
I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
– Hemingway
In loyalty to their kind they cannot tolerate our minds. In loyalty to our kind we cannot tolerate their obstruction.
– Jefferson Airplane, Crown of Creation
In the real world we often want our judgments and moral decisions to be swift and singular and decisive. Fiction messes with our sense of what it is possible to do with our judgments. It usefully suspends our great and violent desire to be in the right on every question, and creates an unholy and ungovernable mix of the true and the false. It’s the place where things are true and not true simultaneously: the ultimate impossibility.
– Zadie Smith
If men could see their true position and understand the horror of it, they would seek a way out.
– Lahiri Mahasaya
Read with a stack of books beside you, never satisfied, always hopeful.
– Annie Dillard
One of the processes of your life is to constantly break down that inferiority, to constantly reaffirm that I Am Somebody.
– Alvin Ailey
used books, used people
used flowers, used love
I need you
– Charles Bukowski
The greatest achievement of humanity is not its work of art, science and technology but the recognition of its own dysfunction, its own madness.
– Eckhart Tolle
Interpretation, the essence of which is homophonic word-play, is the return of speech to writing, that is to say, the return of each present statement to its inscription, to its enunciation by the subject supposed to know.
– Jacques Lacan
As in a wheel the spokes meet at the hub, so all the pranas meet at the Sushumna. This is the pivot of existence. This is the place where the individual meets the universal.
– Chandogya Upanishad
The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.
– W. E. B. Du Bois
The Tantric path uses poison as medicine. The forces that bind the unawakened — desire, fear, the bodily appetites — are the same forces that liberate the awakened. The difference is not in the force but in the consciousness that meets it.
– Kashmir Shaivism
Maybe I was offering oceans to people who were only carrying cups.
– Akhi Umer
Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionaries and rebels—men and women who dared to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower
Where solitude ends, there begins the marketplace; and where the marketplace begins, there begins too the noise of the great actors and the buzzing of poisonous flies.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
…The changing economy was ignored, plans for the change ignored; and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on.
– John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath
The mystery schools did not produce enlightened individuals who then withdrew from the world. They produced individuals whose nervous systems had been upgraded to a baseline that the uninitiated cannot imagine — not by description, not by argument, not by how much they meditated or how much they read. By a biological event in the spine. The initiation was always the nervous system’s own awakening.
The preparation was always for this. The curriculum was always the subtle body. The goal was always kundalini reaching the crown and the practitioner recognizing, in the silence that follows, that they never were what they thought they were. And that what they actually are has never been in danger.
– @bucsbucs
The neurotic opts out of life because he is having trouble maintaining his illusions about it, which proves nothing less than that life is possible only with illusions.
– Ernest Becker
The confusion in the world indicates the collapse of all moral and spiritual values, and the glorification of sensual values.
– Krishnamurti
Now is the time to
demonstrate what language
can do in a time of crisis…
– Patricia Spears Jones
For a life that is too ordinary, literature is unnecessary. Truly, literature cannot spring from a life that is without error.
– Yojūrō Yasuda
The pure poet cannot discover either dialectic or irony as a convenient means of resolving the conflict between reality and the self, or between the self and others. He can discern no alternative but that either he falls within reality, or reality yields to the self.
– Yojūrō Yasuda
The God of whom those who are not eyewitnesses speak is an ‘absent’; they have not seen each other. And for this reason no dogmatist’s God can help him against someone else’s God; the antagonists can neither defeat nor convince each other, they can only separate, each highly dissatisfied with his adversary. For each particular dogma is no better or worse than any other concept elaborated by the rational intellect; essentially limitation, it looks upon every other, equally limited dogma as a contradiction; reduced to analyzing, to decomposing the whole into its parts..!
– Henry Corbin
For me the book is the man and my book is the man I am, the confused man, the negligent man, the reckless man, the lusty, obscene, boisterous, thoughtful, scrupulous, lying, diabolically truthful man that I am.
– Henry Miller
We can’t enchant the world, which makes its own magic; but we can enchant ourselves by paying deep attention.
– Diane Ackerman
Your life is a precious pearl. Don’t throw it into the ocean for a few pieces of colored glass.
– Kabir
Let us stand far off and consider the nature of the thing.
– Seneca
To be realized is to be at home in the mystery of existence.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
A person never discloses their own character so clearly as when describing another’s.
– Jean Paul Richter
To understand is to see without the interference of thought.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
It is a great comfort to have put aside all anxiety.
– Seneca
I must confess that I am deeply troubled. I fear that the great powers of the world are intent upon acting out a vast deathwish and that it lies with us now to make every effort to promote resistance to the insanity and brutality of policies which may encompass the extermination of hundreds of millions of human beings.
– Bertrand Russell, 1962
A man of true virtue is a human-hearted man.
– Confucius
We are experiencing a rise in so-called dissociative disorders, such as borderline personality disorder, conditions in which the sense of one’s own identity is weakened or lost altogether. In the modern world the individual may experience himself or herself as no longer having a role and a place in a close-knit community on a human scale, and therefore as engulfed in the mass – of the populace, of the city, of bureaucratic organizations and global corporations – relatively powerless. No wonder people emphasize (with tragic and damaging results) something called ‘identity’, in which, ironically, their true identity is swallowed up.
– Iain McGilchrist
Hope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door at some point, some way out of the problems of the present moment even before that way is found or followed.
– Rebecca Solnit
People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.
– James Baldwin
You are something that the whole universe is doing, in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing.
– Alan Watts
Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.
– Rebecca Solnit
INTERVIEWER
You’ve also written that Americans tend to avoid contemplating larger issues. What is it that we’re afraid of?
MARILYNNE ROBINSON
People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.
The world is a totality in itself. It has its own muscles, its own brain, its own limbs, and its own circulation. We are not talking about the totality of the world in the sense that everything should be good and perfect and fantastic, and nobody should acknowledge anything bad. We are talking about reality, in which good is made out of bad and bad is made out of good. Therefore, the world can exist in its own good/bad level, its self-existing level of dark and light, black and white, constantly. Whatever is there, favorable or unfavorable, is workable: it is the universe.
– Chögyam Trungpa
When Jung’s patients became overwhelmed with emotions, he sometimes would have them draw a picture of their feelings. Once the feelings were expressed in the form of imagery, the images could be encouraged to speak to one another. As soon as a dialogue could take place, the patient was well embarked on the process of reconciling different aspects of his dissociated psyche.
– Ernest Rossi
With few exceptions music has been for some centuries the art which has devoted itself not to the reproduction of natural phenomena, but rather to the expression of the artist’s soul, in musical sound. A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end.
– Wassily Kandinsky
This is the magic of fragments—the way that poem breaks off leads into a thought that can’t ever be apprehended. There is the space where a thought would be, but which you can’t get hold of. I love that space. It’s the reason I like to deal with fragments. Because no matter what the thought would be if it were fully worked out, it wouldn’t be as good as the suggestion of a thought that the space gives you.
– Anne Carson
There are beautiful wild forces within us. Let them turn the mills inside and fill sacks that feed even heaven.
– St. Francis of Assisi
In our day and age, global society has been saturated with the wrong teaching of false positivity. The denial of darkness never equates the abundance of light. And the denial of your actual character never equates to the reality of your best character. People today are afraid to work on themselves and on their actual realities, they believe that outward appearances are enough. Outward appearances have become everything in our current day and age. People don’t see what they are actually like, nor who they actually are, in reality. They live in a phantasmic version of reality. It has to stop. In the phantasmic version of reality, there is no chance to experience true love, true goodness, and true metamorphosis. The caterpillar does not become a butterfly by telling everybody it has wings. It actually buries itself in darkness and grows those wings.
– C. JoyBell C.
A day is like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doing something else, plan to run an errand, but never get there … And at the end of your life, your whole existence has the same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day.
– Michael Crichton
And after that loneliness will accompany you to
every airport, train station, bus depot, café, cinema,
and onto airplanes and into cars, strange rooms and
offices, classrooms and libraries, and it will hang near
your hand like a habit.
But it isn’t a habit and no one can see it.
It’s your obligation, and your companion warms itself
against you.
You are faithful to it because it was the only vow you
made finally, when it was unnecessary.
If you figured out why you chose it, years later, would
you ask it to go?
How would you replace it?
– Fanny Howe
A mind might ponder its thought for an epoch, and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach in a day.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The capitalist subject constantly experiences its failure to belong, which is why the recurring fantasy within capitalism is that of attaining some degree of authentic belonging (in a romantic relationship, in a group of friends, in the nation, and so on). Though capitalism spawns this type of fantasy, it constantly militates against the fantasy’s realization.
Capitalism offers the promise of belonging with every commodity and with the commodity as such, but the subject can never buy the perfect commodity, or enough of them, to unlock the secret of belonging. Unlike the subject of a particular culture, the capitalist subject does not have a place that offers a sense of identity. There is only a lack of place that spawns the search for a place through the process of constant enrichment, a process that serves only to augment the subject’s lack of place and identity. The only identity the capitalist subject has lies in its absence of any identity.
– Todd McGowan
You don’t need more time to heal, you need more experiences that teach the nervous system a different reality. Experiences of safety, ease, and success. Each one leaves a small imprint, showing the body that this moment is not the past. Over time, those lived experiences shift the nervous system out of survival and back toward safety and connection.
– Anthony Goldsmith
Already I was training my soul and my body to be able to endure.
– Nikos Kazantzakis, (tr. Richard Howard)
With the right music, you either forget everything or you remember everything.
– Unknown
I don’t paint ideas, I paint the unattainable “forever.” Or “for never,” it amounts to the same.
– Clarice Lispector
What do the tall trees say
To the late havocs in the sky?
They sigh.
The air moves, and they sway.
When the breeze on the hill
Is still, then they stand still.
They wait.
They have no fear. Their fate
Is faith. Birdsong
Is all they’ve wanted, all along.
– Wendell Berry
An honorable human relationship … is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
– Adrienne Rich
Coding Poems
No one sees the stitching, but line by line
I sew those fancy stanzas into place.
Indents, enjambments, random rows of space.
No one thinks to thank me. The task is fine
if tedious. No needles, just the tips
of brackets pulling threads of markup tags
I write by hand. And though attention lags,
my fingers find the worn-out keys, the shifts
of buttoned emphasis, then run around
the hidden seams: home-down right-up and paste
and paste and paste. Was all that time a waste?
There is a music in the rapping sound.
Its rhythm like a chain of deadlines faced.
It’s hard to count the hours as they’re erased.
– Timothy Green
What if all children grew up hearing Goddess creation stories instead of patriarchal nonsense?
– Trista Hendren
I’ll say it again: a craft book should not be about “demystifying” poetry—quite the opposite. Poets should feel obligated to hold fast to the particular fragmentation of so-called meaning & communication in how poetry unfolds, & to prepare the so-called novice to surrender to it.
The whole conversation is, in itself, the craft of poetry. Because we’re learning to bear the mystifying, not removing it, & in doing so also learning how to analyze and speak to truths within that language. Something is held, between simplicity & complexity, knowing, unknowing.
– Bianca Stone
The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.
– Erich Fromm
It’s too easy to rebrand the work of artists in a manner that fits the box we want to make. But working within a tradition is one of the most subversive acts. Only the work from *within* has the power to be truly destabilizing and/or heretical.
– Alina Stefanescu
I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horror of sordid passion and — if he is lucky enough — know the love of an honest woman.
– Robert Graves
What you need will come to you if you do not ask for what you do not need. Yet only few people reach this state of complete dispassion and detachment. It is a very high state, the very threshold of liberation.
– Nisargadatta
Perhaps it is the role of art to put us in complicity with things as they happen.
– Lyn Hejinian
The source of love is deep in us and we can help others realize a lot of happiness. One word, one action, one thought can reduce another person’s suffering and bring that person joy.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Love is an untamed force. When we try to control it, it destroys us. When we try to imprison it, it enslaves us. When we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused.
– Paulo Coelho
Most outcomes of modern education are uneducated men. Our education is uneducation; its whole tendency is to unteach people the traditions of their fathers.
– G. K. Chesterton
Why do seasons who regularly follow
their appointed time, deny their kind of energy
to us?
why is winter followed by a few
more days of winter?
– Etel Adnan
In Platonic language, the task of the human being is to “remember” more than his or her personal experience. The larger task is to remember the lost wisdom or legacy of the human soul, and the origins of consciousness from its spiritual source.
– David Tacey
Everything in the world is a result of something inside of you. The whole universe is a manifestation of your thoughts. No thing exists without your permission. The things that you hate and the things that you love in this world are your own projections, your own Self.
– Robert Adams
For the past is not fixed: it changes as we change, and we look back and perceive in it different messages, different patterns. Our past selves speak to our future selves. We are part of a continuing process.
– Margaret Drabble
If the mind knows the truth of life, the disease of ignorance will not arise.
– Bhikkhu P. A. Payutto
Finer men tolerate others’ small inconsistencies though not the large ones; the weak tolerate others’ large inconsistencies though not small ones.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If the whole world rejected you and you didn’t believe any of your thoughts about it, you’d be completely at peace.
– Byron Katie
tea softens edges
that words
could not reach
– @BashoSociety
The temples and monasteries cannot hide you when you are running away from yourself. There is no sanctuary other than to dive inward and investigate who is running away from what?
– Wu Hsin
Hence I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.
– Malcolm X
tea
forgives your
unfinished thoughts
– @BashoSociety
I think that I do not want to write or read or even ‘think’ (so far as I ever engage in that process) for quite a long time again, and need manual work.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
– Alan Watts
What you really master is not what you persist with but what you return to.
– Bernard T. Joy
Living for yourself alone is like dressing and feeding a shadow.
– Leo Tolstoy
Music directly represents the passion of the soul. If one listens to the wrong kind of music, he will become the wrong kind of person.
– Aristotle
Habits are the invisible architecture of our daily life. We repeat about 40 percent of our behavior almost daily, so our habits shape our existence, and our future. If we change our habits, we change our lives.
– Gretchen Rubin
The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen but to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everybody sees.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
The celestial dreamers are not defeated.
– Eugene Jolas
Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.
– Frank Zappa
Understanding is love’s other name.
– Thích Nhất Hạnh
We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.
– Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
Grace is not something outside of you. In fact, your very desire for Grace is due to Grace that is already working in you.
– Ramana Maharshi
The modern man builds shopping malls and factories; the medieval man built cathedrals and ancient man built temples. The former degrades and disfigures nature while the latter draw attention to its sacredness.
– Ramon Elani
If you do not consciously evolve, you unconsciously decay.
– Jung
It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part, the rest are lost in the multitude.
– Voltaire
We are all leaves on one tree, none like another, one symmetrical, the other not, and yet equally important to the whole.
– Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Once upon a time there was a lady. She had no children, and no happiness either. And at first she cried for a long time, but then she became wicked…
– Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
The flame that burns Twice as bright burns half as long.
– Lao Tzu
These silken nights
won’t happen every day,
these offerings of love
won’t happen every day.
– Gulzar
Only in distress can people understand how difficult it is to master their thoughts and feelings.
– Anton Chekhov
I appear to be misplaced among the multitudes, I don’t belong.
– Charles Bukowski
We ought to view ourselves with the same curiosity and openness with which we study a tree, the sky or a thought, because we too are linked to the entire universe.
– Henri Matisse
We have gone as far as wit can go, and it is time for wisdom to come in.
– Manly P. Hall
One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between man and nature shall not be broken.
– Leo Tolstoy
If we connect with our true nature, we also connect with the true nature of other beings.
– Sarah Kokernot
If you do not trust life to unfold, the mind takes over and it becomes a game of strategy motivated by anxiety. This mistrust is unfair. Life has given us so much, and yet we do not trust it.
– Mooji
I don’t know what other people are doing – I just know about me.
– Thelonious Monk
The state is a dangerous fixed idea, which consists of some silly arrogance of illiterate people who think that they themselves are the state when they perform some functions that are completely superfluous to the civilized world.
– Miroslav Krleža, Ten bloody years
I’ve noticed folks who use AI regularly are beginning to lack initiative- they need lots of guidance and instruction, and constantly ask questions about how to accomplish simple things.
– jacque boatman
You’re just going to have to get used to being misunderstood and problematic when your energy carries codes of truth. This world is not used to that.
– Nika Solé
When you meditate, it is not just for yourself, you do it for the whole society. You seek solutions to your problems not only for yourself, but for all of us.
– Gelek Rinpoche
At the moment when desire ceases and contemplation, pure seeing, and self-surrender begin, everything changes. Man ceases to be useful or dangerous, interesting or boring, genial or rude, strong or weak. He becomes nature, he becomes beautiful and remarkable as does everything that is an object of clear contemplation. For indeed contemplation is not scrutiny or criticism, it is nothing but love. It is the highest and most desirable state of our souls: undemanding love.
– Hermann Hesse
From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel, literature is asking us to pay attention. Pay attention to the frog. Pay attention to the west wind. Pay attention to the boy on the raft, the lady on the tower, the old man on the train. In sum, pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells therein.
– Frederick Buechner
Now I tell kids who are in workshops, It’s not your teachers you want to please, it’s your peers—they’re the ones who are going to be your readers. Your teachers are all going to die off within the next fifteen years, forget them.
– Jane Smiley
The shadow is not negative.
It is what was never
allowed to live.
– Matt Licata
Today’s policies and political activity treat people like pawns. More than ever before, attempts will be made to use people like cogs in a wheel. People will be handled like puppets on a string, and everyone will think that this reflects the greatest progress imaginable.
– Rudolf Steiner
You know that they ought to do with churches? Tax them. If holy people are so interested in politics, government, and public policy, let them pay the price of admission like everybody else. The Catholic Church alone could wipe out the national debt if all you did was tax their real estate.
– George Carlin
I want to be remembered
as one who tried.
– Dorothy Height
All I know is this: nobody’s very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down.
– Ken Kesey
The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only
a beginning.
– Albert Camus
The Laws of Motion
by Nikki Giovanni
(for Harlem Magic)
The laws of science teach us a pound of gold weighs as
much as a pound of flour though if dropped from any
undetermined height in their natural state one would
reach bottom and one would fly away
Laws of motion tell us an inert object is more difficult to
propel than an object heading in the wrong direction is to
turn around. Motion being energy—inertia—apathy.
Apathy equals hostility. Hostility—violence. Violence
being energy is its own virtue. Laws of motion teach us
Black people are no less confused because of our
Blackness than we are diffused because of our
powerlessness. Man we are told is the only animal who
smiles with his lips. The eyes however are the mirror of
the soul
The problem with love is not what we feel but what we
wish we felt when we began to feel we should feel
something. Just as publicity is not production: seduction
is not seductive
If I could make a wish I’d wish for all the knowledge of all
the world. Black may be beautiful Professor Micheau
says but knowledge is power. Any desirable object is
bought and sold—any neglected object declines in value.
It is against man’s nature to be in either category
If white defines Black and good defines evil then men
define women or women scientifically speaking describe
men. If sweet is the opposite of sour and heat the
absence of cold then love is the contradiction of pain and
beauty is in the eye of the beheld
Sometimes I want to touch you and be touched in
return. But you think I’m grabbing and I think you’re
shirking and Mama always said to look out for men like
you
So I go to the streets with my lips painted red and my
eyes carefully shielded to seduce the world my reluctant
lover
And you go to your men slapping fives feeling good
posing as a man because you know as long as you sit
very very still the laws of motion will be in effect
A single crocus blossom ought to be enough to convince our heart that springtime, no matter how predictable, is somehow a gift, gratuitous, gratis, a grace.
– David Stedindl-Rast
Every creative
knows that their
work has a symbiotic
effect—as they create
they themselves are
created.
– Joel Uili
One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.
– Jane Austen
We aim. We miss. We live in the gaps between our intentions and the shit that doesn’t work out. So many emotions caught in my pipe. I pound my chest to putter it out. The machinations. Glittery enunciation. The first time I heard the sound of your voice it filled me with a sense of future perfect. The friendship I will have had. Getting to know you. Sounding without thinking. Walking. Just walking and heart beating. Out of synch, but in time.
– Fred Moten & Wu Tsang
Christ Himself sometimes describes the Christian way as very hard, sometimes as very easy. He says, “Take up your Cross” — in other words, it is like going to be beaten to death in a concentration camp. Next minute he says, “My yoke is easy and my burden light.” He means both. And one can just see why both are true.
Teachers will tell you that the laziest boy in the class is the one who works hardest in the end. They mean this. If you give two boys, say, a proposition in geometry to do, the one who is prepared to take trouble will try to understand it. The lazy boy will try to learn it by heart because, for the moment, that needs less effort. But six months later, when they are preparing for an exam, that lazy boy is doing hours and hours of miserable drudgery over things the other boy understands, and positively enjoys, in a few minutes.
Laziness means more work in the long run. Or look at it this way. In a battle, or in mountain climbing, there is often one thing which it takes a lot of pluck to do; but it is also, in the long run, the safest thing to do. If you funk it, you will find yourself, hours later, in far worse danger. The cowardly thing is also the most dangerous thing.
It is like that here. The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self — all your wishes and precautions — to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call “ourselves,” to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be “good.”
We are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way — centered on money or pleasure or ambition — and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly. And that is exactly what Christ warned us you could not do. As He said, a thistle cannot produce figs. If I am a field that contains nothing but grass-seed, I cannot produce wheat. Cutting the grass may keep it short: but I shall still produce grass and no wheat. If I want to produce wheat, the change must go deeper than the surface. I must be ploughed up and re-sown.
That is why the real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.
– C.S. Lewis
In the world in general and in this nation.
May not even the names disease famine, war, and suffering be heard.
May virtuous qualities, merit, and prosperity greatly increase.
And may continuous good fortune and sublime well-bring perfectly arise.
– H.H. Dudjom Rinpoche
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.
– Cormac McCarthy
… when you die, you are grieved by all the atoms of which you were composed. They hung together for years, whether in sheets of skin or communities of spleen. With your death they do not die. Instead, they part ways, moving off in their separate directions, mourning the loss of a special time they shared together, haunted by the feeling that they were once playing parts in something larger than themselves, something that had its own life, something they can hardly put a finger on.
– David Eagleman
Movements thrive on the destruction of reality. Because the real world confronts us with challenges and obstructions, reality is uncertain, messy, and unsettling. Movements work to create alternate realities that offer adherents a stable and empowering place in the world. Amid economic dislocation and the loss of stable identities, the Nazis’ promise of Aryan superiority is stabilizing. Stalin understood that people would easily overlook lies and mass murder if it were in their interest to do so. Above all, movements promise consistency. Movements “conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself.”
Simone Weil wrote that “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” The modern condition of rootlessness is a foundational experience of totalitarianism; totalitarian movements succeed when they offer rootless people what they most crave: an ideologically consistent world aiming at grand narratives that give meaning to their lives. By consistently repeating a few key ideas, a manipulative leader provides a sense of rootedness grounded upon a coherent fiction that is “consistent, comprehensible, and predictable.”
The reason fact-checking is ineffective today — at least in convincing those who are members of movements — is that the mobilized members of a movement are confounded by a world resistant to their wishes and prefer the promise of a consistent alternate world to reality.
– Rebecca Solnit
To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
– Anne Carson
What would it be like
to live in a library
of melted books.
With sentences streaming over the floor
and all the punctuation
settled to the bottom as a residue.
It would be confusing.
Unforgivable.
A great adventure.
– Anne Carson
All age unmanaged, that’s a natural community, human or other. The industry prizes the younger and middle-aged trees that keep their symmetry, keep their branches even of length and angle. But let there also be really old trees who can give up all sense of propriety and begin throwing their limbs out in extravagant gestures, dancelike poses, displaying their insouciance in the face of mortality, holding themselves available to whatever the world and the weather might propose. I look up to them, to have lived that long is to have permission to be eccentric, to be the poets and painters among trees, laughing, ragged, and fearless. They make me look forward to old age.
– Gary Snyder, Ancients Forests of the Far West
My friend tells me how he has begun to imagine the finishing touches of his life. He counts the things he’s lost. As he talks, I imagine tethering a silver thread from his body to mine. It’s dusk. The geese are all headed home. Our two bright shadows grow longer. Grief is a clump of dark feathers in the grass. The sky runs purple and petals out. We look around. It’s almost cruel, he laughs. After everything, how the world still insists on being beautiful.
– Joy Sullivan
Joy is not the product of getting what you want. Joy is compassion turned inward—the end of struggle, the end of competition.
– Cheri Huber
There is a profound ground of unity that is more pertinent and authentic than all the unilateral dimensions of our lives. This a man discovers when he is able to keep open the door of his heart. This is one’s ultimate responsibility, and it is not dependent upon whether the heart of another is kept open for him. Here is a mystery: If sweeping through the door of my heart there moves continually a genuine love for you, it by-passes all your hate and all your indifference and gets through to you at your center. You are powerless to do anything about it. You may keep alive in devious ways the fires of your bitter heart, but they cannot get through to me. Underneath the surface of all the tension, something else is at work. It is utterly impossible for you to keep another from loving you.
– Howard Thurman
Symphony in Yellow
by Oscar Wild
An omnibus across the bridge
Crawls like a yellow butterfly,
And, here and there, a passer-by
Shows like a little restless midge.
Big barges full of yellow hay
Are moored against the shadowy wharf.
And, like a yellow silken scarf,
The thick fog hangs along the quay.
The yellow leaves begin to fade
And fluter from the Temple elms,
And at my feet the pale green thames
Lies like a rod of rippled jade.
If he could walk across the room and touch her he would be sane. But between them lay a treacherous and complex journey. It was a very wide world.
– Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we’re in. Reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back from the present. That now is the creative point of life.
So you see it’s like the idea of forgiving somebody—you change the meaning of the past by doing that. Also watch the flow of music—the melody as it’s expressed is changed by notes that come later. Just as the meaning of a sentence, you wait till later to find out what the sentence means. The present is always changing the past.
– Alan Watts
I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than from anything else in the English Language—and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Oh, seek, my love, your newer way;
I’ll not be left in sorrow.
So long as I have yesterday,
Go take your damned to-morrow!
– Dorothy Parker
The implications of synchronicity will make you dizzy if you really reflect on them. They suggest that the psyche and the outer universe are not as unrelated as conventional psychology would have us believe. They mirror each other and are ultimately inseparable.
– Steven Forrest
By following an authority, by practicing a discipline, controlling yourself, sooner or later you will find what you want, but it will not be the truth.
– Krishnamurti
you’ll have to get down on all fours
to learn my new address:
you’ll have to place your skull
beside this silence
no one hears.
– Franz Wright
Art altogether is nothing but a survival skill, we should never lose sight of this fact, it is, time and again, just an attempt — an attempt that seems touching even to our intellect — to cope with this world and its revolting aspects, which, as we know, is invariably possible only by resorting to lies and falsehoods, to hypocrisy and self-deception, Reger said. These pictures are full of lies and falsehoods and full of hypocrisy and self deception, there is nothing else in them if we disregard their often inspired artistry. All these pictures, moreover, are an expression of man’s absolute helplessness in coping with himself and with what surrounds him all his life. That is what all these pictures express, this helplessness which, on the one hand, embarrasses the intellect and, on the other hand, bewilders the same intellect and moves it to tears, Reger said.
– Thomas Bernhard
The duplicity of words. No, I correct myself again. Every third one at least comes from the heart.
– John Berger
Nearly all mankind is more or less unhappy because nearly all do not know the true Self. Real happiness abides in Self-knowledge alone. All else is fleeting. To know one’s Self is to be blissful always.
– Ramana Maharshi
The danger that faces us today is that the whole of reality will be replaced by words. This accounts for that terrible lack of instinct in modern man.
– Jung
There is no time or place— even the most hellish in association and no matter how marked by boredom or destruction—that could not have its nostalgist. The reason for this is simple. Memory, like longing, is selective and not subject to consensus.
– S. D. Chrostowska
Once you’ve tasted freedom, it stays in your heart and no one can take it. Then, you can be more powerful than a whole country.
– Ai Weiwei
…let my actions speak for me. Words can be traitors but deeds have no advocate.
– Sir Ewain (John Steinbeck, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights)
There are always moments when one feels empty and estranged. Such moments are most desirable, for it means the soul had cast its moorings and is sailing for distant places. This is detachment – when the old is over and the new has not yet come.
– Nisargadatta
Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don’t have to say anything.
– Khaled Hosseini
The hermit locks his door against the blizzard.
He keeps the cabin warm.
All winter long he sorts out all he has.
What was well started shall be finished.
What was not, should be thrown away.
In spring he emerges with one garment
and a single book.
– Lew Welch
No one feels another’s grief, no one understands another’s joy. People imagine that they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each other by.
– Franz Schubert
Do not unveil me if freedom is dear to you, for my face is the prison of love.
– Leonardo da Vinci, Codex Forster III, 1490-1493
Whatever you resist you become. We think that we resist certain states because they are there, but, actually, they are there because we resist them.
– Adyashanti
poetry / isn’t revolution but a way of knowing / why it must come
– Adrienne Rich
Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and tradition and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.
– Søren Kierkegaard
Develop the strength to do bold things, Not the strength to suffer.
– Machievelli
You see, I have this habit – it’s the only sport that I do and I’ve invented myself – to rush down the stairs, terrorizing anyone going up.
– Franz Kafka, 1912.
Nirvana is where you are, provided you don’t object to it.
– Alan Watts
Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
– Erich Fromm
Love is the expression of the one who loves, not of the one who is loved. Those who think they can love only the people they prefer do not love at all. Love discovers truths about individuals that others cannot see.
– Søren Kierkegaard
I wouldn’t trade my solitude for a little love. For a lot of love, yes. But a lot of love is itself a kind of solitude.
– Dulce María Loynaz
Anger, annoyance, and impatience deplete energy. Patient effort strengthens our resources.
– Allan Lokos
The still, small voice comes to the individual who stops talking long enough to hear it.
– Manly P. Hall
Understanding comes from patiently reasoning with yourself. You cannot force your mind or order it about.
– Gelek Rinpoche
When you begin a novel you are in a state of unlimited freedom, and this is alarming.
– Iris Murdoch
Teach your children that it is in sharing the most, not gathering the most, that the most is received.
– Neale Donald Walsch
Marrying means, to grasp blindfolded into a sack hoping to find out an eel out of an assembly of snakes.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
The modern world will not be punished. It is the punishment.
– Nicolas Gomez Davila
If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. Also you will have betrayed our community in failing to make your contribution to the whole.
– Rollo May
Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.
– Michel Houellebecq
frosty morning
my breath
becomes a cloud
– Buson
When you die, you can’t see sunsets.
– Hayao Miyazaki
We only get to keep what we give away, and what we withhold from others we’re withholding from ourselves.
– Marianne Williamson
It is easier to macrobullshit than to microbullshit.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Everything we are is at every moment alive in us.
– Arthur Miller
In a world of plastic and noise, I want to be clay and silence.
– Eduardo Galeano
WAIT
do not leave yet.
Let me rearrange the world
for you.
– Faraj Bou al-Isha, (tr. Khaled Mattawa)
Life, however long, will always be short.
Too short for anything to be added
– Szymborska
Love is an endless act of forgiveness. Forgiveness is an endless act of love.
– Rumi
Intellect is invisible to the man who has none.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
The lonelier the place, the better it pleased me: its silence, its aura, its peculiar conformation, its enclosedness.
– John Fowles
nothing dramatic
just tea and
survival
– @BashoSociety
I do so dearly believe that no half-heartedness and no worldly fear must turn us aside from following the light unflinchingly.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.
– Khalil Gibran
The world is still full of betes noires and scapegoats, just as it formerly teemed with witches and werewolves.
– Jung
Go for the pain of discipline, it weighs ounces. The pain of regret weighs tons.
– Jim Rohn
Every minute can be a holy, sacred minute. Seek the spiritual in every ordinary thing that you do. Sweeping the floor, watering the vegetables, and washing the dishes becomes holy and sacred if mindfulness is there.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
And I get jealous of a stranger, who may see your eyes by chance, and fall in love with them.
– Nizar Qabbani
As other girls prayed for
handsomeness in a lover, or for wealth,
or for power, or for poetry, she had
prayed fervently: let him be kind.
– Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love
Making the complicated simple is true creativity.
– Charles Mingus
winter afternoon
nothing but
wind
– Basho
Men simply copied the realities of their hearts when they built prisons.
– Richard Wright
No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.
– Hal Borland
Do you think the universe fights for souls to be together?
Some things are too strange and strong to be coincidences.
– Emery Allen
Speech is an act. And what an act! If you had stolen, hit someone, or done any other evil, they would probably forgive you. But you had to speak about things that a reasonable person would keep quiet about.
That’s what they don’t forgive.
– Meša Selimović
And the night smells like snow.
Walking home for a moment
you almost believe you could start
again.
And an intense love rushes to
your heart,
and hope. It’s unendurable,
unendurable.
– Franz Wright, Night Walk
Some people are perfect alignment. Others are the inversion embodied.
Choose wisely.
– Nika Solé
When we describe our experiences, we are also giving them meaning.
– Oren Jay Sofer
You need not strain towards the future – the future will come to you on its own. For some time longer you will remain sleep-walking as you do now, bereft of meaning and assurance; but this period will end and you will find your work both fruitful and easy.
– Nisargadatta
The past is always beautiful. So, for that matter, is the future. Only the present hurts, and we carry it around like an abscess of suffering, our compassion between two infinities of happiness and peace.
– Michel Houellebecq
The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good—in spite of all the people who say he is very good.
– Robert Graves
If the path is crowded, differentiate.
If the path is empty, validate.
– James Clear
To understand biology is to understand that all life is linked to the earth from which it came; it is to understand that the stream of life, flowing out of the dim past into the uncertain future, is in reality a unified force, though composed of an infinite number and variety of separate lives.
– Rachel Carson
But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.
– Albert Camus
The oppressor must be harassed until his doom. He must have no peace by day or by night. The slaves have always outnumbered the slavemasters. The power of the oppressor rests upon the submission of the people.
– Huey Newton
We must admit – and let us honor virtue for it – that men’s greatest misfortunes are those that befall them because of their crimes.
– François de La Rochefoucauld
Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead.
– Chuck Palahniuk
It felt possible – though I know this is absurd – that the use of my own body, the only thing I really owned, had somehow been repossessed.
– Catherine Lacey
They are prevented from seeing one another and they cannot write; nevertheless they find countless mysterious ways of corresponding, by sending each other the song of birds, the scent of flowers, the laughter of children, the light of the sun, the sighing of the wind, and the gleam of the stars – all the beauties of creation.
– Victor Hugo
True joy is never cut short.
– Seneca
I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether the things are so.
– Montaigne
The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement, being in unceasing antagonism to that disposition to aim at something better than customary, which is called, according to circumstances, the spirit of liberty, or that of progress or improvement.
– John Stuart Mill
Harry Truman once asked, “How many times do you have to be hit over the head before you see who’s hitting you?”
If we fear something, it is all the more imperative we study it thoroughly.
– Celeste Ng
If the goal was to increase the love, rather than winning or dominating a constant opponent, I think we could actually imagine liberation from constant oppression. We would suddenly be seeing everything we do, everyone we meet, not through the tactical eyes of war, but through eyes of love.
– adrienne maree brown
All too many people do not live their own lives, and generally they know next to nothing about their real nature. They make convulsive efforts to “adapt,” not to stand out in any way, to do exactly what the opinions, rules, regulations, and habits of the environment demand as being “right.” They are slaves of “what people think,” “what people do,” etc.
– Jolande Jacobi, The Way of Individuation
The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what’s told alive.
– Eudora Welty
The Darkness is untiringly active. It does not rest, it never gives up when it is a question of gaining adherents.
– Buddha
Writing fiction gives you a legitimate excuse for being a dilettante. But one of the troubling aspects of getting older is that you really begin to understand, in your bones, that there’s so much to learn, and so little time.
– Vikram Chandra
Never have I read such tosh.
– Virginia Woolf, while reading Ulysses by James Joyce.
it is one thing to live in
the shadow of her
inventions
quite another thing
to be lit up
in her frame
– Alec Finlay
… Everything goes
through the soul,
my dear, – and
back to the soul.
[A self-feeding
fountain.]
– Marina Tsvetaeva
Language is legislation, speech is its code.
– Roland Barthes
Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.
– Marshall McLuhan
ELEANOR SWANSON
Leave it to a poet in an exacting age of
GPS and pixelized satellite images to fasten
onto the handiwork of the cartographer . . .
exploring the flattened contours of a life with
empathy and epiphany.
– Kathryn Winograd
Words and the Supreme Ultimate
Words are always here.
To find them we have to slow down and sit.
Sometimes the words are deep inside us.
Sometimes the words are waiting for us out there,
on the open road, up in the mountains,
where pure water of Tao emerges from the ground.
We all know this:
Words can have magic.
Words can have power.
Ancestors Dongpo and Yangming said
words can create a beautiful nation
or tear people down, split them apart.
Words are entities
brought to life
by way of intent.
The right words heal.
The wrong words maim.
Words are like invisible fireflies floating all around us —
we need only reach out and pluck them from the dark.
If we catch the right ones
they become a lantern
to light a darkened cycle of time.
– Frank Inzan Owen
After the Great Illness Passes
– written two years before the COVID shutdown
There’ll come a time
when we sit together
and take deep breaths again.
There’ll come a time
when we aren’t bracing,
daily,
for the next onslaught.
There’ll come a time,
after the Great Illness passes,
when we remember who we really are.
Until then, don’t turn away.
Enter the Great Silence
for long swaths of time
if you need to,
but don’t turn away.
Record with your Heart-Eye
what is happening right now
for those yet to come.
Every generation asks:
“How did this happen on our watch?”
Breathe!
I may be going blind,
and I may not be here to see it all unfold,
but I have seen the first ripples of the future.
A Great Reclamation will unfurl.
People will move in and out of spaces
as if moving through a great house.
The Revered Woman will be present.
Her soft-sturdy-groundedness is paramount.
Men of Esteem will rise again
like the great sages of the past
and play the role of Conscious Man again.
Crossing over each threshold,
acclimating to the Unseen Ether in each place,
every home will conjure gradual purification.
The Great Spirit of Grief underneath it all will stir too.
Everyone will wash each other’s brow
and whisper:
The fever has finally broken.
– Frank Inzan Owen
Success is liking yourself, liking
what you do, and liking how
you do it.
– Maya Angelou
Becoming a warrior and facing yourself is a question of honesty rather than condemning yourself.
– Chögyam Trungpa
To love someone is to
accept that they are a
whole person: flawed,
layered, ever-evolving.
– Jillian Turecki
AT HAND
Things
are just
out
of reach
and
as we stretch
for them
we push them
farther
away.
– William Bronk
So you know how things stand. Now forget what they think of you. Be satisfied if you can live the rest of your life, however short, as your nature demands. Focus on that, and don’t let anything distract you. You’ve wandered all over and finally realized that you never found what you were after: how to live. Not in syllogisms, not in money, or fame, or self-indulgence. Nowhere.
– Marcus Aurelius
I understood that if I wish to understand life and its meaning, I must not live the life of a parasite, but must live a real life, and — taking the meaning given to live by real humanity and merging myself in that life — verify it.
– Leo Tolstoy
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.
– Cormac McCarthy
The problem in middle life, when the body has reached its climax of power and begins to decline, is to identify yourself, not with the body, which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. This is something I learned from myths. What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle? One of the psychological problems in growing old is the fear of death. People resist the door of death.
But this body is a vehicle of consciousness, and if you can identify with the consciousness, you can watch this body go like an old car. There goes the fender, there goes the tire, one thing after another—but it’s predictable. And then, gradually, the whole thing drops off, and consciousness rejoins consciousness. It is no longer in this particular environment.
– Joseph Campbell
Souls love. That’s what souls do. Egos don’t, but souls do. Become a soul, look around, and you’ll be amazed – all the beings around you are souls. Be one, see one. When many people have this heart connection, then we will know that we are all one, we human beings all over the planet. We will be one. One love. And don’t leave out the animals, and trees, and clouds, and galaxies – it’s all one. It’s one energy.
– Ram Dass
You are the traveler, you are the path and you are the destination. Be careful never to lose the way to yourself.
– Shihab al-Din Yahya Suhrawardi
We ourselves are events in history.
Things do not merely happen to us, they happen through us.
The emotional life is not simply a part or an aspect of human life.
It is not, as we so often think, subordinate, or subsidiary to the mind.
It is the core and essence of human life.
The intellect arises out of it, is rooted in it, draws its nourishment and sustenance from it.
The mind is the subordinate partner in the human economy.
This is because the intellect is essentially instrumental.
Thinking is not living.
The education of the intellect to the exclusion of the education of the emotional life will inevitably create an instrumental conception of life ~ in which all human activity will be valued as a means to an end, never for itself.
When it is the persistent and universal tendency in any society to concentrate upon the intellect and its training, the result will be a society which amasses power, and with power the means to the good life ~ but which has no correspondingly developed capacity for living the good life for which it has amassed the means.
We have immense power, and immense resources; we worship efficiency and success; and we do not know how to live finely.
I should trace the condition of affairs almost wholly to our failure to educate our emotional life.
– Scottish philosopher John Macmurray
Pirandello said once that we are, in reality, the juxtaposition of infinite, blurred selves. It’s so, and we can’t unblur all the selves. But we can recognize that they exist, and above all, we can let them look at things, remembering always Goethe’s saying that, of all the things that we do, that we can do, the nicest of all is just to stand and look. From the moment that one pays continuous attention to anything, no matter what it is–a leaf, a nail–whatever is being regarded becomes a world in itself, mysterious, imposing, unspeakably magnified and inexhaustibly fertile in possibilities. Once you have begun to do this, you have entered into the kingdom of the Other, recognizing its otherness, and wanting to learn from it. The feeling that you get is that the world, and each aspect of it, is a mystery, is unfathomable, and that it glows against the background of universal darkness with a kind of strange and even magical light, both utterly meaningful and utterly meaningless, as the universe itself is.
– James Dickey
Reality has no inside, outside, or middle part.
– Bodhidharma
No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it. Where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity. We thus come again to the paradox that one can become whole only by the responsible acceptance of one’s partiality.
– Wendell Berry
Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.
– Anne Carson
In the beginning, there’s a blank mind. Then that mind gets an idea in it, and the trouble begins, because the mind mistakes the idea for the world.
– George Saunders
Such reciprocity is the very structure of perception. We experience the sensuous world only by rendering ourselves vulnerable to that world. Sensory perception is this ongoing interweavement: the terrain enters into us only to the extent that we allow ourselves to be taken up within that terrain.
– David Abram
Magic doesn’t sweep you away; it gathers you up into the body of the present moment so thoroughly that all your explanations fall away: the ordinary, in all its plain and simple outrageousness, begins to shine – to become luminously, impossibly so. Every facet of the world is awake, and you within it.
The deeper I slid into the material density of the real, the more I found that there was nothing determinate or predictable about existence. Actuality, this inexhaustible mystery, cannot be domesticated. It is wildness incarnate. Reality shapeshifts.
– David Abram
Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning. … The natural world may be conceived of as a system of concentric circles, and we now and then detect in nature slight dislocations which apprise us that this surface on which we now stand is not fixed but sliding … The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle. . .
– Emerson
At the fulcrum point, at the point where this tide changes from one direction to another, this is the point where the breath of life interchanges with the Cerebrospinal Fluid. A fulcrum is a still point, a source of power. Fulcrums aren’t levers; fulcrums are still points. Out of the fulcrum flow the levers. The tissues you have gotten ahold of are the levers that are going to be doing the moving around for you, automatically. They are taking advantage of your reference point. You sense through the fulcrum.
A fulcrum is a source of power.
– Rollin Becker, DO
ERASING STARS
A teacher of standing, a poet, tells her class, Never put stars in your poems, and some of the students write this down. And some stop writing after a year or two. And some get married or take jobs selling pharmaceuticals. And some think Time is in short supply, and ex cathedra take up parent worship.
I know a Baltic poet who draws Egyptian star charts on cocktail napkins as he answers questions. I also know a poet in Tucson, an amateur ornithologist who believes that stars influence birds. “Of course,” he says, “the carbon in our brains comes from stars.”
Erase stars from a page. Nothing happens. The allotropic pulse of mathematics ticks anyway. But now try putting the stars back in. It can’t be done. This failure has nothing to do with personal habits.
– Stephen Kusisto
Modern mass culture, aimed at the “consumer,” the civilization of prosthetics, is crippling people’s souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held on to their own, secret souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming, a long outwaiting.
– N. Scott Momaday