Journal XXXVIII

After an expansive experience that challenges our narrow way of being in the world, we often retreat instead of pressing forward into the unknown.
– Lisa Marchiano

If you abandon reason, you will have nothing to guide you but the emotional depth of the situation—what Heidegger called ‘the depth of the call.’ And in the twentieth century, the history of following the depth of the call has not been a happy one. We cannot trust the call of the blood unrefined by reason.
– Terence McKenna

Let a person’s presence be precious without demanding that it become permanent.
– Larkin

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.
– Samuel Johnson

​Matter is condensed syntax, a temporary arrangement of linguistic agreements.
– Terence McKenna

I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.
– Henry David Thoreau, The Dispersion of Seeds

Rest is not the end of all effort, but the end of self-empowered attempts to earn God’s favor.
– John Koessler

​Every society has always believed that it possessed 95% of the truth and that the remaining 5% would fall into place in the next fifteen years. Yet all of them were completely off the mark. We don’t understand anything—we’ve just substituted incomprehensibility for explanation.
– Terence McKenna

Culture is a form of enforced infantilism. It’s the last nursery, and most people never leave it.
– Terence McKenna

Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.
– James Baldwin

If a man is mistaken, instruct him kindly and show him his error. But if thou art not able, blame thyself, or blame not even thyself.
– Marcus Aurelius

​Rejection of culture is the last and farthest leap it takes. Culture is an operating system designed to keep you predictable and manageable, but it leaves you entirely unequipped for the raw mystery of your own existence.
– Terence McKenna

In a way, all thought is experimental and remains so until it can be fixed in a sentence.
– Jeff Porter

The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to realize our collective dreams.
– Terence McKenna

It’s all about love—making someone else’s existence just a little easier. Nothing else matters. I know this now.
– Terence McKenna

It is essential that justice be done, and it is equally vital that justice not be confused with revenge, for the two are wholly different.
– Oscar Arias Sánchez

When you realize that there is no method, no system, no mantra, no teacher, nothing in the world that is going to help you to be quiet, when you realize the truth that it is only the quiet mind that sees, then the mind becomes extraordinarily quiet.
– Krishnamurti

​The history of the last 10,000 years is the history of a single species’ attempt to deal with the trauma of losing its symbiotic connection to the plant world.
– Terence McKenna

I found the only thing I could bring back, not being graphically endowed, was ideas. It’s a very mysterious business—the revelation of the world to the mind.
– Terence McKenna

It is excellent To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous To use it like a giant.
– William Shakespeare

Listening for the still small voice is a feminine art that is the basis of spiritual counseling and direction. It is a quality that all women seem to possess in some measure, that some men have to some degree, and that all men and women need to cultivate if we are to mature spiritually.
– David Tacey

Art is to find something that fits perfectly where it doesn’t belong. The goal? To create something for everywhere.
– Alex Thatcher

You go to the side of Cold Mountain and compound mushrooms and draw cold water from a well and thank your lucky stars that that’s the situation you find yourself in.
– Terence McKenna

The art of rest is a part of the art of working.
– John Steinbeck

I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention… To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone.
– Henry Rollins

In most cases, our so-called limitations are nothing more than our own decision to limit ourselves.
– Daisaku Ikeda

If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.
– Ray Bradbury

Modernism in its broadest context is the first movement to come along to be able to in any way challenge classicism.
– Terence McKenna

​Out of the flesh, the word must be redistilled—that’s the second half of the historical process.
– Terence McKenna

The goal is to live in dynamic balance with the unknown, rather than trying to trap it in a box of dogma or ideology.
– Terence McKenna

…one of the hardest demands on the obedience of faith is to do nothing; it is often so much easier to do foolishly!
– George MacDonald, Heather and Snow

Madness really is contagious, and friends are a blessing, especially when you’re on your own.
– Roberto Bolaño

​We are playing with fire, but that is what species on the brink of metamorphosis do.
– Terence McKenna

There is no crisis to which academics will not respond with a seminar.
– Marvin Bressler

We must rid ourselves of the bitter desire to get on with everyone. The great for the great, the profound for the profound, the subtle for the subtle, and the rare for the rare.
– Nietzsche

It is a mark of a tyrant to have men of foreign extraction rather than citizens as guests at table and companions, feeling that citizens are hostile but strangers make no claim against him.
– Aristotle, Politics

Totalitarianism and technocracy like to present themselves as the pinnacle of rationality and science.
– Mattias Desmet

​The real tragedy of modern politics is that it argues over how to divide the crumbs while ignoring the fact that we are sitting in front of a banquet of infinite human potential. We are fighting over dirt while the stars wait.
– Terence McKenna

All our dignity consists then in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavor to think well; this is the principle of morality.
– Blaise Pascal

Whenever I set off on any sort of journey I fall off the radar. No one knows where I am.
– Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

Although every American is entitled to exercise the right to free press, no one is entitled to be trusted or believed–that you have to earn.
– Adrienne LaFrance

Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm.
– Joyce Carol Oates, High Lonesome

​Culture is an illusion of language. Homer was as trapped within it as Heidegger. There is no classic recension or historical movement that will save us—we have to reach past language to raw, unmediated experience.
– Terence McKenna

The price of clarity is a willingness to be completely unfashionable. If you align yourself with the dominant cultural paradigms of your day, you guarantee that your thinking will be obsolete before you even reach the grave.
– Terence McKenna

In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.
– Ambrose Bierce

There never comes a point where a theory can be said to be true. The most that anyone can claim for any theory is that it has shared the successes of all its rivals and that it has passed at least one test which they have failed.
– A. J. Ayer, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century

One can only argue that “cancel culture” is bad in itself, if they have a completely relativistic view of morality, where things like exploitation, ethnic cleansing, genocide, or ecocide, are just “a different way of doing things.”

If you think cancel culture isn’t effective, then why is everyone getting so up in arms about it? If a bunch of people suddenly decide you’re an asshole, guess what? It has a real social impact, so this argument is also bunk—it is effective, that’s why so many people are opposed to it.

If you compulsively think that all attempts to shame someone into irrelevancy are wrong or ineffective, then you may need to find your own moral backbone, because these times call for them friends, now more than ever.

– Vince Horn

Someone should form an organization of missionaries to go into American evangelical churches and convert them to Christianity.
– Tony Rush

Rereading, an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us ‘throw away’ the story once it has been consumed, so that we can then move on to another story, buy another book, and which is tolerated only in certain marginal categories of readers (children, old people, and professors), rereading is here suggested at the outset, for it alone saves the text from repetition (those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere), multiplies it in its variety and its plurality: rereading draws the text out of its internal chronology (‘this happens before or after that’) and recaptures a mythic time (without before or after); it contests the claim which would have us believe that the first reading is a primary, naïve, phenomenal reading which we will only, afterwards, have to ‘explicate,’ to intellectualize (as if there were a beginning of reading, as if everything were not already read: there is no first reading, even if the text is concerned to give us that illusion by several operations of suspense, artifices more spectacular than persuasive); rereading is no longer consumption, but play (that play which is the return of the different).
– Roland Barthes

I want to be a child and not a mother, and I feel guilty about this.
– Anne Sexton

One of the great unresolved psychological enigmas of the modern western world is the question of what or who has persuaded us to accept as virtually axiomatic a self-view and a world-view that demand we reject out of hand the wisdom and vision of our major philosophers and poets in order to imprison our thought and our very selves in the materialist, mechanical and dogmatic torture-chamber devised by purely quantitative and third-rate scientific minds.
– Philip Sherrard

The future of writing is pointing.
– Kenneth Goldsmith

iris blossoms
the traveler
forgets the road

– Basho

The words of the Lord are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O Lord, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.
– Psalm 12:6-7

Your mission will isolate you. Your spiritual gifts will make you different. Your dedication to a vision only you can see will have you wildly misunderstood. This is the cost of entry to greatness. This is you blazing the path.
– Nika Solé

I want to be anonymous. I don’t know how you get involved with uninvolvment, but I don’t want to be involved. My ambition is to be completely forgotten.
– Bob Kaufman

Some things you have influence over right now, and some things you don’t. You begin to see that some things are just requiring us to bear it right now, until something inevitably changes.
– Tuere Sala

Eventually the wound must be left alone
for it to heal.

This is not neglect.
It is love’s holding.

– @KavijiPoet

Once you base your whole life striving on a desperate lie, and try to implement that lie, you instrument your own undoing.
– Ernest Becker

I discovered that I was a good reader of dreams, which are marvelous and mysterious, and alert you to the fact that the human mind is something about which we know nothing.
– Donald Meltzer

What do you know better than your own secrets?
– Raymond Carver

There is only one sin, from which all the others grow forth like the many heads of the Hydra, and from which they fly forth like the contents of Pandora’s box when it is opened. That is ingratitude. And there is only one virtue: gratitude.
– Ernst Jünger

Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.
– George Bernard Shaw

Why do I walk? I walk because I like it. I like the rhythm of it, my shadow always a little ahead of me on the pavement. I like being able to stop when I like, to lean against a building and make a note in my journal, or read an email, or send a text message, and for the world to stop while I do it. Walking, paradoxically, allows for the possibility of stillness.

Walking is mapping with your feet. It helps you piece a city together, connecting up neighbourhoods that might otherwise have remained discrete entities, different planets bound to each other, sustained yet remote. I like seeing how in fact they blend into one another, I like noticing the boundaries between them. Walking helps me feel at home. There’s a small pleasure in seeing how well I’ve come to know the city through my wanderings on foot, crossing through different neighbourhoods of the city, some I used to know quite well, others I may not have seen in a while, like getting reacquainted with someone I once met at a party.

Sometimes I walk because I have things on my mind, and walking helps me sort them out. Solvitur ambulando, as they say.

I walk because it confers — or restores — a feeling of placeness. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says a space becomes a place when through movement we invest it with meaning, when we see it as something to be perceived, apprehended, experienced.

I walk because, somehow, it’s like reading. You’re privy to these lives and conversations that have nothing to do with yours, but you can eavesdrop on them. Sometimes it’s overcrowded; sometimes the voices are too loud. But there is always companionship. You are not alone. You walk in the city side by side with the living and the dead.

[This is] the key problem at the heart of the urban experience: are we individuals or are we part of the crowd? Do we want to stand out or blend in? Is that even possible? How do we — no matter what our gender — want to be seen in public? Do we want to attract or escape the gaze? Be independent and invisible? Remarkable or unremarked-upon?

I became suspicious of an entirely vehicle-based culture; a culture that does not walk is bad for women. It makes a kind of authoritarian sense; a woman who doesn’t wonder — what it all adds up to, what her needs are, if they’re being met — won’t wander off from the family. The layout of the suburbs reinforces her boundaries: the neat grid, the nearby shopping centre, the endless loops of parkways, where the American adventure of the open road is tamed by the American dream.

In those six months, the streets were transformed from places in between home and wherever I was going into a great passion. I drifted wherever they looked interesting, lured by the sight of a decaying wall, or colourful window boxes, or something intriguing down at the other end, which might be as pedestrian as a perpendicular street. Anything, any detail that suddenly loosened itself, would draw me towards it. Every turn I made was a reminder that the day was mine and I didn’t have to be anywhere I didn’t want to be. I had an astonishing immunity to responsibility, because I had no ambitions at all beyond doing only that which I found interesting.

I remember when I’d take the métro two stops because I didn’t realise how close together everything was, how walkable Paris was. I had to walk around to understand where I was in space, how places related to each other. Some days I’d cover five miles or more, returning home with sore feet and a story or two for my room-mates. I saw things I’d never seen in New York. Beggars (Roma, I was told) who knelt rigidly in the street, heads bowed, holding signs asking for money, some with children, some with dogs; homeless people living in tents, under stairways, under arches. Every quaint Parisian nook had its corresponding misery. I turned off my New York apathy and gave what I could. Learning to see meant not being able to look away; to walk in the streets of Paris was to walk the thin line of fate that divided us from each other.

– Lauren Elkin

The closer one is to
Christ, the further one
is from Christianity.

– Sofo Archon

If by a “Liberal” they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties—someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal,” then I’m proud to say I’m a “Liberal.”
– John F. Kennedy

Peace is a competition between despair
and hope, between disempowerment
and committed persistence. To the
degree that powerlessness takes root in
people’s consciousness, there is a
greater tendency to resort to force.
Powerlessness breeds violence.

– Daisaku Ikeda

People invented God as a
substitute for what they
most deeply long for: an
intimate connection
with nature.

– Sofo Archon

In the whole universe, wood is rarer than diamonds.

Woods and diamonds have one similarity they are both made of carbons but wood is a complex organic structure and compared to its diamonds is simple. In the whole universe, wood is rarer than diamonds.

Trees can give you oxygen and it is one of the major member of our ecosystem and after they die they gives us wood. So woods are more valuable than diamonds.

– Shounak Das

there’s a house across the river
but alas, i cannot swim
& a garden of such beauty
that the flowers seem to grin
there’s a house across the river
but alas, i cannot swim
i’ll live my life regretting that i never jumped in.
– Laura Marling

One has to find a balance between
what people need from you
and what you need for yourself.
– Jessye Norman

The less you chase approval, the more authentic your life becomes.
– Erlend Loe

What happens in the heart simply happens.
– Ted Hughes

If it is asserted that civilization is a real advantage in the condition of man, – and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages, – it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly[.]
– Henry David Thoreau

To live is to choose. But to choose well, you must know who you are and what you stand for, where you want to go and why you want to get there.
– Kofi Annan

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.
– Walt Disney

​You don’t ask Freud to clip your fingernails, for God’s sake. When I once posed a question to a psychedelic experience about whether I was doing the right thing with my life, the answer came back: ‘What kind of a chicken-shit question is that to ask a galactarian intelligence?’ It put my problems right into perspective.
– Terence McKenna

The power to reshape reality doesn’t belong to governments or corporations; it belongs to the individual mind.
– Terence McKenna

Time does not change us. It just unfolds us.
– Max Frisch

​No one is truly in charge of the process. This is what makes history so interesting—it’s a runaway freight train on a dark and stormy night.
– Terence McKenna

The greatest tool of liberation is curiosity.
– Terence McKenna

​Given a more advanced nervous system, the intuition changes. Your breath begins to make poetry, you experience loss, and you feel love. You begin to feel the emotional outlines of the enterprise of being.
– Terence McKenna

​We are the species that talks itself into existence.
– Terence McKenna

If you want to weigh yourself up, set aside your money, your house, your rank, and consider your inner man: for as it is, you are entrusting to others the gauge of your quality.
– Seneca

It was pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes men as angels.
– Saint Augustine

When you step into the unknown, you are not losing your way—you are finding it.
– Terence McKenna

Growth comes through sunshine, but also through rain.
– Derrick Porter

Modernism is a form of primitivism.
– Terence McKenna

Ideas beget their opposites and then are subsumed by them.
– Terence McKenna

You never hear about museums misplacing their paintings anymore, do you?

It’s a lost art.

– Daniel Edison

You have to be willing to get happy about nothing.
– Andy Warhol

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.
– Alexis de Tocqueville

​Once you see that all of the forms are dualistic experiencing… it loosens the power of all those things over you.
– Ram Dass

You don’t drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there.
– Edwin Louis Cole

​The flying saucer is the soul of humanity exteriorized as the apotheosis of technology. It is a millenarian transformation, a siren at the end of time calling us out of the trees, through history, and into a state of pure language.
– Terence McKenna

We have to stop consuming our culture. We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow.
– Terence McKenna

I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower

We’re running into one of those compression points where everything that has been going on on this planet for the last billion years is a series of telescoping processes of ever-accelerating intensity.
– Terence McKenna

For there is nothing more evident than that which cannot be seen by the eyes and nothing more palpable than that which cannot be perceived by the senses…
– Confucius

If you understood anything I said tonight, it’s a perfect proof that I’m far from enlightened.
– Terence McKenna

Many are the men whose ways I have learned.
– Odysseus, The Odyssey

​The ultimate frontier is not outer space; the ultimate frontier is the interior topology of the human mind.
– Terence McKenna

A shaman is someone who has seen the end of time, understood the geometry, and returned to the present.
– Terence McKenna

Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.
– James Joyce, Ulysses

The future has not yet undergone the formality of actually occurring.
– Terence McKenna

spiritual practice does not need to be connected to organized religion to be meaningful.
– bell hooks, all about love

Humans are so selfish that you have to talk to them about their reward in the next life just to get them to do good in this one.
– Epictetus

To reach something good it is very useful to have gone astray, and thus acquire experience.
– Saint Teresa of Avila

​

The ego is a calcarious growth on the bloodstream of the psyche. If you don’t inoculate yourself against it, it will begin to take root and grow.
– Terence McKenna

I’ve never been wrong about this: if intelligence fails, aesthetics will pull you through. The revelation of the mystery—one thing is for sure—will not be tacky. It won’t be tasteless, and it won’t be wearing sequins for God’s sake.
– Terence McKenna

We don’t get harmony when everybody sings the same note. Only notes that are different can harmonizer. The same is true with people.
– Steve Goodier

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.
– William Jennings Bryan

The break between nature and man has been overstressed; when you look at the global ecology, you see that there must be a minded species that will open a hole through which everything could escape.
– Terence McKenna

Tribalism is a social form which can exist at any level of technology; it’s a complete illusion to associate it strictly with low levels of technology.
– Terence McKenna

To have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.
– Elaine Scarry

​Neoteny is the preservation of juvenile characteristics into adulthood. Culturally, we have enforced an absolute neoteny upon ourselves: we decided we never needed to grow up at all, leaving us stranded in the extreme, boundary-enforcing egoism of an eleven-year-old child.
– Terence McKenna

You must change your soul, not the sky. Even if you cross the wide sea, even if, as our Virgil says: Lands and cities should depart, vices will follow you wherever you go.
– Seneca

He who follows reason in all things is both tranquil and active at the same time, and also cheerful and collected.
– Marcus Aurelius

A man looking back at his life and realizing that somewhere during the journey, he himself became the thing he lost.
– Badr-uddin Choudhary

​Social science is an obscene idea and should be disabused immediately. Sociology, psychology, intellectual history, linguistics—these people should find honest work. They are not scientists, and they are mucking up the domain of human values with pseudo-descriptive engines.
– Terence McKenna

My vision is that we turn this world from the war zone it has become into a garden.
– Dr. Vandana Shiva

I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.
– Lillian Smith

Every person in this world is destined to experience the shattering of their illusions.
– Erich Maria Remarque

Use caution when describing barriers.
Being Black is not a barrier for me.
White supremacy is the barrier.
Being female is not a barrier for me.
Patriarchy is the barrier.
Name the systems of power.
These are the barriers.

– @Drawn2Intellect

This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.
– Philip K. Dick

Our women have been chosen by the creator to be the portal between the spiritual realm and this physical realm. The only force on earth powerful enough to navigate unborn spirits onto this planet.
– unknown

Nature poets can’t walk across the backyard without tripping over an epiphany.
– Christian Wiman

You can’t rush the work of a significant life transition. In the space between what was and what will be you need to put down deep roots and build the healthy foundation for the next season of your life. This is uncomfortable but essential work.
– Krista O’Reilly-Davi-Digui

Take one day at a time and
appreciate that day to the full.

– Eileen Caddy

The Liquid Birds

Pēnelopē (Πηνελόπη) is usually understood to combine the Greek word pēnē (πήνη), “weft,” and ōps (ὤψ), “face,” which is considered the most appropriate for a cunning weaver whose motivation is hard to decipher

Penelope finds when she unweaves the shroud—
that she was making for the father of her husband,
who of course is absent and has been for years—
that when she undoes what she wove in this time
she can unweave all time that has passed and by
weaving a different pattern can shift the present
and as she weaves warp through weft, thread by thread
she finds mastery and after much practice can
unweave better than she ever wove, can unweave
her marriage back before she ever met the man
can hover with threads added and subtracted
in the passion of their first years, make one night,
one kiss, happen over and over, and then she can
unweave it all so that their marriage bed, famously
made from a rooted tree, is not yet a bed, the tree
only a sapling, crones become maidens, eagles, doves
drop from the skies to find the nests they left
and the gulls, cormorants, terns likewise find
the fragments of their old eggshells that begin to
pull back together to hold the liquid birds within,
the wool itself unspins and goes back to the flock
and the flock goes backward, wool shorter and shorter
on their frames as they disgorge grass to the earth,
enough to replant the hillsides, as snow flies upward,
and rivers flow uphill, and she works time like a dj
scratching the record back and forth, revolutions
giving way to the rhythms, lyric music to notes
clustering forward and backward; she masters time
and weaves and picks apart many endings, turnings,
weaves other lives for herself, lives for centuries
during the decade she waits for his return, lives
as a priestess, as the beloved of the handsome sailor
who came to shore when she was a girl, has daughters,
has travels, studies, passions, strange woven patterns,
and then she lets it go and weaves his return,
weaves the massacre of the suitors, weaves the shroud,
and takes her knife and cuts the last thread, done,
and she knows this is not the only or the best
of all her destinies but that the pattern is good.

– Rebecca Solnit

I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days.
– Henry David Thoreau

Languages have a flavor to me, which I’ve never understood people saying they’re awfully dry and dull, because a new language to me is just like taking a new wine or a sweetmeat or something.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

I respect the spiritual grind more than anything because I know what it takes to really be on your path. Which is why most people avoid that kinda thing.
– Nika Solé

When you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it then becomes sacred.
– Allen Ginsberg

Poetry’s another word
For losing everything
Except purity of heart.
– Paul Durcan

A little tap on the window-pane, as though something had struck it, followed by a plentiful light falling sound, as of grains of sand being sprinkled from a window overhead, gradually spreading, intensifying, acquiring a regular rhythm, becoming fluid, sonorous, musical, immeasurable, universal: it was the rain.
– Louise Erdrich

It is not the wind
waking you, but the low roar of years
fumbling to tell you what has happened,
or will, when the door flies open
and the naked message of love
stands there stuttering in your face,
alive, crying, leaving nothing out.
– Dave Smith

Small joys are available to us in the pauses between the outer actions that fill our lives. They are the depth in the moments lived fully with complete attention. This is what smaller living is all about, cultivating simple joys in our days while stepping outside of the schedules, deadlines, and chaos that make up so much of modern life. Joy comes when we take the time to thoroughly relish something wonderful we’re experiencing, no matter how small or insignificant it may seem to others.
– Victoria Vargas

Nothing’s so beautiful as the memory of it
Gathering light as glass does,
As glass does when the sundown is on it
and darkness is still a thousand miles away.
– Charles Wright

Humans in love are terrible. You see them come hungering at one another like prehistoric wolves, you see something struggling for life in between them like a root or a soul and it flares for a moment, then they smash it. The difference between them smashes the bones out. So delicate the bones.
– Anne Carson

Always breathing-in this pre-life, exhaling this post. Something goes away, something comes back. But through you. Leaving no trail but self. As trails go not much of one. But patiently you travel it. Your self.
– Jorie Graham

I believe we are a species with amnesia, I think we have forgotten our roots and our origins. I think we are quite lost in many ways.

And we live in a society that invests huge amounts of money and vast quantities of energy in ensuring that we all stay lost.

A society that invests in creating unconsciousness, which invests in keeping people asleep so that we are just passive consumers or products and not really asking any of the questions.

– Graham Hancock

1858

Sept. 19: Decided that one must love and work, and that’s it.
Sept. 20: Tired. Didn’t love and didn’t work.

– Leo Tolstoy

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

The pillow’s just as hot
when I turn it over.
And now a second candle
is guttering, and crows
are cawing louder than ever.
Not a wink … And it’s too late
even to think of sleep.
White, blindingly white –
a blind on a white window.
Good morning!

– Robert Chandler

…but they say extreme fear drives the fearful to deep and continual slumber. Sleeping, she sleeps; waking, she sleeps; walking, she sleeps; and eating, she sleeps.
– Mahmoud Darwish

To wake up and be like the weather to be no longer the broken hearted servants of mad kings
– Robert Montgomery

From her I learned all the nuances of neverness that link the gladiola to God.
– Christian Wiman

One soft infested summer, me and Terry became friends
Trying in vain to breathe the fire we was born in
Catching rides to the outskirts, tying faith between our teeth
Sleeping in that old abandoned beach house, getting wasted in the heat
And hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
With a love so hard and filled with defeat
Running for our lives at night on them backstreets

Slow dancing in the dark on the beach at Stockton’s Wing
Where desperate lovers park, we sat with the last of the Duke Street Kings
Huddled in our cars, waiting for the bells that ring
In the deep heart of the night they set us loose of everything
To go running on the backstreets
Running on the backstreets
Terry, you swore we’d live forever
Taking it on them backstreets together

Endless juke joints and Valentino drag
Where famous dancers scraped the tears up off the street, dressed down in rags
Running into the darkness, some hurt bad, some really dying
At night sometimes it seemed you could hear the whole damn city crying
Blame it on the lies that killed us, blame it on the truth that ran us down
You can blame it all on me, Terry, it don’t matter to me now
When the breakdown hit at midnight, there was nothing to say
But I hated him, and I hated you when you went away

Laying here in the dark, you’re like an angel on my chest
Just another tramp of hearts crying tears of faithlessness
Remember all the movies, Terry, we’d go see
Trying to learn to walk like the heroes we thought we had to be
And after all this time, to find we’re just like all the rest
Stranded in the park and forced to confess
To hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Where we swore forever friends
On the backstreets until the end

Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Was all right, we’re all
Hiding on the backstreets tonight
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets

– Bruce Springsteen

To be a poet is to be attached to life by a different set of hooks.
– John Barr

Future: That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.
– Ambrose Bierce

…there is cloud on blue ground up there, & wind which the eye loves so deeply it would spill itself out and liquefy to pay for it—
– Jorie Graham

The nightmares I had been fending off had come home in the form of the Trump administration: a white supremacist kleptocracy linked to a transnational crime syndicate, using digital media to manipulate reality and destroy privacy, led by a sociopathic nuke-fetishist, backed by apocalyptic fanatics preying on the weakest and most vulnerable as feckless and complicit officials fail to protect them.
– Sarah Kendzior

Every human being is both a social self and an embryonic soul. The challenge of life is to support the former while nourishing the latter. It is not easy…

Psychology’s healing insights and methods were never intended and never were able to address the “verticality” of the human psyche.

…We are not saints, we are not angels; we are embryonic souls immersed in a badly educated body being pulled along by a love-starved lonely horse called the emotions.

Mankind is called – to maintain the human reflection of divinity in a world overwhelmed by violence, confusion, and illusion.

– Jacob Needleman, A Little Book on Love

One thing I have learned about attention is that certain forms of it are contagious. When you spend enough time with someone who pays close attention to something if you were hanging out with me, it would be birds), you inevitably start to pay attention to some of the same things. I’ve also learned that patterns of attention – what we choose to notice and what we do not – are how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time. These aspects, taken together, suggest to me the revolutionary potential of taking back our attention. To capitalist logic, which thrives on myopia and dissatisfaction, there may indeed be something dangerous about something as pedestrian as doing nothing: escaping laterally toward each other, we might just find that everything we wanted is already here.
– Jenny Odell

All our life so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits – practical, emotional and intellectual – systematically organized, for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny whatever the latter may be.
– William James

If You Go to Bed Hungry
by Angela Narciso Torres

If you go to bed hungry, your soul will get up and steal cold rice from the pot.
Stop playing with fire before the moon rises or you’ll pee in your sleep.

Sweeping the floor after dark sweeps wealth and good fortune out the door.
Fork dropped: a gentleman will visit. Spoon: a bashful lady.

Bathing after you’ve cooked over a hot stove makes the veins swell.
For safe passage to the guest who leaves mid-meal: turn your plate.

The adage goes: coffee stunts growth. Twelve grapes on New Year’s: the opposite.
Advice from the learned: hide a book under your pillow. Never step on. Never drop.

Every rice grain that remains on your plate you’ll meet again on the footpath
to heaven. You’ll have to stoop to pick each one of them up.

Because My Child Asks if the World Is Ending

Because there is scant mercy
in this one world,
and justice comes
like lame mares through the pastures,
I wake at night from foul dreams
of destruction
and lay my hand on the thrum
of your sleeping heart
like a seabird in the dark storm of its passage
from one shore to the question
of another,
and listen to its little song of trials,
its little hymn of dim
and vanished harbors,
its wings still fresh
from the farthest, vastest lands.
Child, I have brought you
to this hard world, and I must see
that you have a way to face it.
I don’t know
what men will do
with their mad machines,
or whether the human heart will endure this,
but I know that hope
is our garden in the darkness,
and I know I won’t be here, my child,
to harvest it—
not always, not forever, not beside you—
and so I rise
and walk out through the new moon—
through ashes, though all that I have
gathered—
and lay my hands
on oak, on pine, on ivy,
and then, at last,
on the cold, bold face
of Joseph—
that figure that I carved, last spring,
from olive,
in the old hard sorrow of creation—
and I hear the wind
like a lost boy in the willows,
and I listen, I fall apart
and say this:
Hear my prayer, you sweet man
in your manger.
Wake us
as far as you can wake us.
May we be like you, heart-father,
every one of us.
May we never ask
whose child is our child.
May we who think
that nothing ever holds us—
may we wake at last
and see, past any reasons,
that with no ways left
to wake
or break
or change us,
God breathed deep
and closed his eyes of honey—
brackish, Nazareth honey—
and laid his infant body in our hands.

– Joseph Fasano

They sat far apart
deliberately, to experience, daily,
the sweetness of seeing each other across
great distance.
– Louise Glück

The older I get, the fucker the no.
– The Mouthy Renegade

Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.
– Joan Didion

I would take a thread and a needle
and I’d interweave love
into our society.

– Jason Arday

​Standing firmly in your own identity and ancestry is what gives you authority. You don’t need to borrow someone else’s lineage or culture when your own ancestral soil holds deep roots waiting to be remembered.
– Darren Le Baron

Self-transformation is not just about changing yourself. It means shifting yourself to a completely new dimension of experience and perception.
– Jaggi Vasudev

Merely demonstrating an unmet need is not sufficient to say that it should be met—not when resources are scarce and have alternative uses.
– Thomas Sowell

A country, finally, erodes and the dust blows away, the people all die and none of them were of any importance permanently, except those who practiced the arts, and these now wish to cease their work because it is too lonely, too hard to do, and is not fashionable. A thousand years makes economics silly and a work of art endures forever.
– Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa

He who sings frightens away his ills.
– Miguel de Cervantes

When Carmen walked through the door, I had mistaken her for an interruption. There is a sense that real kindness is only possible when we are willing to stray from our course of purposeful trying to get the next thing done.
– Tara Brach (reading from Fr. Greg Boyle’s Tattoos on the Heart)

The summary of the advice
of all the prophets is this;
Find yourself a mirror.

– Shams of Tabriz

Once you begin to acknowledge random acts of kindness – both the ones you have received and the ones you have given – you can no longer believe that what you do does not matter.
– Dawna Markova

Ultimately, to step into the larger, we have to go through our fears. I have to emphasize go through. There is no magic, no set of five steps to dissolve the obstacles, no pill, no narcotic to make it all possible. There is only the going through.
– James Hollis

One has good reason to award the earth
The dog-like dumb devotion of the eyes;
Death, love, dishonor are predicted there,
Her arbitrary movements are the truth:

– W. H. Auden, Kairos and Logos

Would it be too childish of me to say: I want? But I do want: theater, light, color, paintings, wine and wonder.
– Sylvia Plath

The true legacy of any pioneer is not the books they wrote or the speeches they gave, but the people they inspired to carry the work forward. True leadership creates more leaders, not more followers.
– Darren Le Baron

Let it offend you that someone else could be handed your days and they make something greater with them.
– Lucius Annaeus Seneca

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.
– Lady Ada Lovelace

​I always remind people that you don’t have to fly to the Amazon or cross the ocean to find sacred ground. The soil beneath your feet in the UK, Europe, or wherever you live holds ancient roots and fungal intelligence.
– Darren Le Baron

If soulmates do exist, they’re not found, they’re made. People meet, they get a good feeling, and they get to work building a relationship.
– The Good Place

Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground, and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow. People are like that, too. They start over. They find a way.
– Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

The reason ancient cultures preserved their botanical knowledge through oral traditions and myth was to keep it living and adaptable. When wisdom is held by living elders rather than static texts, it evolves naturally alongside the changing needs of the community.
– Darren Le Baron

There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham.
– Jojo Moyes

I hope you love birds too, it is economical. It saves going to heaven.
– Emily Dickinson to Eugenia Hall

After you: this polite formula should be the most beautiful definition of our civilization.
– Milan Kundera

Quantum physicists don’t need mysticism, and mystics don’t need quantum physics. But the world needs both.
– Dr. Fritjof Capra

I have found the path to the placeless world; it begins right where you are.
– Hafiz

Man is helpless when he lacks knowledge; helplessness due to ignorance is the fertilizer of dictatorship.
– Wilhelm Reich

The wisdom held by our elders is an irreplaceable archive of experience. In a world obsessed with the newest digital trends, we lose our footing when we ignore the practical insights of those who have already navigated the storms of life.
– Darren Le Baron

You know, you spend your whole life feeling like you don’t quite fit in anywhere. And then you walk into a room one day, whether it’s at university or an office or some kind of club, and you just go, ‘Ah. There they are.’ And suddenly you feel at home.
– Jojo Moyes

A person who understands human nature stops expecting everyone to act from goodwill and starts paying attention to incentives.
– The Laws of Human Nature

A fool is known by his speech, and wise man by his silence.
– Pythagoras

People do not decide to become extraordinary. They decide to accomplish extraordinary things.
– Sir Edmund Hilary

People get nervous when they hear the word ‘colonization,’ but the first true colonizers on Earth were the mushrooms. They colonized the barren rock, created soil, and laid down the foundation for all living species without destroying the planet.
– Darren Le Baron

Don’t let your ego get too close to your position, so that if your position gets shot down, your ego doesn’t go with it.
– Colin Powell

A lot of our predicament is that in meditation or prayer we go into these incredibly high spaces where everybody is a brother and sister and we’re all living light—and then you walk out and say, ‘Who took my hat?’
– Ram Dass

​If you approach these compounds with arrogance or disrespect, the experience will humble you very quickly. Humility is the price of admission to deeper knowledge.
– Darren Le Baron

Sometimes, the greatest victory lies not in destroying those who hurt us, but in giving them the opportunity to become better people.
– unknown

​Our sun gets its light from a sun beyond the sun—the Sirius star system, as my elders taught. Mushrooms absorb that cosmic light-code information, store it as data, and hand it to you like a hardware plug-in.
– Darren Le Baron

Fellow-wanderer,
Could we but mix ourselves into a dream,
Not in its image on the mirror!

– W.B. Yeats

​Raymond Carver wrote: ‘No other word will do for that’s what it was: gravy. These past ten years alive, sober, working, loving, and being loved by a good woman. Don’t weep for me, I’m a lucky man. I’ve had ten years longer than anyone expected—pure gravy, and don’t forget it.’
– Tara Brach

I think the more you write, the less inclined you will be to rely on theories like determinism. Mystery isn’t something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge.
– Flannery O’Connor

If someone wanted to be with you, after all, they just made it happen.
– Jojo Moyes

When you look at the natural world, there are no shortcuts to maturity. Every living organism must pass through distinct phases of growth, friction, and integration to build the structural integrity needed to bear fruit.
– Darren Le Baron

​Our job is not just to heal ourselves, but to clear the path so that the next generation doesn’t have to carry the heavy emotional baggage we inherited.
– Darren Le Baron

Pride is a wonderful terrible thing, a seed that bears two vines: life and death.
– James Hurst

Love can either be the biggest trap there is or the greatest liberator. It depends on if you have liberated, freed the love from your personal self.
– Michael Singer

You can’t build clouds. And that’s why the future we imagine never becomes real.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

​Mushrooms are the creators, the sustainers, and the destroyers—Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva.
– Darren Le Baron

In order for capitalism to survive, it must have someone to exploit. That is why it creates racism, why it creates poverty, why it creates war.
– Kwame Ture

​When you look at the cycle of the mushroom, it grows out of decaying matter and transforms it into life. That is a profound lesson for human transformation. No matter how much hardship, decay, or trauma you have experienced in your life, you possess the capacity to turn that raw material into wisdom and growth.
– Darren Le Baron

Meher Baba said: ‘Love springs spontaneously from within. It is not dependent upon anything or anyone. It is whole within itself.’
– Michael Singer

I like bands more than solo acts. I like team sports more than individual sports. In success you have somebody to high-five along the way, and failure is a little bit easier when there’s somebody in the foxhole with you.
– Aaron Sorkin

If in a hurry, take the roundabout path.
– Japanese proverb

It requires more philosophy than I possess, to bear this injustice with patience.
– Mary Shelley

​The Great Mother is the mycelium network underneath our feet. She is the living web working silently in the dark, and the mushroom that pops up above the ground is simply her child—the fruiting body sent out to communicate with us.
– Darren Le Baron

The man who acquires the ability to take full possession of his own mind may take possession of anything else to which he is justly entitled.
– Andrew Carnegie

She was always tired, these days. She put on one of those smiles that wasn’t really a smile at all, and they went on.
– Jojo Moyes

Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you still had your mother or father at your back, you’d be okay. Some deep-rooted part of you would know you were loved. That you deserved to be loved.
– Jojo Moyes

Faith would be a false, illusory, hypocritical self–invention, which never justifies, were it not accompanied by love and hope.
– Bonhoeffer

​Alice Walker said it best: ‘I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.’ We are designed by evolution to notice, take pleasure in, and appreciate the beauty around us.
– Tara Brach

​Every culture that maintained a healthy relationship with the earth understood that you cannot take from nature without offering something in return. Whether it was a physical offering of tobacco, cornmeal, or water, or simply an offering of gratitude and respectful harvesting practices, reciprocity was the law. When modern society abandoned reciprocity and shifted purely to exploitation, we broke the natural contract that keeps the planet in balance.
– Darren Le Baron

You are not expected to complete the work.
Nor are you allowed to desist.

– Rabbi Tarfon

Using our tax dollars to benefit the people who actually pay them is not communism.

I’m tired of hearing that word thrown around every time someone suggests our government should actually work for its citizens.

We already pay the taxes. Every paycheck. Every purchase. Every gallon of gas. Every property bill. The money is collected whether we like it or not. So why is it controversial to ask that it comes back to us in ways that make our lives better?

Nobody calls it communism when our taxes fund the military.

Nobody calls it communism when firefighters save a neighborhood from burning down.

Nobody calls it communism when the police respond to a 911 call, when the interstate gets repaved, when airports are maintained, when food inspectors keep contaminated products off store shelves, or when the National Weather Service warns us about an approaching hurricane.

Those are all taxpayer-funded services. Most people recognize them as basic responsibilities of government.

But the second someone says we should have better schools, affordable health care, clean drinking water, functioning infrastructure, or programs that help veterans, seniors, children, or people facing hard times, suddenly the conversation turns into, “That’s communism.”

No. It’s not.

Communism is an economic and political system based on collective ownership of the means of production and the elimination of private ownership in its traditional form. The United States is a capitalist country. Businesses are privately owned. People buy and sell property. Markets determine prices. None of that changes because taxpayers expect public services in return for the taxes they already pay.

You don’t have to support every government program. Reasonable people can disagree about how much government should do, how much taxes should be, and where money should be spent. That’s a healthy debate.

What isn’t healthy is using one emotionally charged word to shut down every conversation before it even starts.

Here’s the real question:

If we can spend billions on projects, subsidies, contracts, and interests that don’t directly improve everyday Americans’ lives, why is it suddenly “too expensive” or “socialist” when people ask for better schools, safer roads, reliable infrastructure, affordable health care, or support for veterans and seniors?

Our taxes shouldn’t disappear into a black hole while communities crumble.

They shouldn’t leave us driving over potholes, wondering if our drinking water is safe, watching teachers buy classroom supplies with their own money, or choosing between paying rent and seeing a doctor.

Demanding accountability isn’t radical.

Expecting value for the money we’re legally required to pay isn’t radical.

Wanting our government to invest in the people who fund it isn’t radical.

It’s common sense.

Stop letting people convince you that expecting a return on your own tax dollars is somehow un-American.

A government funded by the people should never forget who it’s supposed to serve.

– Equality Trading Post

If one is not aware, then one becomes shoddy, middle-class, mediocre.

The root meaning of that word mediocre is “going halfway up the hill,” going halfway up the mountain, never reaching the top of it. That’s mediocrity.

That is, never demanding of ourselves excellence, never demanding of ourselves total goodness or complete freedom—not freedom to do what we like, that is not freedom, that is triviality, but to be free from all pain of anxieties, loneliness, despair, and all the rest of it.

– Jiddu Krishnamurti

mountain creek
cold water over
smooth rocks

– Basho

We can make the world better by coming together. By coming together, the world is better.
– Ryan Holiday

Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night.

Primitive folk, gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night; they fear, rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power; we of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself.

With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it.

Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars?

– Henry Beston

In the third third of life, you may become just as miserable and prickly as ever, but you cycle through more quickly. You remember other dark nights of the soul and how by dawn they always broke.
– Anne Lamott

Will the multiplication of things bring creative happiness? Will worldly possessions free thought and feeling from bondage and pain?
– Krishnamurti

I can not feel her voice I am too far away skiing in Austria.
– Frank Lima

It’s never as bad as you think it is or as good as you think it is.

(Lessons from personal finance that apply to life overall and vice versa.)

– Kenneth Folk

Many persons have inquired: Where is the goal of mankind? […] Past thinking and methods did not prevent world wars. Future thinking must prevent wars. […] A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.
– Albert Einstein

Practice the pause. Pause before judging. Pause before assuming. Pause before accusing. Pause whenever you’re about to react harshly and you’ll avoid doing and saying things you’ll later regret.
– Lori Deschene

If you ask me, something sinister lurks in men who avoid wine, games, the company of lovely women, and dinnertime conversation. Such people are either gravely ill or secretly detest everyone around them.
– Mikhail Bulgakov

The internal machinery of life, the chemistry of the parts, is something beautiful. And it turns out that all life is interconnected with all other life.
– Prof. Feynman

Nothing and no one owns you. No one is watching; no one is keeping score. Let go of whatever has its grip on you: concerns, hopes, fears.
– Charlotte Rotterdam

It seems we are at the point of societal decline where everybody is just extracting as much value as they can before the whole thing collapses. Would love to be proven wrong.
– Noah Ryan

Everything is in decline, and always has been…One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.
– Emil Cioran

No one works better out of anguish at all; that’s an incredible literary conceit.
– James Baldwin

Again and again, the natural world reminds me that I belong to something larger than my own thoughts.
– Daniel H. Shapiro

this chaos of letters I have collected.
– Edvard Munch

It’s funny how, in a world where so many people want more, you start wanting less. Less noise, less stress, less comparison and less proving. More authenticity.
– @tinybuddha

To most of us, the whole business of falling in love is totally absorbing, nothing else matters.
– Nadine Gordimer

I too often feel like a person I know nothing about.
– John Ashbery

On your spiritual journey you will have dug deep, blazed a new path, spent years in the fire of self mastery, swam to the edge of your own consciousness, and stretched the comfort zone of humanity. And no one will really understand what that means but you.
– Nika Solé

Misery loves company. But so does authenticity. So does divine power. So do elevation, confirmation, and reclamation. You decide the company you keep and the company you keep will help you decide what’s called forward in your life.
– Nika Solé

AIs lack credibility the same way nerds lack credibility; they can say all the smart things better than you, but don’t have the down-in-the-dirt embodiment to earn your trust.
– Kenneth Folk

Character is characters; our nature is a plural complexity, a multiphasic polysemous weave, a bundle, a tangle, a sleeve. That’s why we need a long old age: to ravel out the snarls and set things straight.
– James Hillman

I never decided I wanted to be a writer. I simply woke up a writer one morning.
– Shelby Foote

Most of us treat our birth as the opening line of our story, when really it’s the middle of a much longer sentence.
– Christopher Rivas

The nervous system is in touch with far more information than the mind. That’s why regulating it and listening to it will change your whole life.
– Nika Solé

What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal.
– Albert Pike

Before one can deepen as a person, one must visit the deeps within. We cannot ascend without first descending.
– James Hollis

In a world where speaking ill of others is a sort of accepted sport, we can fail to see the great cost of this violation.
– Adyashanti

We need, above all things, to slow down and get ourselves to amble through life instead of to rush through it.
– Alan Watts

Five minutes after birth, they decide your name, religion, nationality, and sect.
And you spend the rest of your life defending what you did not choose.
– Arthur Schopenhauer

We are accountable to each other because we know we can hurt each other. This is the very essence of the social contract. You cannot hurt an AI, so there is no social contract. The AI can hurt you, but you cannot hurt the AI.
– Kenneth Folk

Life will not, it will never, make sense to your mind. The secret is to see life from the soul’s perspective; to add to the mind’s experience the soul’s wisdom, awareness, and total knowing.
– Neale Donald Walsch

lost in a shuffle
of second-hand music books . . .
thrush answering thrush

– Chen-ou Liu

AMERICAN SONNET FOR THE NEW YEAR

Things got terribly ugly incredibly quickly
Things got ugly embarrassingly quickly
actually Things got ugly unbelievably quickly
honestly Things got ugly seemingly infrequently
initially Things got ugly ironically usually
awfully carefully Things got ugly unsuccessfully
occasionally Things got ugly mostly painstakingly
quietly seemingly Things got ugly beautifully
infrequently Things got ugly sadly especially
frequently unfortunately Things got ugly
increasingly obviously Things got ugly suddenly
embarrassingly forcefully Things got really ugly
regularly truly quickly Things got really incredibly
ugly Things will get less ugly inevitably hopefully

– Terrance Hayes

GENESIS

Oh, I said, this is going to be.
And it was.
Oh, I said, this will never happen.
But it did.
And a purple fog descended upon the land.
The roots of trees curled up.
The world was divided into two countries.
Every photograph taken in the first was of people.
Every photograph taken in the second showed none.
All of the girl children were named And.
All of the boy children named Then.

– Mary Ruefle

Into the void of silence, into the empty space of nothing, the joy of life is unfurled.
– C. S. Lewis

There is nothing to fear in the act of beginning. More often than not it knows the journey ahead better than we ever could. Perhaps the art of harvesting the secret riches of our lives is best achieved when we place profound trust in the act of beginning. Risk might be our greatest ally. To live a truly creative life, we always need to cast a critical look at where we presently are, attempting always to discern where we have become stagnant and where new beginning might be ripening. There can be no growth if we do not remain open and vulnerable to what is new and different. I have never seen anyone take a risk for growth that was not rewarded a thousand times over.
– John O’Donohue

If the goal is the sole point of orientation, then the spatial interval to be crossed before reaching it is simply an obstacle to be overcome as quickly as possible. Pure orientation towards the goal deprives the in-between space of all meaning, emptying it to become a corridor without any value of its own. Acceleration is the attempt to make the temporal interval that is needed for bridging the spatial interval disappear altogether. The rich meaning of the path disappears. Acceleration leads to a semantic impoverishment of the world. Space and time no longer mean very much.
– Byung-chul Han

I have no patience
for people who can watch
the world burn and
never wonder:

How do I become rain?

– john roedel

THE BLUE

You can have Egypt and Nantucket.
The only place I want to visit is The Blue,
not the Wild Blue Yonder that seduces pilots,
but that zone where the unexpected dwells,
waiting to come out of it in the shape of bolts.

I want to walk its azure perimeter
where the unanticipated is coiled, on the mark,
ready to spring into the predictable homes of earth.

I want to stroll through the pale indigo light
examining all the accidents about to rocket into time,
all the forgotten names about to fly from tongues.

I will scrutinize all the surprises of the future
and watch the brainstorms gathering darkly,
ready to hit the heads of inventors
laboring in their crackpot shacks.

A jaded traveler with an invisible passport,
I am at home with this heaven of the unforeseen,
waiting for the next whoosh of sudden departure
when, with no advance warning, to tiny augery,
the unpredictable plummets into our lives
from somewhere that looks like sky.

– Billy Collins

Eclipse of the light of heaven, eclipse of God – such indeed is the character of the historic hour through which the world is now passing.
– Martin Buber

There is no logical, rational, pre-structured criterion “out there” with a divine plan. There is no truth “out there” which our weak minds or souls eventually run across. There is this casual, haphazard, amoral process that leaps the logical gaps and brings about newness. And the procedurés only demand is that given talents be invested, risked, doubled, the possibilities explored.
– Joseph Chilton Pearce

The world is not a place but the vastness of the soul. And the soul is nothing more than love, limitless, all that moves us toward knowing what is true. I once thought love was supposed to be nothing but bliss. I now know it is also worry and grief, hope and trust. … If people we love die, then they are lost only to our ordinary senses. If we remember, we can find them anytime with our hundred secret senses.
– Amy Tan

Where in the world did you get the idea that the Lord wants the truth from us? It is a strange, a most original, idea of yours, My Lord [Cardinal]. Why, he knows it already, and may even have found it a little bit dull. Truth is for tailors and shoemakers, My Lord. I, on the contrary, have always held that the Lord has a penchant for masquerades. Do you not yourself tell us, my lords spiritual, that our trials are really blessings in disguise? And so they are. I, too, have found them to be so, at midnight, at the hour when the mask falls. But at the same time nobody can deny that they have been dressed up by the hand of an unrivaled expert. The Lord himself—with your permission—seems to me to have been masquerading pretty freely at the time when he took on flesh and dwelt amongst us.
– Isak Dinesen

Nobody can judge an internal injury by the size of the superficial wound.
– Salman Rushdie

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

THE UNIVERSE PROCEEDS out of what it has been and into what it will be, inexorably, unstoppably, at the rate of one second per second, one year per year, forever. At right angles to its forward progress lie the past and the future. The future, that is to say, does not lie “ahead” of the present in the stream of time, but at a right angle to it: the future of any present moment can be projected as far as you like outward from it, infinitely in fact, but when the universe has proceeded further, and a new present moment has succeeded this one, the future of this one retreats with it into the what-has-been, forever outdated. It is similar but more complicated with the past.
– John Crowley

He caught a glimpse of that extraordinary faculty in man, that strange, altruistic, rare, and obstinate decency which will make writers or scientists maintain their truths at the risk of death. Eppur si muove, Galileo was to say; it moves all the same. They were to be in a position to burn him if he would go on with it, with his preposterous nonsense about the earth moving round the sun, but he was to continue with the sublime assertion because there was something which he valued more than himself. The Truth. To recognize and to acknowledge What Is.

That was the thing which man could do, which his English could do, his beloved, his sleeping, his now defenceless English. They might be stupid, ferocious, unpolitical, almost hopeless. But here and there, oh so seldome, oh so rare, oh so glorious, there were those all the same who would face the rack, the executioner, and even utter extinction, in the cause of something greater than themselves. Truth, that strange thing, the jest of Pilate’s.

Many stupid young men had thought they were dying for it, and many would continue to die for it, perhaps for a thousand years. They did not have to be right about their truth, as Galileo was to be. It was enough that they, the few and martyred, should establish a greatness, a thing above the sum of all they ignorantly had.

– T.H. White

But whenever I take to my restless dreamless dewdrenched bed
I cannot close my eyes – fear stands over me instead of sleep.
And whenever I think to sing or hum a tune to stay awake
then my tears fall.
This house is in trouble.
The good days are gone.
How I pray for a change! A happy change! A light in darkness.

– Anne Carson

I am an obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong. I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art, where others voyage or fight; and from time to time I’ll entertain myself by diving for those green and yellow shells that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for myself and cover the walls of my hut with them.
– Gustave Flaubert

Gorge after gorge, turning, turning. Caverns of sunset, falling, falling away—just a single vast gold air breathed out by beings—they must have been marvelous beings, those gold-breathers. Down. Purple-and-green islands. Cleft and groined and gigantically pocked like something left behind after all the oceans vanished one huge night: the mountains. Their hills fold and fold again, fold away, down. Folded into the dens and rocks of the hills are ghost towns. Broken streets end in them, like a sound, nowhere. Shadow is inside. We walk (oh quietly) even so—breaking lines of force, someone’s. Houses stand in their stones. Each house an empty socket. Some streaked with red inside. Words once went on in there—no. I don’t believe that. Words never went on in there.
– Anne Carson

That is the first thing I know for sure: (1.) If the questions don’t make sense, neither will the answers.
– Kurt Vonnegut

The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.
– James Baldwin

With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.
– James Baldwin

Wachtel: Maybe I’m being too literal- minded when I think of dismantling because when I think of taking the poem apart word by word-

Carson: Yes it is a mantle, the confidence that you can ever know what words mean because really we don’t. They’re just these signs that we pretend to nail down in dictionaries, tokens of usage, but frankly they’re all wild integers. Disassembling it is a way of exposing that myth at the bottom of language.

Wachtel: Is that the myth you’re referring to?

Carson: The myth that you can know it ever definitively. Use it, yes. Make sense, yes. But know it, I’m not sure.

There are no watertight compartments in our inmost nature.
– Alexis Carrel

Waiting

There are no calls from the outside.
Miracles are the perversity of literature.
We should know that by now.
Only that these never revealed connections of things
lead us oddly on. Caesar’s legions
entering Greenland ice, the scout far in front
wanting to do battle where there are
no enemies,
never were any enemies.

– Jim Harrison

I moved my chair into sun
I sat in the sun
the way hunger is moved when called fasting.

– jane hirshfield

Of what secret lights are we made?
Of what densities?

– Hélène Cixous

To life, to love
To our nights, to our days
To the eternal return of luck
– Alina Stefanescu

If you’re a stranger to your own wound, then you’re gonna be tempted to despise the wounded.
– Father Gregory Boyle

The difference between humans and animals is that animals never allow a fool to lead the pack.
– Winston Churchill

Collective Diseases of the Mind

As a psychologist I am deeply interested in mental disturbances, particularly when they infect whole nations. I want to emphasize that I despise politics wholeheartedly: thus I am neither a Bolshevik, nor a National Socialist, nor an Anti-Semite. I am a neutral Swiss and even in my own country I am uninterested in politics, because I am convinced that 99 per cent of politics are mere symptoms and anything but a cure for social evils. About 50 per cent of politics is definitely obnoxious inasmuch as it poisons the utterly incompetent mind of the masses. We are on guard against contagious diseases of the body, but we are exasperatingly careless when it comes to the even more dangerous collective diseases of the mind.

– Carl Jung

Mass Psychosis

It is becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes.

– Carl Jung

Emancipation

It is not for nothing that our age cries out for the redeemer personality, for the one who can emancipate himself from the grip of the collective [psychosis] and save at least his own soul, who lights a beacon of hope for others, proclaiming that here is at least one man who has succeeded in extricating himself from the fatal identity with the group psyche.

– Carl Jung

Growing up means growing out of the emotional reactive patterns that were laid down in childhood. I should mention that an important part of this work is learning how to hold our emotions and reactivity in a space of kindness and understanding.

Beyond growing up, there’s a greater possibility as well—waking up. A loving relationship can also help us plug into our deeper nature, the absolute radiance in our heart, so that we begin to connect with another person from this more inclusive, more genuinely loving part of ourselves. This means waking up to who we really are—that fundamental openness and warmth of the sun. It means learning to live more and more from that place, even when new clouds arise, as they will.

– John Welwood

Everything Trump touches seems to wither and dies because he understands nothing as a trust. To him, everything is property: the White House, the Justice Department, the armed forces, the presidency, the National Mall, the truth and eventually the country itself. If something can be branded, he brands it. If it can be sold, he sells it. If it resists him, he attacks it. If it dies beneath the weight of his excess, he blames vandals. He has spent his public life breaking things and demanding applause for the cleanup. He is the arsonist pointing at the smoke, the burglar complaining about the broken window and the vandal standing in the dead grass insisting that somebody else must have stepped there.
– Michael Jochum

Earlier this week I read a line that stood out to me, “Your goal in life should be to reduce the amount of time it takes you to get out of a bad state”

The ability to bounce back quickly is a key skill in life.

My wife once told me, “When you’re five, you can be mad for a day. When you’re ten, you can be mad for an hour. By the time you’re thirty, you get ten minutes-and then you have to move on.”

Life is full of moments of frustration and disappointment. Growth and maturity is learning to pull yourself out of a bad state faster.

– James Clear

It seems to me that the great pleasure of human life is not in having an opinion, but rather in learning all the ways you are wrong, and all the nuances you failed to account for, and all the truths that turned out to be not as simple as you once believed. And it seems to me that one of the central pleasures of attending school is that you get to read with really well-informed people who can help welcome you into a complex world stuffed with rich and maddening ambiguity.
– John Green

I have shut my balcony
because I do not want to hear the weeping,
but from behind the grey walls
nothing else is heard but the weeping.

There are very few angels that sing,
there are very few dogs that bark,
a thousand violins fit into the palm of my hand.

But the weeping is an immense dog,
the weeping is an immense angel,
the weeping is an immense violin,
the tears muzzle the wind,
nothing else is heard but the weeping.

– Federico García Lorca

Embrace the ugliness that’s hard to put on the page. Step away from the safety of your favorite writing space, stop thinking, and focus on the concrete details.
– Beth Mead

I reckon that being good is about the easiest thing in the world for a lazy man.
– William Faulkner

People don’t like love. They like that flittery flirty feeling. They don’t love love. Love is sacrificial. Love is ferocious. It’s not emotive. Our culture doesn’t love love. It loves the idea of love. It wants the emotion without paying anything for it. It’s ridiculous.
– Matt Chandler

It is only the vain that pretend to be humble.
– Krishnamurti

the long heat
broken by
one cool wind

– @BashoSociety

Paul McCartney was one of the most competitive people I’ve ever met. Lennon wasn’t. He just thought everyone else was shit.
– Ray Davies

the ocean at dawn
the white waves
already shining

– Basho

If change, if being of service was easy, everyone would do it. If problems solved themselves, there wouldn’t be problems. The world would be fair and wonderful and the right people would always be in charge.

Until then we have to be smart and capable and competent.

– Ryan Holiday

Knowing who you are and standing on that, is freedom. It’s the reward for the work that no one sees but you.
– Nika Solé

For those of us who are sincere and disciplined yet struggle to see our own buddha-nature due to samsaric illusions or who practice inconsistently or only during holidays, there remains the assurance that even small efforts will ultimately lead to buddhahood.
– An Tran

Healing is a constant practice, not the conclusion of a problem.
– Michael Meade

Hold up my goings in thy paths, that my footsteps slip not.
– Psalm 17:5

Almost. It’s a big word for me. I feel it everywhere. Almost home. Almost happy. Almost changed. Almost, but not quite. Not yet. Soon, maybe.
– Joan Bauer

I’ve always felt that naming was artificial.
– Lydia Davis

Let your heart go out in spontaneous and immeasurable compassion. It is compassion that is the best protection; it is also, as the great masters of the past have always known, the source of all healing.
– Sogyal Rinpoche

The centuries have grown heavy and weigh upon the moment. We are more corrupt than all the ages, more decomposed than all the empires. Our exhaustion interprets history, our breathlessness makes us hear the death rattle of nations…the curtain of the universe is moth-eaten, and through its holes we see nothing, now, but masks and ghosts…
– Emil Cioran

All I’m saying is that if you think your religion or spiritual belief system is the only right way to God, you have been bamboozled and frankly have gravely underestimated the infinite nature of the divine.
– Nika Solé

The unlimited individual freedom that neoliberalism offers us is nothing more than an illusion. We no longer live in a disciplinary society, where everything is regulated through prohibitions and mandates, but in a society of performance.

One imagines that one is free, but in reality, what one does is exploit oneself voluntarily and with enthusiasm, until collapsing. That is a mirage of freedom. Self-exploitation is much more effective than being exploited by others, because it arouses that deceptive sensation of freedom.

– Byung-Chul Han

Very ugly emotions perhaps make a poem.
– Robert Lowell

A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person.
– Mary Karr

Methods limit you as soon as you recognize them.
– Joy Williams

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

You know you’ve found alignment when your reality is actively reciprocating you.
– Nika Solé

The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
– Chris McCandless

Being a beggar is no disgrace, but buying or selling shares of the Suez Canal Company is.
– Pierre Auguste Renoir

There is no single, simple, static ‘women’s point of view.’
– Margaret Atwood

We have been educated to such a fine—or dull—point that we are incapable of enjoying something new, something different, until we are first told what it’s all about. We don’t trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation. In short, the blind lead the blind. It’s the democratic way.
– Henry Miller

To be a poet, to me, means being experimental and liberatory with language, pushing words to their farthest potential through the power of imagination,
– Alison C. Rollins

breaking waves …
the foam line between
before and after

– Chen-ou Liu

Anger blocks a miracle. Defensiveness blocks a miracle. Resentment blocks a miracle. Judgment blocks a miracle. But love, love produces miracles.
– Marianne Williamson

The war of ideas is a Greek invention. It is one of the most important inventions ever made. Indeed, the possibility of fighting with words instead of fighting with swords is the very basis of our civilization, and especially of all its legal and parliamentary institutions.
– Karl Popper

Antimatter

On the other side of a mirror there’s an inverse world, where the insane go
sane; where bones climb out of the earth and recede to the first slime of love.

And in the evening the sun is just rising.

Lovers cry because they are a day younger, and soon childhood robs them
of their pleasure.

In such a world there is much sadness which, of course, is joy…

– Russell Edson

And when you get there,
don’t be so busy
looking for the next thing
that you forget
you got there.

– Blue Iris

I don’t know who
needs to hear this,
but what they’re
calling socialism is
just using our taxes
to pay for something
besides bombs.

– unknown

Being Irish means you re part of a small island that made a massive noise.
– Cillian Murphy

Mathematics is a logical method… Mathematical propositions express no thoughts. In life it is never a mathematical proposition which we need, but we use mathematical propositions only in order to infer from propositions which do not belong to mathematics to others which equally do not belong to mathematics.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

To act on behalf of the evolutionary process requires us to overcome our inertia and apathy, our selfishness, our tendency toward individualism, egoism, and self-indulgence. To be attached to a world in process means that we must constantly leave behind what has already been achieved in order to move ahead to what is yet to be accomplished.
– Ilia Delio

As in childhood we live sweeping close to the sky and now, what dawn is this.
– Anne Carson

Maybe happiness is like a virus. Maybe it’s one of those bugs that sits for a long time, so we don’t even know that we are infected.
– Richard Powers

Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you’re free. But a few measures more, and the cloak of time closes back around you.
– Richard Powers

Suddenly: the word most used by Dostoevsky. Somebody told me that. Some Dostoevsky expert. Suddenly. As though any kind of action could be drawn into words: Suddenly music. Suddenly turning. Suddenly silent. Suddenly. As though I never saw the process. Everyone in the old house is sick but me. Silence, except for the snoring, coughing, and occasional trips to the bathroom. Snow everywhere through the windows. You can’t look out without seeing it. Suddenly winter. Frozen rivers. Bitter cold. Barren trees. Small silver plane etched out against a chalk, still sky. Suddenly, completely alone.
– Sam Shepard

Steer your way past the ruins of the altar and the mall
Steer your way through the fables of creation and the fall
Steer your way past the palaces that rise above the rot
Year by year, month by month, day by day
Thought by thought
They whisper still, the ancient stones
The blunted mountains weep
As he died to make men holy
Let us die to make things cheap
And say the mea culpa, which you probably forgot
Year by year, month by month, day by day
Thought by thought

– Leonard Cohen

The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.
– Jean Luc Godard

If greed were not the master of modern man–ably assisted by envy–how could it be that the frenzy of economism does not abate as higher “standards of living” are attained, and that it is precisely the richest societies which pursue their economic advantage with the greatest ruthlessness? How could we explain the almost universal refusal on the part of the rulers of the rich societies–where organized along private enterprise or collective enterprise lines–to work towards the humanization of work? It is only necessary to assert that something would reduce the “standard of living” and every debate is instantly closed. That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of of “bread and circuses” can compensate for the damage done–these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence–because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity.
– E.F. Schumacher

My life is quiet. There is little beside working and walking. I have no desire to see people, and I feel as though I am waiting for something new and strange which will burn the unburnt side of my soul.
– Kahlil Gibran

The first revolution is when you change your mind.
– Gil Scott-Heron

You’re writing with your hands, not with your brain, as Beckett said. He was completely right… I started as a musician, and I stopped playing. I turned to writing and writing is comparable to playing music for me. When doing that, you don’t think first, you’re improvising… You just do it. Martin Heidegger, he said that art happens. It’s like that for me. It just happens. When writing a novel or a play or whatever, at a certain point I get this feeling that it’s already written, not inside me, but out there somewhere. My job is to write down what is already written before it disappears.
– Jon Fosse

Let us never forget that the National Park Service is based upon a legislative act and is not securely incorporated in the Constitution of the United States. Hence, it is vulnerable to erosion and destruction by legislative action. Such action may be sudden and catastrophic, as in the event of some national emergency, or it might appear as a slow but tragic attrition induced by overpopulation, economic pressures and public apathy. Obviously, eternal vigilance must therefore be the essential attitude of all our people.
– Ansel Adams

Uncommon advice: If you don’t know what to pursue in life right now. Pursue yourself. Pursue becoming the healthiest, happiest, most healed, most present, most confident version of yourself. Then the right path will reveal itself.
– unknown

Van Gogh’s Last Letter to Theo

I am going alone into the fields now.
I tried to make my life
its own faith, an ochre road
between the elms in autumn.
I found the moon, one April,
like a changeling,
yellow petals in her slender arms.
I spent my silent childhood
on my knees.

No more. No more wounds now.

My brother, I love you
as the earth does, wild
and cold and inconsolable.
I leave you
these few paints
and your changes.
And this little gift, this one thing
I have fathomed:
There is only
one way
to be as vast as God:
Make your world no matter who
believes.

– Joseph Fasano

If you actually look, if you take your whole being apart and examine it, you find that you are genuine and good as you are.
– Chögyam Trungpa

I was beginning to realize that you must come slowly to a place, wait a little before feverishly resorting to guidebooks . . . Place has a mighty tongue of its own.
– J. Lash, On Pilgrimage

I have known many people who keep going back to the same empty well, sharing their truths and waiting for a certain response to liberate them. Waste of time-some people will never hear us or own their actions. We have to fill our own wells, but first we have to empty them of what isn’t ours.
– Jeff Brown

In the Library
by Charles Simic

for Octavio

There’s a book called
“A Dictionary of Angels.”
No one has opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered

The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.

Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.
The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.

She’s very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does.