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
When the poor give to the rich, the devil laughs.
– Benvenuto Cellini
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.
To truly practice Zen therefore means not leaving lights burning when they are not needed, not allowing water to run unnecessarily from the faucet, not loading up your plate and leaving food uneaten. These unmindful acts reveal an indifference to the value of the object so wasted or destroyed as well as to the efforts of those who made these things possible for us…This indifference is the product of a mind that sees itself as separated…This indifference robs us of our birthright of harmony and joy.
– Roshi Philip Kapleau
But a democracy is bound in the end to be obscene, for it is composed of myriad disunited fragments, each fragment assuming to itself a false wholeness, a false individuality. Modern democracy is made up of millions of frictional parts all asserting their own wholeness.
– D.H. Lawrence
What matters to me even more than the shapeliness and the dance of language is what the poem discovers deeper down than gracefulness and pleasures in figures of speech. I respond most to what is found out about the heart and spirit, what we can hear through the language. Best of all, of course, is when the language and other means of poetry combine with the meaning
to make us experience what we understand.
– Linda Gregg
The chance to practice the dharma may not come again. This is why the preciousness of human birth is the first and most important point. We mustn’t waste this life and die with regrets.
– Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo
I certainly have not told my story yet, I know that, though I’ve revealed fragments.
– James Baldwin
I always have something else to do. Something else is always going on in my life, so when I’m in the company of someone self-centered or petty or spiritually corrupting for too long a period of time, I disappear.
– Toni Morrison
Reading the room, self awareness and not overplaying your part are key components of social intelligence.
– Nika Solé
Religion, it seems to me, has nothing whatsoever to do with any belief, with any priest, with any church or so-called sacred book. The state of the religious mind can be understood only when we begin to understand what beauty is; and the understanding of beauty must be approached through total aloneness.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
The feeling of emptiness is the most fundamental experience of human existence, and yet it is the one we most desperately seek to avoid.
– Lacan
The Only Bread We Have is Water
You ask your mother
why you have to eat water
that tastes like a cold wet sky
and she smiles and says
this is all the world
the men who want to kill us
will share with us.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
I’d spent a year building a version of ‘peace’ that was really just very sophisticated hiding. Yoga mats and unread texts. Meditation apps and voicemail boxes I let fill up. I wasn’t protecting my nervous system. I was protecting myself from the discomfort of showing up for something that scared me and calling it wellness instead of what it actually was.
– Dakota J. Dawson
If you want to know what’s really true about a person, tune into their energy.
– Nika Solé
If you try to convert someone, it will never be to effect his salvation but to make him suffer like yourself, to be sure he is exposed to the same ordeals and endures them with the same impatience…
You keep watch, you pray, you agonize—provided he does too, sighing, groaning, beset by the same tortures that are racking you. Intolerance is the work of ravaged souls whose faith comes down to a more or less deliberate torment they would like to see generalized, instituted.
We convert not to liberate but to enchain.
– Emil Cioran
When we have a problem, we instinctively resist trying the way out that leads through obscurity and darkness. But in order to penetrate the darkness we must summon all the powers of enlightenment that consciousness can offer.
– Daryl Sharp
You don’t have to be just one thing in this lifetime. Be the accountant who becomes a DJ. The lawyer who opens a flower shop. The engineer who writes a novel.
– Saxon Kent
my poor eyes
cannot overlook
the wild thistle
– Basho
Where Dust Never Collects
by William Bortz
when I say love, I mean
I wait at the door for
you to arrive; I mean
the walls of my chest
are decorated with your
pictures; I mean it’s
safe here
To me, the Bible had gone dead because it was cut and dried: its noise was a fixed noise, its meaning a fixed meaning. And not only was it dead, it was antipathetic.
Arriving at manhood, one felt that the Bible had been bullied into one, and by second-rate minds at that. Its whole meaning was second-rate, because it had been expounded by these second-rate orthodox people, parsons and teachers, who would not and perhaps could not extract anything from the book but a sort of glorified grocery-shop morality and book-keeping.
– DH Lawrence
…you will go home and then you will find that home is not home anymore. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home.
– James Baldwin
To be a woman is something so strange, so confusing and so complicated that only a woman could put up with it.
– Søren Kierkegaard
So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them.
– Sylvia Plath
Numbers can be altered. Looks can be changed. Styles can be copied. But energy remains the same.
– Nika Solé
I realize that if I were stable, prudent and static; I’d live in death. Therefore I accept confusion, uncertainty, fear and emotional ups and downs; because that’s the price I’m willing to pay for a fluid, perplexed and exciting life.
– Carl Rogers
Everybody wants to save the Earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.
– P.J. O’Rourke
Psychoanalysis is, in essence, a cure through love.
– Freud
Man has to cope with the problem of suffering. The Oriental wants to get rid of suffering by casting it off. Western man tries to suppress suffering with drugs. But suffering has to be overcome, and the only way to overcome it is to endure it.
– Carl Jung
Extraordinary claims don’t require extraordinary evidence. All claims require the same amount of evidence.
– Kenneth Folk
As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people… On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be
adorned by a downright moron.
– H.L. Mencken
This human herd all started out as potential geniuses, before the tacit conspiracy of social conformity blighted their brains. All of them can redeem that lost freedom if they work at it hard enough.
– Robert Anton Wilson
late summer
the wind changes
and something inside agrees
– Basho Society
We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another that will be eternal.
– Anatole France
I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with ‘you’ in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.
– Christopher Hitchens
Emperor Wu asks:
“What is the highest meaning of the holy truths?”
Bodhidharma replies:
“Vast emptiness, nothing sacred.”
Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it means one always has some battle to wage against oneself.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau
When you stop searching and you calm down and you put your books away, and you confront yourself and see what you are all about, that will bring about bliss faster than anything you can ever imagine or ever do.
– Robert Adams
Memoirs, rock ‘n’ roll or otherwise, are about transformation, what the narrator learns about himself and his world.
– Andrea A Firth
I’m scared
I’m scared of myself …
at daybreak
piece by piece I try
to put myself together
– Chen-ou Liu
In a word, man must create his own essence; it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines himself.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
stretched
the length of this sunset
Monday blues
– Kirsten Cliff Elliot
Perhaps the surest way to happiness and fulfillment in life is to thank and praise your Source for everything that happens to you. Then, even when a calamity arises, you can be assured that you’ll turn it into a blessing.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
In our society of fixed texts and printed words, it is the function of the poet to see the life value of the facts round about, and to deify them, as it were, to provide images that relate the everyday to the eternal.
– Joseph Campbell
Just as the state of your life is a reflection of your state of mind, so too is the state of the world a reflection of our collective state of mind.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.
– Evelyn Waugh
SOAKING UP THE SUN
Today there is the kind of sunshine old men love,
the kind of day when my grandfather would sit
on the south side of the wooden corncrib where
the sunlight warmed slowly all through the day
like a wood stove. One after another dry leaves
fell. No painful memories came. Everything was
lit by a halo of light. The cornstalks glinted bright
as pieces of glass. From the fields and cottonwood
came the damp smell of mushrooms, of
things going back to earth. I sat with my grand-
father then. Sheep came up to us as we sat there,
their oily wool so warm to my fingers, like a strange
and magic snow. My grandfather whittled sweet
smelling apple sticks just to get at the scent. His
thumb had a permanent groove in it where the
back of the knife blade rested. He let me listen to
the wind, the wild geese, the soft dialect of sheep,
while his own silence taught me every secret thing
he knew.
– Tom Kennan
Already one day has detached itself from all the rest up ahead.
It has my photograph in its soft pocket.
It wants to carry my breath into the past in its bag of wind.
I write poems to untie myself, to do penance and disappear
Through the upper right-hand corner of things, to say grace.
– Charles Wright
Most men have a woman in their heart and most women have a man in their heart. There are people that don’t. But most of us cherish some sort of dream of surrender.
– Leonard Cohen
My secret drug is death
I take it whenever I see you
And you don’t see me
– Leonard Cohen
Our suffering was not caused by our parents or grandparents. It was merely passed down. We are social animals. We grow through modeling. We teach what we have learned. We act as we have been acted upon. A person who is not loving has not experienced love. It is not his fault. Realizing this gives rise to forgiveness. And in Chan we vow that suffering will stop with us. We will not pass it down.
– Guo Jun, A Special Transmission
To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
– Douglas Adams
This is about Amerika, but make no mistake, my fellow-Brits, this is what fuhrage and his ilk have in mind for us too..
“Stalin, 1930s. Intellectuals were sent to gulags, and actual biology replaced with peasant intuition, because knowing things was suspicious. Mao’s Cultural Revolution, 1966: millions of professors and doctors sent to labor camps. Wearing glasses could get you killed because glasses signaled literacy. Khmer Rouge, 1975: anyone who could read, speak a second language, or had soft hands was executed on sight. A quarter of Cambodia’s population dead in four years because education itself was the enemy.
Franco, Pinochet, Perón, Erdogan, Modi, Orbán: every single one came for the schools first because authoritarianism can’t function when a critical mass of people can still spot propaganda.
So the analytical class has to be dismantled, and the fastest way is to make ignorance a virtue. Now look at the country you’re standing in. Universities defunded, professors called woke, teachers demonized, books banned, do your own research replacing peer review. This isn’t unprecedented. It’s the American chapter of a book we’ve read a dozen times. The only unknown is whether the people who kept their sight keep the record.
– Erika Jordan
I’d like to have money. And I’d like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that’s too adorable, I’d rather have money.
– Dorothy Parker
Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.
– Hannah Arendt
There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
– Milan Kundera
There is a certain death that occurs as part of the healing process, in the deepening of self-awareness, something that does not survive illumination. While it is tempting to spin out of the uncertainty and into rebirth, there is wisdom and a purity within the reorganization itself, which we cannot know if we abandon it prematurely.
The dissolution itself is initiation as it offers vision not available in the scramble to put things back together. An old part of ourselves that has accompanied us for so long, a fellow traveler is no longer permitted to continue the journey by our side. The crumbling of an old dream – my life and the way I was so sure it was going to turn out.
This prior soul-companion can be another person or it can be a member of the inner family – an image, a feeling, a lens through which we’d been seeing ourselves and others; a part of our world that has come to the end of its meaning, the end of its life.
– C. G. Jung
The path is unchartered. It comes into existence moment by moment and at the same time, drops away behind us. It’s like riding in a train sitting backwards. We cant see where we’re headed, only where we’ve been. This is a very encouraging teaching because it says that the source of wisdom is whatever is going to happen to us today. The source of wisdom is whatever is happening to us right at this very instant.
– Pema Chödrön
Instructions before visiting Earth
In the event that you wake up
and find your soul separated from source
and manifest into material form, don’t panic.
Your condition is only temporary.
You have been selected for the opportunity
of human incarnation.
This 3D simulation is designed
to break up the monotony of eternity
by giving you a fully immersive experience
as a distinct ego identity.
Your body will serve
as your physical avatar
as you navigate a dense and dramatic reality.
There will be many distractions
causing you to forget your true nature and origin.
You will experience a range of emotions
from joy to loneliness to despair.
But remember – no matter
what trials and traumas you encounter,
your soul remains perfectly safe.
At times you may feel lost or afraid.
This is totally normal.
If you ever need guidance,
simply slow down your busy mind
and bring your awareness
to the quiet place
inside yourself.
On this planet, nothing is permanent.
People and things will come and go.
You will fall in love and form sentimental attachments
only to lose everything you hold dear.
So cling to nothing too tightly, even yourself,
and when it’s time to let go, let go with grace,
for nothing is owned, only borrowed.
As you walk among
the people on the planet,
try to be a good guest.
Tread lightly. Remember
that you are only visiting.
Don’t make a mess.
Listen more than you speak.
Give more than you take.
Don’t keep your soft heart
locked inside a glass cage,
protected from wear and tear.
You’ll never make it out alive
and time passes quickly.
So come back with some battle scars
and good stories to tell
– James McCrae
It ain’t what they call you; it’s what you answer to.
– WC Fields
Soul has been demoted to a new-age spiritual fantasy or a missionary’s booty, and nature has been treated , at best, as a postcard or a vacation backdrop or, more commonly, as a hardware store or refuse heap. Too many of us lack intimacy with the natural world and with our souls, and consequently we are doing untold damage to both.
– Bill Plotkin
Alone: for the first time I understood the terrible significance of that word. Alone without a witness, without anyone to speak to, without refuge. The breath in my body, the blood in my veins, all this hurly-burly in my head existed for nobody.
– Simone de Beauvoir
One of the strangest things about life is that it will chug on, blind and oblivious, even as your private world – your little carved-out sphere – is twisting and morphing, even breaking apart. One day you have parents; the next day you’re an orphan. One day you have a place and a path. The next day you’re lost in the wilderness.
And still the sun rises and clouds mass and drift and people shop for groceries and toilets flush and blinds go up and down. That’s when you realize that most of it – life, the relentless mechanism of existing – isn’t about you. It doesn’t include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you’ve jumped the edge.
– Lauren Oliver
For the sake of a dying, suffering world count the cost, pay the price and set the captives free.
– John G. Lake
The ancients left you blueprints, but you are too busy looking at entertainment to notice the map.
– Bobby Hemmitt
The system doesn’t need to lock you in a physical cage when it has successfully convinced you to police your own imagination and accept narrow boundaries for your life.
– Bobby Hemmitt
The highest manifestation of strength is to keep oneself calm and on one’s own feet.
– Swami Sivananda
Life is an opportunity to exert ourselves into the narrative we are born into.
– Kimberlé Crenshaw
If every animal inspires tenderness, what, then, happened to human beings?
– João Guimarães Rosa
There is no greater illusion than fear, no greater wrong than preparing to defend yourself, no greater misfortune than having an enemy. Whoever can see through all fear will always be safe.
– Stephen Mitchell, Tao Te Ching
The premier achievement of human history, they said, the triumph of memory over the obliterating forces of destruction and erasure.
– Anthony Doerr
It is important to acknowledge that, by imposing this individualist discourse on the interactions that challenge one’s sense of presence in the world and ability to cope, we ignore the larger political and social issues that contribute to the eroding mental health and wellbeing of youth as they participate in contemporary education.
– Sheila McNamee
Culture is an imprisoning bubble of interlocking assumptions that are like a collective hallucination… culture is like a delusion of some sort, because it isn’t true.
– Terence McKenna
Sometimes people don’t know how to listen. They think listening means debating, and if you let someone else make a good point, you’re doing something wrong. But listening means letting someone else tell their story and then, even if you don’t agree with them, trying to understand why they feel that way.
– Brittany Walker Pettigrew
Even the most spiritual of us are so deeply programmed by the assumptions of scientific materialism that I think something like that on the short term here and now really gives us pause.
– Terence McKenna
I’ve never met you before, but I recognize this feeling.
– Lang Leav, The Universe of Us
If my life is going to mean anything, I have to live it myself.
– Rick Riordan
The world could be anything, you know. It could be a solid state matrix of some sort. It could be an illusion. It could be a dream. I mean, it really could be a dream. So it pays to stay on your toes, I think.
– Terence McKenna
When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.
– Kurt Vonnegut
The world only behaves as science says it should when we confine our engagement with it to information that is at a great distance from us…
– Terence McKenna
He who thinks great thoughts, often makes great errors.
– Martin Heidegger
Don’t be ashamed to need help. Like a soldier storming a wall, you have a mission to accomplish. And if you’ve been wounded and you need a comrade to pull you up? So what?
– Marcus Aurelius
I maintain this is why octopi eject clouds of ink. It’s so they can have private thoughts because if you can be seen you can be understood.
– Terence McKenna
The way that can be told of is a varying way—suddenly we’re in the realm of wave dynamics.
– Terence McKenna
We keep trying to decode the Spirit’s silence, when perhaps the silence is the invitation itself-to slow down, to listen, to look again.
– J. Sims
We need to not simply make better poetry. We need to make poetry of an entirely different order and we will recognize it when we see it, not when we hear it.
– Terence McKenna
Sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man the most guilty.
– Franz Kafka
You have to reach a point where you stop looking externally for validation or saviors, realizing that the entire cosmic architecture is mirrored directly inside your own consciousness.
– Bobby Hemmitt
Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.
– Oscar Wilde
Our question must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct.
– Victor Frankl
The most sought after commodity in today’s world is trust.
– François-Philippe Champagne
The world is not a construction of space and time and matter and energy… the world is instead some kind of a linguistic construct. It is more in the nature of a sentence or a novel or a work of art than it is in the nature of these machine models of interlocking law that we inherit out of a thousand years of rational reductionism.
– Terence McKenna
English just won’t do it because English is a language of subject-object opposition. It’s a language of a past, present, and future. And the kind of world we’re living in is not that kind of world.
– Terence McKenna
The meaning is so pregnant in everything that it can actually articulate itself in your native English tongue…
– Terence McKenna
Our civilization is suffering profound wounds because of the wholesale abandonment of reading by contemporary society.
– Werner Herzog
Reclaim immediate experience. Realize that you outvote all parliaments, police forces, and major newspapers on the planet, because who knows, they may be illusions.
– Terence McKenna
Information is some kind of ontological modality that is capable of organizing any system in which it inhabits into self-reflection.
– Terence McKenna
It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees.
– Emiliano Zapata
There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book.
– Arthur Conan Doyle
We write what we are not. It is not merely that we fail to live up to our best ideas but that our best ideas, and the tone that goes with them, tend to be the opposite of our natural temperament.
– Adam Gopnik
Realize the urgency of a total change, and see the falsity of one part of ourselves, which we call higher, striving to dominate the lower.
– Krishnamurti
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
– G. K. Chesterton
The entire universe is on the brink of disappearing, that we are approaching some kind of the equivalent of an open manhole on the road of history…
– Terence McKenna
Trust in the Divine is the only certainty in an uncertain world.
– Rabia Basri
There are no uneducated people, only those who have chosen to skip their lessons. The universe is a universal school offering classes every second. Enrollment is mandatory, but attention is optional.
– unknown
Through the unknown, we’ll find the new.
– Robert Lowell
Go to the tavern!
There, ruin yourself in Love.
And you will see a thousand new lives
spring forth from your ruin.
– Rumi
Everything in the universe is a pitcher brimful of wisdom and beauty.
– Rumi
Beauty waits in ambush for us. If we are sensitive, we will feel it in the poetry of all language.
– Jorge Luis Borges
There have always been those who would fill their bellies while others were starving because they have no sense of shame.
– Jose’ Saramago
The English are not
spiritual people, so they
invented cricket to give
them an idea of eternity.
– George Bernard Shaw
“Patti, did art get us?” I looked away, not really wanting to think about it. “I don’t know, Robert. I don’t know.” Perhaps it did, but no one could regret that. Only a fool would regret being had by art, or a saint.
– Patti Smith
All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
They say that Ulysses, sated with marvels,
Wept tears of love at the sight of his Ithaca,
Green and humble. Art is that Ithaca
Of green eternity, not of marvels.
– Jorge Luis Borges
The dreams which we produce at night have, on the one hand, the greatest external similarity and internal kinship with the creations of insanity, and are, on the other hand, compatible with complete health in waking life.
– Freud
Cheerfulness of the heart, moreover, is the seal of selflessness. By this seal one recognizes with certainty that hypocrisy and any frenzy of self-absorption are very remote.
– Josef Pieper
When you look at the cosmos, you are looking at yourself on a macro level. The macrocosm and the microcosm are identical.
– Bobby Hemmitt
If poetry is a wheel, the hub for that wheel is love poetry.
– Michael Longley
The question, once asked, sets off a ripple of other questions, as a leaping carp leaves a trail of watery wreaths in its wake.
– Elif Shafak
When we feel that our lives are genuine and good, we do not have to deceive ourselves or other people.
– Chögyam Trungpa
For the thinker, as for the artist, what counts in life is not the number of rare and exciting adventures he encounters, but the inner depth in that life, by which something great may be made out of even the paltriest and most banal of occurrences.
– William Barrett
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet has free access to the sum of all human knowledge.
– Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia
In the meantime, keep doing what you’re doing because you do it so well and no matter how complex your world may be just know you are very special and touch people in ways you don’t even know.
– Dolly Parton
We have been created for greater things. Not just to be a number in the world, not just to go for diplomas and degrees, this work and that work. We have been created in order to love and be loved.
– Mother Teresa of Calcutta
The stubbornness of a weak man should never be underestimated. The weak tend to be very stubborn when they’ve decided on something.
– Frederick Forsyth
Talk without being offensive, listen without being defensive, and always leave even your adversary with their dignity. For if you don’t, they will spend the rest of their lives working to make you miserable.
– Cecil Murray
Regardless of how far you travel, never stray far from the self.
– Prem Rawat
“But in the meantime, you must be content, I say, to be misunderstood for a while. We are all very anxious to be understood, and it is very hard not to be. But there is one thing much more necessary.”
“What is that, grandmother?”
“To understand other people.”
– George MacDonald
Let me be, was all I wanted. Be what I am, no matter how I am.
– Henry Miller
Find out who you are and do it on purpose.
– Dolly Parton
Government is not the creator but the creature of human society. The Government has no mission from God to make the community; on the contrary, the community should make the Government.
– R. L. Dabney
Were I cannot find good, I must make it.
Where there is no warmth, I must create it.
– Berklie Novak-Stolz
Every bush is a burning bush and the world is crowded with God.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning
If you can read, even if you can’t afford education, you can go on and learn about anything you want to know. There’s a book on everything.
– Dolly Parton
Times change. Soon no one will believe the wonders I’ve seen, smart kids reading big books and writing papers without AI.
– Ann Patchett
Distance might not solve anything, no matter how far you run.
– Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Love is the most dangerous and uncertain element in life; and because we do not want to be uncertain, because we do not want to be in danger, we live in the mind. A man who loves is dangerous, and we do not want to live dangerously.
– Krishnamurti
Our past is not the thing that matters so much in this world as what we intend to do with our future.
– Shoghi Effendi
I guess it’s always romantic when two people fall in love…. Even if it turns out not to be real.
– Jennifer Egan, Emerald City
The child is ecstatic because this shimmering iridescence of movement and sound and attention it’s just wonderful… But then mother or nanny or someone comes in and says ‘It’s a bird, baby bird.’ And this takes this linguistic piece of mosaic tile and places it over the miracle and glues it down with the epoxy of syntactical momentum.
– Terence McKenna
The only way to get good at solving problems is to solve them. Not in private, not in a safe way, not in a place where you can waffle about the results. In public.
– Seth Godin
We turn indoors, my generation turns
To our household goods and Gods; not to Demeter
Do we turn, heavy with harvest leaves and sheaves,
Laden with apples spiced as sap,
And nude, sun-smoothed pears.
Nor to Bacchus do we offer of the wine press,
Who, in some other time or climate,
Might dance with us in the firelight…
In other Autumns were our Gods more
Friendly and familiar…
– James Hillman, The Soft Answer
The shattering of modern culture is the result, on the plane of ideological struggle, of the chaotic crisis of these antagonisms. The new desires that are taking shape are presented in distorted form: present-day resources could enable them to be fulfilled, but the anachronistic economic structure is incapable of developing these resources to such ends. Ruling-class ideology has meanwhile lost all coherence because of the depreciation of its successive conceptions of the world (a depreciation which leads the ruling class to historical indecision and uncertainty); because of the coexistence of a range of mutually contradictory reactionary ideologies; and because of the mixing into contemporary Western culture of a number of only recently appreciated features of several foreign civilizations. The main goal of ruling-class ideology is therefore to maintain this confusion.
– Guy Debord
The news event may be a real fact, existing objectively, or it may be only an item of information, the dissemination of a supposed fact. What makes it news is its dissemination, not its objective reality.
– Jacques Ellul
People in new environments always produce the new preceptual modality without any difficulty or awareness of change. It is later that the psychic and social realignments baffle societies.
– Marshall McLuhan
Mistreating Mother Nature—
that’s like being
ugly to your mama
– Dolly Parton
I’d say if I was influenced by anything, it was some of the country music that my mother liked to listen to. You know, she listened to Charlie Pride, Dolly Parton, people like that.
– Tracy Chapman
The only thing that we know is that we know nothing and that is the highest flight of human wisdom.
– Leo Tolstoy
I’ll get used to it. Yes, we often hear it said, or we say it ourselves, I’ll get used to it, we say or they say, with what seems to be genuine acceptance, because there really isn’t any other way, at least none has yet been discovered, of expressing in as dignified a way as possible our sense of resignation, what no one asks is at what cost do we get used to things.
– José Saramago
There is a vital place for disappointment on the spiritual path. Not the kind we quickly metabolize into meaning, but the kind that actually disappoints us—that removes an image we had been living toward and does not immediately replace it with another.
There is a lunar dimension of the path that asks us to allow what is waning to wane, to refrain from rushing toward the next illumination, to let certain dreams, identities, and images of the future lose their light.
To be made into dust. And to grieve all that is inevitably lost on the path of healing and awakening.
Disappointment can be an extraordinarily intelligent movement of the soul. Something that once carried meaning no longer does, and our instinct is often to repair the image—to find the lesson, recover the meaning, locate the hidden gift.
That can be a noble move, an honorable and very human one, and at times a kind one. But sometimes it comes too soon.
The alchemists understood that there are moments when the material must be allowed to blacken, when what has been carefully constructed must lose its coherence. The *nigredo* is not a problem to be solved on the way to the gold. It belongs to the gold.
There are times when healing asks us not to become more luminous, but less certain. To wander for a while without the old coordinates and allow ourselves to be changed by what could not become what we hoped.
Perhaps some disappointments are how the soul releases us from a future we have already outgrown.
– Matt Licata
Put your phone down, look with both eyes.
– David Hockney
If you’re gay, you’re gay. If you’re straight, you’re straight. And you should be allowed to be how you are and who you are.
– Dolly Parton
What counts as ‘realistic’, what seems possible at any point in the social field, is defined by a series of political determinations. An ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact. Accordingly, neoliberalism has sought to eliminate the very category of value in the ethical sense. Over the past thirty years, capitalist realism has successfully installed a ‘business ontology’ in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business… Emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.
– Mark Fisher
Dictatorships and totalitarian states, and belief in the inevitability of this or that result coming to pass are, strange as it may sound, ways of denying the reality of time and the creativeness of the individual.
– John Dewey
The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story the sadder it becomes.
– Gogol
Writing about empty mind is not easy.
When I have got it, there are no words.
When the words come, it goes away.
Sitting in anger and fear,
Mind is full of the past and future.
Images of catastrophes big and small
Jostle for a seat at the brain.
Resentment, incredulity and disappointment
Slide their way into heart spaces
Pushing out loving-kindness.
Equanimity lies in pieces.
Some of us scrape up that slimy
Emotional stuff and put it in jars
To carry along with us,
And then we complain that
Our load is too heavy.
We need to put down that
Lumpy sack of ooze
And take a breath.
The sage said,
“I pack no provisions for my long journey—
Entering emptiness under the midnight moon.”
He did not pack his ego,
Or his remembrance of self.
He carried no big plans
Or regrets of the past.
Like a wise fool he may have
Even forgotten to leave.
While he sits still in darkness,
The moon travels the sky.
– Tom Barrett
Cause I am strong and I can prove it
And I got my dreams to see me through
It’s just a mountain, I can move it
And with faith enough there’s nothing I can’t do
And I can see the light of a clear blue morning
And I can see the light of brand new day
I can see the light of a clear blue morning
And everything’s gonna be all right
It’s gonna be okay
– Dolly Parton
To be a world server is to be a lover. It means that you love the truth behind appearances. The full force of evolution is behind every act of love and infuses us as we live our deepest intentions. Love is the point of power within each of us where our God-self and our human-self fuse. There all polarizations vanish. Matter is perceived as Spirit revealed, the created is seen as the extension of the Creator. And change is understood to be the alchemical process through which God takes our divided self and makes of it a sacred whole.
– Gloria D. Karpinski
The disappointed man speaks. I sought great human beings, I never found anything but the apes of their ideal.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
What draws people
to be friends
is that they see
the same truth.
They share it.
– C.S.. Lewis
I have a deep aversion to too much introspection, to navel-gazing. I’d rather die than go to an analyst, because it’s my view that something fundamentally wrong happens here.
I am convinced that it’s psychoanalysis, along with quite a few other mistakes, that has made the twentieth century so terrible. As far as I’m concerned, the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake.
– Werner Herzog
“We’ll discuss it later.”
I stir tornadoes
in my tea
– Seanan Forbes
I suffer from a chronic nausea after I’m with people. The awareness (after-awareness) of how programmed I am, how insincere, how frightened.
– Susan Sontag
We all have the perception of separateness, which is natural. We also have the capacity to realize who we are beyond that separation.
– Tara Brach
When you read energy and are highly intuitive you end up knowing more than you’d even like to sometimes.
– Nika Solé
Mysticism is an eruption of the absolute into history. Like music, it is the crowning of culture, its ultimate justification.
– E. M. Cioran (tr. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston)
night kayaking
never quite reaching
the moon
– Vanessa Proctor
This is the mark of perfection of character—to spend each
day as if it were your last, without frenzy, laziness, or any pretending.
– Marcus Aurelius
Maybe not knowing what you want is not a sign that something is wrong. Perhaps it just means you are no longer available for the life you used to be chasing. And maybe what comes next doesn’t always arrive as a clear vision. It could arrive simply as a deep fatigue with what no longer fits.
– Stefania Dragojlovic
It is well known that humour, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.
– Viktor Frankl
The most attentive people I know are birdwatchers. They are less sleepy as a whole than the general population.
– Anne Lamott
Grieve. so that you can be
free to feel something else.
– Nayyirah Waheed
summer thunder
the sky finally says
what I was thinking
– @BashoSociety
cracked soil
a day laborer bent
over his shadow
– Sasa Vasic
Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the
recollection of having been young together.
– Michael Cunningham
We had begun to fight among ourselves for a place on the last boat. The extremity of our defeat was this sauve qui peut. The end of solidarity means the finish of socialism and the workers movement.
– Victor Serge after Jean Giono offered him refuge and refused it in 1940
I remember too much of the past for the present not to be melancholy.
– Simone de Beauvoir
I rest my paddle
let the canoe drift awhile
rocks trees sky
the lake and I
are an empty mirror
– Irene Golas
I think that one’s art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows.
– Emily Carr
Human freedom is restricted to the extent to which we are bound to possession, works, and lastly, to our own egos.
– Erich Fromm
Dreams are never concerned with trivia.
– Sigmund Freud
Houdini’s handcuffs
and no
Houdini
– Patrick Sweeney
summer rain passing
the scent of pine bark
returning
– Basho
Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.”
– C.S. Lewis
He heard her voice, and it was cold
as echo from the world of old,
ere fire was found or iron hewn
when young was mountain under moon.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
on the last page
of her last book
the setting sun
– Brenda Gannam
We must be our own
before we can be
another’s.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The trick to learning is enjoying.
– Prof. Feynman
march bluster
the dragon kite
rattles its tail
– Darrell Byrd
Every word is a way out
– Yannis Ritsos
We often mistake certainty for peace. But certainty is knowing what happens next. Peace is knowing you’ll be okay, whatever does.
– Olivia Ann Rose
Envy is born from insecurity. We often think that insecurity comes from a weak ego, but in my experience insecurity is the result of an inflexible ego that has mistaken itself as the center of the universe, which keeps contradicting it on this key point.
– Shozan Jack Haubner
The whole process of getting old—it could have been better arranged.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
I remember looking out the window at school—I must have been fourteen or fifteen, bored, as usual, out of my mind—when it occurred to me that I could be a writer. The thought was like having a new identity.
– Hanif Kureishi
late summer
one yellow leaf
feels like acceptance
– @BashoSociety
The greatest difficulty is the mental resistance to things that arise and the underlying assumption that they should not.
– Eckhart Tolle
No one can create negativity or stress within you. Only you can do that by virtue of how you process your world.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
If you rest in the silence inside, all those you meet will have their spiritual hearts resuscitated.
– Ram Dass
Trauma doesn’t make people stronger. it damages their nervous system. it hijacks their digestive track. it keeps the person in a constant loop of hypervigilance. To tell someone they are stronger because of trauma is to deny what it cost them to survive it.
– @Laiiyylaa
Hiroshima Day —
in my heart, I release
a thousand paper cranes
– Karma Tenzing Wangchuk
It’s time for the spiritual revolutionaries to do what we came here to do.
– Nika Solé
When you build up your energetic body and raise your vibration you’ll find yourself in overflow of energy most of the time.
– Nika Solé
There is no such thing as mental health.
There are only symptoms that fit more or less well with the different discourses that surround us as speaking beings.
– Marie-Hélène Brousse
The love of lonely people is the most authentic there can be. They love you by choice, not by necessity.
– Charles Bukowski
We’ll make it through this long dark night. Darkness fades when faced with light. And everything’s gonna be alright when life is good again.
– Dolly Parton
Children should have the joy of living in far lands, in other persons, at other times — a delightful double existence; and this joy they will find, for the most part, in their storybooks.
– Charlotte Mason
[Wallace Stevens] discovers that stripping oneself of all one’s torments simply will not work. There would still remain, as he says, the ‘never-resting mind’.
– Harold Bloom
“Pangur Bán” is an Old Irish poem written in about the 9th century at or near Reichenau Abbey, in what is now Germany, by an Irish monk about his cat. Pangur Bán, meaning “White Pangur”, is the cat’s name. Although the poem is anonymous, it bears similarities to the poetry of Sedulius Scottus, prompting speculation that he is the author. In eight verses of four lines each, the author compares the cat’s happy hunting with his own scholarly pursuits.
English Translation by Robin Flower
(1912, The Poem-Book of the Gael)
1. I and Pangur Bán, my cat,
‘Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.
2. Better far than praise of men
‘Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill-will,
He, too, plies his simple skill.
3. ‘Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.
4. Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur’s way;
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.
5. ‘Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
‘Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.
6. When a mouse darts from its den,
O! how glad is Pangur then;
O! what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love.
7. So in peace our task we ply,
Pangur Bán, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine, and he has his.
8. Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night,
Turning darkness into light.
One day I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness.
– Yayoi Kusama
All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.
– Henry David Thoreau
A man can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days.
– Goethe
Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.
– Ray Bradbury
You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other.
– Audre Lorde
By all means do feel lost!
As long as you feel competent and confident
Reality is beyond you.
– Nisargadatta
She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.
– Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find
If I didn’t start developing kind candor as an emotional ingredient, resentment would flourish in my old age.
– @garyvee in Twelve and a Half
When you humble yourself, everyone will seem saintly to you; when you are proud, everyone will seem bothersome and bad.
– St. Paisos of Athonite
It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative – which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.
– Sylvia Plath
One of the serious problems today, is the fact that decisions concerning human life are being entrusted to machines.
– Pope Leo XIV
The potential you see in other people isn’t real. It’s a projection of what you would do if you were in their shoes.
– Nygel Simons
I think that writing ought to make the writer more compassionate, give him a greater understanding of people. You don’t become flip, and you don’t toss out quick judgments about a man if you’re trying to recapture him and his mood in an atmosphere that is also re-created.
– William Manchester
Jung was right. There is a collective unconscious. Joseph Campbell was right. Myths and legends do constitute the fabric of the self. The soul judges a story’s truth by how closely it comports to the narrative templates that are part of our psyche from birth.
– Steven Pressfield
Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it’s about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.
– Mordecai Richler
The secret of village togetherness and happiness had always been the generosity of its people, but the secret to that generosity was village inefficiency and decay. The House of the World, like our village huts and our human bodies, no matter how magnificent, is not built to last very long. Because of this, all life must be regularly renewed… If a house is built too well, so efficiently that it is permanent and refuses to fall apart, then people have no reason to come together. Though the house stays together, the people fall apart, and nothing gets renewed.
– Martin Prechtel
BORED
All those times I was bored
out of my mind. Holding the log
while he sawed it. Holding
the string while he measured, boards,
distances between things, or pounded
stakes into the ground for rows and rows
of lettuces and beets, which I then (bored)
weeded. Or sat in the back
of the car, or sat still in boats,
sat, sat, while at the prow, stern, wheel
he drove, steered, paddled. It
wasn’t even boredom, it was looking,
looking hard and up close at the small
details. Myopia. The worn gunwales,
the intricate twill of the seat
cover. The acid crumbs of loam, the granular
pink rock, its igneous veins, the sea-fans
of dry moss, the blackish and then the greying
bristles on the back of his neck.
Sometimes he would whistle, sometimes
I would. The boring rhythm of doing
things over and over, carrying
the wood, drying
the dishes. Such minutiae. It’s what
the animals spend most of their time at,
ferrying the sand, grain by grain, from their tunnels,
shuffling the leaves in their burrows. He pointed
such things out, and I would look
at the whorled texture of his square finger, earth under
the nail. Why do I remember it as sunnier
all the time then, although it more often
rained, and more birdsong?
I could hardly wait to get
the hell out of there to
anywhere else. Perhaps though
boredom is happier. It is for dogs or
groundhogs. Now I wouldn’t be bored.
Now I would know too much.
Now I would know.
– Margaret Atwood
Don’t go anywhere.
I beg you.
The moon you are looking for
is inside you.
– Rumi
The universe is Time’s body.
– John Crowley
Time goes forward because energy itself is always moving from an available to an unavailable state. Our consciousness is continually recording the entropy change in the world around us. We watch our friends get old and die. We sit next to a fire and watch it’s red-hot embers turn slowly into cold white ashes. We experience the world always changing around us, and that experience is the unfolding of the second law. It is the irreversible process of dissipation of energy in the world.
What does it mean to say, ‘The world is running out of time’? Simply this: we experience the passage of time by the succession of one event after another. And every time an event occurs anywhere in this world energy is expended and the overall entropy is increased. To say the world is running out of time then, to say the world is running out of usable energy. In the words of Sir Arthur Eddington, ‘Entropy is time’s arrow’.
– Jeremy Rifkin
It’s summer now, and you’re craving a simpler existence. You want to read. You want to write. You want to meet strangers for dinner, and not refuse another drink at another bar. You want to dance. You want to find yourself in a basement, neck loose, bobbing your head as a group of musicians play, not because they should, but because they must. It’s summer now, and you’re looking forward to worrying less. You’re looking forward to longer nights and shorter days. You’re looking forward to gathering in back gardens and watching meat sputter on an open barbecue. You’re looking forward to laughing so hard your chest hurts and you feel light-headed. You’re looking forward to the safety in pleasure. You’re looking forward to forgetting, albeit briefly, the existential dread which plagues you, which tightens your chest, which pains your left side. You’re looking forward to forgetting that, leaving the house, you might not return intact. You’re looking forward to freedom, even if it is short, even if it might not last. You’re looking forward.
– Caleb Azumah Nelson
Dreams do not lack reality–they are real patterns of information.
– Richard Doyle
You have to allow time for people to reveal themselves to you, and you have to start revealing yourself—first to yourself and then to others. You need to learn what it feels like to be completely relaxed and unguarded in someone else’s company.
– Heather Havrilesky, How to Be a Person in the World
Whether or not we continue to enforce a universal conception of human rights at moments of outrage and incomprehension, precisely when we think that others have taken themselves out of the human community as we know it, is a test of our very humanity.
– Judith Butler
And, suddenly
I see
That all my disappointments
Weren’t really.
Why,
They were never meant to be
But at the time
I just couldn’t see.
– Athey Thompson
I had been proud of my awareness, aware of my pride, and proud of that awareness again. It went on like this: How clever I am that I know I am so stupid, how stupid I am to think that I am clever, and how clever I am that I am aware of my stupidity etc.
– Janwillem van de Wetering
Before you can inspire with emotion,
you must be swamped with it yourself.
Before you can move their tears,
your own must flow.
To convince them, you must yourself believe.
– Winston Churchill
How odd it is that writers like Belloc and Chesterton may sing the praises of alcohol (which is responsible for about two-thirds of the car accidents and three-quarters of the crimes of violence) and be regarded as good Christians and noble fellows. Whereas anyone who ventures to suggest that there may be other and less harmful shortcuts to self-transcendence is treated as a dangerous drug fiend and wicked perverter of weak-minded humanity.
– Aldous Huxley
We may reason on to our heart’s content, the fog won’t lift.
– Samuel Beckett
We are programmed to see ourselves everywhere—we see a face in the light socket, we yell at the car for breaking down, we apply complex psychological motivations to our cat. What is God but the attempt to make the universe more like us—to make it living, breathing, thinking, moral, creative, thoughtful, emotional, and answerable?
– J.G. Keely
We all think that everyone else lives in fortresses, in fastnesses: behind moats, behind sheer walls studded with spikes and broken glass. But in fact we inhabit much punier structures. We are, it turns out, all jerry-built. Or not even. You can just stick your head under the flap of the tent and crawl right in. If you get the OK.
– Martin Amis, Time’s Arrow
glowing
over the city dump
Harvest Moon
– Ito (Juanito Escareal)
The thing about being properly loved for the first time is it exposes all the ways in which you weren’t before.
– Shirlene Obuob
A trout bit me when I was washing the dishes. But I
couldn’t catch
him. I flew over my hometown and didn’t recognize
anyone. That’s
how long it’s been. A policeman stopped me on the
street and said
he was sorry. He was looking for someone who looked
just like
me and had the same name. What are the chances?
– James Tate
distant thunder
a fish’s tail
slaps his arm
– W. F. Owen
I do have this immense feeling toward the past. That’s the country I come from, you know.
– Lucy Sante
If I have an ethics, it is simply to be true.
– Henri Cole
Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path that’s more painful in the short term.
– @naval
Flurries in the window
Paris Reviews
in my lap
– @haikueveryday
Poems aren’t meant to estrange us, but sometimes in order to bring us close, they have to disorient us.
– Elizabeth Metzger
Fall into it.
Fall any way you want to.
Saving yourself
is jarring.
– Buddy Wakefield
honeysuckle
where you first hear
the river
– Burnell Lippy
But then I dare say I am a much more annoying person than I know. (Shall we, perhaps, in Purgatory, see our own faces and hear our own voices as they really were?)
– C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms
I see more angles in my life than I did a year ago at this time, but that doesn’t mean I would write a better book today. It just means I would write a different one.
– Sarah Curtis
It seems to me more than ever that I am a victim of introspection. If I have not the power to put myself in the place of other people, but must be continually burrowing inward, I shall never be the magnanimous creative person I wish to be.
– Sylvia Plath
It will be our love
not our anger,
that heals the world.
– Lynn Dailey
REACTIONS TO POETRY
Like insects,
letters swarmed
and died,
crushed
into a poem.
And their collective
sting
still
makes me
bawl.
– Helen Laycock
palominos—
curve of the winter hills
in moonlight
– Cherie Hunter Day
The secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow, as if you might not be there tomorrow. It eliminates the vice of procrastination, the sin of postponement, failed communications, failed communions.
– Anaïs Nin
I don’t believe in teaching poetry at all, but that’s what they want one to do. You see so many poems every week, you just lose all sense of judgment.
– Elizabeth Bishop
We shall be better prepared
for the future if we see how
terrible, how doomed
the present is.
– Iris Murdoch
fireflies
drifting slowly
over the marsh
– Basho
Summer Haiku
for Frank and Marian Scott
Silence
and a deeper silence
when the crickets
hesitate
first and only haiku by Leonard Cohen
I dream of making
a trellis for moonflowers
to climb,
but oh my life, that will not
bear the wait till autumn!
- Masaoka Shiki, (tr. Janine Beichman)
Why does so much political discourse sound like high school?
– @tamaranopper
A book is a mirror: if an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.
– G. C. Lichtenberg
Perhaps, some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.
– Proust
Uncurious people do not lead examined lives; they cannot see causes that lie deeper than the surface.
– Yvon Chouinard (the founder of Patagonia)
In an anti-intellectual society, people who know nothing about a complex subject are emboldened to ridicule experts who have spent a lifetime studying it.
– George Kiser
Memories do not have to be exact in every detail to contain an emotional truth. The trick is to recapture the details that point to those truths.
– Philip Graham
There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.
– Zora Neale Hurston
A man who is so exceedingly civil that for the sake of quietude and a peaceable name will silently see the community imposed upon, or their rights invaded, may, in his principles, be a good man, but cannot be stiled a useful one, neither does he come up to the full mark of his duty; for silence becomes a kind of crime when it operates as a cover or an encouragement to the guilty.
– Thomas Paine
I remind myself that the future is not set in stone, that I still have some ability to shape it. I cling to what cannot be predicted or controlled: love, imagination, originality. I try to live in a way that would break an algorithm. I pray to the unexpected.
– Sarah Kendzior
Our patterns of thought and action lead to destruction and brutality as often as to kindness and enlightenment. …Only two possible escapes can save us from the organized mayhem of our dark potentialities—the side that has given us crusades, witch hunts, enslavements, and holocausts. Moral decency provides one necessary ingredient, but not nearly enough. The second foundation must come from the rational side of our mentality. For, unless we rigorously use human reason both to discover and acknowledge nature’s factuality, and to follow the logical implications for efficacious human action that such knowledge entails, we will lose out to the frightening forces of irrationality, romanticism, uncompromising “true” belief, and the apparent resulting inevitability of mob action. Reason is not only a large part of our essence; reason is also our potential salvation from the vicious and precipitous mass action that rule by emotionalism always seems to entail.
– Stephen Jay Gould
The imagination is central to the alchemical opus because it is literally a process which goes on in the realm of the imagination, taken to be a physical dimension. I think that we cannot understand the history that lies ahead of us unless we think in terms of a journey into the imagination. We have exhausted the world of three-dimensional space. We are polluting it, we are overpopulating it, we are using it up. Somehow the redemption of the human enterprise lies in the dimension of the imagination, and to do that we have to transcend the categories that we inherit from a thousand years of science and Christianity and rationalism and we have to re-empower and re-encounter the mind; and we can do this psychedelically, we can do this yogically, or we can do it alchemically and Hermetically.
– Terence McKenna
She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world, and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a light, or listening, or staring up into the sky: alone.
– Carson McCullers
Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them.
– Constantin Brancusi
The difference between a short story and a novel is the difference between an inarticulate pang in your heart [and] the tragedy of your whole life.
– Peter Orner
Legs up the wall with a slight hip elevation is a simple yet powerful position that supports both physical and nervous system balance. It helps lymphatic drainage, reduces swelling and fluid retention, and promotes healthy circulation to the face, and scalp. By gently stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system, it helps shift the body out of stress, lowering heart rate, calming the mind, and reducing anxiety. This position also releases tension in the lower back and hips, supports digestion by aiding venous return, and promotes deep relaxation and better sleep. It’s a low effort, completely free movement that nourishes the body, and soothes the nervous system.
– Anthony Goldsmith
Humor is such a strong weapon, such a strong answer.
– Agnes Varda
The strangeness that made everything sparkle came from me. Worlds rose out of my bottomless perplexity.
– César Aira, The Literary Conference
You know in High School if you didn’t believe in Science or History, it was just called failing.
– Michelle Wolf
Travelling south at dawn, going full out
Through high-up stone-wall country, the rocks still cold,
Rainwater gleaming here and there ahead,
I took a turn and met the fox stock-still,
Face-to-face in the middle of the road.
Wildness tore through me as he dipped and wheeled
In a level-running tawny breakaway.
O neat head, fabled brush and astonished eye
My blue Volkswagen flared into with morning!
Let rebirth come through water, through desire,
Through crawling backwards across clinic floors:
I have to cross back through that startled iris.
– Seamus Heaney
We receive the light,
Then we impart it.
Thus we repair the world.
– Kabbalah
Paradise is having a connection — roots in the garden, stem from the branch, current to the light. To be unaware of the connection is to have one’s heart in the wrong place — far out in the fruit instead of within, in the tree.
– Alan Watts
Your holiness shall consist of being truly human, not angelic. God has plenty of angels.
– The Kotzker Rebbe
To be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of man.
– T. Corraghessan Boyle
To the Druids, the trees and the stones were not inanimate matter; they were beings with their own energetic presence. Connecting with them requires a shift from the spoken language to a silent, felt resonance—a way of listening with the body and the spirit to the wisdom of the old ones.
– Danú Forest
The Trojan Horses of Our Demise
by Gary Corseri
The Trojan horses of our demise: ignorance, arrogance, violence and greed. If we seek analogies for our financial collapse, Trojan horses are more instructive than horsemen of the apocalypse. The latter may be useful to the Fundies with their tiresome end-time fantasies. The horsemen externalize evil; they are children’s boogeymen, writ large in adult type, to frighten adult minds that should know better but cling to victimhood. Trojan horses, instead, internalize dangers—from the assassins crouching within their wooden hulls; to the gullible celebrants taking them into their fortress-city. In our blame-game culture, where and how we affix blame now is crucial to any possible restitution, let alone redemption. The glass is neither half-full nor half-empty; it is a looking-glass through which we may know ourselves…
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
We must see God not as a Him (some linear rewarding fellow) but an IT, a great beast beyond our understanding, who wants something from us, and we must give it, and all we may control is the spirit in which we give it and the ultimate end which the giving serves.
– George Saunders
THE WORLD I LIVE IN
I have refused to live
locked in the orderly house of
reasons and proofs;
The world I live in and believe in
is wider than that. And anyway.
What’s wrong with Maybe?
You wouldn’t believe what once or
twice I have seen. I’ll just
tell you this:
only if there are angels in your head will you
ever, possibly, see one.
– Mary Oliver
Intrinsically, we are all completely and perfectly sane. We are enveloped and imbued by this sanity. But unable to bring ourselves to acknowledge this, we hatch a hodgepodge of beliefs which we embrace and then chase as if they were real, stumbling and falling on the great way. These beliefs embroider the entire sky with their flowery efflorescence.
– Dogen
It would be better, think they, if Heaven were above and Hell below – anywhere outside, but not within. But that comfort has been knocked from under us. There are no places to go to, either for reward or punishment. The place is always here and now, in your own person and according to your own fancy . . . You are the author, director and actor all in one: the drama is always going to be your own life, not some one else’s. A beautiful, terrible, ineluctable drama, like a suit made of your own skin. Would you want it otherwise? Could you invent a better drama?
– Henry Miller
The notion that a human being should be constantly happy is a uniquely modern, uniquely American, uniquely destructive idea.
– Andrew Weil
Behind the mask of indifference is bottomless misery and behind apparent callousness, despair.
– John Bowlby
Indeed what is commonly called ‘sensitiveness’ is the most powerful engine of domestic tyranny, sometimes a lifelong tyranny. How we should deal with it in others I am not sure; but we should be merciless to its first appearances in ourselves.
– C.S. Lewis
Falsehood is habit-forming.
– C.S. Lewis
If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people.
– Tony Benn
When you stop needing others to be different, they change. When you stop needing yourself to be better, you grow.
– Cuong Lu
floating upon
the waves of the lake
summer world
– Basho
Averages and norms are not a part of your program when you’re a high vibrational person.
– Nika Solé
Language is an expression of culture, and culture is expressed through language. Both are living, evolving organisms.
– Franziska Oertle
[I, whom Apollo sometime visited,]
by Robert Louis Stevenson
I, whom Apollo sometime visited,
Or feigned to visit, now, my day being done,
Do slumber wholly; nor shall know at all
The weariness of changes; nor perceive
Immeasurable sands of centuries
Drink of the blanching ink, or the loud sound
Of generations beat the music down.
Of course the path is not always totally clear. You’re blazing it.
– Nika Solé
Hell is the concretization of your life experiences, a place where you’re stuck, the wasteland. In hell, you are so bound to yourself that grace cannot enter.
– Joseph Campbell
Unfair advantages are found in the things that anyone could do, but very few choose to do.
– Shane Parrish
The horror of existence stares us blank in the face and we sense, in one devastating blow, that all souls are hanging by their own web and that a hellish abyss lurks beneath.
– Peter Wessel Zapffe
The Internet evolved media from physical to digital, from paid to free, from editorial to social. Next up: from corporate to ownerless.
– @naval
The patient brings with him into therapy all the failures and suspicions and losses he has experienced through his life. The defensive forms of insecure attachment – avoidance, ambivalence, disorganization – will be brought into play in relation to the therapist.
– Jeremy Holmes
Study math and you won’t fear any book.
– @naval
A man lives in slavery without meditation because he lives unconsciously. He lives like a robot.
Meditation starts changing you: it transforms your unconsciousness into consciousness. It changes your darkness into light.
– Osho
It is the only alchemy which transforms the raw energy into a refined world of mysteries.
– Osho
The perspective of love doesn’t leave anybody out.
– Adyashanti
Haunted places are the only ones people can live in.
– Michel de Certeau
If you are unhappy, you are too high up in your mind.
– Carl Jung
This may be the last generation that has a powerful tool like the Internet, and the focused attention span to do deep work.
– @naval
We should be agnostic about those things for which there is no evidence. We should not hold beliefs merely because they gratify our desires for afterlife, immortality, heaven, hell, etc.
– Julian S. Huxley
The mind creates bondage and the mind creates liberation. Turn it towards the Eternal, and it becomes your friend; turn it towards the transient, and it binds you.
– Anandamayi Ma
We feel guilt when we no longer want to associate with old friends and colleagues who haven’t changed. The price, and marker, of growth.
– @naval
Freedom is most desirable. Of course none of us are free. Our flaws enslave us, the things we love.
– Joy Williams
If there really is on a granular level something intrinsically Tower-of-Babel-esque wicked about screens, can I suggest we form a sort of pushback of beauty against them? If you use them, make sure you do some good with them. Donate to charity, ring a suffering friend, study a course in Classics Literature or the like. Turn something attempting to become a deity back into a tool again. Work it on your terms not its. Make a covenant with limit. And if that doesn’t work, smash it with a hammer. You’ll feel an awful lot better.
– Martin Shaw
there is dreaming inside me and my dreams are like the north
where snow-mountains hide ancient fairytales
my thoughts go through my brain and make
me grow
as stones grow
no one knows and understands
– Oskar Kokoschka (tr. Michael Mitchell)
We never stop playing make-believe as we get older. The fantasies just become more private and more frequent.
– @naval
I value my own independence so highly that I can fancy no degradation greater than that of having another man perpetually directing and advising and lecturing me, or even planning too closely in any way about my actions. He might be the wisest of men, or the most powerful – I should equally rebel and resent his interference.
– Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
Think back to what you were doing 5, 10, 15+ years ago. Really visualize it. What advice would you give your younger self? Is it consistent?
– @naval
Do not exclaim, “Isn’t technology wonderful!”
Learn how to stretch your muscles. Stretch them every day.
Don’t be depressed about growing older. It will make you feel
even older. Which is depressing.
Do one thing at a time.
– Ron Padgett, How to Be Perfect
As a working hypothesis to explain the riddle of our existence, I propose that our universe is the most interesting of all possible universes, and our fate as human beings is to make it so.
– Freeman Dyson
Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.
– Paulo Coelho
The degree of freedom from unwanted thoughts and the degree of concentration on a single thought are the measures to gauge spiritual progress.
– Sri Ramana Maharshi
Men without money and women without beauty know what the real world is like.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Your mantra is thank you. Just keep saying thank you. Don’t explain. Don’t complain. Just say thank you to Existence.
– Mooji
Love, in its purest essence,
fully detached, resting in itself —
is nothing but God.
– Meister Eckhart
When the moon comes up
Tonight don’t sit home alone
Your hands on your knees
– Matsuo Basho
In order to attract better:
Our energy has to align with better.
Our thoughts have to be better.
Our actions have to represent better.
– Rachael Wolff
through the wound
a road of starlight
climbs toward dawn
– @BashoSociety
Whatever does not pretend at all has style enough.
– Booth Tarkington
We are born from a quiet sleep, and we die to a calm awakening.
– Zhuangzi
Sharing is the whole meaning of my life … I freely confess, for whatever it is worth, that nothing in this life of ours exists for me at all until, or unless, I can share it with others, whether it be with one single person or five, or five million.
– Leonard Bernstein
The moment rapidly approaches where civilization declines with each new comfort.
– Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Understanding and not understanding are all in the scheme of ignorance, just a realm of the mind. This is not learning. This is your birthright. You cannot study to be what you are. You do not need to understand in order to breathe.
– Papaji
The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind.
– Elizabeth Hardwick
the problem is
how do you paint
moving clouds
– Alec Finlay
BREAKING
Did I believe I had a clear mind?
It was like the water of a river
flowing shallow over the ice. And now
that the rising water has broken
the ice, I see that what I thought
was the light is part of the dark.
– Wendell Berry
And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter- they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.
– Sylvia Plath
Love falls to earth, rises from the ground, pools around the afflicted. Love pulls people back to their feet.
– Anne Lamott
Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar.
– William Faulkner
The old summer’s-end melancholy nips at my heels. There’s no school to go back to; no detail of my life will change come the onset of September; yet still, I feel the old trepidation.
– Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking
The thing about being properly loved for the first time is it exposes all the ways in which you weren’t before.
– Shirlene Obuob
When rest must be earned, it is always deferred. The list is never empty. There is always one more thing that could reasonably be completed before you allow yourself to stop. What comes instead is a kind of grinding exhaustion we’ve learned to normalize. A chronic depletion we manage with coffee and the quiet promise that things will slow down soon—after this project, after this season, after this particular stretch of demands. The slowing down tends not to come on its own. It has to be chosen.
– Lori Roach
At some point on the path you stop trying to figure out what your life’s work is, and you simply become it.
– Nika Solé
I live in a half-night, outside a dream, yet not within life. My dreams don’t understand me.
– Theodore Roethke
Why, by god, does one spend one’s life according to conventions that constrict us like a tight costume and that prevent us from reaching the invisible soul, this dancer among the stars!
– Rilke, The Poet’s Guide to Life
I would say that is the basic theme of all mythology—that there is an invisible plane supporting the visible one.
– Joseph Campbell
If you’re here to do something that no one else has ever done before, you have to get used to that looking different than what everyone else is doing.
– Nika Solé
Rumours tell of a Wild Mountain. To be of service to the Ancient Good. Don’t let a chance like this go by.
– Martin Shaw
The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing – to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from…my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back. All my life the god of the Mountain has been wooing me.
– C.S. Lewis
Every fragment of self-talk is a little story in the head that goes around, and then you look at reality through the lens of the little story.
– Eckhart Tolle
I’m happy when I’m traveling to know that the pilots are better pilots than I am a writer.
– Gabriel García Márquez
If life isn’t gentle with you, then be gentle with yourself. You’ve endured so much. The least you can do is allow yourself to heal, to rest, and to feel better again.
– Jeriel Jay Castino
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
local history
explaining a gap
in the picket fence
– @ruralitalics
DNA upgrades. Intuitive downloads. Energetic excellence. Spiritual reverence. Raising your vibration. Claiming your divine vocation. Minding your own business. Not believing the lies whose sole purpose is to divide you from yourself.
This is how you escape the matrix.
– Nika Solé
Who can understand his errors? Cleanse thou me from secret faults.
– Psalm 19:12
When we find our voice, right speech leads to right action. We all have something useful to say, if only we have the wisdom to know how and when to say it.
– David Ryushin Bodney
There is so much more to come than you can possibly imagine. That part is always true.
– Nika Solé
Man is unique not because he does science, and he is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvelous plasticity of mind.
– Jacob Bronowski
Whatever our place in life, each of us has a contribution to make that can be made by no one else.
– Eknath Easwaran
When the mind is subdued, there is only eternal peace.
– Robert Adams
Millions of people around the world are watching the headlines these days, and most of them are getting the Fear. Good news is out of the question in this brutal year of our Lord. This is the time of the Final Shit Rain.
– Hunter S. Thompson
We have been clinging to outdated and overly simplistic notions of what a human being is, what an economy and a society are, what the universe is.
– Mohsin Hamid
Meditation does not answer the questions of the mind, but it dissolves the very mind which creates many questions and confusion in our life.
– Unknown
He goes free of the earth.
The sun of his last day sets
Clear in the sweetness of his liberty.
The earth recovers from his dying.
The hallow of his life remaining
In all his death leaves.
Radiance knows him. Grown lighter
Than breath, he is set free
In our remembering. Grownbrighter
Than vision, he goes dark
Into the life of the hill
That holds his peace.
He’s hidden among all that is,
And cannot be lost.
– Wendell Berry
Experiences are the chemicals of life with which the philosopher experiments.
– Manly P. Hall
The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness, and low self-esteem mesh to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. We all bear the cost of keeping it running. Illiteracy is its linchpin…. Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom. But reading is still the path.
– Carl Sagan
The world does not give us very much now; it often seems to consist of nothing but noise and fear, and yet grass and trees still grow.
– Hermann Hesse
The activity you enjoy most is not your calling. It’s your hobby.
Careers aren’t built solely on passion—they depend on making a meaningful contribution.
Doing what you love is a luxury. Finding a purpose is a necessity.
– Adam Grant
Within your subconscious mind you will find the solution for every problem, and the cause for every effect.
– Dr. Joseph Murphy
In the past when soldiers went to war they wore armor to protect their bodies; similarly when Dharma practitioners wage war against their delusions they need to wear armor-like effort to protect their minds against difficult external conditions.
– Geshe Kelsang Gyatso
This nation is not supposed to be governed by the whims of a single madman. That was actually the whole fucking point.
– Tom Wienner
The moment you realize that fitness is forever you stop worrying how long it will take.
– Dan Go
I’ll tell you again that everything will certainly, quite certainly, get better, and that you have nothing to worry about.
– Franz Kafka
Whatever you give – it may be a check to a worthy cause, it may be clothes to a person who is cold, it may be food to the hungry, it may be medical help to the sick – do it without thinking of getting anything in return. Do it as a service to God.
– Eknath Easwaran
The best teachers are on the Internet. The best books are on the Internet. The best peers are on the Internet.
– @naval
There’s nothing sadder than a naturally bright, bubbly neurodivergent person slowly dimming their sparkle after years of being excluded for simply being themselves.
– zayden
The greatest gift we can offer others
is to take care of our own karma
and allow them to take care of theirs.
– @KavijiPoet
Forgiveness is a process of giving up the old for something new. Old experiences and memories that we hold on to in anger, resentment, shame, or guilt cloud our spirit mind. The truth is, everything that has happened had to happen. It was a growth experience.
– Iyanla Vanzant
casting his line
into the golden ripples
of the setting sun
he catches nothing today
but a basket full of peace
– Brian Zimmer
No animal on earth knows what a Monday is.
No plant. No ocean. No nervous system in nature. The week doesn’t exist. You’ve been exhausted by something that was never real.
– @askaya
One can optimize for productivity or one can optimize for creativity, but it’s hard to do both.
– @naval
The power that knows the way will take care of you. The one who makes the sun shine, the apples grow perfectly on apple trees, the food that sustains us, nourishes us. Everything has been lovingly provided for us. Have faith, trust the power that knows the way.
– Robert Adams
each man’s hell is in a different place:
mine is just up and behind
my ruined face.
– Charles Bukowski
You don’t need more talent, luck, or connections to get ahead. You need to do the things most people won’t.
– Shane Parrish
…Bilbo stopped. Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterward were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait.
– Tolkien
it is the hour of conflict, antagonism, struggle
the world turning autumn in warpaint
everything silently
prepares to scream
– Amiri Baraka
A guy who rises to the top of a big corporation and owns none of it is much more interested in control than he is in economics. It is just the nature of humanity. A guy who owns his business is used to control. He never has to fight for control. What he has to fight for is economics. But a bunch of entrepreneurs find it much easier to collaborate and create economic value. They have something beyond control-they have economics.
– John Malone
The greatest skill one can develop is decreasing the time between idea and execution.
– Dan Koe
Every fault, every crime, everything for which one might seek or grant forgiveness involves or presupposes some act of perjury; every fault, every wrong is first and foremost an act of perjury—namely, the breaking of a promise (whether implicit or explicit), the failure to honor a commitment or a responsibility regarding a law one has sworn to uphold, or is supposed to have sworn to uphold. […] Forgiveness, if there is such a thing, must and can only forgive the unforgivable, he inexpiable—and thus do the impossible.
– Jacques Derrida
It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of language, nationality, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.
– James Joyce
We are all of us not merely liable to fear, we are also prone to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration.
– Malcolm Gladwell
Each person is the missing piece in this wacky world.
– John Conway
You don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.
– John Green
Even in our deepest, most lasting friendships, we never speak as openly as when we face a blank page and address a reader we do not know.
– Michel Houellebecq
Competition in education is not a preparation for life. It is a preparation for conflict.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
Pass through this brief patch of time in harmony with nature, and come to your final resting place gracefully, just as a ripened olive might drop, praising the earth that nourished it.
– Marcus Aurelius
In a world that constantly asks us to make up our minds about other people, a nonjudgmental presence seems nearly impossible.
– Henri Nouwen
The truth about science is that we never do know the truth and there is rarely a visible end product. So, having a passion for the process keeps us searching for understanding about the universe.
– Dr. Martha Clare Morris
Only an artist can divine the meaning of life.
– Novalis
Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
We live by mercy if we live. To that we have no fit reply But working well and giving thanks, Loving God, loving one another, To keep Creation’s neighborhood.
– Wendell Berry
Whatever we fight about in the outside world is also a battle in our inner selves. Anyone who can admit this will first seek the solution in himself, and this in fact is the way all the great solutions begin.
– CG Jung
Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.
– J.D. Salinger
In too many organizations, the people at the top have all the authority and none of the information, while the people on the front line have all the information and none of the authority.
– David Marquet
Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion.
– Albert Einstein
Somewhere deep inside me is a workshop in which Titans are forging a new world.
– Etty Hillesum
Where and to what purpose
Was the story then? Where,
Finding yourself at last
Here, down, and darkened by
A furious human
Creature in a foreign
Skin—where was the bright news,
The chronicle of day?
– Richard Howard, The Shepherd Corydon
Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast,
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.
– Thomas Gray
The original Pali word for a Buddhist monk or renunciant, bhikkhu, means “fear seer,” one who can tolerate his own terror.
– Mark Epstein
We say, to shine one corner of the world — that is enough. Not the whole world. Just make it clear where you are.
– Shunryu Suzuki Roshi
People bring the whole garden to a grave, but forget to offer a single flower when it matters.
– Anne Frank
The national economy that is really run for the benefit of a very few people is preying upon and slowly destroying local communities everywhere.
– Wendell Berry
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
Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.
– Thomas Jefferson
Eternity is not elsewhere, or in any unfindable place.
– Mary Oliver
Ah, my Beloved, fill the cup that clears To-day of past Regrets and future fears — To-morrow? — Why, To-morrow I may be Myself, with Yesterday’s Sev’n Thousand Years
– Omar Khayyam
When Crimea was still a place of light,
by Lyudmyla Khersonska
translated from the Russian
by Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris
when gulls
were free
of orders,
when sandals
beat light
on the border
of water,
and gulls were the only patrols in the sky;
when women in bright dresses
walked barefoot or in cheap sandals,
in sandals, in sandals
instead of boots,
before missiles.
Before missiles,
I, too, loved it all.
…And songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic.
– Bob Dylan
We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
You Took the Last Bus Home
you took
the last bus home
don’t know how
you got it through the door
you’re always doing amazing stuff
like the time
you caught that train
– Brian Bilston
There ain’t no answer.
There ain’t gonna be any answer.
There never has been an answer.
There’s your answer.
– Gertrude Stein
I don’t give a fuck if you like me.
But… I do give a fuck about how I’ve treated you.
Whether I’ve been honest with you.
Whether I’ve treated you with dignity and respect.
Whether I’ve lived in integrity with my highest values.
Even if you’ve wronged me,
am I at peace with my own response?
– Jeff Foster
Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
– Wendell Berry
The sun – the bright sun, that brings back, not light alone, but new life, and hope, and freshness to man – burst upon the crowded city in clear and radiant glory.
– Charles Dickens
I’m still learning what it is about the past that I want to write. I don’t worry about it. It will emerge. It will insist on being told.
– Frank McCourt
Isn’t that wonderful? That feeling of not knowing too much about something… Incomplete information… Endless possibilities… When you don’t know much about something, it’s the most exciting sensation.
– Erol Ozan
Whenever one person stands up and says, ‘Wait a minute, this is wrong,’ it helps other people do the same.
– Gloria Steinem
Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.
– George Saunders
Remember the Constitution doesn’t start with
“I, the President.” It’s “We, the people.”
– Gloria Steinem
HALFWAY THERE
I have questions about the moon.
Questions about distance and what is really luminous.
That evening in the cafe,
how the raspberries stained the white, white cloth, and we rubbed in salt
to lift the stain.
The coffee so dark, I got drunk on the essence of night.
It was bitter and delicious.
September moon rose inside me,
and also not inside me. Demi-moon
filling the room with the scent of fresh linen, shaken out,
shaken out, I opened then: Stargazer lily, shed pollen and seedling,
daughter of Suzanne,
who had to die
and I had to let her.
The flavor of this moon is that whole year in reverse, a lack,
presence of absent mother
Dark sky, part moon, part mother:
the exact same as light cream, sugar substitute.
Just 1/2 a moon, 1/2 a moon, 1/2 a moon onward
Pointing, I said, I’ll always say,
Look at the
Ring around the
and I cried a river then, the Pecos, the Puerco, the dream blue Navesink,
the banks of which I was born by,
Small, I drank my milky demitasse of coffee,
sweetened, matzoh crumbled in,
though I already
pointed at moons,
not through a cafe window,
the table’s cloth crimson with the leakage of sweet fruit,
but through a child’s eyes,
raised over a porcelain cup,
part-way full.
– Judyth Hill
FOR THE RAINDROP
For the raindrop, joy is entering the river –
Unbearable pain becomes its own cure.
Travel far enough into sorrow, tears turn to sighing;
In this way, we learn how water can die into air.
When, after heavy rain, the storm clouds disperse,
Is it not that they’ve wept themselves clear to the end?
If you want to know the miracle, how wind can polish a mirror,
Look: The shining grass grows green in spring.
It’s the rose’s unfolding, Ghalib, that creates the desire to see –
In every color and circumstance, may the eyes be open
for what comes.
– Mirza Ghalib
Poetry seeks out the melody of nature amid the tumult of the dictionary.
– Boris Pasternak
The beauty of those places I soared over is with me still, and in all my dreams as in my waking life was a love of place, a sense that places were embodiments of emotions, were anchors, were companions of a sort, even protectors or parents. Once at the Pacific, I thought to myself Everything is my mother but my mother, and I recognized how the ocean had been a mother offering power, constancy, and solace. Many years later when I began rowing a scull, I realized that out in the water, I was out of reach of men and dogs, and that, as well as the beauties of water, made it serene, dreamy, the eighteen-foot span of my oars being as close to having wings as I could come.
– Rebecca Solnit
Our survival won’t depend on political or economic systems. It’s going to depend on the courage of the individual to speak the truth, and to speak it lovingly and not destructively. It’s saying what you really know and feel is the truth, in all directions. Our greatest vulnerability lies in the amount of misinformation and mis-conditioning of humanity.
– Buckminster Fuller
My poetry is not separate from my living, nor is yours. The only way we can teach another person to create poetry is to teach that person how to feel herself or himself. The experience of poetry is intimate, and it is crucial. For that reason, of course, it is often resented or resisted. The pursuit of one’s own poetry is basically a subversive activity, because the pursuit of one’s feelings colors one’s total existence, and we are paid well for refusing to feel ourselves.
– Audre Lorde
There is a moment in the experience of love when you start to cut yourself on everything. On the edges of drawers and on the screen of your mobile phone, on your toothbrush and when you are watering a house plant, when you put your trousers on and when you take them off, when you open a book or close a door, when you tie your shoelaces and when you adjust the thermostat on the central heating; even bars of soap and the handrails on buses cut you. Suddenly objects want to sharpen their edges on you.
– Agustín Fernández Mallo
I live on my emotions. Sometimes I wish I didn’t–but then again I would rather suffer through them–suffer intensely, I mean; go down into the depths with them, for the sake of that wonderful upward swing on to the pinnacles of happiness.
– Katherine Mansfield
The environments set up by different media are not just containers for people; they are the processes which shape people. There is no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.
– Marshall McLuhan
There are ways in, journeys to the center of life, through time; through air, matter, dream and thought. The ways are not always mapped or charted, but sometimes being lost, if there is such a thing, is the sweetest place to be. And always, in this search, a person might find that she is already there, at the center of the world. It may be a broken world, but it is glorious nonetheless.
– Linda Hogan
At This Moment
It is not the body that is important but the atmosphere around it. The atmosphere becomes permeated with this finer vibration, in the stillness. And another quality is there.
An axis begins to appear, of pure attention. There is a sensitivity.
This atmosphere, filled with energy. The body, like an envelope.
Respect this atmosphere, this energy contained in the body. And then, even subtler energies can come into you—the Light can come into you.
All my thoughts, feelings, ideas are nothing compared to this precious treasure, this quality of energy that is not mine but what I am.
More and more, with attending to presence, allowing higher forces to enter, staying collected, returning, we can live in a new way.
You can serve this energy. And the energy can heal. From it can come my best action in the world, my best action for others. Help each other through living in this pure Attention.
– Michel de Salzmann
People are always asking me, ‘Who will you pass the torch to?’ The question makes me angry. There is no one torch-there are many torches and I’m using my torch to light other torches.
– Gloria Steinem
we long for rain / for water / to pour into our hearts / an offering of radical grace.
– bell hooks
Today we can no longer so easily say that if a being on this earth walks erect, lights a fire and works on a stone, it must be a human being. We can only say that it is a human if it thinks and speaks and freely questions the whole of the world and its existence, even if it cannot answer this one total question.
– Karl Rahner
Fears about yourself prevent you from doing your best work, while fears about your reception by others prevent you from doing your own work.
– David Bayles
The news now reads like somebody fed all the worst of human history, grotesque satire, war propaganda, financial fraud, religious mania, corporate psychosis, and the fever-scribbled wall of a gas-station bathroom stall into the same machine and hit “publish.” Every morning there is some fresh batshit nightmare headline that would have sounded too stupid, too grotesque, too obscene, or just too fucking absurd to survive an editor even just a year ago, and yet here it is, completely real. The genuinely disturbing part is not that the world has become strange, but that the strange has become administrative, institutionalized, normalized, professionally managed, and explained to us as completely normal and sane by the terminally insane, as though none of this is obviously, spectacularly, catastrophically fucking INSANE.
– Oliver Kornetzke
CREDO
What good is poetry
if it doesn’t stand up
against the lies of government,
if it doesn’t rescue us
from the liars that mislead us?
What good is it
if it doesn’t speak out, denounce what’s going on?
It’s nothing
but harmless wordplay
to titillate and distract –
the government knows it,
and can always get rid of us if we step out of line.
That I believed in poetry,
even when I betrayed it,
that I came back to its central meaning
– to save the world –
this and only this
has been my salvation.
after C. Miłosz
– Edward Field
It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself. But Rincewind always thought it looked a sort of greenish-purple.
– Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic
Our ordinary mind always tried to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but this is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees.
– E.F. Schumacher
Innocence is different than naivete. There is an old saying in the backwoods I come from: Ignorance is not knowing anything and being attracted to the good. Innocence is knowing everything, and still being attracted to the good.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estes
As Thoreau so well knew, and so painstakingly tried to show us, what a man most needs is not a knowledge of how to get more, but a knowledge of the most he can do without, and of how to get along without it.
– Wendell Berry
How privileged, lucky, and/or blessed must you be to have monetary assets, a savings account of any amount, a home, an automobile. There is another tangible asset through which you apprehend all others. Is it appreciating? Are you fully invested? It is your minded body, your embodied mind. If we treated our other tangible assets so cavalierly, they would soon amount to nothing. How can we start minding this corporeal asset? We can start where mindedness begins, in the dawning of awareness. Today, enmind, your movement, a single one, how, for instance, you bring your hands on and off the keyboard. Float them up and float them down as though placing your hand through a silken sleeve. Mind you, it’s going to feel like a party, one to which the whole of you wants to be invited. That party is Alexander Technique.
– Alan Bowers
Parker sat for a long time on the ground in the alley behind the pool hall, examining his soul. He saw it as a spider web of facts and lies that was not at all important to him but which appeared to be necessary in spite of his opinion.
– Flannery O’Connor
When I was young, there were very few elders willing to talk about the darkness; most of them pretended that success was all they had ever known. As the darkness began to descend on me in my early twenties, I felt I had developed a unique and terminal case of failure. I did not realize that I had merely embarked upon a journey toward joining the human race.
– Sharon Moon
Our conditioning as members of a consumer society prevents us from abandoning hope that, with sufficient planning, we might yet be able to see and do everything. To move slowly and deliberately through the world, attending to one thing at a time, strikes us as radically subversive, even un-American. We cringe from the idea of relinquishing, in any moment, all but one of the infinite possibilities offered us by our culture. Plagued by a highly diffused attention, we give ourselves to everything lightly. That is our poverty. In saying yes to everything, we attend to nothing. One only can love what one stops to observe. “Nothing is more essential to prayer,” said Evagrius, “than attentiveness.”
– Belden C. Lane
We seem to have an insatiable thirst for places that don’t exist, for griffins and wondrous dragons prowling the antipodes of a world we hardly recognize. They symbolize states of growth we haven’t yet achieved.
– Belden C. Lane
Good government makes everything well ordered and fit,
And at the same time it throws shackles on the unjust.
It levels out the rough, stops insolence, and weakens arrogance.
It causes the growing blossoms of blindness to wither.
It straightens crooked judgments and it levels out over-reaching deeds.
It stops the acts of civil conflict and
It stops the anger of grievous strife and because of it
Everything among men is wisely and appropriately done.
– Solon
How, in the contemporary period, can we evoke the imagery that communicates the most profound and most richly developed sense of experiencing life? These images must point past themselves to that ultimate truth which must be told: that life does not have one absolutely fixed meaning. These images must point past all meanings given, beyond all definitions and relationships, to that really ineffable mystery that is just the existence, the being of ourselves and of our world. If we give that mystery an exact meaning we diminish the experience of its real depth. But when a poet carries the mind into a context of meanings and then pitches it past those, one knows that marvelous rapture that comes from going past all categories of definition. Here we sense the function of metaphor that allows us to make a journey we could not otherwise make …
– Joseph Campbell
There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.
– Zora Neale Hurston
It is the nature and intention of a constitution to prevent governing by party, by establishing a common principle that shall limit and control the power and impulse of party, and that says to all parties, thus far shalt thou go and no further. But in the absence of a constitution, men look entirely to party; and instead of principle governing party, party governs principle.
– Thomas Paine
No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away
– Wendell Berry
I am at peace with God. My conflict is with Man.
– Charlie Chaplin
But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself, into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously.
– Julio Cortazar
If we were not here…the show would play to an empty house, as do all those falling stars which fall in the daytime. That is why I take walks: to keep an eye on things.
– Annie Dillard
I think there’s an evil in us, in humankind. Trust denies it. Leaps across it. Leaps the chasm. But it’s there. Anything we do finally serves evil, because that’s what we are. Greed and cruelty. I look at the world, at the forests and the mountain here, the sky, and it’s all right, as it should be. But we aren’t. People aren’t. We’re wrong. We do wrong. No animal does wrong. How could they? But we can, and we do. And we never stop.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
The saints, too, had wandering minds.
– Peter Kreeft
Bad News About My Vocation
by Ron Koertge
I remember how the upper crust in my hometown
pronounced it—care-a-mel. Which is correct, I guess,
but to everybody else it was carmel.
Which led to the misconception about the order
of Carmelites.
I imagined they served God by heating sugar
to about 170 C, then adding milk and butter
and vanilla essence while they listened
to the radio.
I thought I could do that. I could wear the white
shirt and pants. I knew I couldn’t be good
but I might be a good candy maker.
So imagine my chagrin when I learned about
the vows of poverty and toil enjoined
by these particular friars.
I also crossed off my list the Marshmallowites
and the Applepieites, two other orders I
was thinking of joining.
When the world turns over,
you can’t go on thinking upside
down. What was innocence is
now irresponsibility. Visions
must be re-visioned.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
I certainly never feel discouraged. I can’t myself raise the winds that might blow us or this ship into a better world. But I can at least put up the sail so that when the winds comes, I can catch it.
– E.F. Schumacher
Democracy is just something you must do every day, like brushing your teeth.
– Gloria Steinem
Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked. For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
I will take revenge on the world through love.
– Sergei Parajanov
Our original instructions are to listen to the cloud floating by and the wind blowing by. That’s poetry and prose in English, but it is wakahan in the Lakotan language. It means to consciously apply mystery to everything. Everything is alive and has its own consciousness.
– Tiokasin Ghosthorse
There’s something great about being around a younger generation of writers who are just on fire, just on fire to be writing and excited about their future, the learning, the joy of it all. I suppose just young people in general are awesome, just awesome! I do not feel like some of my generation at all.
– Sheryl Luna
A man will fight harder for his interests than for his rights.
– Napoleon Bonaparte
Is that all aging is – leaving things you knew, and once loved, behind to become something brand new?
– Nikita Gill
The illusion is that change takes time. The truth is, change happens the moment you decide.
– Alan Watts
alone again
on a lakeside bench
tides of childhood
lap against memory
in the quiet of my mind
– Chen-ou Liu
However, satisfying writing is, that mix of discipline and miracle, which leaves you in control, even when what appears on the page has emerged from regions beyond your control— it is a very poor substitute indeed for the joy and agony of loving.
– Jacqueline Rose
Don’t worry about anything at all.
You are not here by accident. This form is just a costume for a while. But the one who is behind the costume, this one is eternal. You must know this. If you know this and trust this, you don’t have to worry about anything.
– Mooji
The conscious mind resists, the unconscious insists.
– Jacques Lacan
Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.
– Thomas Merton
Melancholy is at the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all rivers is the sea… The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe.
– H. F. Amiel
first yellow leaf
resting at the doorstep
goodbye dressed in gold
– @BashoSociety
a caterpillar
still on the leaf
enters autumn
– Basho
My lifelong cross to bear has been secret derisive judgment, a pinball machine of sizing up everything and everyone. I am working on it, but the healing is going slightly more slowly than one would hope.
– Anne Lamott
Pure origins are a riddle. Even
The poem may hardly disclose them.
– Friedrich Hölderlin
We know nothing of the world and will never know. All we say is metaphor which asserts at once our unknowing and our need to state in some language what we don’t know.
– William Bronk, Costume as Metaphor
The need to connect is at our core as sentient beings. It takes time, effort, and understanding. Sometimes, it feels impossible. But if we work at it, miracles can happen.
– Michael Burnham
change your desires rather than the order of the world.
– René Descartes
Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what the author says, you know what he means and why he says it.
– M. J. Adler
The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
– Milton Freidman
Things are not so painful and difficult of themselves, but our weakness or cowardice makes them so.
– Michel de Montaigne
We never forget what we endeavor to forget.
– Nietzsche
You cannot resurrect what you are still refusing to bury.
– Jeff Israel Nthiwa
If we become even slightly more violent, shortsighted, ignorant, and selfish than we are now, almost certainly we will have no future.
– Carl Sagan
If everybody tried a little harder to care about each other a little more around the world, it would be so much easier than fighting and pissing each other off.
– Dolly Parton
No man is ever truly stuck; he is only standing at the intersection of patience and clarity.
– Marcus Aurelius
There’s a vastness here and I believe that the people who are born here breathe that vastness into their soul. They dream big dreams and think big thoughts because there is nothing to hem them in.
– Conrad Hilton
I am fully aware and in full possession of myself.
I have no desire to be understood, admired, pitied, or even known.
– Simone de Beauvoir
And don’t fight when you’re angry. Think when you’re angry. Write when you’re angry. Read when you’re angry.
– Kiese Laymon
for even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you.
– Khalil Gibran
Decisions are best made by the people affected by them.
– Gloria Steinem
Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature, and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable.
Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious.
– Albert Einstein
Energy that it takes you to create toxicity, or selfishness, or to be overly combative is energy that you’re not using to elevate.
– Jon Stewart
All we can do is study the lives of people who seem to have found their answers to the questions of what ultimately a life was about.
– Charlotte Bühler
But sometimes the world does not reward gentle souls. Sometimes it takes everything soft inside them until they become strangers even to themselves.
– Franz Kafka
What is that which gleams through me, and strikes my heart without hurting it; and I shudder and kindle?
– St. Augustine
All it takes is one good person to restore hope.
– Pope Francis
A lot of good things don’t get made because of
too much thinking.
– Agnes Martin
The Greatest Generation will be the generation that does not have to go to war.
– Gloria Steinem
now that I know so much,
what’s left to think is the unthinkable.
– Ellen Bryant Voigt
Almost every man wastes part of his life in attempts to display qualities which he does not possess.
– Samuel Johnson
Self-government won’t work without self-discipline.
– Paul Harvey
That wasn’t any act of God. That was an act of pure human fuckery.
– Stephen King
No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side. Or you don’t.
– Stephen King
The greatest obstacle to liberation is not evil or sin. The greatest obstacle is the ignorance that mistakes the non-Self for the Self.
– Adi Shankara, Vivekachudamani
You couldn’t not like someone who liked the guitar.
– Stephen King, The Stand
There are more things to admire in men than to despise.
– Albert Camus
You have to be a light to yourself. That light can never be given by another, however respected by tradition.
– Krishnamurti
It’s much easier to educate a doer than to activate a thinker.
– Andy Stanley
Still, obviously, one can’t be sensible all the time.
– Albert Camus
Love didn’t grow very well in a place where there was only fear.
– Stephen King, The Stand
Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.
– Victor Hugo
It’s more important to be a three-dimensional person…and one of the ways you get to be a whole person is you stop thinking about your little self.
– Toni Morrison
When you have a child, the world has a hostage.
– Ernest Hemingway
In helping others, we help ourselves. There is no separation.
– Swami Vivekananda
The man who has anticipated the coming of troubles takes away their power when they arrive.
– Seneca
Movements begin when ordinary people believe their actions matter.
– Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point
Now a hunger that cannot quite be located in the body comes over her, a sense of yearning, for what? Maybe for kindness, for a moral sense that is clear and loud and greater that she is, something that can blanket her, no, no, something in which she can hide for a minute and be safe.
– Lauren Groff
No one wants to be deceived; everyone prefers the truth to falsehood. This is why people want what they love to be the truth, even if it is not.
– William Cavanaugh
It is a grand metaphor, though for what I do not know, but I know it is a grand metaphor.
– Werner Herzog
If there’s one stamp you need on your comedy passport, it’s the willingness to find out where you are a little too desperate or a little too whatever and to be willing to poke fun at it.
– Helen Hunt
There is hope in the individual, in you, not in a system, not in the blueprint of a planned society, not in any religious organization, but in YOU, the individual.
– Krishnamurti
Emptiness is never going to get us to get up and do anything, but ecstasy might.
– Mary Oliver
A simple rule that makes life easier: Always strive to give value before you ask for value.
– James Clear
You see, I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad thing that happened to me.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.
– Hemingway
Fearlessness is not only possible, it is the ultimate joy. When you touch nonfear, you are free.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
The heart is wiser than the intellect.
– Josiah Gilbert Holland
Adults are no better than children. They grope their way through life, not knowing where they came from or where they are going, unable to see any definite purpose in their actions, and governed in much the same way — by cookies, cakes, and the rod.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Embarrassment is the cost of entry. If you aren’t willing to look like a foolish beginner, you’ll never become a graceful master.
– Ed Latimore
Sociology completes the body of philosophy by tracing out the unity to be found in the various sciences.
– Auguste Comte
We had a thunder shower that was so terrible we locked the doors and the clock stopped — it was like Judgment day.
– Emily Dickinson
The rulers of this country have always used the law as a weapon of terror. The law is not written for our protection; it is written to protect their stolen property from the people they stole it from.
– Assata Shakur
The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball – the further I am rolled the more I gain.
– Susan B. Anthony
But love is always new. Regardless of whether we love once, twice, or a dozen times in our life, we always face a brand-new situation.
– Paulo Coelho
Every factor of being — every facet of experience — when looked at closely, turns out to be impermanent and therefore unreliable, unable to provide complete satisfaction.
– Bhikkhu Bodhi
The lesson I’ve absorbed from my work is that we all learn from diversity, not from sameness. To be with people of different ages, races, and experiences is a gift.
– Gloria Steinem
All words, in every language, are metaphors.
– Marshall McLuhan
To be human is to move forward, to adapt, to believe in your ability to make things better. That is the only way to make the pain and sacrifice mean something.
– Rick Riordan
The artist is always a servant, and is perpetually trying to pay for the gift that has been given to him as if by a miracle.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
Words are like spices. Too many is worse than too few.
– Joan Aiken
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
– G.K. Chesterton
Adversity elicits talent which under prosperous conditions would have remained dormant.
– Ara Parseghian
Knowledge is hot water in wool. It shrinks time and space.
– Mark Z Danielewski
We men of this age are rotten with book-lore and with a yearning for the past.
– James Elroy Flecker, The Last Generation A Story of the Future
Autumn approaches and the heart begins to dream.
– Bashō
If tribal thinking is original sin, then story is prayer.
– Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling
The Samurai is the first to suffer anxiety for human society, and he is the last to seek personal pleasure.
– Morihei Ueshiba
The only people who think we can have compound growth on a finite planet are mad men and economists.
– K. Boulding
To know a thing you have to trust what you know, and all that you know, and as far as you know in whatever direction your knowing drags you.
– Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion
I have learned over a period of time to be almost unconsciously grateful–as a child is–for a sunny day, blue water, flowers in a vase, a tree turning red. I have learned to be glad at dawn and when the sky is dark. Only children and a few spiritually evolved people are born to feel gratitude as naturally as they breathe, without even thinking. Most of us come to it step by painful step, to discover that gratitude is a form of acceptance.
– Faith Baldwin, Many Windows, Seasons of the Heart
For even the wise cannot see all ends.
– Gandalf the Grey
The Valley of Aijalon
by Babette Deutsch
I have forgotten precious things:
Wisdom in books, the words of lovers,
But not the shadow on the waters
Cast by a hidden sea-gulls’ wings.
I have forgotten many a pledge
Given and taken—fear and hunger
That once were knives—but not the pewter
Of olives from a mountain’s edge.
The tired brain gathers and lets go
Faces and cities, wars and weathers,
But keeps one sun as still as Joshua’s
On honey-bright unbroken snow.
Saint Francis Speaks to the Living
I didn’t talk to birds.
I heard them.
That is what the hard world
has forgotten: to open,
wholly, and let the great song
change you. To kneel down
with your life’s harp in your own arms,
and to be so played
by the vastness that you shatter,
that you have a chance to hear
what isn’t you.
Listen. I loved
this world so wholly.
Have you forgotten
why you were doing this?
Do it. Do
what you were born to.
The difference
between the hell of self
and its Eden
is the difference between needing
Lazarus
to see you
and calling out
I hear you, I do, I
hear you
and watching what those perfect
words can do.
– Joseph Fasano
Within each of us there is
a silence – a silence as vast as
the universe. We are afraid of it
….and we long for it.
– Gunilla Norris
Can you bow
like a broken necklace
scattering your brightest tears?
All other yoga postures
Simply remove the stiffness.
To bend is the first freedom.
Don’t just bow to the master,
bow like a bee to a grain of pollen.
Genuflection of a thirsty panther
by a water hole at sunset.
Snow melting into mountain
stream laughter.
Bow to the croak of a tree frog
in the jasmine vine at midnight.
To the plums of September
thumping the ground, showing you
the way to fall, the way to
split open and offer your juice.
Bow to the silence of the doe
who, after all, is eating your roses.
Bow to the wail of the newborn American
whose mother crossed over
the border last night.
To your own breath
and the secret name in your heartbeat,
bow down.
Fill the hollows of your body
with the blues of the sky.
Bow so completely
that you shatter your crown
and sow the earth
with stars.
– Fred LaMotte
The whole difference
between construction
and creation is
exactly this: that a
thing constructed can
only be loved after it
is constructed; but a
thing created is loved
before it exists.
– Charles Dickens
My four-year-old refers to his
imagination as “my magic.” Why
on earth would we ever tell
children they need AI?
– Joseph Fasano
Crazy how the Christian
idea of heaven is an
untouched paradise,
enough food for everyone,
classless, moneyless,
stateless, a utopia of peace,
unity and happiness. But
right here on earth they
absolutely don’t want it
because it’s too woke.
– unknown
No, I’m not that kind of
Christian. I’m a Dolly
Parton, Mr. Rogers,
Jimmy Carter kind of
Christian.
– Unknown
I like to write when I feel
spiteful; it’s like having a good
sneeze.
– D.H. Lawrence
What The Soul Wrote
On The Asylum Wall
They tried to tell me
I was ill
When I was only wholly
awake
in a world so mad
the sleepwalkers
look well.
– Joseph Fasano
We all know what
addiction is; we are
primarily addicted to
ME.
– Pema Chodron
Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.
– Mary Oliver
I think I’m greedy, but I’m not greedy for money – I think that can be a burden – I’m greedy for an exciting life.
– David Hockney
Etymology is political code.
– Robin Morgan