magical mystery tour

"The sun shines, snow falls, mountains rise and valleys sink, night deepens and pales into day, but it is only very seldom that we attend to such things. When we are grasping the inexpressible meaning of these things, this is life, this is living."
 - R. H. Blyth



"Apropos of nothing at all except that it has been on my mind and I think I had better say it because it accounts for a good deal of my behavior. There is a strong streak in me that wishes not to exist and really does not believe that I do, so that I tend to become unnerved when these curious ideas are proved to be not really true because someone (in this case you) has responded to something I have said or done just as if I were an actual person the same as you (especially) or anyone else. Some of it is, I guess, just the worst sorts of arrogance and irresponsibility , but not all of it, as I really don't think I exist a lot of the time, so I'm asking you to bear with it, me, whatever, for the sake of what? - friendship I suppose, which I want to be capable of, which is obviously not enough."
 - Edward Gorey
Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer



Perhaps the whisper was born before lips,
And the leaves in treelessness circled and flew,
And those, to whom we impart our experience as bliss,
Acquire their forms before we do.
 - Osip Mandelstam



"Here in the museum of things gone terribly wrong, the Mütter Museum of Medical Oddities, in Philadelphia. All the specimens: a loud carbuncle in plaster, on the back of a neck, like a scream. A smallpox pustule like an open mouth, its lips pulled down in sorrow in the photograph. The (forgive me) macaroni and cheese-with-ketchup face of a syphilitic. The gorgeous phrase "cavity of the sacrum" followed by photos of Frederik Ruysch's tiny, mounted fetal skeletons, some playing miniature bone-and-ligament violins, some jarred and injected with wax, tale, cinnabar, oil of lavendar, alcohol, black pepper, colored pigments to better illustrate the transience of life and other allegorical lessons.

I read the medieval explanation about these bodies: God's anger. The Devil's hand at work. Some fear, danger, tragedy striking a mother straight through to her child. I looked and looked past reason to the useless necks again. To sit with you have to look into the gap in your understanding, not drive the conversation, not know where it's going. Not know beforehand at all where it's heading. I read once, there is a quality of legend about freaks . . . like a person in a fairy tale who stops and demands that you answer a riddle. That's the space. That open field, where you're sitting with, and don't have the answer, but an atmosphere of response is forming."
 - Lia Purpura
On Looking
Essays



There is the sound of dust heard over the telephone.
There is the sound of a piano with a faint heart
coming from below, a hell where people are happy.
There is the sound of someone standing on the grave
of someone they do not know and do not care about.
There is the sound the same person makes
standing on their own grave.
I love the sound of the iron on the ironing board
turning on and off, waiting for someone to come.
 - Mary Ruefle



In this
In this house you would come to believe
in ghosts and lives beyond the grave. Here
noises configure themselves into the voices
of those who've gone. "Cyril!" calls a wife
lost to cancer; a dead dog's nametag chinks
against the brass of her collar; the creak
of an opening door, a footstep
on a warped floorboard, and someone
you've loved comes to breathe your name
once again,  and now in Autumn the wind
moaning beneath the eaves, and the small tornadoes
of leaves lifted in frenzied gusts
scratch against the window late at night
like the feeble clawing of all our loves
wanting to come back, wanting to make us
believe that we can ever be reunited.
 - Mikey Fatboy Delgado
Life and War



With the Sun's Fire
Are you a horror to yourself?
Do you have eyes peering at you
from within at the back of your skull
as you manage to stay calm, knowing
you are being watched by a stranger?

Be well, I am seated beside you,
planning a day's work. We are contending
with the stuff of stones and stars,
with water, air, with dirt, with food
and with the sun's fire.
 - David Ignatow
Against the Evidence



"I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a demoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons - the autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown."
 - H. P. Lovecraft
Nyarlathotep



"I have often wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong. Whilst the greater number of our nocturnal visions are perhaps no more than faint and fantastic reflections of our waking experiences - Freud to the contrary with his puerile symbolism - there are still a certain remainder whose immundane and ethereal character permit of no ordinary interpretation, and whose vaguely exciting and disquieting effect suggests possible minute glimpses into a sphere of mental existence no less important than physical life, yet separated from that life by an all but impassable barrier. From my experience I cannot doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrial consciousness, is indeed sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different nature from the life we know, and of which only the slightest and most indistinct memories linger after waking. From those blurred and fragmentary memories we may infer much, yet prove little. We may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon."
 - H. P. Lovecraft
Beyond the Wall of Sleep



"There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and  when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy."
 -  H. P. Lovecraft
Celephais

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"Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.

Most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses remote from traveled ways, usually squatted upon some damp grassy slope or leaning against some gigantic outcropping of rock. Two hundred years and more they have leaned or squatted there, while the vines have crawled and the trees have swelled and spread. They are almost hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green and guardian shrouds of shadow; but the small-paned windows still stare shockingly, as if blinking through a lethal stupor which wards off madness by dulling the memory of unutterable things."
 - H. P. Lovecraft
The Picture in the House



"In the Christian calendar, November 1st is the Feast of All Saints, a day honoring not only those who are known and recognized as enlightened souls, but more especially the unknowns, saints who walk beside us unrecognized down the millennia. In Buddhism, we honor the bodhisattvas - saints - who refuse enlightenment and return willingly to the wheel of karma to help other beings. Similarly, in Judaism, anonymous holy men pray the world from its well-merited destruction. We never know who is walking beside us, who is our spiritual teacher. That one - who annoys you so - pretend for a day that he's the one, your personal Obi Wan Kenobi. The first of November is a splendid, subversive holiday.

Imagine a hectic procession of revelers - the half-mad bag lady; a mumbling, scarred janitor whose ravaged face made the children turn away; the austere, unsmiling mother superior who seemed with great focus and clarity to do harm; a haunted music teacher, survivor of Auschwitz. I bring them before my mind's eye, these old friends of my soul, awakening to dance their day. Crazy saints; but who knows what was home in the heart? This is the feast of those who tried to take the path, so clumsily that no one knew or noticed, the feast, indeed, of most of us.

It's an ugly woods, I was saying to myself, padding along a trail where other walkers had broken ground before me. And then I found an extraordinary bouquet. Someone had bound an offering of dry seed pods, yew, lyme grass, red berries, and brown fern and laid it on the path: "nothing special," as Buddhists say, meaning "everything." Gathered to formality, each dry stalk proclaimed a slant, an attitude, infinite shades of neutral.

All contemplative acts, silences, poems, honor the world this way. Brought together by the eye of love, a milkweed pod, a twig, allow us to see how things have been all along. A feast of being."
 - Mary Rose O'Reilley
The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd



"I once had a friend. He had been teaching a long time when I was just starting. He liked telling his students he'd seen them before. In another life, at another school, the same hairline, the same kid brother back home in eighth grade. In class, he gave them obituaries to read. And though we're no longer close, here is consolation: I still believe in what he was up to: seeing if he could make them dizzy. Suggesting they write their way into or out of the disquieting facts he offered up. Offering the chance to find themselves breathless, to consider themselves a point on a circle falling and rising, falling/drawn up, as the wheel moved, moves, is moving relentlessly on. He wanted them to feel conveyor beneath their feet, when all along they'd assumed they were walking. To consider they might, somehow, for another, be a mark and a measure of vastness. A site.

What does my friend want his students to say, what does he want them to stumble into, considering those obituaries? "Nothing in particular," he'd answer, meaning "I have no plan." No one thing in mind. Only for them to skid to a halt, to go breathlessly forth, for here is their chance to see: the patterns keep coming, all the lives theirs resemble - in the newspaper photo, the deceased at age twenty, the jaunty tilt of that head so like the tilt of their own. That they share the same name, the same birthday and interests. That the most basic, seismic events daily converge and include us."
 - Lia Purpura
On Looking



Do You Have Any Advice For Those of Us Just Starting Out?
Give up sitting dutifully at your desk. Leave
your house or apartment. Go out into the world.
It's all right to carry a notebook but a cheap
one is best, with pages the color of weak tea
and on the front a kitten or a space ship.
Avoid any enclosed space where more than
three people are wearing turtlenecks. Beware
any snow-covered chalet with deer tracks
across the muffled tennis courts.
Not surprisingly, libraries are a good place to write.
And the perfect place in a library is near an aisle
where a child a year or two old is playing as his
mother browses the ranks of the dead.
Often he will pull books from the bottom shelf.
The title, the author's name, the brooding photo
on the flap mean nothing. Red book on black, gray
book on brown, he builds a tower. And the higher
it gets, the wider he grins.
You who asked for advice, listen: When the tower
falls, be like that child. Laugh so loud everybody
in the world frowns and says, "Shhhh."
Then start again.
 - Ron Koertge
Fever



"I celebrate myself," the poet Walt Whitman wrote. The thought is so delicious it is almost obscene. Imagine the joy that would come with celebrating the self - our achievements, our experiences, our existence. Imagine what it would be like to look into the mirror and say, as God taught us, "That's good."
 - Joan D. Chittister



"I was sitting with a zen monk and I couldn't stop looking out the window in front of me.
"Why are you looking out the window," he asked, "concentrate on your posture."
I tried to bring my attention back to my posture but I soon found myself drawn outwards again to the window in front of me.
Smiling, he asked me "are you a writer."
"Yes."
"I feel so sorry for you," he said laughing."
 - Luke Storms
Intense City



We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it's cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it's cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes.
 - Charles Bukowski



After Rain
They noticed, you see, that I was a noticing
kind of person, and so they left the dictionary
out in the rain and I noticed it,
I noticed it was open to the rain page,
much harm had come to it, it had aged to the age
of ninety-five paper years and I noticed rainbow
follows rain in the book, just as it does on
earth, and I noticed it was silly of me to
notice so much but I noticed there is no stationary
in heaven, I noticed an infant will grip your hand like
there is no tomorrow, while the very aged
will give you a weightless hand for the same reason,
I noticed in a loving frenzy that some are hemlocked
and others are not (believe me yours unspeakably obliged),
I noticed whoever I met in my search for entrance
into this world went too far (but that was their
destination) and I noticed the road followed roughly
the route of a zipper around a closed case,
I noticed the sea was human but no one believed me,
and that some birds have the wingspan of an inch
and some flowers the petal span of a foot yet the two
are very well suited to each other, I noticed that.
There are eight major emotional states but I forget
seven of them, I can hear the ambulance singing
but I don't think it will stop for me,
because I noticed the space between the waterfall and
the rock and I am safe there, resting in
the cradle of all there is, the way a sea horse
(when it is tired) will tie its tail to a seaweed
and rest, and there has not been, in my opinion,
enough astonishment over this fact, so now I will
withdraw my interest in the whole external world
while I am in the noticing mode, notice how I
talk to you just as if you were sitting on my lap
and not as if it were raining, not as if there were
a sheet of water between us or anything else.
 - Mary Ruefle 
Indeed I Was Pleased With the World



"Writing is a very, very unnatural act. Most people are out living - their bodies are, they're walking and they're talking and they're working and playing and they're interacting. Writing's very unnatural because you are not living when you write. But at the same time, what a great paradox - because you're all writers so you all know. You're all going, Oh but no, no, I'm most alive when I write. So are you more living or less, we can't use "more" or "less," it's just different. And this is the crux of any writer's life. It is the essential paradox and question and torment and joy. Are you writing or living and what's the difference and where's the line and how do we divide those activities?

I've spent my whole life thinking, Is this unnatural? Shouldn't someone be parading outside my apartment with a cardboard placard saying, "Insanity's taking place on the inside?" They really should, there'd be a point to it. And then, in other moods, I go, No, no, no, the insanity's taking place out there. And I waffle back and forth. And this waffling back and forth, when you yourself experience it, it's called life. And you are going to experience this waffling back and forth for the rest of your life. And whenever you do, don't think you're unnatural or broken or different. It's life, and we're living it, and that tension is life."
 - Mary Ruefle



"A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them. That is, he does not draw on a reservoir; instead, he engages in an activity that brings to him a whole succession of unforeseen stories, poems, essays, plays, laws, philosophies, religions."
 - William Edgar Stafford


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"Some people, when they hear the word process, interpret it as meaning something inhuman. But it's actually quite the opposite. I'm not referring to a process in a flat, mechanical, materialistic sense. This process is alive. And it's you. The process is you. Indeed, what is so important about this shift of perspective is that you begin to see your own sense of self as part of a vast unfolding stream of development. Your understanding of what it means to be human expands almost infinitely, because you start to see your own humanity and your own potential for greater humanity as a result of this process, and an inherent part of this process - and as far as we know, the highest expression of this process. In this way, evolutionary spirituality enhances and enlarges to almost infinite proportions your sense of the significance of what it means to be human."
 - Andrew Cohen



"It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it's dense, isn't it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlicue, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually - if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning - you're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as - Mr. so-and-so, Ms. so-and-so, Mrs. so-and-so - I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm that, too. But we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it."
 - Alan Watts



"Isn't all art irreverent? It is irreverent to create that which doesn't exist; the newly made thing flies in the face of the already created and as such is based on negation (what already exists is simply not enough!), but born also out of the greatest reverence for all that already is. When Borges, visiting the Sahara, picked up a little bit of sand, carried it in his hand and let it fall someplace else, he said, "I am modifying the Sahara," and he wrote that this was one of the most significant memories of his stay. What Borges did is what we do when we write poems after millennia of poem writing. We aren't saving the Sahara, we are modifying it, and you have to be irreverent to think you can modify the Sahara in the first place, and sincere in your attempt to do so."
 - Mary Ruefle
Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures



"Make the universe your companion, always bearing in mind the true nature of all creation - mountains and rivers, trees and grasses, and humanity - and enjoy the falling blossoms and scattering leaves."
 - Basho
Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel



I would rather see words out on their own, away
from their families and the warehouse of Roget,
wandering the world where they sometimes fall
in love with a completely different word.
Surely, you have seen pairs of them standing forever
next to each other on the same line inside a poem,
a small chapel where weddings like these,
between perfect strangers, can take place.
 - Billy Collins
from Thesaurus



A New Poet
Finding a new poet
is like finding a new wildflower
out in the woods. You don't see

its name in the flower books, and
nobody you tell believes
in its odd color or the way

its leaves grow in splayed rows
down the whole length of the page. In fact
the very page smells of spilled

red wine and the mustiness of the sea
on a foggy day - the odor of truth
and of lying.

And the words are so familiar,
so strangely new, words
you almost wrote yourself, if only

in your dreams there had been a pencil
or a pen or even a paintbrush,
if only there had been a flower.
 - Linda Pastan
Heroes In Disguise



"And when you think about it, poets always want us to be moved by something, until in the end, you begin to suspect that a poet is someone who is moved by everything, who just stands in front of the world and weeps and laughs and laughs and weeps . . . "
 - Mary Ruefle



"This cell belongs to a brain, and it is my brain, the brain of me who is writing; and the cell in question, and within it the atom in question, is in charge of my writing, in a gigantic minuscule game which nobody has yet described. It is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy, guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one."
 - Primo Levi
The Periodic Table



The Continuous Life
What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,
Have run their course? O parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost - a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don't really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief,
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.
 - Mark Strand
New Selected Poems



"The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing."
 - David Foster Wallace


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"Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust."
 - Charles Bukowski



"I would not call this meditation, sitting in the back garden. Maybe I would call it eating light. Mystical traditions recognize two kinds of practice: apophatic mysticism, which is the dark surrender of Zen, the Via Negativa of John of the Cross, and kataphatic mysticism, less well defined: an openhearted surrender to the beauty of creation. Maybe Francis of Assissi was, on the whole, a kataphatic mystic, as was Thérèse of Lisieux in her exuberant moments: but the fact is, kataphatic mysticism has low status in religious circles. Francis and Thérèse were made, really made, any mother superior will let you know, in the dark nights of their lives: no more of this throwing off your clothes and singing songs and babbling about the shelter of God's arms."
 - Mary Rose O'Reilley
The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd



"The human body essentially recreates itself every six months. Nearly every cell of hair and skin and bone dies and another is directed to its former place. You are not who you were last November."
 - Donald Miller
A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life



"The heart changes, and it is our worst sorrow; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change."
 - Marcel Proust



First, it will comfort you to know there are crows.
And calipers for measuring the amount of sunshine
that can escape from under the shadows
of thought. Far out at sea ships go down
in a crippled light, and bunches of black iris
are sent to the remaining crew.
You, too, shall have lived and died
a jot, with the queer feeling you were vast and
ageless, with a good education in sleep, prepared
to die with one regret, that you could not devote
more years in vain. And no one could do nothing
but let it happen. Whatever was tied to the mast
the waves have come - here they are:
after anxiety turns into pain and pain
turns into rain and the rain
into a doorbell on the face,
the forehead splits open.
Crows come for that speck of gold
you were saving for you eyelids at the point of death
and turn away, wildly happy.
 - Mary Ruefle
Grief
Indeed I Was Pleased with the World



"Observe your own body. It breathes. You breathe when you are asleep, when you are no longer conscious of your own ideas of self-identity. Who, then, is breathing? The collection of information that you mistakenly think is you is not the protagonist in this drama called the breath. In fact, you are not breathing; breath is naturally happening to you. You can purposely end your own life, but you cannot purposely keep your own life going. The expression, 'my life' is actually an oxymoron, a result of ignorance and mistaken assumption. You don't possess life; life expresses itself through you. Your body is a flower that life let bloom, a phenomenon created by life."
 - Ilchi Lee



"It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognize the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognize from day to day."
 - Alain de Botton



We have time
We have time for everything
Sleep, run back and forth,
regret we made an error and err again
judge others and absolve ourselves,
we have time to read and write,
edit what we wrote, regret what we wrote,
we have time to make projects and never follow through
we have time to dwell in illusions and stir through
their ashes much later.

We have time for ambitions and diseases,
to blame destiny and details,
we have time to look at the clouds, at the ads, or some random accident, we have time
to chase away our questions, postpone our answers, we have time
to crush a dream and reinvent it, we have time to make friends,
to lose them, we have time to take lessons and forget them
soon after, we have time to receive gifts and not understand them. We have time for everything.

No time, though, for a little tenderness.
When we're about to do that, too, we die.
 - Octavian Paler



"I am coming to see that the sensation of the worst nightmares, a sensation that can be felt asleep or awake, is identical to those worst dreams' form itself: the sudden intra-dream realization that the nightmares' very essence and center has been with you all along, even awake: it's just been . . . overlooked; and then that horrific interval between realizing what you've overlooked and turning your head to look back at what's been right there all along, the whole time."
 - David Foster Wallace
Infinite Jest



"When you are thinking something, you have the feeling that the thoughts do nothing except inform you of the way things are and then you choose to do something and you do it.  That's what people generally assume.  But actually, the way you think determines the way you're going to do things.  Then you don't notice a result comes back, or you don't see it as a result of what you've done, or even less do you see it as a result of how you were thinking.  Is that clear?"
 - David Bohm

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"No, it's not fools who turn mystics. It takes a certain amount of intelligence and imagination to realize the extraordinary queerness and mysteriousness of the world in which we live. The fools, the innumerable fools, take it all for granted, skate about cheerfully on the surface and never think of inquiring what's underneath."
 - Aldous Huxley
Those Barren Leaves



a song with no end
when Whitman wrote, "I sing the body electric"
I know what he
meant
I know what he
wanted:

to be completely alive every moment
in spite of the inevitable.

we can't cheat death but we can make it
work so hard
that when it does take
us

it will have known a victory just as
perfect as
ours.
 -  Charles Bukowski