chasing waterfalls

"If it happens that the human race doesn't make it, then the fact that we were here once will not be altered, that once upon a time we peopled this astonishing blue planet, and wondered intelligently at everything about it and the other things who lived here with us on it, and that we celebrated the beauty of it in music and art, architecture, literature, and dance, and that there were times when we approached something godlike in our abilities and aspirations. We emerged out of depthless mystery, and back into mystery we returned, and in the end the mystery is all there is."
 - James Howard Kunstler
The Long Emergency

"Note some odd things about the self's world. One is that it is not the same as the Cosmos-environment. The planet Venus may be a sign in the self's world as the evening star or the morning star, but the galaxy M31 may not be present at all. Another oddity is that the self's world contains things which have no counterpart in the Cosmos, such as centaurs, Big Foot, détente, World War I (which is past), World War III (which may not occur). Yet another odd thing is that the word apple which you utter is part of my world but it is not a singular thing like an individual apple. It is in fact understandable only insofar as it conforms to a rule for uttering apples. But the oddest thing of all is your status in my world. You - Betty, Dick - are like other items in my world - cats, dogs, and apples. But you have a unique property. You are also co-namer, co-discoverer, co-sustainer of my world - whether you are Kafka whom I read or Betty who reads this. Without you - Franz, Betty - I would have no world."
 - Walker Percy
Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book



Catchpenny Road
Summer ends tonight.
Air cuts into our lungs
as frost cuts the field
into flowers. Stars catch
in the pond's dark water
drawing us farther
from the lighted houses.
We catch our arms
in circles round our chests
as if this were protection
against darkness.

Spiked firs border the road.
Behind each one are ghosts
whose names we don't know,
who watch us, who
withhold themselves,
who'd never hurt us.
They come to you in your sleep,
sit in a circle round your bed,
saying the things the living
want to say and can't.
You try to move your head, try
to move into their world of light
where the lace on the child's
white dress burns your skin
like a kiss. But no,
touching their lips to yours,
they go, wordlessly and without cause,
as only the dead might.

Mist spills from the trees
as you talk and we walk
from valley to hill, hill to valley,
till we come to the place
where we left off, unmarked road
crossing itself in the dark.
Blackened by frost, leaves
blow over the pond,
absorbing the water's stain,
sinking toward the stars' reflections.
You kneel, smooth the water
with your hands, and say nothing.
Perfect in their pain,
the dead surround us, holding
stones in their hands like coins.
Money they would lend us.
 - Elizabeth Spires



"We are fast moving into something, we are fast flung into something like asteroids cast into space by the death of a planet, we the people of earth are cast into space like burning asteroids and if we wish not to disintegrate into nothingness we must begin to now hold onto only the things that matter while letting go of all that doesn't. For when all of our dust and ice deteriorates into the cosmos we will be left only with ourselves and nothing else. So if you want to be there in the end, today is the day to start holding onto your children, holding onto your loved ones; onto those who share your soul. Harbor and anchor into your heart justice, truth, courage, bravery, belief, a firm vision, a steadfast and sound mind. Be the person of meaningful and valuable thoughts. Don't look to the left, don't look to the right; we simply don't have the time. Never be afraid of fear."
 - C. JoyBell C.



Long Afternoons
Those were the long afternoons when poetry left me.
The river flowed patiently, nudging lazy boats to sea.
Long afternoons, the coast of ivory.
Shadows lounged in the streets, haughty manikins in shopfronts
stared at me with bold and hostile eyes.

Professors left their schools with vacant faces,
as if the Iliad had finally done them in.
Evening papers brought disturbing news,
but nothing happened, no one hurried.
There was no one in the windows, you weren't there;
even nuns seemed ashamed of their lives.

Those were the long afternoons when poetry vanished
and I was left with the city's opaque demon,
like a poor traveler stranded outside the Gare du Nord
with his bulging suitcase wrapped in twine
and September's black rain falling.

Oh, tell me how to cure myself of irony, the gaze
that sees but doesn't penetrate; tell me how to cure myself
of silence.
 - Adam Zagajewski



Days pass here, weeks slip away,
and even when it isn't,
it seems to be Sunday,
irreal, subdued, the queer, slowed-down
feeling of late afternoon
spreading through the hours
of an entire day. Impersonal, yet benign,
the sun rains indiscriminately down
on everything, instead of singling out
particular objects, so that
even the rocks out by the tide line,
normally gray-brown, become heightened,
false, and I have to turn away.
 - Elizabeth Spires
from Letter from Swan's Island



"When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors."
 - Andrew Boyd
Daily Afflictions: The Agony of Being Connected to Everything in the Universe



"Sometimes it was hard to say things. Things were so complicated. People might resent what you said. They might use your remarks against you. They might take you seriously and act upon your words, actually do something. They might not even hear you, which perhaps was the only thing worth hoping for. But it was more complicated than that. The sheer effort of speaking. Easier to stay apart, leave things as they are, avoid responsibility for reflecting the world and all its grave weight. Things that should be simple are always hard. But hard things are never easy."
 - Don DeLillo
Ratner's Star



"I ought to stop it, she thought.
You end up nowhere, that way.
It would all be simpler if they hadn't hammered into you this business of ending up somewhere, if they had taught you, rather to be happy standing still. All that nonsense about your road. Finding your road. Taking your own road. Maybe we were made to live in a plaza, or a park, instead, to stay there, as our life passes, or maybe we are a crossroads, and the world needs us to stand still, it would be a disaster if, at some point, we were to go off on our road, what road?, others are roads, I am a plaza, I lead nowhere, I am a place."
 - Alessandro Baricco
City



Do not expect that if your book falls open
to a certain page, that any phrase
you read will make a difference today,
or that the voices you might overhear
when the wind moves through the yellow-green
and golden tent of autumn, speak to you.

Things ripen or go dry. Light plays on the
dark surface of the lake. Each afternoon
your shadow walks beside you on the wall,
and the days stay long and heavy underneath
the distant rumor of the harvest. One
more summer gone,
and one way or another you survive,
dull or regretful, never learning that
nothing is hidden in the obvious
changes of the world, that even the dim
reflection of the sun on tall, dry grass
is more than you will ever understand.

And only briefly then
you touch, you see, you press against
the surface of impenetrable things.
 - Dana Gioia

<°))))><

"Poetry is like truth: on one level it simply is, and as such it is available to anyone. Anyone, that is, who will spend himself or herself to receive it, for no one has an inherent right to truth. One must earn it, and one earns the truth by honoring it, by treasuring it in a thousand daily acts, by shaping one's life to both give it and receive it. The emperors have their treasures, and we have ours. Larry Levis said it perfectly when he spoke in the voice of Whitman, which is the voice of American poetry; 'To find me now will cost you everything.'"
 - Philip Levine
My Lost Poets



"And then a man of forty or so, with a French accent, asked, "How do you achieve the presence of mind to initiate the writing of a poem?" And something cracked open in me, and I finally stopped hoarding and told them my most useful secret. The only secret that has helped me consistently over all the years that I've written. I said, "Well, I'll tell you how. I ask a simple question. I ask myself: What was the very best moment of your day?" The wonder of it was, I told them, that this one question could lift out from my life exactly what I will want to write a poem about. Something I hadn't known was important will leap out and hover there in front of me, saying I am - I am the best moment of the day. "Often," I went on, "it's a moment when you're waiting for someone, or you're driving somewhere, or maybe you're just walking across a parking lot and admiring the oil stains and the dribbled tar patterns. One time it was when I was driving past a certain house that was screaming with sunlitness on its white clapboards, and then I plunged through tree shadows that splashed and splayed across the windshield. I thought, Ah, of course - I'd forgotten. You, windshield shadows, you are the best moment of the day."
 - Nicholson Baker
The Anthologist



"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness - that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what - at last - I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me."
 - Bertrand Russell



"For if I believe anything, it is that the primary business of literature and art is cognitive, a kind of finding out and knowing and telling, both in good times and bad; a celebration of the way things are when they are right, and a diagnostic enterprise when they are wrong."
 - Walker Percy



"My theory is that the purpose of art is to transmit universal truths of a sort, but of a particular sort, that in art, whether it's poetry, fiction or painting, you are telling the reader or listener or viewer something he already knows but which he doesn't quite know that he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition. And so, what the artist does, or tries to do, is simply to validate the human experience and to tell people the deep human truths which they already unconsciously know."
 - Walker Percy



"Art is the means by which we communicate what it feels like to be alive - in the past that was mixed up with other illustrative duties but that was still its central function that has been liberated in the art called modern. Art is not necessarily good for you or about communicating "good things."

Making beautiful things for everyday use is a wonderful thing to do - making life flow more easily - but art confronts life, allowing it to stop and perhaps change direction - they are completely different."
 - Antony Gormley
BBC Forum
Series of questions from the public following the opening of Tate Modern, London, 2002



I Am Learning to Abandon the World
I am learning to abandon the world
before it can abandon me.
Already I have given up the moon
and snow, closing my shades
against the claims of white.
And the world has taken
my father, my friends.
I have given up melodic lines of hills,
moving to a flat, tuneless landscape.
And every night I give my body up
limb by limb, working upwards
across bone, towards the heart.
But morning comes with small
reprieves of coffee and birdsong.
A tree outside the window
which was simply shadow moments ago
takes back its branches twig
by leafy twig.
And as I take my body back
the sun lays its warm muzzle on my lap
as if to make amends.
 - Linda Pastan
PM/AM

"(a) Are the skies you sleep under likely to open up for weeks on end?
 (b) Is the ground you walk on likely to tremble and split?
 (c) Is there a chance (and please check the box, no matter how small that chance seems) that the ominous mountain casting a midday shadow over your home might one day erupt with no rhyme or reason?

Because if the answer is yes to one or all of these questions, then the life you lead is a midnight thing, always a hair's breadth from the witching hour; it is volatile, it is threadbare; it is carefree in the true sense of that term; it is light, losable like a key or a hair clip. And it is lethargy: why not sit all morning, all day, all year, under the same cypress tree drawing the figure eight in the dust? More than that, it is disaster, it is chaos: why not overthrow a government on a whim, why not blind the man you hate, why not go mad, go gibbering through the town like a loon, waving your hands, tearing your hair? There's nothing to stop you - or rather anything could stop you, any hour, any minute. That feeling. That's the real difference in a life."
 - Zadie Smith
White Teeth

"Our homes overgrown with junk, papers, knickknacks. Shelves piled with the clothing of the dead and of the children who have grown, and so are also dead.
Desks full of mementos and faded letters. To live in such a domestic graveyard. That's how I live.
Time flies, and sleep opens ever greater chasms in time. Time becomes a second graveyard, a graveyard in the depths of consciousness.
To throw it all out would mean to die. So now a third graveyard, the one that waits.
I live in three cemeteries."
 - Anna Kamienska
In That Great River: A Notebook



Humans are indeed frightful beings.
A single moon
Bright and clear
In an unclouded sky:
Yet still we stumble
In the world's darkness
Have a good look
stop the breath,
peel off the skin,
and everybody ends up looking the same.
No matter how long you live,
the result is not altered.
Who will not end up as a skeleton?
Cast off the notion that "I exist."
Entrust yourself to the windblown clouds,
and do not wish to live forever.
 - Ikkyu
Wild Ways: Zen Poems of Ikkyu
translated by John Stevens

><((((º>

My birthday began with the water -
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In a rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days

ﮏ

These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singing birds.
 - Dylan Thomas
from Poem in October



"Then as regards the actual connection between spirit and body I consider that the body by reason of being a living body can "attract" and hold on to a "spirit" whilst the body is alive and awake and the two are firmly connected. When the body is asleep I cannot guess what happens but when the body dies the "mechanism" of the body, holding the spirit, is gone and the spirit finds a new body sooner or later perhaps immediately.

As regards the question of why we have bodies at all; why we do not or cannot live free as spirits and communicate as such, we probably could do so but there would be nothing whatever to do. The body provides something for the spirit to look after and use."
 - Alan Turing



"Perhaps the essence of the Liberal outlook could be summed up in a new decalogue, not intended to replace the old one but only to supplement it. The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows:

1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness."
 - Bertrand Russell
The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell



"One of the most solid pieces of writing advice I know is in fact intended for dancers - you can find it in the choreographer Martha Graham's biography. But it relaxes me in front of my laptop the same way I imagine it might induce a young dancer to breathe deeply and wiggle their fingers and toes. Graham writes: 'There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.'"
 - Zadie Smith



"I feel as though, if I were to extend my hand just a little toward the pool where the ideas ferment, I could grab at the idea and pull it out of the pool and onto the floor where ideas must stand before the jury of the brain. There, it must present itself, still from the pool, and a bit shivery because new ideas are not given a towel to dry off with, towels being reserved for proven theories; new ideas are simply pulled and stood up, and asked to explain themselves - not a very pleasant thing really, which is why so many people go into the room where the pool is. The exercise is exhausting not to mention a bit difficult to watch, if you are at all a sympathetic creature. What was my idea, anyways?"
 - Emilie Autumn



"My time does not come in large, focused blocks, but in fragments and shards. The fault is my own, arguably, but it's yours too - it's the fault of everyone I know who rarely finds herself or himself with uninterrupted hours. We're shattered. We're breaking up. It's hard, now, to be with someone else wholly, uninterruptedly, and it's hard to be truly alone. The fine art of doing nothing in particular, also known as thinking, or musing, or introspection, or simply moments of being, was part of what happened when you walked from here to there alone, or stared out the train window, or contemplated the road, but the new technologies have flooded those open spaces. Space for free thought is routinely regarded as a void, and filled up with sounds and distractions."
 - Rebecca Solnit



Transformation
I haven't written a single poem
in months.
I've lived humbly, reading the paper,
pondering the riddle of power
and the reasons for obedience.
I've watched sunsets
(crimson, anxious),
I've heard the birds grow quiet
and night's muteness.
I've seen sunflowers dangling
their heads at dusk, as if a careless hangman
had gone strolling through the gardens.
September's sweet dust gathered
on the windowsill and lizards
hid in the bends of walls.
I've taken long walks,
craving one thing only:
lightning,
transformation,
you.
 - Adam Zagajewski
Mysticism for Beginners



"We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment. We all got to face the nothingness before us and behind. Call it sleep. We all begin in sleep and that's where we find our end. Even in between, sleep keeps trying to claim us. To stay awake in life as much as possible - that may be the point.
Pain comes to us from deep back, from where it grew in the human body. Pain sucks more pain into it, we don't know why. It lives and we harbor its weight. When the worst comes, we will not act the opposite. We will do what we were taught, we who learnt our lessons in the dead light. We pass them on. We hurt, and hurt others, in a circular motion.
There is no trace where we were. No arrows pointing to the place we're headed. We are the trackless beat, the invisible light, the thought without a word to speak. Poured water, struck match. Before the nothing, we are the moment."
 - Louise Erdrich
The Bingo Palace



"There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas."
 - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Idiot



"I must, before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet - a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and the fearful passionless force of non-human things."
 - Bertrand Russell

<°))))><

You'll be driving along depressed when suddenly
a cloud will move and the sun will muscle through
and ignite the hills. It may not last. Probably
won't last. But for a moment the whole world
comes to. Wakes up. Proves it lives. It lives -
red, yellow, orange, brown, russet, ocher, vermilion,
gold. Flame and rust. Flame and rust, the permutations
of burning. You're on fire. Your eyes are on fire.
It won't last, you don't want it to last. You
can't stand any more. But you don't want it to stop.
It's what you've come for. It's what you'll
come back for. It won't stay with you, but you'll
remember that it felt like nothing else you've felt
or something you've felt that also didn't last.
 - Lloyd Schwartz
from Leaves
Goodnight, Gracie

To Live in This World Requires
To live in this world requires
that you leave your house every morning
and step into the wind
Every morning: with all your memories
on file and the future pinned to some wall
you will have to build and tear down and
build again. If you get there. If. If.

Into the wind: first you walk the dog whose
blessed face belies the beast it is built upon
Millennia behind you, that beast enters a cave
and decides whether or not to kill a child sleeping
by a fire. It does not kill the child
because its heart has been surprised by love
Both softened and sharpened by it, inexplicably
Inexplicably, to this day

And on this day, the wind relents
The morning star lifts itself into a changeable sky
and you, carrying extra weight, wearing
last year's clothes, start walking towards the train
Seeds that grew from ancient science digest in your stomach;
your bones begin to separate because science did not plan
this length of life; your heart slows down and you feel
the pressure of dragging a million, billion years
behind you. A million, billion lie ahead that you
will know nothing about

Thus, harnessed to time, facing the inevitable,
constructed by science and fed on inexplicable events
taking place somewhere in the middle of history,
your day goes by. Miles away, the ocean
murmurs to its own beloved creatures, a mountain
applies pressure to the weaving of a golden seam
And in your house, the dog wonders
if you will make it home again. And each day,
despite or because the performance of this feat
is both a mystery and a triumph, somehow
you will. You do
 - Eleanor Lerman

(the narrator here is a polar bear who has learned to write):
"I have to admit: my life changed because I'd made myself an author. Or to be precise, it wasn't exactly me who did that, I was made an author by the sentences I'd written, and that wasn't even the end of the story: each result gave birth to the next, and I found myself being transported to a place I hadn't known existed. Writing was a more dangerous acrobatic stunt than dancing atop a rolling ball. To be sure, I'd worked myself to the bone learning to dance on that ball and actually broke some bones rehearsing, but in the end I attained my goal. In the end I knew with certainty that I could balance on a rolling object - but when it comes to writing, I can make no such claims. Where was the ball of authorship rolling? It couldn't just roll in a straight line, or I'd fall off the stage. My ball was supposed to spin on its axis and at the same time circle the midpoint of the stage, like the Earth revolving around the sun.

Writing demanded as much strength as hunting. When I caught the scent of prey, the first thing I felt was despair: would I succeed in catching my prey, or would I fail yet again? This uncertainty was the hunter's daily lot. When my hunger grew too strong, I was incapable of hunting. All I wanted to do was stop - before the hunt - at a first-class restaurant for a three-course meal. I also wanted to make sure my limbs were adequately rested before each big hunt. My ancestors had spent entire winters slumbering in their sheltered caves. How pleasant it would be to withdraw once a year until spring came to wake me. A true winter knows no light, nor sound, nor work. In the big city, winter shrank and shriveled, and the dimensions of life grew narrow too."
 - Yoko Tawada
Memoirs of a Polar Bear

"If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie - a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days - but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge."
 - Hannah Arendt



"I write to make peace with the things I cannot control. I write to make red in a world that often appears black and white. I write to discover. I write to uncover. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin a dialogue. I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things differently perhaps the world will change. I write to honor beauty. I write to correspond with my friends. I write as a daily act of improvisation. I write because it creates my composure. I write against power and for democracy. I write myself out of my nightmares and into my dreams. I write in a solitude born out of community. I write to the questions that shatter my sleep. I write to the answers that make me complacent. I write to remember. I write to forget. I write to the music that opens my heart. I write to quell the pain. I write with the patience of melancholy in winter. I write because it allows me to confront that which I do not know. I write as an act of faith. I write as an act of slowness. I write to record what I love in the face of loss. I write because it makes me less fearful of death. I write as an exercise in pure joy. I write as one who walks on the surface of a frozen river beginning to melt. I write out of my anger and into my passion. I write from the stillness of night anticipating - always anticipating. I write to listen. I write out of silence. I write to soothe the voices shouting inside me, outside me, all around me. I write because I believe in words. I write because it is a dance with paradox. I write because you can play on the page like a child left alone in sand. I write because it is the way I take long walks. I write because I believe it can create a path in darkness. I write with a knife, carving each word from the generosity of trees. I write as ritual. I write out of my inconsistencies. I write with the colors of memory. I write as a witness to what I have seen. I write as witness to what I imagine. I write by grace and grit. I write for the love of ideas. I write for the surprise of a sentence. I write with the belief of alchemists. I write knowing I will always fail. I write knowing words always fall short. I write knowing I can be killed by my own words, stabbed by syntax, crucified by understanding and misunderstanding. I write past the embarrassment of exposure. I trust nothing especially myself and slide head first into the familiar abyss of doubt and humiliation and threaten to push the delete button on my way down, or madly erase each line, pick up the paper and rip it into shreds - and then I realize it doesn't matter, words are always a gamble, words are splinters from cut glass. I write because it is dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words, to say the words, to touch the source, to be touched, to reveal how vulnerable we are, how transient. I write as though I am whispering in the ear of the one I love."
 - Terry Tempest Williams
from A Letter to Deb Clow
Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert



"Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed.

If you, not just you in this room tonight but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as but individuals, men and women, you will change the earth.

In one generation, all the Napoleons and Hitlers and Caesars and Mussolinis and Stalins, and all the other tyrants who want power and aggrandizement, and all the simple politicians and time-servers who themselves are merely baffled or ignorant or afraid, who have used, or are using, or hope to use, man's fear and greed for man's enslavement, will have vanished from the face of it."
 - William Faulkner

What We Want
What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names -
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don't remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there
even in full sun.
 - Linda Pastan

"All ages have said and repeated that one should strive to know one's self. This is a strange demand which no one up to now has measured up to and, strictly considered, no one should. With all their study and effort, people are directed to what is outside, to the world about them, and they are kept busy coming to know this and to master it to the extent that their purposes require. How can you come to know yourself? Never by thinking, always by doing. Try to do your duty, and you'll know right away what you amount to. And what is your duty? Whatever the day calls for."
 - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe



"We inhabit, in ordinary daylight, a future that was unimaginably dark a few decades ago, when people found the end of the world easier to envision than the impending changes in everyday roles, thoughts, practices that not even the wildest science fiction anticipated. Perhaps we should not have adjusted to it so easily. It would be better if we were astonished every day."
 - Rebecca Solnit
Hope in the Dark



The Layers
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
 - Stanley Kunitz

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"I think we do have an obligation to be citizens - to be informed and engaged - but it's not just duty. Public life enlarges you, gives you purpose and context, saves you from drowning in the purely personal, as so many Americans seem to.

I've also learned by firsthand experience and eyewitnessing that popular power matters - to recognize the power of citizens and grassroots efforts and not be so depressingly, disempoweringly focused on the power of the elected and elite, as so many Americans are. Alone, we're powerless in many ways that we're powerful together, and that power is one of the great pleasures and purposes of life we hardly have language for in this culture."
 - Rebecca Solnit



"It is, after all, not necessary to fly right into the middle of the sun, but it is necessary to crawl to a clean little spot on earth where the sun sometimes shines and one can warm oneself a little."
 - Franz Kafka
Letter to my Father



1. Just watch everything happen. This is the same thing as surrendering.
2. The reason you can't do it is because you're afraid of your own mind.
3. To do it, you have to stop the continuous squinching that makes you you.
4. The self that gets lost in thoughts is also a thought.
5. Everything of which you can be aware is a mental event, including the "me" who thinks it's aware.
6. That "me" is the thought that Ramana Maharshi says is last to go, his "I-thought." His method aims at suffocating that thought by placing all attention on it.
7. One of thinking's main purposes is to say "this really exists" and "that does not," but this distinction isn't useful for meditation.
8. Forget about the nature of reality. This is about phenomenology.
9. Watching takes the fun out of thoughts. The pain, too.
10. All thinking is motivated by an intention (intention is not quite the right word, but the proper word does not exist) to excite a feeling.
11. Nothing you think can make you happy for very long.
12. Being lost in thoughts is a form of masturbation.
13. This instruction sums it up: don't daydream. Or does it?
14. And this one too: be aware. But it makes a difference whether you are aware of something or of anything.
15. You can play a lot of games with meditation that are pure wastes of time.
16. Gurdjieff's self-remembering is the same thing as Theravada's mindfulness.
17. Minds are incredibly prone to travel in ruts.
18. The reason we have to do this stuff - seek relief from unhappiness, meditate, get enlightened - is that nature designed our minds for brains that were much less intelligent than the ones we have.
19. Small children hum like cats when they eat. The memory is worth recovering.
 - Freddie Yam
What I've Learned From Meditating

Answers To Letters
In the bottom drawer of my desk I found a letter that first arrived twenty-
six years ago. A letter in panic, and it's still breathing when it arrives the
second time.
A house has five windows: through four of them the day shines clear
and still. The fifth faces a black sky, thunder and storm. I stand at the fifth
window. The letter.
Sometimes an abyss opens between Tuesday and Wednesday
but twenty-six years could pass in a moment. Time is not a straight line, it's
more of a labyrinth, and if you press close to the wall at the right place you
can hear the hurrying steps and the voices, you can hear yourself walking
past on the other side.
Was the letter ever answered? I don't remember, it was long ago. The
countless thresholds of the sea kept migrating. The heart kept leaping
from second to second like a toad in the wet grass of an August night.
The unanswered letters pile up, like cirrostratus clouds promising bad
weather. They can make the sunbeams lusterless. One day I will answer. One
day when I am dead and can at last concentrate. Or at least so far away
from here that I can find myself again. When I'm walking, newly arrived,
in the big city, on 125th Street, in the wind on the street of dancing
garbage. I who love to stray off and vanish in the crowd, a capital T in the
endless mass of the text.
 - Tomas Tranströmer

The ponies run, the girls are young
The odds are there to beat
You win a while and then it's done
Your little winning streak
And summoned now to deal
With your invincible defeat
You live your life as if it's real
A thousand kisses deep
 - Leonard Cohen
from A Thousand Kisses Deep

"I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package, I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it."
 - Joan Didion
excerpt from a commencement address
University of California
Riverside 1975

"Political conflicts are merely surface manifestations. If conflicts arise you may be sure that certain powers intend to keep this conflict under operation since they hope to profit from the situation. To concern yourself with surface political conflicts is to make the mistake of the bull in the ring, you are charging the cloth. That is what politics is for, to teach you the cloth. Just as the bullfighter teaches the bull, teaches him to follow, obey the cloth."
 - William S. Burroughs



The Word
Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,
between "green thread"
and "broccoli" you find
that you have penciled "sunlight."
Resting on the page, the word
is beautiful, it touches you
as if you had a friend
and sunlight were a present
he had sent you from some place distant
as this morning - to cheer you up,
and to remind you that,
among your duties, pleasure
is a thing,
that also needs accomplishing.
Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds
of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder
or a safe spare tire?
Tomorrow you may be utterly
without a clue,
but today you get a telegram
from the heart in exile,
proclaiming that the kingdom
still exists,
the king and queen alive,
still speaking to their children,
- to any one among them
who can find the time
to sit out in the sun and listen.
 - Tony Hoagland
Sweet Ruin



"What is it? The ordinary is extraordinary. The ordinary is extraordinary. The ordinary is the thing we want back when someone we love dies. When someone dies or leaves or falls out of love with us. We call it "little things". We say, "it's the little things I miss most." The ordinary things. It's the little things that bring them back to us unexpectedly. We say "reminds us" but it is more than reminding - it's a conflagration - it's an inundation - Both fire and flood is memory. It's spark and breach so ordinary we do not question it. The atom split. The little thing."
 - Lynda Barry
What It Is

This world is wild as an old wives' tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.
 - G. K. Chesterton
from The House of Christmas


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The Stones
The stones we have thrown I hear
fall, glass-clear through the year. In the valley
confused actions of the moment
fly howling from tree-top
to tree-top, quieting
in air thinner than now's, gliding
like swallows from mountain-top
to mountain-top till they
reach the furthest plateaus
along the edge of existence. Where
all our deeds fall
glass-clear
to no ending
except ourselves.
 - Tomas Tranströmer
translated by Patty Crane



"Go back to knowing that it is simple. The fun is in the busy-ness as long as it's fun for you. And when you see that it's just more of the same stories, all about 'me', drop it. You can observe what goes on benignly, but keep going. From the position of observer, take that last step. Who's the one observing ? Go there. Who is that ultimate, absolute observer, where 'seeing itself' arises? Let attention rest there. Let it be ok that nothing has happened. Let the show be over, let the movie, the story of 'I' as an individual person, be over. And see what happens. Truth will reveal itself, absolute clarity of how this matrix works, will show itself to be no more than a matrix. And somehow, a capacity to enjoy what ever is unfolding is always there. You don't have to be perfect, you don't have to have good health, you don't have to do it before your body dies, it's got nothing to do with anything: it's right now, place your attention behind any stories, any concepts. From there, freedom arises, beauty arises, love arises. But don't take my word for it, do it. And prove me wrong, I'd be delighted. I'll take on that challenge any day. Do it and find out. So blessings on all of us, who are pretending to be human."
 - Jac O'Keeffe



"We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it. That is at the bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.

That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called 'visions,' the whole so called 'spirit-world,' death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily paring been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied.

For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed; it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope.

But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence."
 - Rainer Maria Rilke
Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations
John J. L. Mood, Rainer Maria Rilke



"Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness - and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe.
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."
 - Arundhati Roy
War Talk



"We're told, often enough, that as a species we are poised on the edge of the abyss. It's possible that our puffed-up, prideful intelligence has outstripped our instinct for survival and the road back to safety has already been washed away. In which case there's nothing much to be done. If there is something to be done, then one thing is for sure: those who created the problem will not be the ones who come up with a solution."
 - Arundhati Roy
Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations


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