life is a carnival
Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left.
- Victor Hugo
Gautama said that when the Great Ferris Wheel
stops turning, you will still be way up
there, swinging in your seat and laughing.
- Robert Bly
Hiding in a Drop of Water
It is early morning, and death has forgotten us for
A while. Darkness owns the house, but I am alive.
I am ready to praise all the great musicians.
Whatever happens to me will also happen to you.
Surely you must have realized this from hearing
The way the strings cry out no matter who hits them.
From the great oak trees in the yard in October,
Leaves fall for hours each day. Every night
A thousand wrinkled faces look up at the stars.
Still we know that at any second the soul can stand
Up and start across the desert, as when Rabia ended up
Riding on a resurrected donkey toward the Meeting.
It is this reaching toward the Kaaba that keeps us glad.
It is this way of hiding inside a drop of water
That lets the hidden face become visible to everyone.
Gautama said that when the Great Ferris Wheel
Stops turning, you will still be way up
There, swinging in your seat and laughing.
- Robert Bly
My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy
"We can understand making offerings to demons as "appreciate your lunacy." Bow to your own weakness, your own craziness, your own resistance. Congratulate yourself for them, appreciate them. Truly it is a marvel, the extent to which we are selfish, confused, lazy, resentful, and so on. We come by these things honestly. We have been well trained to manifest them at every turn. This is the prodigy of human life bursting forth at its seams, it is the effect of our upbringing, our society, which we appreciate even as we are trying to tame it and bring it gently round to the good. So we make offerings to the demons inside us, we develop a sense of humorous appreciation for our own stupidity. We are in good company! We can laugh at ourselves and everyone else."
- Norman Fischer
Training in Compassion
"Don't fight your demons. Your demons are here to teach you lessons. Sit down with your demons and have a drink and a chat and learn their names and talk about the burns on their fingers and scratches on their ankles. Some of them are very nice."
- Charles Bukowski
- Charles Bukowski
Many red devils ran from my heart
And out upon the page,
They were so tiny
The pen could mash them.
And many struggled in the ink.
It was strange
To write in this red muck
Of things from my heart.
- Stephen Crane
The Black Riders and Other Lines
"First of all you must use your ears to take some of the burden from your eyes. We have been using our eyes to judge the world since the time we were born. We talk to others and to ourselves mainly about what we see. A warrior is aware of that and listens to the world; he listens to the sounds of the world. He is aware that the world will change as soon as he stops talking to himself and he must be prepared for that monumental jolt. The world is such-and-such or so-and-so only because we tell ourselves that that is the way it is. If we stop telling ourselves that the world is so-and-so, the world will stop being so-and-so. You must start slowly to undo the world."
- Don Juan Matus
A Separate Reality
- Don Juan Matus
A Separate Reality
"We're all carnies, though some people are in denial. They want to be above it all, above the mayhem of laughter and people and lights and animals and the dark sadness that lurks in the corners and beneath the rides and in the trailers after hours. So they ride the Ferris wheel, and at the top, they think they've left it all behind. They've ascended to a place where they can take things seriously. Where they can be taken seriously."
- N. D. Wilson
Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl
This is the song of the cold when people
are themselves but less so, people
who haven't listened to my unworded advice.
I was once described as "immortal"
but this didn't include my mother who recently died.
And why go to New York after the asteroid
and the floods of polar waters, the crumbling
buildings, when you're the only one there
in 2050? Come back to earth.
Blow your nose and dwell on the shortness of life.
Lift up your dark heart and sing a song about
how time drifts past you like the gentlest, almost
imperceptible breeze.
- Jim Harrison
from Cold Poem
are themselves but less so, people
who haven't listened to my unworded advice.
I was once described as "immortal"
but this didn't include my mother who recently died.
And why go to New York after the asteroid
and the floods of polar waters, the crumbling
buildings, when you're the only one there
in 2050? Come back to earth.
Blow your nose and dwell on the shortness of life.
Lift up your dark heart and sing a song about
how time drifts past you like the gentlest, almost
imperceptible breeze.
- Jim Harrison
from Cold Poem
"Color and sound are not only the language in which one communicates with the life without, but also the language in which one communicates with the life within. One might ask how it is done. We can see the answer in certain scientific experiments. Special plates are made, and by speaking near such a plate marks are made upon the plate with sound and vibrations. Those marks make either harmonious or inharmonious forms. If that is true, then every person, from morning till evening, is making invisible forms in space by what he says. He is creating invisible vibrations around him, and so he is producing an atmosphere. Therefore it is that one person may come into the house, and before he speaks you are tired of him, you wish to get rid of him. Before he has said or done anything you are finished with him, you would like him to go away, for in his atmosphere he is creating a sound; a sound is going on which is disagreeable. There is another person with whom you feel sympathy, to whom you feel drawn, whose friendship you value, whose presence you long for; harmony is continually created through him. That is sound too.
If that is true then it is not only the external signs, but also the inner condition which is audible and visible. Though not visible to the eyes and not audible to the ears, yet it is audible and visible in the soul. We say: "I feel his vibrations. I feel the person's presence. I feel sympathy, or antipathy towards that person." There is a feeling, and a person creates a feeling without having said anything or done anything. Therefore a person who is in a wrong vibration, without doing or saying anything wrong, creates the wrong atmosphere, and you find fault with him. It is most amusing and very funny to see how people may come to you with a complaint: "I have said nothing, I have done nothing, and yet people dislike me and are against me." That person does not know that it is not because of his saying or doing anything: it is because of his being. "What you are speaks louder than what you say." It is life itself which has its tone, its color, its vibration. it speaks aloud."
- Hazrat Inayat Khan
Vol. 2, The Mysticism of Sound and Music
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You're the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.
- Margaret Atwood
from February
Morning in the Burned House
><((((º>
"The devil can quote Scripture for his purpose; and the text of Scripture which he now most commonly quotes is, "The Kingdom of heaven is within you." That text has been the stay and support of more Pharisees and prigs and self-righteous spiritual bullies than all the dogmas in creation; it has served to identify self-satisfaction with the peace that passes all understanding. And the text to be quoted in answer to it is that which declares that no man can receive the kingdom except as a little child. What we are to have inside is a childlike spirit; but the childlike spirit is not entirely concerned about what is inside. It is the first mark of possessing it that one is interested in what is outside. The most childlike thing about a child is his curiosity and his appetite and his power of wonder at the world. We might almost say that the whole advantage of having the kingdom within is that we look for it somewhere else."
- G. K. Chesterton
What I Saw in America
If that is true then it is not only the external signs, but also the inner condition which is audible and visible. Though not visible to the eyes and not audible to the ears, yet it is audible and visible in the soul. We say: "I feel his vibrations. I feel the person's presence. I feel sympathy, or antipathy towards that person." There is a feeling, and a person creates a feeling without having said anything or done anything. Therefore a person who is in a wrong vibration, without doing or saying anything wrong, creates the wrong atmosphere, and you find fault with him. It is most amusing and very funny to see how people may come to you with a complaint: "I have said nothing, I have done nothing, and yet people dislike me and are against me." That person does not know that it is not because of his saying or doing anything: it is because of his being. "What you are speaks louder than what you say." It is life itself which has its tone, its color, its vibration. it speaks aloud."
- Hazrat Inayat Khan
Vol. 2, The Mysticism of Sound and Music
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You're the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.
- Margaret Atwood
from February
Morning in the Burned House
"The devil can quote Scripture for his purpose; and the text of Scripture which he now most commonly quotes is, "The Kingdom of heaven is within you." That text has been the stay and support of more Pharisees and prigs and self-righteous spiritual bullies than all the dogmas in creation; it has served to identify self-satisfaction with the peace that passes all understanding. And the text to be quoted in answer to it is that which declares that no man can receive the kingdom except as a little child. What we are to have inside is a childlike spirit; but the childlike spirit is not entirely concerned about what is inside. It is the first mark of possessing it that one is interested in what is outside. The most childlike thing about a child is his curiosity and his appetite and his power of wonder at the world. We might almost say that the whole advantage of having the kingdom within is that we look for it somewhere else."
- G. K. Chesterton
What I Saw in America
The Porcupine in the Wind
for Galway Kinnell
In half-light, I make out a shape near a tree trunk - a half-grown porcupine! He hurries clumsily - like a steam shovel - up the tree. Six feet up, he decides he has gone far enough and he waits, occasionally looking at me over a half-turned shoulder. Stepping up, I look into his eye, which is black, with little spontaneity, above an expressionless nose. He knows little about climbing, and his claws keep slipping on the gray poplar bark. His body apparently feels no excitement anyway to be climbing higher, toward the immaterial sky: he can't remember any stories he's heard.
Sun already down. The white needle-fur stands out, something pre-Roman, next to the elegant bark. As I listen I become aware of a third thing, still older. It is the wind through miles of leafless forest.
- Robert Bly
How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren't, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?
- Galway Kinnell
from Another Night in the Ruins
"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
- Buckminster Fuller
"You are never dedicated to something that you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt."
- Robert M. Pirsig
Cold Mountain is full of weird sights;
People who try to climb it always get scared.
When the moon shines, the water glints and
sparkles;
When the wind blows, the grasses rustle and sigh.
Snowflakes make blossoms for the bare plum,
Clouds in place of leaves for the naked trees.
At a touch of rain, the whole mountain shimmers. But
only in good weather can you make the climb.
- Han-shan
"If for company you find a wise and prudent friend who leads a good life, you should, overcoming all impediments, keep his company joyously and mindfully.
If for company you cannot find a wise and prudent friend who leads a good life, then, like a king who leaves behind a conquered kingdom, or like a lone elephant in the elephant forest, you should go your way alone."
translated from the Pali by
Acharya Buddharakkhita
Chapter 23, The Elephant
The Dhammapada
The Buddha's Path to Wisdom
(Robert Burns says in one of his letters: "There is scarcely any earthly object gives me more - I do not know if I should call it pleasure - but something which exalts me - something which enraptures me - than to walk in the shelter'd side of a wood in a cloudy winter day, and hear the stormy wind howling among the trees, and raving over the plain. It is my best season of devotion." Some of his most characteristic poems were composed in such scenes and seasons.)
- Walt Whitman
138. February Days
There is an otherness inside us
We never touch,
no matter how far down our hands reach.
It is the past,
with its good looks and Anytime, Anywhere.
Our prayers go out to it, our arms go out to it
Year after year,
But who can ever remember enough?
- Charles Wright
The Southern Cross
"If the only vision we have of ourselves comes from the social mirror - from the current social paradigm and from the opinions, perceptions, and paradigms of the people around us - our view of ourselves is like the reflection in a crazy mirror room at the carnival."
- Stephen Covey
<°))))><
"You sort of underestimate the human being when you say that every least thing that is an abstract experience is spiritual. It isn't. It's just your real self. You can be capable of fantastic abstract experiences, right in this life."
- Agnes Martin
If for company you cannot find a wise and prudent friend who leads a good life, then, like a king who leaves behind a conquered kingdom, or like a lone elephant in the elephant forest, you should go your way alone."
translated from the Pali by
Acharya Buddharakkhita
Chapter 23, The Elephant
The Dhammapada
The Buddha's Path to Wisdom
(Robert Burns says in one of his letters: "There is scarcely any earthly object gives me more - I do not know if I should call it pleasure - but something which exalts me - something which enraptures me - than to walk in the shelter'd side of a wood in a cloudy winter day, and hear the stormy wind howling among the trees, and raving over the plain. It is my best season of devotion." Some of his most characteristic poems were composed in such scenes and seasons.)
- Walt Whitman
138. February Days
There is an otherness inside us
We never touch,
no matter how far down our hands reach.
It is the past,
with its good looks and Anytime, Anywhere.
Our prayers go out to it, our arms go out to it
Year after year,
But who can ever remember enough?
- Charles Wright
The Southern Cross
"If the only vision we have of ourselves comes from the social mirror - from the current social paradigm and from the opinions, perceptions, and paradigms of the people around us - our view of ourselves is like the reflection in a crazy mirror room at the carnival."
- Stephen Covey
"You sort of underestimate the human being when you say that every least thing that is an abstract experience is spiritual. It isn't. It's just your real self. You can be capable of fantastic abstract experiences, right in this life."
- Agnes Martin
"Here in these circuses and carnivals we all love each other with our oddities and queernesses. People leave us alone because we mesmerize them with tricks, tickle them with feathers, tie them up in wonder and hope. We never let them know that we read books, that we love everyone and accept everything, that our bodies are free, that we travel, resist, and fight and that we give refuge to convicts and revolutionaries, that we have saved gypsies and Jews.
And, my little child, do not tell a soul that we are knowers and non-believers. We know that after this grand act of life nothing is left but the dust beneath the elephants' feet and the sound of the monkeys' clapping."
- Rawi Hage
Carnival
"I used to tell students . . . the difference between poetry and you is you look in the mirror and say, "I am getting old," but Shakespeare looks in the mirror and says, "Devouring Time, blunt thou thy lion's paws."
- Jim Harrison
"What a wild ride this is. Spinning at six thousand miles per hour on a minuscule ball in a field of stars that stretches into millions of galaxies. Seriously, this is WILD."
- Ralph Benmergui
I Thought He Was Dead
- Ralph Benmergui
I Thought He Was Dead
"We came in the wind of the carnival. A wind of change, or promises. The merry wind, the magical wind, making March hares of everyone, tumbling blossoms and coat-tails and hats; rushing towards summer in a frenzy of exuberance."
- Joanne Harris
The Lollipop Shoes
Compassing
limitless is a faraway place
way beyond the rock-strewn ridge named possibility
it's over there
through a tangle-thick forest the old ones call maybe
it is a fortnight's trudge through what could be
and at least as far as a strong man can chunk a stone
- straight as the crow flies
a hard tough row across the mind's breadth
a frog's hair from probably and head high from unreachable
you can't get there from here
but you can get here from there
unfurl the map
aim the compass well
cause true north does lie
dead reckon instead on reality
find yourself there
- J. Drew Lanham
The canoe is incredibly wobbly, even when you sit on your heels. A balancing act.
If you have the heart on the left side you have to lean a bit to the right,
nothing in the pockets, no big arm movements, please, all rhetoric has to be left behind.
Precisely: rhetoric is impossible here.
The canoe glides out over the water.
- Tomas Tranströmer
from Standing Up
The Half-Finished Heaven
translated by Robert Bly
limitless is a faraway place
way beyond the rock-strewn ridge named possibility
it's over there
through a tangle-thick forest the old ones call maybe
it is a fortnight's trudge through what could be
and at least as far as a strong man can chunk a stone
- straight as the crow flies
a hard tough row across the mind's breadth
a frog's hair from probably and head high from unreachable
you can't get there from here
but you can get here from there
unfurl the map
aim the compass well
cause true north does lie
dead reckon instead on reality
find yourself there
- J. Drew Lanham
The canoe is incredibly wobbly, even when you sit on your heels. A balancing act.
If you have the heart on the left side you have to lean a bit to the right,
nothing in the pockets, no big arm movements, please, all rhetoric has to be left behind.
Precisely: rhetoric is impossible here.
The canoe glides out over the water.
- Tomas Tranströmer
from Standing Up
The Half-Finished Heaven
translated by Robert Bly
"At dawn the crowds get our silent planet going with their tramping.
We are all aboard the street. It is packed like the deck of a ferry.
Where are we going? Are there enough teacups? We can count ourselves lucky getting aboard this street!
It's a thousand years before the birth of claustrophobia.
We look almost happy out in the sun, while we are bleeding fatally from
wounds we don't know about."
- Tomas Tranströmer
The Great Enigma
We are all aboard the street. It is packed like the deck of a ferry.
Where are we going? Are there enough teacups? We can count ourselves lucky getting aboard this street!
It's a thousand years before the birth of claustrophobia.
We look almost happy out in the sun, while we are bleeding fatally from
wounds we don't know about."
- Tomas Tranströmer
The Great Enigma
"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater."
- Frank Zappa
- Frank Zappa
"You see, to me it seems as though the artists, the scientists, the philosophers were grinding lenses. It's all a grand preparation for something that never comes off. Someday the lens is going to be perfect and then we're all going to see clearly, see what a staggering, wonderful, beautiful world it is. But in the meantime we go without glasses, so to speak. We blunder about like myopic, blinking idiots. We don't see what is under our nose because we're so intent on seeing the stars, or what lies beyond the stars. We're trying to see with the mind, but the mind sees only what it's told to see. The mind can't open its eyes and look just for the pleasure of looking. Haven't you ever noticed that when you stop looking, when you don't try to see, you suddenly see? What is it you see? Who is it that sees? Why is it all so different - so marvelously different - in such moments? And which is more real, that kind of vision or the other?"
- Henry Miller
The Rosy Crucifixion
Curriculum Vitae
1) I was born in a Free City, near the North Sea.
2) In the year of my birth, money was shredded into
confetti. A loaf of bread cost a million marks. Of
course I do not remember this.
3) Parents and grandparents hovered around me. The
world I lived in had a soft voice and no claws.
4) A cornucopia filled with treats took me into a building
with bells. A wide-bosomed teacher took me in.
5) At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.
6) On Sundays the city child waded through pinecones
and primrose marshes, a short train ride away.
7) My country was struck by history more deadly than
earthquakes or hurricanes.
8) My father was busy eluding the monsters. My mother
told me the walls had ears. I learned the burden of secrets.
9) I moved into the too bright days, the too dark nights
of adolescence.
10) Two parents, two daughters, we followed the sun
and the moon across the ocean. My grandparents stayed
behind in darkness.
11) In the new language everyone spoke too fast. Eventually
I caught up with them.
12) When I met you, the new language became the language
of love.
13) The death of the mother hurt the daughter into poetry.
The daughter became a mother of daughters.
14) Ordinary life: the plenty and thick of it. Knots tying
threads to everywhere. The past pushed away, the future left
unimagined for the sake of the glorious, difficult, passionate
present.
15) Years and years of this.
16) The children no longer children. An old man's pain, an
old man's loneliness.
17) And then my father too disappeared.
18) I tried to go home again. I stood at the door to my
childhood, but it was closed to the public.
19) One day, on a crowded elevator, everyone's face was younger
than mine.
20) So far, so good. The brilliant days and nights are
breathless in their hurry. We follow, you and I.
- Lisel Mueller
Alive Together
We're unprepared
for our little disappointments.
Normally I might not pay attention
to sunlight pouring into the courtyard
but this afternoon, I do -
probably because it's already nearly gone.
None of us mentions the night,
but I, for one, would like to
be expecting it, when
it comes.
- Nathan McClain
from Power Outage Elegy
"When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But sill we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then - that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world. Do they not teach you this?"
- C. S. Lewis
Out of the Silent Planet
"We know that in each day, we laugh, and we are serious. We do both, in the same day, every day. But in our art we expect clear distinction between the two . . . But we don't label our days Serious Days or Humorous Days. We know that each day contains endless nuances - if written would contain dozens of disparate passages, funny ones, sad ones, poignant ones, brutal ones, the terrifying and the cuddly. But we are often loathe to allow this in our art. And that is too bad . . . "
- Dave Eggers
There is Peace in the Surging Prow
On a winter morning you feel how this earth
plunges ahead. Against the house walls
an air current smacks
out of hiding.
Surrounded by movement: the tent of calm.
And the secret helm in the migrating flock.
Out of the winter gloom
a tremolo rises
from hidden instruments. It is like standing
under summer’s high lime tree with the din
of ten thousand
insect wings above your head.
- Tomas Tranströmer
The Great Enigma
"But I'm a believer in the perfectibility of human beings. I think we can be better. I think we can be perfect or near to it. And when we become our best selves, the possibilities are endless. We can solve any problem. We can cure any disease, end hunger, everything, because we won't be dragged down by all our weaknesses, our petty secrets, our hoarding of information and knowledge. We will finally realize our potential."
- Dave Eggers
The Circle
- Dave Eggers
The Circle
"We are the bright new stars born of a screaming black hole, the nascent suns burst from the darkness, from the grasping void of space that folds and swallows - a darkness that would devour anyone not as strong as we. We are oddities, sideshows, talk show subjects. We capture everyone's imagination."
- Dave Eggers
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
- Dave Eggers
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
"I rejoice in the knowledge of my biological uniqueness and my biological antiquity and my biological kinship with all other forms of life. This knowledge roots me, allows me to feel at home in the natural world, to feel that I have my own sense of biological meaning, whatever my role in the cultural, human world."
- Oliver Sacks
The River of Consciousness
"We, as human beings, are landed with memories which have fallibilities, frailties, and imperfections - but also great flexibility and creativity. Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength: if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge, we would be overwhelmed with often irrelevant information. Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge. Memory arises not only from experience but from the intercourse of many minds."
- Oliver Sacks
The River of Consciousness
- Oliver Sacks
The River of Consciousness
"For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured - disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui - in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off."
- Henry Miller
Tropic of Cancer
- Henry Miller
Tropic of Cancer
some of them inside, some of them out.
But only the poem you leave behind is what's important.
Everyone knows this.
The voyage into the interior is all that matters,
Whatever your ride.
Sometimes I can't sit still for all the asininities I read.
Give me the hummingbird, who has to eat sixty times
His own weight a day just to stay alive.
Now that's a life on the edge.
- Charles Wright
Littlefoot: A Poem
"I am no longer so fond of making journeys. But the journey visits me. Now when I am more and more pushed into a corner, when the annual growth rings multiply, when I need reading glasses. Always there is much more happening than we can bear. There is nothing to be surprised at."
- Tomas Tranströmer
"When the ego invests itself in its knowing, it is convinced that it has the whole picture. At that point, growth stops. The journey stops. Nothing new is going to happen to us after that point. The term we're using here, "beginner’s mind," comes from Buddhism. For Buddhists, it seems to refer to an urgent need to remain open, forever a student. A beginner's mind always says, "I'm a learner. I've got more to learn." It has to do with humility before reality, and never assuming that I understand. If there are fifty thousand levels of the mystery, maybe I'm at level forty-five. Maybe there's more that needs to show itself to me. Can you imagine what a different world it would be if we all lived with that kind of humility?"
- Daily Meditations
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Beginner's Mind
Center for Action and Contemplation faculty
The Last Word Is the Captain
Because my head hasn't grown
since I stopped growing, and my memories
have piled up inside me,
I have to assume they're now in my belly
and my thighs, and legs. A sort of walking archive,
an orderly disorder, a cargo hold weighing down
an overloaded ship.
Sometimes I want to lie down on a park bench:
that would change my status
from Lost Inside to
Lost Outside.
Words have begun to abandon me
as rats abandon a sinking ship.
The last word is the captain.
- Yehuda Amichai
Fair Warning
I keep a lunatic chained
to a beam in the attic. He
is my twin brother whom
I'm trying to cheat
out of his inheritance.
It's all right for me
to tell you this because
you won't believe it.
Nobody believes anything
that's put in a poem.
I could confess to
murder and as long as
I did it in a verse
there's not a court
that would convict me.
So if you're ever
a guest overnight
in my house, don't
go looking for
the source of any
unusual sounds.
- Alden Nowlan
"I am a storyteller, for better and for worse.
I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self, and autobiographical memory.
The act of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike any other. It takes me to another place - irrespective of my subject - where I am totally absorbed and oblivious to distracting thoughts, worries, preoccupations, or indeed the passage of time. In those rare, heavenly states of mind, I may write nonstop until I can no longer see the paper. Only then do I realize that evening has come and that I have been writing all day.
Over a lifetime, I have written millions of words, but the act of writing seems as fresh, and as much fun, as when I started it nearly seventy years ago."
- Oliver Sacks
- Daily Meditations
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Beginner's Mind
Center for Action and Contemplation faculty
The Last Word Is the Captain
Because my head hasn't grown
since I stopped growing, and my memories
have piled up inside me,
I have to assume they're now in my belly
and my thighs, and legs. A sort of walking archive,
an orderly disorder, a cargo hold weighing down
an overloaded ship.
Sometimes I want to lie down on a park bench:
that would change my status
from Lost Inside to
Lost Outside.
Words have begun to abandon me
as rats abandon a sinking ship.
The last word is the captain.
- Yehuda Amichai
Fair Warning
I keep a lunatic chained
to a beam in the attic. He
is my twin brother whom
I'm trying to cheat
out of his inheritance.
It's all right for me
to tell you this because
you won't believe it.
Nobody believes anything
that's put in a poem.
I could confess to
murder and as long as
I did it in a verse
there's not a court
that would convict me.
So if you're ever
a guest overnight
in my house, don't
go looking for
the source of any
unusual sounds.
- Alden Nowlan
"I am a storyteller, for better and for worse.
I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self, and autobiographical memory.
The act of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike any other. It takes me to another place - irrespective of my subject - where I am totally absorbed and oblivious to distracting thoughts, worries, preoccupations, or indeed the passage of time. In those rare, heavenly states of mind, I may write nonstop until I can no longer see the paper. Only then do I realize that evening has come and that I have been writing all day.
Over a lifetime, I have written millions of words, but the act of writing seems as fresh, and as much fun, as when I started it nearly seventy years ago."
- Oliver Sacks
"Human beings from the moment of entry into language are ready to become dreamers and fiction-makers, not to mention liars, fetishists, and perverters of the real. Our fiction-making capacity may be foundational of our search for truth in our selves and in the world, but it does not guarantee it, nor assure our mental stability. The vehicles of truth and untruth are the same. But fiction-making does seem to be crucial to the ability to carve out a space within reality for attempts at understanding and reflection."
- Peter Brooks
Seduced by Story
Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.
- William Martin
The Parent's Tao Te Ching
"While most of the flowers in the garden had rich scents and colors, we also had two magnolia trees, with huge but pale and scentless flowers. The magnolia flowers, when ripe, would be crawling with tiny insects, little beetles. Magnolias, my mother explained, were among the most ancient of flowering plants and had appeared nearly a hundred million years ago, at a time when "modern" insects like bees had not yet evolved, so they had to rely on a more ancient insect, a beetle, for pollination. Bees and butterflies, flowers with colors and scents, were not preordained, waiting in the wings - and they might never have appeared. They would develop together, in infinitesimal stages, over millions of years. The idea of a world without bees or butterflies, without scent or color, affected me with a sense of awe."
- Oliver Sacks
The River of Consciousness
- Peter Brooks
Seduced by Story
Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.
- William Martin
The Parent's Tao Te Ching
"While most of the flowers in the garden had rich scents and colors, we also had two magnolia trees, with huge but pale and scentless flowers. The magnolia flowers, when ripe, would be crawling with tiny insects, little beetles. Magnolias, my mother explained, were among the most ancient of flowering plants and had appeared nearly a hundred million years ago, at a time when "modern" insects like bees had not yet evolved, so they had to rely on a more ancient insect, a beetle, for pollination. Bees and butterflies, flowers with colors and scents, were not preordained, waiting in the wings - and they might never have appeared. They would develop together, in infinitesimal stages, over millions of years. The idea of a world without bees or butterflies, without scent or color, affected me with a sense of awe."
- Oliver Sacks
The River of Consciousness
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
- Mark Strand
from Eating Poetry
><((((º>
"Oh, how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. One knew nothing. One lived and ran about the earth and rode through forests, and certain things looked so challenging and promising and nostalgic: a star in the evening, a blue harebell, a reed-green pond, the eye of a person or of a cow. And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all; but then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken, and in the end one grew old and looked cunning like Father Anselm or wise like Abbot Daniel, and still one knew nothing perhaps, was still waiting and listening."
- Hermann Hesse
Narcissus and Goldmund
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
- Mark Strand
from Eating Poetry
"Oh, how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. One knew nothing. One lived and ran about the earth and rode through forests, and certain things looked so challenging and promising and nostalgic: a star in the evening, a blue harebell, a reed-green pond, the eye of a person or of a cow. And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all; but then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken, and in the end one grew old and looked cunning like Father Anselm or wise like Abbot Daniel, and still one knew nothing perhaps, was still waiting and listening."
- Hermann Hesse
Narcissus and Goldmund
"Sometimes I flew to prove that I could. I was the girlfriend of the poet John Keats and I demonstrated I could fly among blackberry bushes whose fruit the size of street lamps suggested I was, we were, the size of songbirds. Other times I flew across the rooftops of the city and the view was dazzling, as was the sense of having all that space under you, like the sense of all that water when you swim in clear lakes. It was the beautiful spacious side of loneliness.
I wondered what this flying meant. Sometimes it seemed to be dreams' impatience, a jump cut from here to there without filling in the space between. Sometimes it was escape. Sometimes it was a talent, and like talents sometimes do, it set me apart, usually literally, since I tended to fly alone, to be the only one who could fly, though sometimes I showed other people how to do it or carried them along.
It was an experience of not belonging to the ordinary world and not being bound to it. I thought sometimes that it might be about writing, about being a writer, and now I wonder why I didn't think of it as reading, as that constant, chronic activity that had taken up so much of my waking hours since I'd learned to read, as being in a book, in a story, in the lives of others and invented worlds and not my own, unbounded by my own body and my own life and my own time and place.
I could fly, though now I wonder if the problem was how to come to earth."
- Rebecca Solnit
Recollections of My Nonexistence
"Poetry - and writing in general - is a solitary vocation. But I have never felt alone in it. I am not alone in it now. Look, you're here, too."
- Maggie Smith
Keep Moving
- Maggie Smith
Keep Moving
The Mysterious Arrival of an Unusual Letter
It had been a long day at the office and a long ride back to the small apartment where I lived. When I got there I flicked on the light and saw on the table an envelope with my name on it. Where was the clock? Where was the calendar? The handwriting was my father's, but he had been dead for forty years. As one might, I began to think that maybe, just maybe, he was alive, living a secret life somewhere nearby. How else to explain the envelope? To steady myself, I sat down, opened it, and pulled out the letter. "Dear Son," was the way it began. "Dear Son" and then nothing.
- Mark Strand
"The feeling life is not a conceptual experience. Feelings are not ideas, but subtle physical experiences. They take place in the body. They are not inherently meaningful in the way they seem to be when we apply our thoughts and beliefs to them. Feelings are part of the rhythm, the giving and receiving, the nourishment, and the interdependent ecology of our experience here."
- Stephen R. Schwartz
"We are in this body, this exotic life form, on this puzzling planet, assuming that we understand what the consciously felt energetic fluctuations called feelings actually mean. Mystery is the predominant quality of our human experience. We don't know very much. We can't know very much and yet there is so much here, so much to receive and so much to give."
- Stephen R. Schwartz
The Prayer Of The Body II
"I write because I have nothing else to do in the world: I was left over and there is no place for me in the world of men. I write because I'm desperate and I'm tired, I can no longer bear the routine of being me and if not for the always novelty that is writing, I would die symbolically every day. But I am prepared to slip out discreetly through the back exit. I've experienced almost everything, including passion and its despair. And now I'd only like to have what I would have been and never was."
- Clarice Lispector
The Hour of the Star
- Clarice Lispector
The Hour of the Star
"There is nothing more important to true growth than realising that you are not the voice of the mind - you are the one who hears it. If you don't understand this, you will try to figure out which of the many things the voice says is really you. People go through so many changes in the name of 'trying to find myself.' They want to discover which of these voices, which of these aspects of their personality, is who they really are. The answer is simple: none of them."
- Michael Singer
The Weighing
The heart's reasons
seen clearly,
even the hardest
will carry
its whip-marks and sadness
and must be forgiven.
As the drought-starved
eland forgives
the drought-starved lion
who finally takes her,
enters willingly then
the life she cannot refuse,
and is lion, is fed,
and does not remember the other.
So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.
The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.
- Jane Hirshfield
October Palace
"When you nurture the ability to witness your life in the third person, in extremis, or through prayer or meditation, there is an unavoidable shift in consciousness as you realize that who you are is not simply how you feel - but a presence beyond desire of any sort. Intense emotions that have held us prisoner all our lives suddenly lose power, are uncloaked as tricks of memory, exposed as tireless, groping sensations whose function is to keep us distracted by the body's appetites until the body is no more."
- Simon Van Booy
The Presence of Absence
I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds & the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old women hawking roses, & children all of them, break my heart. There's a dream I have in which I love the world. I run from end to end like fingers through her hair. There are no borders, only wind. Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart.
- Cameron Awkward-Rich
"I should have been a clown; it would have afforded me the widest range of expression. But I underestimated the profession. Had I become a clown, or even a vaudeville entertainer, I would have been famous. People would have appreciated me precisely because they would not have understood; but they would have understood that I was not to be understood. That would have been a relief, to say the least."
- Henry Miller
Tropic of Capricorn
- Henry Miller
Tropic of Capricorn
Yes. There is a point at which any person gets tired
of knowledge. You could call this a threshold
or you could call this the point at which a person
gets tired of knowledge. I'll tell you this:
I've never felt further from another than when
standing beside them trying to point out a star.
- Robert Wood Lynn
Mothman Apologia
"About the Phones
Closing my car door, you always say - Watch
for deer and text when you get home.
I want to, I do, but I will forget.
Time moves and I forget. - Look
I am trying, I am, but it's not the kind
of thing that trying solves.
Once
on the side of a highway, a cop told me
about dragging a full grown buck out
the windshield of a wrecked car all by himself.
About the sounds it made, Like the devil learning
what regret feels like. About the woman it kicked
to death in the driver's seat. The phone call
he had to make to her grown daughter after
whose first question was, Did the deer survive?
Different cop, different time, different highway.
Said she keeps her phone on silent then spoke
about securing the crime scene in that classroom
in Blacksburg where one student shot
all the others. Every single one of them
had a cell phone, she said, and for hours after
every single one rang and rang or vibrated
across the floor in the same slow way
that blood pools. No one was allowed to answer,
no one, so instead the phones rang all night
until batteries were empty, voicemails full
of a thousand Call me when you get this so I know
you're okays. Turns out time moves the way
blood does. Batteries too. Runs out
like a startled deer across a road. - Listen
I am trying to find a way to tell you this.
There are things that trying solves but this
is not one of them."
- Robert Wood Lynn
Mothman Apologia
"Life is an endless recruiting of witnesses. It seems we need to be observed in our postures of extravagance or shame, we need attention paid to us. Our own memory is altogether too cherishing, which is the kindest thing I can say for it. Others are required, other perspectives, but even so our most important ceremonies - birth, love, and death - are secured by whomever and whatever is available. What chance, what caprice!"
- Carol Shields
The Stone Diaries
"How did we ever drift into this chill state? I'm feeling kind of bent in half myself; and I see us both bound for the fire, lone peach tree, then nothing, then pure spirit again, even Lazarus has to die - what have I done, what have I been so afraid of all my life?"
- Franz Wright
from Peach Tree
"I walked the fairground midway, where the Whip lashed its riders this way and that, where the Caterpillar enveloped screaming patrons in darkness as it slung them around a track a thousand times faster than any real caterpillar could move, where the Big Drop lifted its gondola two hundred feet into the night and then released it in what seemed to be an uncontrolled free fall, and where the Ferris wheel carried its passengers high and brought them low and raised them high and brought them low again, as if it were not merely a carnival ride but also a metaphor for the basic pattern of human experience.
It's difficult to spend time in any carnival or amusement park and not realize that a repressed fear of death may be the one emotion that is constant in the human heart even if, most of the time, it is confined to the unconscious as we go about our business. Thrill rides offer us a chance to acknowledge our ever-present dread, to release the tension that arises from repression of it, and to subtly delude ourselves with the illusion of invulnerability that surviving the Big Drop can provide."
- Dean Koontz
Saint Odd
- Carol Shields
The Stone Diaries
"How did we ever drift into this chill state? I'm feeling kind of bent in half myself; and I see us both bound for the fire, lone peach tree, then nothing, then pure spirit again, even Lazarus has to die - what have I done, what have I been so afraid of all my life?"
- Franz Wright
from Peach Tree
"I walked the fairground midway, where the Whip lashed its riders this way and that, where the Caterpillar enveloped screaming patrons in darkness as it slung them around a track a thousand times faster than any real caterpillar could move, where the Big Drop lifted its gondola two hundred feet into the night and then released it in what seemed to be an uncontrolled free fall, and where the Ferris wheel carried its passengers high and brought them low and raised them high and brought them low again, as if it were not merely a carnival ride but also a metaphor for the basic pattern of human experience.
It's difficult to spend time in any carnival or amusement park and not realize that a repressed fear of death may be the one emotion that is constant in the human heart even if, most of the time, it is confined to the unconscious as we go about our business. Thrill rides offer us a chance to acknowledge our ever-present dread, to release the tension that arises from repression of it, and to subtly delude ourselves with the illusion of invulnerability that surviving the Big Drop can provide."
- Dean Koontz
Saint Odd
How to Leave the Planet
1. Phone NASA. Their phone number is (713) 483-3111. Explain that it's very important that you get away as soon as possible.
2. If they do not cooperate, phone any friend you may have in the White House - (202) 456-1414 - to have a word on your behalf with the guys at NASA.
3. If you don't have any friends in the White House, phone the Kremlin (ask the overseas operator for 0107-095-295-9051). They don't have any friends there either (at least, none to speak of), but they do seem to have a little influence, so you may as well try.
4. If that also fails, phone the Pope for guidance. His telephone number is 011-39-6-6982, and I gather his switchboard is infallible.
5. If all these attempts fail, flag down a passing flying saucer and explain that it's vitally important you get away before your phone bill arrives.
- Douglas Adams
The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
><((((º>
2. If they do not cooperate, phone any friend you may have in the White House - (202) 456-1414 - to have a word on your behalf with the guys at NASA.
3. If you don't have any friends in the White House, phone the Kremlin (ask the overseas operator for 0107-095-295-9051). They don't have any friends there either (at least, none to speak of), but they do seem to have a little influence, so you may as well try.
4. If that also fails, phone the Pope for guidance. His telephone number is 011-39-6-6982, and I gather his switchboard is infallible.
5. If all these attempts fail, flag down a passing flying saucer and explain that it's vitally important you get away before your phone bill arrives.
- Douglas Adams
The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
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