old loves
"Of all ghosts the ghosts of our old loves are the worst."
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Memoirs Of Sherlock Holmes
finally, drops
about me, on me,
in the old ways.
What did I know
thinking myself
able to go
alone all the way.
- Robert Creeley
For Love
"But there isn't actually a most beautiful person in the world, because there are so many kinds of beauty. Some people love roundness and softness, and other people love sharp edges and strong muscles. Some people like thick hair like a lion's mane, and other people like thin hair that pours down like an inky waterfall, and some people love someone so much they forget what they look like. Some people think the night sky full of stars at midnight is the most beautiful thing imaginable, some people think it's a forest in snow, and some people . . . Well, there are a lot of people with a lot of ideas about beauty. And love. When you love someone a lot, they just look like love."
- Rebecca Solnit
Cinderella Liberator
Yamaoka Tesshu, a samurai and student of Zen, traveled around Japan studying from various Zen masters. One day, he wandered into the Shokoku Temple and happened upon the monk Dokuon.
In a desire to show his comprehension of Zen, Tesshu stated to the Master, "The mind, the Buddha and all beings are empty. The true nature of all things is emptiness. There is no enlightenment, no delusion; no sages, no commoners; no toil, no reward."
Master Dokuon remained quiet for some time and then banged him on the head.
Tesshu fumed in anger and asked, "What did you do that for?"
Master Dokuon replied, "If everything is empty, where did the temper come from?"
Isha Foundation
Tea for You, Too
My friends,
I want to tell you
that in general things
are all right with me,
relatively speaking.
Just a second, here's Einstein
asking where the tea is.
I reassure him
it will be ready soon,
relatively speaking,
and he shuffles back
to the room that holds him,
with plenty of space
for that cup of tea,
even though the cup
is twelve feet in diameter,
about the same size
as my thinking of you
this morning.
- Ron Padgett
"It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama."
- Richard P. Feynman
- Richard P. Feynman
"If the Universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don't. It's like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don't hurt it. Not even major surgery if it's done properly. Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make."
- Douglas Adams
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
- Douglas Adams
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
A Small Hotel
When a match touched
the edge of the page,
my poem filled with smoke,
then a few words
were seen to stumble out
in nothing but their nightgowns
with no idea which way to run.
- Billy Collins
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by
each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.
- Jorie Graham
from Prayer
Never
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by
each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.
- Jorie Graham
from Prayer
Never
The slow overture of rain,
each drop breaking
without breaking into
the next, describes
the unrelenting, syncopated
mind. Not unlike
the hummingbirds
imagining their wings
to be their heart, and swallows
believing the horizon
to be a line they lift
and drop.
- Jorie Graham
from Mind
Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts
"I believe that we must attack these things in which we do not believe. Not attack by the method of cutting off the heads of the people, but attack in the sense of discuss. I believe that we should demand that people try in their own minds to obtain for themselves a more consistent picture of their own world; that they not permit themselves the luxury of having their brain cut in four pieces or two pieces even, and on one side they believe this and on the other side they believe that, but never try to compare the two points of view. Because we have learned that, by trying to put the points of view that we have in our head together and comparing one to the other, we make some progress in understanding and in appreciating where we are and what we are."
- Richard P. Feynman
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
- Richard P. Feynman
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
- Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian: Or, the Evening Redness in the West
The Up Side
The pines are
stately
still
reflecting
upon themselves
without knowing it
in eternity
upside down.
- Ron Padgett
"It is the solstice. A diamond of energy holds us. We breathe, and what we call the next moment between us, where I take your empty hand and we start home, emptied of attempt and emptied of survival skill, is love."
- Jorie Graham
"With age all my opinions drift away. Who am I to say for sure? My people thought they'd see Jesus when they died. Now that we know we have 90 billion galaxies, I'm not inclined to discount anything. How can I say what is not possible in this universe? You can disembowel reality all you want and certainties are hard to find, the towering reality being death. I don't mind. I was never asked. On death, a tour of the 90 billion galaxies would be flattering. Yes? Our curiosity is still in the lead. Wittgenstein said that the miracle is that the world exists."
- Jim Harrison
"Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups . . . So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing."
- Philip K. Dick
"No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race."
- Richard P. Feynman
June
The June bug
on the screen door
whirs like a small,
ugly machine,
and a chorus of frogs
and crickets drones like Musak
at all the windows.
What we don't quite see
comforts us.
Blink of lightning, grumble
of thunder - just the heat
clearing its throat.
- Linda Pastan
from The Months
The peonies, too heavy with their beauty,
slump to the ground. I had hoped
they would live forever but ever so slowly
day by day they're becoming the soil of their birth
with a faint tang of deliquescence around them.
Next June they'll somehow remember to come alive again,
a little trick we have or have not learned.
- Jim Harrison
slump to the ground. I had hoped
they would live forever but ever so slowly
day by day they're becoming the soil of their birth
with a faint tang of deliquescence around them.
Next June they'll somehow remember to come alive again,
a little trick we have or have not learned.
- Jim Harrison
I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can't stand the scene
And I'm neither left or right
I'm just staying home tonight
Getting lost in that hopeless little screen
But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags
That time cannot decay
I'm junk but I'm still holding up
This little wild bouquet
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A
- Leonard Cohen
from Democracy
The Lyrics of Leonard Cohen
"Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them - if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry."
- J. D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye
The Ordinary Weather of Summer
In the ordinary weather of summer
with storms rumbling from west to east
like so many freight trains hauling
their cargo of heat and rain,
the dogs sprawl on the back steps, panting,
insects assemble at every window,
and we quarrel again, bombarding
each other with small grievances,
our tempers flashing on and off
in bursts of heat lightning.
In the cooler air of morning,
we drink our coffee amicably enough
and walk down to the sea
which seems to tremble with meaning
and into which we plunge again and again.
The days continue hot.
At dusk the shadows are as blue
as the lips of the children stained
with berries or with the chill
of too much swimming.
So we move another summer closer
to our last summer together -
a time as real and implacable as the sea
out of which we come walking
on wobbly legs as if for the first time,
drying ourselves with rough towels,
shaking the water out of our blinded eyes.
- Linda Pastan
Carnival Evening
The morning coffee. I'm not sure why I drink it. Maybe it's the ritual of the cup, the spoon, the hot water, the milk, and the little heap of brown grit, the way they come together to form a nail I can hang the day on. It's something to do between being asleep and being awake. Surely there's something better to do, though, than to drink a cup of instant coffee. Such as meditate? About what? About having a cup of coffee. A cup of coffee whose first drink is too hot and whose last drink is too cool, but whose many in-between drinks are, like Baby Bear's porridge, just right. Papa Bear looks disgruntled. He removes his spectacles and swivels his eyes onto the cup that sits before Baby Bear, and then, after a discrete cough, reaches over and picks it up. Baby Bear doesn't understand this disruption of the morning routine. Papa Bear brings the cup close to his face and peers at it intently. The cup shatters in his
paw, explodes actually, sending fragments and brown liquid all over the room. In a way it's good that Mama Bear isn't there. Better that she rest in her grave beyond the garden, unaware of what has happened to the world.
- Ron Padgett
"Beyond the wall of the unreal city, beyond the security fences topped with barbed wire and razor wire, beyond the asphalt belting of the superhighways, beyond the cemented banksides of temporarily stopped and mutilated rivers, beyond the rage of lies that poisons the air, there is another world waiting for you. It is the old true world of the deserts, the mountains, the forests, the islands, the shores, the open plains. Go there. Be there. Walk gently and quietly deep within it. And then -
May your trails be dim, lonesome, stony, narrow, winding and only slightly uphill. May the wind bring rain for the slickrock potholes fourteen miles on the other side of yonder blue ridge. May God's dog serenade your campfire, may the rattlesnake and the screech owl amuse your reverie, may the Great Sun dazzle your eyes by day and the Great Bear watch over you by night."
- Edward Abbey
Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside
"Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise - the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer."
- Milan Kundera
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Breathing Space, July
The one who's lying on his back under the tall trees
is also up there within them. He's flowing out into thousands of twigs,
swaying to and fro,
sitting in an ejector seat that lets go in slow motion.
The one who's standing down by the docks squints at the water.
The docks age faster than people.
They have silver-gray lumber and stones in their gut.
The glaring light pounds all the way in.
The one who's traveling all day in an open boat
over the glittering bays
will fall asleep at last inside a blue lamp
while the islands crawl like huge moths over the glass.
- Tomas Tranströmer
The Blue House
translated by Patty Crane
Fireflies in the Garden
Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.
- Robert Frost
"I myself shall continue living in my glass house where you can always see who comes to call, where everything hanging from the the ceiling and on the walls stays where it is as if by magic, where I sleep nights in a glass bed, under glass sheets, where who I am will sooner or later appear etched by a diamond."
- André Breton
Nadja
"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!"
- Hunter S. Thompson
The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman
"That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack."
- David Foster Wallace
Infinite Jest
Instruction
You must rock your pain in your arms
until it's asleep, then leave it
in a darkened room
and tiptoe out.
For a moment you will feel
the emptiness of peace.
But in the next room
your pain is already stirring.
Soon it will be
calling your name.
- Linda Pastan
May your trails be dim, lonesome, stony, narrow, winding and only slightly uphill. May the wind bring rain for the slickrock potholes fourteen miles on the other side of yonder blue ridge. May God's dog serenade your campfire, may the rattlesnake and the screech owl amuse your reverie, may the Great Sun dazzle your eyes by day and the Great Bear watch over you by night."
- Edward Abbey
Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside
"Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise - the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer."
- Milan Kundera
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Breathing Space, July
The one who's lying on his back under the tall trees
is also up there within them. He's flowing out into thousands of twigs,
swaying to and fro,
sitting in an ejector seat that lets go in slow motion.
The one who's standing down by the docks squints at the water.
The docks age faster than people.
They have silver-gray lumber and stones in their gut.
The glaring light pounds all the way in.
The one who's traveling all day in an open boat
over the glittering bays
will fall asleep at last inside a blue lamp
while the islands crawl like huge moths over the glass.
- Tomas Tranströmer
The Blue House
translated by Patty Crane
Fireflies in the Garden
Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.
- Robert Frost
"I myself shall continue living in my glass house where you can always see who comes to call, where everything hanging from the the ceiling and on the walls stays where it is as if by magic, where I sleep nights in a glass bed, under glass sheets, where who I am will sooner or later appear etched by a diamond."
- André Breton
Nadja
"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!"
- Hunter S. Thompson
The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman
"That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack."
- David Foster Wallace
Infinite Jest
Instruction
You must rock your pain in your arms
until it's asleep, then leave it
in a darkened room
and tiptoe out.
For a moment you will feel
the emptiness of peace.
But in the next room
your pain is already stirring.
Soon it will be
calling your name.
- Linda Pastan
"I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystems collapse and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address those problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy . . . and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation and we, (Lawyers) and scientists, don't know how to do that."
- Gus Speth
earth charter
"I've never been afraid of the American Nazi Party, on the grounds that anybody dumb enough to pick a name like that is not a serious threat. Any real fascist movement that's a threat, that's serious and really endangers us, would call itself the Red, White, and Blue Christian American Party, or something like that. They wouldn't be dumb enough to call themselves Nazis."
- Robert Anton Wilson
Beyond Chaos and Beyond: The Best of Trajectories, Vol. II
- Robert Anton Wilson
Beyond Chaos and Beyond: The Best of Trajectories, Vol. II
Self help
In the middle of the night
in Sweden, in the northern part
northish, anyway,
at midsummer
there are no stars
the light shimmers when you get up
and walk through the woods
to the outhouse
shimmers. it is not
like
what you are used to, shining from
like the sun through
the trees to your eyes.
it breaks and shimmers
in all directions.
at least i am pretty sure,
i didn't have my glasses on.
we saw two moose
a big one one evening
a little one the next evening
i sat on the porch in a lawn chair
i looked at the lake
and at the trees
eventually i noticed i was not thinking
i was a little surprised
what am i doing when i am not thinking
i am living
so i lived on the porch
for a few days.
would i recommend this?
i don't recommend anything
anymore
you'll figure it out
- Mig Living
metamorphosism
thank you for this, Mig
In the middle of the night
in Sweden, in the northern part
northish, anyway,
at midsummer
there are no stars
the light shimmers when you get up
and walk through the woods
to the outhouse
shimmers. it is not
like
what you are used to, shining from
like the sun through
the trees to your eyes.
it breaks and shimmers
in all directions.
at least i am pretty sure,
i didn't have my glasses on.
we saw two moose
a big one one evening
a little one the next evening
i sat on the porch in a lawn chair
i looked at the lake
and at the trees
eventually i noticed i was not thinking
i was a little surprised
what am i doing when i am not thinking
i am living
so i lived on the porch
for a few days.
would i recommend this?
i don't recommend anything
anymore
you'll figure it out
- Mig Living
metamorphosism
thank you for this, Mig
The moon glows the same:
it is the drifting cloud forms
make it seem to change.
- Matsuo Bashō
"Awakening doesn't mean you awaken. It means that there is only awakening. There is no "you" who is awake, there is only awakeness. As long as you identify with a "you" who is either awake or not awake, you are still dreaming. Awakening is awakening from the dream of a separate you into simply being Awakeness.
The problem is that most people are paying attention to objects, to what they perceive - rather than to the ultimate perceiver, the background. Either way, awareness is happening 100% of the time. The light is on brightly. It never goes off, but where is it looking? The human condition is characterized by a complete fascination with objects, starting with this object that we interpret as "me." Me is only a thought. You are before this me thought."
- Adyashanti
The Impact of Awakening
"When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you. It happened to me by imperceptible degrees and I could not really believe it; I could not really claim it for some time. I thought there must be something wrong. It's like taking a drink of cold water when you are thirsty. Every tastebud on your tongue, every molecule in your body says thank you."
- Leonard Cohen
Each ending is an hourglass filled with doors. There are times
when I feel you might be searching for me, when I can read
what is written on the far sides of stars. I'm nearly out of time.
My heart is a dragonfly. I'll have to settle for this, standing under
a waterfall of words you never said. There are times like this
when no ending appears, times when I am so inconsolably happy.
- Richard Jackson
from Alternate Endings
"For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been a collision. I feel too much, sense too much, am exhausted by the reverberations after even the simplest conversation."
- May Sarton
Journal of a Solitude
when I feel you might be searching for me, when I can read
what is written on the far sides of stars. I'm nearly out of time.
My heart is a dragonfly. I'll have to settle for this, standing under
a waterfall of words you never said. There are times like this
when no ending appears, times when I am so inconsolably happy.
- Richard Jackson
from Alternate Endings
"For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been a collision. I feel too much, sense too much, am exhausted by the reverberations after even the simplest conversation."
- May Sarton
Journal of a Solitude
See that?
Some time just went past
but so quietly
you might have missed it.
Then it morphed
into the sky.
Look, another one!
It came out
of my wristwatch
and slipped away.
- Ron Padgett
from Wristwatch
"There is a twilight zone in our own hearts that we ourselves cannot see. Even when we know quite a lot about ourselves - our gifts and weaknesses, our ambitions and aspirations, our motives and drives - large parts of ourselves remain in the shadow of consciousness.
This is a very good thing. We always will remain partially hidden to ourselves. Other people, especially those who love us, can often see our twilight zones better than we ourselves can. The way we are seen and understood by others is different from the way we see and understand ourselves. We will never fully know the significance of our presence in the lives of our friends. That's a grace, a grace that calls us not only to humility but also to a deep trust in those who love us. It is in the twilight zones of our hearts where true friendships are born."
- Henri Nouwen
This is a very good thing. We always will remain partially hidden to ourselves. Other people, especially those who love us, can often see our twilight zones better than we ourselves can. The way we are seen and understood by others is different from the way we see and understand ourselves. We will never fully know the significance of our presence in the lives of our friends. That's a grace, a grace that calls us not only to humility but also to a deep trust in those who love us. It is in the twilight zones of our hearts where true friendships are born."
- Henri Nouwen
I can tell you that solitude
Is not all exaltation, inner space
Where the soul breathes and work can be done.
Solitude exposes the nerve,
Raises up ghosts.
The past, never at rest, flows through it.
- May Sarton
from Gestalt at Sixty
A Self Portrait
"It is a curious psychological fact that the man who seems to be "egotistic" is not suffering from too much ego, but from too little. When the ego is strong and well developed, there is no nagging need to impress others - by money, by rudeness, or by any other show of false strength."
- Sydney J. Harris
Pieces of Eight
"We must see that when we feel anger, we are not reacting to the person who harmed us, but to that person's hatred. Their hatred has blinded them. They were unable to stand up for themselves. They submitted completely to their anger. Even though they think they are doing something great, consider how stupid they have actually been. They have become total slaves of their hatred. Who is a better candidate for compassion than that?"
- Kyabje Nawang Gehlek
- Kyabje Nawang Gehlek
"I found myself delighted by the pithy language and imagery of the early monks. Here, for example, is the seventh-century monk of Sinai, John Climacus, on the subject of pride, from a book that is still read in Orthodox monasteries during Lent:
Pride is a denial of God, an invention of the devil, contempt for men. It is the mother of condemnation, the offspring of praise, a sign of barrenness. It is a flight from God's help, the harbinger of madness, the author of downfall. It is the cause of diabolical possession, the source of anger, the gateway of hypocrisy. It is the fortress of demons, the custodian of sins, the source of hardheartedness. It is the denial of compassion, a bitter pharisee, a cruel judge. It is the foe of God. It is the root of blasphemy.
Welcome to the truth: that's the feeling I have when I read such a text. And the monk Evagrius, the first to write down and attempt to codify the beliefs and practices of the desert monks with regard to sin (which they called "demons" or "bad thoughts"), not only provides me with a means of understanding my own "bad thoughts" but also with the tools to confront them. His view of anger is typically sensible. Anger, he wrote, is given to us by God to help us confront true evil. We err when we use it casually, against other people, to gratify our own desires for power or control."
- Kathleen Norris
The Cloister Walk
"Before this is all over. Before they close the house and sell the furniture and give away the books. Before the cosmetics and shoes are handed out. Before they throw the pans in the trash. Before they empty the cupboards, before they take away the spices, the noodles. Before the happy days and Sunday afternoons end. Before the last of the mornings. Before the end of the anguish. Before sex without love and love without sex are over. Before the clothes rot in the closets. Before they take down the paintings and cover the armchairs with canvases and close the windows forever. Before they burn the photos. Before the doormats dry out, before the curtains rust on their tracks. Before curiosity is over, the bones, the liver and the corneas. Before all the plants on the balcony dry out. Before there is no more snow, no colors, no tropics. Before the end of all the jungles, of all the seas, of all the reflections in the water. Before the last poem. From the end of the sidewalks and streets. The end of all walks.
Before goodbye to all the airports and all the planes, all the cities and all the cafes with steamed up windows. Before the cancellation of all the discussions, of all the arguments, of all the fury, of all the contempt. Of all the metallic anxieties. Before the end of the screams, the desolation and the guilt. Before the last agenda, the last Friday, the last bar, the last dance. Before all the domes and all the screens go out. Before the moths eat the remains of the wool and the pillow. Before the end of pets. Before, much before: you have to live.
But how? As? "How admirable / he who does not think "life flees" / when he sees lightning," Basho wrote. Admirable those who are in time without thinking about it."
- Leila Guerriero
Theory of Gravity
"The planet is spinning on time: not a small event. All the galaxies are managing fine; the whole cosmos is doing great. But you have one nasty little thought crawling through your head, and it is a bad day! The problem is you are living in a psychological space that bears no connection with reality. And you are insecure, because it can collapse at any moment."
- Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev
Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy
"All delusions begin in the mind. All delusions are based on various ways we're talking to ourselves and then believing what we are saying."
- Adyashanti
Baudelaire
"When I have inspired universal horror
I shall have conquered solitude,"
he wrote in his journal, in his rented misery.
Interesting strategy. The person who wrote
this was an ill and wrathful man. One
who constantly strove to do better, composer
of a couple sad dope-sickness remedies -
Icelandic moss? - and the firm resolution
to pray every morning to God, his mother
and Edgar Allan Poe. Who made,
the splendid mind, to self, this note:
"Whenever you receive a letter from a creditor
immediately write fifty lines
upon an otherworldly subject
and you will be saved! (If not from the stepfool.)
His throne a wheelchair in an empty park;
the satanic baby, enfant du mal, and Mom
the true power behind it right to the end.
Evil isn't hard to comprehend, it is nothing
but unhappiness
in its most successful disguise.
Evil is hated and feared at least.
It is possessed, unlike mere misery,
of a dark glamour nobody pities.
- Franz Wright
Wheeling Motel
"People have gotten used to living a botched-up life - to be anxious, insecure, hateful, jealous, and in various states of unpleasantness through the day - slowly humanity has begun to see it as normal. None of these things are normal. These are abnormalities. Once you accept them as part of life they become normal because the majority has joined the gang of unpleasantness. They are all saying, "Unpleasantness is normal. Being nasty to each other is normal. Being nasty to myself is normal." Someone trusted that you would be doing good things at least to yourself and said, "Do unto others what you do unto yourself." I am telling you, never do unto others what you are doing to yourself! By being with people, I know what they are doing to themselves is the worst thing. Fortunately, they are not doing such horrible things to others. Only once in a while they are giving a dose to others, but to themselves they are giving it throughout the day."
- Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev
Life and Death in One Breath
"We're a race of elsewhere people. That's what makes us the best saints and the best poets and the best musicians and the world's worst bankers. That's why wherever you go you'll see some of us - and it makes no difference if the place is soft and warm and lovely and there's not a thing anyone could find wrong with it, there'll always be what Jimmy the Yank calls A Hankering. It's in the eyes. The idea of the better home. Some of us have it worse than others."
- Niall Williams
History of the Rain
- Niall Williams
History of the Rain
"You can waste a perfectly good life trying to meet the standards of someone who thinks you're not good enough because they can't understand who you are."
- Barbara Sher
"The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? 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. And with such a people you can then do what you please."
- Hannah Arendt
"Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people's anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble - yes, gamble - with a whole part of their life and their so called 'vital interests'."
- Albert Camus
S.O.S. 1995
Take a long time with your anger,
sleepy head.
Don't waste it in riots.
Don't tangle it with ideas.
The Devil won't let me speak,
will only let me hint
that you are a slave,
your misery a deliberate policy
of those in whose thrall you suffer,
and who are sustained
by your misfortune.
The atrocities over there,
the interior paralysis over here -
Pleased with the better deal?
You are clamped down.
You are being bred for pain.
The Devil ties my tongue.
I'm speaking to you,
'friend of my scribbled life'.
You have been conquered by those
who know how to conquer invisibly.
The curtains move so beautifully,
lace curtains of some
sweet old intrigue:
the Devil tempting me
to turn away from alarming you.
So I must say it quickly.
Whoever is in your life,
those who harm you,
those who help you;
those whom you know
and those whom you do not know -
let them off the hook,
help them off the hook.
Recognize the hook.
You are listening to Radio Resistance.
- Leonard Cohen
Book of Longing
"Remember how long you have been putting these things off, and how often you have received an opportunity from the gods and have not made use of it. By now you ought to realize what cosmos you are a part of, and what divine administrator you owe your existence to, and that an end to your time here has been marked out, and if you do not use this time for clearing the clouds from your mind, it will be gone and so will you."
- Jacob Needleman and John Piazza
The Essential Marcus Aurelius
from The Meditations
by Marcus Aurelius
translated by George Long
"Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By the most astounding stroke of luck an infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist."
- Bill Bryson
I'm a Stranger Here Myself
- Bill Bryson
I'm a Stranger Here Myself
"Yes, and the luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. It can't help it."
- Nick Cave and Seán O'Hagan
Faith, Hope and Carnage
- Nick Cave and Seán O'Hagan
Faith, Hope and Carnage
"I sometimes think the worst thing a young person can feel is when you can find no answer to the question of what you are supposed to do with this life you've been given. At moments you're aware of it balanced on your tongue, but not what comes next. Something like that. I can now say that another version of that happens in old age, when it occurs to you that since you've lived this long you must have learned something, so you open your eyes before dawn and think: What is it that I've learned, what is it I want to say?"
- Niall Williams
This Is Happiness
Going Through the Motions
Eventually, the way you don't notice
dirt on the windshield until someone
sweeps a finger across, and it's clear
you've been driving through a fog
for longer than you know, it's easy
to get used to fear and anger, the kind
they served at the diner, closed for months
of course, or the kind you've been feeding
on alone in the back of the garage where
you keep tools you bought for some task
long abandoned. They lean against each other,
rattle from a wind through a cracked window
making a sound like skeletons would
if they could say what they thought of you
now. Hope is a thin membrane, maybe
patience too, a lake we float on looking down
to see what we lost, but seeing instead
our own unsteady reflection.
- Grant Clauser
"Make no mistake about it - Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true."
- Adyashanti
The End Of Your World
"It is not a matter of fighting indifference or lethargy or anger. The real problem is vision - is to see. But this seeing is only possible if we return to the source, to the reality in us. We need another quality of seeing, a look that penetrates and goes immediately to the root of myself. If we look at ourselves from outside, we cannot penetrate and go deeper because we see only the body, the form of the seed, its materiality. Reality is here, only I have never put my attention on it. I live with my back turned to myself."
- Jeanne de Salzmann
The Reality of Being
"Some years ago, I was walking downtown San Francisco with a great friend and a learned Tibetan scholar. I asked him about one of the most striking ways that the Tibetans express the uniqueness of the human condition.
Imagine, they say, that deep in the vast ocean there swims a great and ancient turtle who surfaces for air once every hundred years. Imagine further that floating somewhere in the ocean is a single ox-yoke carried here and there by random waves and currents. What are the chances that when the turtle surfaces, his head will happen to emerge precisely through the center of the ox-yoke? That is how rare it is to be born as a human being!
In the middle of our conversation, I pointed to the crowds of men and women rushing by on the street and I gestured in a way to indicate not only them, but all the thousands and millions of people rushing around in the world. "Tell me, Lobsang," I said, "if it is so rare to be born a human being, how come there are so many people in the world?"
My friend slowed his pace and then stopped. He waited for a moment, taking in my question. I remember suddenly being able to hear, as though for the first time, the loud and frenetic traffic all around us. He looked at me and very quietly replied, "How many human beings do you see?"
In a flash, I understood the meaning of the story and the idea. Most of the people I was seeing, in the inner state they were in at that moment, were not really people at all. Most were what the Tibetans call "hungry ghosts." They did not really exist.
They were not really *there*. They were *busy*, they were *in a hurry*. They - like all of us - were obsessed with doing things *right away*. But *right away* is the opposite of *now* - the opposite of the lived present moment in which the passing of time no longer tyrannizes us.
The hungry ghosts are starved for "more" time; but the more time we hungry ghosts get, the more time we "save", the hungrier we become, the less we actually *live*. And I understood that it is not exactly more time, more days and years, that we are starved for, it is the present moment. "Right Away" is not "Now."
- Jacob Needleman
Time and the Soul
"The first revolution is when you change your mind about how you look at things, and see there might be another way to look at it that you have not been shown.
What you see later on is the results of that, but that revolution, that change that takes place will not be televised."
- Gil Scott Heron
"I'm not trying to send you out "on the road" in search of Valhalla, but merely pointing out that it is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it. There is more to it than that - no one HAS to do something he doesn't want to do for the rest of his life."
- Hunter S. Thompson
The Proud Highway
"Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. We have never seen a totally sane human being."
- Robert Anton Wilson
The Afterlife
While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth,
or riffling through a magazine in bed,
the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.
They're moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
you go to the place you always thought you would go,
The place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.
Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.
Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.
Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.
There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals - eagles and leopards - and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,
while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.
There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld
by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.
The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.
(And some just smile, forever on)
- Billy Collins
Questions About Angels
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