Hope Inspires the Good to Reveal Itself

"Most of us have figured out that we have to do what’s in front of us and keep doing it… Every time we choose the good action or response, the decent, the valuable, it builds, incrementally, to renewal, resurrection, the place of newness, freedom, justice…

We live stitch by stitch, when we’re lucky. If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching. And maybe the stitching is crude, or it is unraveling, but if it were precise, we’d pretend that life was just fine and running like a Swiss watch. This is not helpful if on the inside our understanding is that life is more often a cuckoo clock with rusty gears.

[…]

A great truth, attributed to Emily Dickinson, is that “hope inspires the good to reveal itself.” This is almost all I ever need to remember. Gravity and sadness yank us down, and hope gives us a nudge to help one another get back up or to sit with the fallen on the ground, in the abyss, in solidarity."

Anne Lamott in Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair

Clarity

"Obscurity and vagueness of expression are at all times and everywhere a very bad sign. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred they arise from vagueness of thought, which, in its turn, is almost always fundamentally discordant, inconsistent, and therefore wrong. When a right thought springs up in the mind it strives after clearness of expression, and it soon attains it, for clear thought easily finds its appropriate expression. A man who is capable of thinking can express himself at all times in clear, comprehensible, and unambiguous words. Those writers who construct difficult, obscure, involved, and ambiguous phrases most certainly do not rightly know what it is they wish to say: they have only a dull consciousness of it, which is still struggling to put itself into thought; they also often wish to conceal from themselves and other people that in reality they have nothing to say."
- Arthur Schopenhauer

A Dreamer

loss of words

Language Within a Language

”The Paris Review” - Spring of 1982 - no.83
Stanley Kunitz (interviewed by Chris Busa) - The Art of Poetry

Noise

Cosmic Reverie

"The cosmic reverie … is a phenomenon of solitude which has its roots in the soul of the dreamer.

Cosmic reveries separate us from project reveries. They situate us in a world and not in a society. The cosmic reverie possesses a sort of stability or tranquility. It helps us escape time. It is a state. Let us get to the bottom of its essence: it is a state of mind… Poetry supplies us with documents for a phenomenology of the soul. The entire soul is presented in the poetic universe of the poet."

- Gaston Bachelard

Eternal

"The reason why the universe is eternal is that it does not live for itself; it gives life to others as it transforms."

~ Lao Tzu

Apocalypse

“The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.”
– Terence McKenna

Collective Dream

“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.”

― Leo Tolstoy

rest in peace

"He repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet."

"It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment."

"No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you’ve already had."

"It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams."

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Terence Mckenna

"The imagination is the goal of history. I see history as an effort to literally realise our collective dreams."

"Matter is not lacking in magic, matter is magic."

"The artist's role is to save mankind; anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. If the artist cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found."

"We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don't matter and in the act of taking that idea to ourselves, we give everything away to somebody else, to something else."

"You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding."

"Nothing comes unannounced, but many can miss the announcement. So it's very important to actually listen to your intuition, rather than driving through it."

"There is a spiritual obligation, there is a task to be done. It is not, however, something as simple as following a set of somebody else's rules."

"I think we have a very narrow conception of what is possible with reality. We're surrounded by the howling abyss of the unknowable - nobody knows what's out there!"

"Who is to say what is real and what is not? 'Real' is a distinction of a naive mind. I think we're getting beyond that."

"Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves."

Creating Who You Are

“And the principle is that any time you voluntarily let up control, in other words, cease to cling to yourself, you have an access of power. Cause you’re wasting energy all the time in self-defense trying to manage things, trying to force things to conform to your will. Once you stop doing that, that wasted energy is available. Therefore you are, in that sense, you are having that energy available, you are one with the divine principle, you have the energy. When you’re trying however to act as if you were God, that is to say you don’t trust anybody and you’re the dictator and you have to keep everybody in line, you lose the divine energy, cause what you are doing is simply defending yourself. So then, the principle is, the more you give it away, the more it comes back. Now you see, I don’t have the courage to give it away. I’m afraid. And you can only overcome that by realizing, you better give it away cause there’s no way of holding on to it. The meaning of the fact that everything is dissolving constantly, that we are all falling apart, we’re all in a process of constant death (…), that fact that everything is in decay is your helper. That is allowing you that you don’t have to let go, because there’s nothing to hold on to. It’s achieved for you, by the process of nature. So once you see that you just don’t have a prayer, it’s all washed up, and you will vanish and not leave a rack behind and you really get with that, suddenly you have the power, this enormous access of energy. But it’s not power that came to you because you grabbed it, it came in entirely the opposite way. The power that comes to you in a opposite way is power with which you can be trusted.”
- Alan Watts

The Soul

"Astrology as a means of predicting is, as far as I can make out, of almost no value. But there was one sensible idea behind it. When you cast a person's horoscope, what you did is you drew a map of the then known universe as it was at the time this child was born, and this was supposed to be a map of his soul. What an ingenious idea! It is to say your soul is the whole world as it focuses upon your moment. Now ordinarily when we talk of souls, we think of something clad in a sheet with holes in it, like a Halloween ghost, that is kind of miasmic feature, that inhabits your body and and when you die, it leaves you. But that's not the soul at all! The soul is something which contains the body. The body doesn't contain the soul. The soul, if we put it into modern language, is the entire complex of relationships in whose context this organism exists."
- Alan Watts

Artist

Signposts

Invincible

My dear,
In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love.
In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile.
In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm.
I realized, through it all, that…
In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.
Truly yours,
Albert Camus

Ugliness

"Because we live in such a mind-dominated culture, most modern art, architecture, music, and literature are devoid of beauty, of inner essence, with very few exceptions. The reason is that the people who create those things cannot - even for a moment - free themselves from their mind. So they are never in touch with that place within where true creativity and beauty arise. The mind left to itself creates monstrosities, and not only in art galleries. Look at our urban landscapes and industrial wastelands. No civilization has ever produced so much ugliness."

Eckhart Tolle - The Power of Now

Being

"The mind cannot know the tree. It can only know facts or information about the tree.
My mind cannot know you, only labels, judgments, facts, and opinions about you. Being
alone knows directly."

"Being is the eternal, ever-present One Life beyond the myriad forms of life that
are subject to birth and death. However, Being is not only beyond but also deep
within every form as its innermost invisible and indestructible essence. This means
that it is accessible to you now as your own deepest self, your true nature. But don't
seek to grasp it with your mind. Don't try to understand it. You can know it only when
the mind is still, when you are present, fully and intensely in the Now.... To regain
awareness of Being and to abide in that state of `feeling-realization' is enlightenment."

Eckhart Tolle - The Power of Now