“The difference between mind and brain is that brain deals only with memorized, subjective, special-case experiences and objective experiments, while mind extracts and employs the generalized principles and integrates and interrelates their effective employment. Brain deals exclusively with the physical, and mind exclusively with the metaphysical.”
–Buckminster Fuller
Photo by Howard Sochurek
Credit: Memphis Muse
"It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days… Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me…So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling…"
Aldous Huxley - Island, 1962.
Wonsook Kim - Afloat in the light, 2014, 김원숙.
Credit: Ravenous Butterflies
Walkers with The Dawn
Being walkers with the dawn and morning
Walkers with the sun and morning,
We are not afraid of night,
Nor days of gloom,
Nor darkness,
Being walkers with the sun and morning.
Still Here
I been scarred and battered.
My hopes the wind done scattered.
Snow has friz me,
Sun has baked me,
Looks like between 'em they done
Tried to make me
Stop laughin', stop lovin', stop livin'--
But I don't care!
I'm still here!
- Langston Hughes
Song of the Barren Orange Tree
- Federico Garcia Lorca
(translated by W.S. Merwin)
Woodcutter.
Cut my shadow from me.
Free me from the torment
of seeing myself without fruit.
Why was I born among mirrors?
The day walks in circles around me,
and the night copies me
in all its stars.
I want to live without seeing myself,
and I will dream that ants
and thistleburrs are my
leaves and my birds.
Woodcutter.
Cut my shadow from me.
Free me from the torment
of seeing myself without fruit
— Haruki Murakami, from "Samsa in Love" in "Men Without Women". Translated by Ted Goossen. (Alfred A. Knopf, 2017) (via katy moukakou)
"Any fool can criticize, complain, and condemn—and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.”
– Dale Carnegie
"We may fight against what is wrong, but if we allow ourselves to hate,
that is to insure our spiritual defeat and our likeness to what we hate."
- George William Russell
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
- Martin Luther King Jr
Around Us
Marvin Bell, 1937
We need some pines to assuage the darkness
when it blankets the mind,
we need a silvery stream that banks as smoothly
as a plane’s wing, and a worn bed of
needles to pad the rumble that fills the mind,
and a blur or two of a wild thing
that sees and is not seen. We need these things
between appointments, after work,
and, if we keep them, then someone someday,
lying down after a walk
and supper, with the fire hole wet down,
the whole night sky set at a particular
time, without numbers or hours, will cause
a little sound of thanks--a zipper or a snap--
to close round the moment and the thought
of whatever good we did.
REST
is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be. Rest is not stasis but the essence of giving and receiving. Rest is an act of remembering, imaginatively and intellectually, but also physiologically and physically. To rest is to become present in a different way than through action, and especially to give up on the will as the prime motivator of endeavor, with its endless outward need to reward itself through established goals. To rest is to give up on worrying and fretting and the sense that there is something wrong with the world unless we put it right; to rest is to fall back, literally or figuratively from outer targets, not even to a sense of inner accomplishment or an imagined state of attained stillness, but to a different kind of meeting place, a living, breathing state of natural exchange…
...
from ‘REST’ From CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. © 2015 David Whyte
It Goes Away
I give everything away and it goes way,
into the dusty air,
onto the face of the water
that goes away beyond our seeing.
I give everything away
that has been given to me:
the voices of children under clouds,
the men in the parks at the chess tables,
the women entering and leaving bakeries.
God who came here by rock, by tree, by bird.
All things silent in my seeing.
All things believable in their leaving.
Everything I have I give away
and it goes away.
~ Linda Gregg, All of It Singing (Graywolf Press, 2008)
"Freedom can’t be contained within a paradigm that is individualistic. One cannot be free alone: freedom is collective. Freedom is about transforming conditions so that communities can live in more habitable conditions"
"Justice is indivisible. You can’t decide who gets civil rights and who doesn’t.”
“We are never assured of justice without a fight.”
- Angela Davis
