He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.
William Blake
I wanted to say 'why the long face?'
Sparrow perch and play songs of long face
Burro buck and bray songs of long face
Sings 'I will swallow your sadness and eat your cold clay
Just to lift your long face
And though it may be madness, I will take to the grave
Your precious long face
And though our bones they may break and our souls separate
Why the long face?
And though our bodies recoil from the grip of the soil
Why the long face?'
Joanna Newsom, from Saw Dust and Diamonds
"Another is penetrating him, furrowing him with suffering, and this other, who has been transformed into a torture machine, is the handsome lad whose venomous splendour he has been admiring. Beauty is painful, beauty is frightful. Behind its appearance is revealed the unbearable horror of the Universe."
Jean-Paul Sartre on Jean Genet from Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr
“Everything that can suffer, does suffer. Everything that can die, will die. You have suffered, you will suffer much more, and a lifetime of your suffering will culminate in your death. When you can muster genuine gratitude for all of that, then you will have made the kind of progress that is not easily reversed. To develop sincere appreciation for this opportunity to be born in a brutal world, not of your making, to struggle and fail time and time again, to feel repeatedly lost, bewildered, frustrated, and hopeless, to swim in this ocean of misery, and, ultimately, to drown in it—this is the beginning of wisdom. You must embody overwhelming gratitude for the opportunity to fail repeatedly, with no guarantee of eventual success, and to wade cheerfully into a doomed struggle against time and your own limitations. You clamber toward your own death across a landscape of thorns, broken glass, and the corpses of those who have gone before you. Would you have it any other way?”
William Ferraiolo in Meditation on Self-Discipline and Failure
i thank You [...] for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
doubt unimaginable You?
of all nothing—human merely being
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
e e cummings (excerpt)
The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.
William Blake from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
“I forever stand at the pillars of your existence where fear will not seep through and torture you, on my clock which is 24/7 fear does not exist so remember that it’s a temporary illusion and kindly ask her to leave and that her name is doubt.”
Lily wasp akk Chadd Curry
"Behind the world we live in, in the distant background, lies another world standing in roughly the same relation to the former as the stage one sometimes sees in the theatre behind the real stage stands to the latter. Through a thin gauze one sees what looks like a world of gossamer, lighter, more ethereal, of a different quality from the real world. Many people who appear bodily in the real world do not belong there but to this other world. Yet the fact that someone fades away in this manner, indeed almost disappears from reality, can be due to either health or sickness".
Soren Kierkegaard - from 'The Seducer's Diary'
'The word in Tibetan for hope is rewa; the word for fear is dokpa. More commonly, the word re-dok is used, which combines the two. Hope and fear is a feeling with two sides. As long there's one, there's always the other. This re-dok is the root of our pain. In the world of hope and fear, we always have to change the channel, change the temperature, change the music, because something is getting uneasy, something is getting restless, something is beginning to hurt, and we keep looking for alternatives.
In a nontheistic state of mind, abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning. You could even put "Abandon hope" on your refrigerator door instead of more conventional aspirations like "Every day in every way I'm getting better and better".
Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something; they come from a sense of poverty. We can't simply relax with ourselves. We hold on to hope, and hope robs us from the present moment. We feel that someone else knows what's going on, but that there's something missing in us, and therefore something is lacking in our world.
Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look. that's the compassinate thing to do. That's the brave thing to do. We could smell that piece of shit. We could feel it; what is its texture, colour and shape?
We can explore the nature of that piece of shit. We can know the nature of dislike, shame and embarrassment, and not believe there's anything wrong with that. We can drop the fundamental hope that there is a better "me" who one day will emerge. We can't just jump over ourselves as if we were not there. It's better to take a straight look at all of our hopes and fears. Then some kind of confidence in our basic sanity arises'.
Pema Chödrön - from 'When Things Fall Apart'
"The cosmic humor is that if you desire to move mountains and continue to purify yourself, you will ultimately arrive at the place where you can move mountains. But to arrive at this position of power, you will have to give up being he-who-wanted-to-move-mountains so that you can be he-who-put-the-mountain-there-in-the-first-plce. The humor is that when you finally have the power to move the mountain, you are the person who placed it there - so there the mountain stays."
Ram Dass