There are no ordinary people

It is a serious thing to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.

~ C.S. Lewis

The deep parts

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The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can't reach.
With my sense, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
and in the ponds broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

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~ Rainer Maria Rilke
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[translated by Robert Bly]
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surrender

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The human mind has grown even since the time of the Buddha, 2,500 years ago.

 The human mind is more noisy and more all-pervasive, and the egos are bigger.

 There's been an ego growth over thousands of years; it's growing to a point of madness,

 with the ultimate madness having been reached in the twentieth century.

 One only needs to read twentieth-century history to see that it has been the climax

 of human madness, if it's measured in terms of human

 violence inflicted on other humans.

So in the present time, 

we can't escape from the world anymore;

 we can't escape from the mind. 

We need to enter surrender while we are in the world. 

That seems to be the path that is effective in the world that we live in now.

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- Eckhart Tolle

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a boy playing on the seashore

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I do not know what
I may appear to the world,
but to myself
I seem to have been
only like a boy
playing on the seashore,
and diverting myself
in now and then finding
a smoother pebble
or a prettier shell
than ordinary,
whilst the great
ocean of truth
lay all undiscovered
before me.

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~ Isaac Newton

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quiet breathing

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A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

Its loveliness increases, it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing

A flowery band to bind us to the earth,

Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth

Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,

Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways

Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,

Some shape of beauty moves away the pall

From our dark spirits.

~ John Keats, from:  'Endymion' 

I knew

 

I knew when I said

I love you
that I was inventing a new alphabet
for a city where no one could read
that I was saying my poems
in an empty theater
and pouring my wine
for those who could not
taste it.

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~ Nizar Qabbani

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hiding inside a drop of water

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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.

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~ Robert Bly

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from: 'My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy: Poems'

reblogged from: http://whiskeyriver.blogspot.com/

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Supple like a tree

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A good traveller has no fixed plans

and is not intent on arriving.
Supple like a tree in the wind,
she has no destination in view
and makes use of anything
life happens to bring her way.
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~ Lao Tzu

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a voice inside the body

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There is a voice inside the body.

There is a voice and a music,

a throbbing, four-chambered pear

that wants to be heard, that sits 

alone by the river with its mandolin

and its torn coat, and sings

for whomever will listen

a song that no one wants to hear.

But sometimes, lost,

on his way to somewhere significant,

a man in a long coat, carrying

a briefcase, wanders into the forest.

He hears the voice and the mandolin, 

he sees the thrush and the dandelion,

and he feels the mist rise over the river.

And his life is never the same,

for having been lost –

for having strayed from the path of his routine,

for no good reason.

~ Michael Blumenthal

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experiences which helped me along the way

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To the few experiences which helped me along the way
toward my life’s true goal I added this new one: the
observation of such configurations [staring at a fire,
tree roots, veins in rock, smoke, clouds, water,
reflections, light, dust, swirling specks of light when
eyes are closed].
The surrender to Nature’s irrational, strangely confused
formations produces in us a feeling of inner harmony with
the force responsible for these phenomena. We soon fall
prey to the temptation of thinking of them as being our
own moods, our own creations, and see the boundaries
seperating us from Nature begin to quiver and dissolve.
We become acquainted with that state of mind in which
we are unable to decide whether the images on our retina
are the result of impressions coming from without or
from within. Nowhere as in this exercise can we discover
so easily and simply to what extent we are creative, to what
extent our soul partakes of the constant creation of
the world. For it is the same indivisible divinity
that is active through us and in Nature, and if the
outside world were to be destroyed, a single one of us
would be capable of rebuilding it: mountain and stream,
tree and leaf, root and flower, yes, every natural
form is latent within us, originates in the soul whose
essence is eternity, whose essence we cannot know but
which most often intimates itself to us as the power
to love and create.
The next time we were together, the organist gave me
an explanation: “We always define the limits of our
personality too narrowly. In general, we count as part
of our personality only that which we can recognise as
being an individual trait or as diverging from the norm.
But we consist of everything the world consists of, each
of us, and just as our body contains the genealogical table
of evolution as far back as the fish and even much further,
so we bear everything in our soul that once was alive in
the soul of men. Every god and devil that ever existed,
be it among the Greeks, Chinese, or Zulus, are within us,
exist as latent possibilities, as wishes, as alternatives.
If the human race were to vanish from the face of the earth
save for one halfway talented child that had received no
education, this child would rediscover the entire course
of evolution, it would be capable of producing everything
once more, gods and demons, paradises, commandments, the
Old and New Testament.”
“Yes, fine,” I replied. “But what is the value of the
individual in that case? Why do we continue striving if
everything has been completed within us?”
“Stop!” exclaimed Pistorius. “There’s an immense
difference between simply carrying the world within us
and being aware of it. A madman can spout ideas that
remind you of Plato, and a pious little seminary student
rethinks deep mythological correspondences found among
the Gnostics or in Zoroaster. But he isn’t aware of them.
He is a tree or stone, at best an animal, as long as he is not
conscious. But as soon as the first spark of recognition
dawns within him he is a human being. You wouldn’t
consider all the bipeds you pass on the street human
beings simply because they walk upright and carry their
young in their bellies nine months! It is obvious how
many of them are fish or sheep, worms or angels, how
many are ants, how many are bees! Well, each one of
them contains the possibility of becoming human, but
only by having an intimation of these possibilities,
partially even by learning to make himself conscious
of them; only in this respect are these possibilities his.

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~ Herman Hesse

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You cannot depend upon anybody

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You cannot depend upon anybody. 

There is no guide, no teacher, no authority. 

There is only you

 - your relationship with others 

and with the world 

- there is nothing else. 

When you realize this,

 it either brings great despair, 

from which comes cynicism and bitterness, 

or, in facing the fact that you and nobody else

 is responsible for the world and for yourself,

 for what you think, 

what you feel,

 how you act, 

all self-pity goes.

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~  Jiddu Krishnamurti

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Heaven and Earth give themselves

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Heaven and Earth give themselves. 

Air, water, plants, animals, and humans 

give themselves to each other.

 It is in this giving-themselves-to-each-other that we actually live. 

Whether you appreciate it or not, it is true.

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~ Kodo Sawaki

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There's a space at the bottom of an exhale,

 a little hitch 

between taking in and letting out 

that's a perfect zero you can go into. 

There's a rest point between

 the heart's muscle's close and open 

- an instant of keenest living 

when you're momentarily dead. 

You can rest there.

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~  Mary Karr

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reblogged from: http://whiskeyriver.blogspot.com/
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gaps

The gaps are the thing. 

The gaps are the spirit's one home,

 the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that 

the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. 

The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; 

they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through,

 the icy narrowing fords splitting the cliffs of mystery. 

Go up into the gaps.

 If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. 

Stalk the gaps. 

Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock -

 more than a maple - a universe.

~ Annie Dillard

Early in the morning

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Early in the morning, walking

in a garden in Vancouver

three thousand miles from your grave,

the sky dripping, song

sparrows singing in the borders,

I come suddenly upon 

a Japanese dogwood, a tree

you loved, bowed down with bloom.

By what blessedness do I weep?

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~ Wendell Berry

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