"What would it be like if I could accept life—accept this moment—exactly as it is?

- Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach

How have I frightened myself?
How many times?

How many times
Have I dived
Into too-cold water
And survived.

The Writer.

In her room at the prow of the house 
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden, 
My daughter is writing a story. 

I pause in the stairwell, hearing 
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys 
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale. 

Young as she is, the stuff 
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy: 
I wish her a lucky passage. 

But now it is she who pauses, 
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure. 
A stillness greatens, in which 

The whole house seems to be thinking, 
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor 
Of strokes, and again is silent. 

I remember the dazed starling 
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago; 
How we stole in, lifted a sash 

And retreated, not to affright it; 
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door, 
We watched the sleek, wild, dark 

And iridescent creature 
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove 
To the hard floor, or the desk-top, 

And wait then, humped and bloody, 
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits 
Rose when, suddenly sure, 

It lifted off from a chair-back, 
Beating a smooth course for the right window 
And clearing the sill of the world. 

It is always a matter, my darling, 
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish 
What I wished you before, but harder.


Richard Wilbur

The best things happen when I'm doing what I'm not supposed to be doing.

"Intensification of production to feed an increased population leads to a still greater increase in population."

- Peter Farb

 

"I am in no hurry to comprehend myself (Enough! I shall always comprehend myself). If such and such a sentence of mine causes me a momentary disappointment, I trust in the next sentence to right its wrongs, I refrain from beginning it over again or polishing it."

- First Manifesto of Surrealism, Andre Breton

Convinced the universe is offering yellow cars as roses. 
Never saw a yellow car before two months ago.

“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.”

- Henry Miller

Memorable Quotes of the Weekend.

"If I could leave you with one practice, cultivate self-love, because it shifts us from being somebody, to being nobody, to being everybody."

"Be cool, work with the chaos, and ultimately develop a vagabond spirit."

"...suggestions that consciousness is not local to the brain."

"Western medication treats the symptoms. Entheogenic medication treats the root cause."

"The African mind doesn't distinguish between what you may call the natural and the supernatural. What you experience is real, there's no such thing as an hallucination."

"God is balance."

Social Transformation through Cultivating Genuine Confidence in Our's and Others' Basic Goodness/Buddha Nature - Fleet Maull

http://www.upaya.org/dharma/fleet-maull-08-07-2013-social-transformation-through-cultivating-genuine-confidence-in-ours-and-others-basic-goodnessbuddha-nature/

Grown Ocean.

In that dream I'm as old as the mountains


Still is starlight reflected in fountains


Children grown on the edge of the ocean


Kept like jewelry, kept with devotion

In that dream moving slow through the morning

You would come to me then without answers


Lick my wounds and remove my demands for now


Eucalyptus and orange trees are blooming


In that dream there's no darkness a-looming

In that dream moving slow through the morning time

In that dream I could hardly contain it


All my life I will wait to attain it


There, there, there

I know someday the smoke will all burn off


All these voices I'll someday have turned off


I will see you someday when I've woken


I'll be so happy just to have spoken


I'll have so much to tell you about it

In that dream I could hardly contain it


All my life I will wait to attain it


There, there, there

Wide-eyed walker, don't betray me


I will wake one day, don't delay me


Wide-eyed leaver, always going

Fleet Foxes / Robin Noel Pecknold

Boards of Canada : Tomorrow's Harvest

Give yourself a little time every morning to sit, silent, to rediscover that anything is possible.

"I hope I will be given time. Sometimes when I think of death, I think merely that it would be too bad, for I have not yet yielded up all the treasures I have collected. The chemistry I am producing of turning experience into awareness is not yet finished."

- The Journals of Anaïs Nin, Volume 5, Anaïs Nin

     Restlessness is no offense to the loved one except that the loved one considers it a matter of personal pride. He feels he should be the Sea, the Mountain, the Exotic Islands, the Religion, the Food, the Stimulant, the Inspiration, the Provider, the Total Universe to his love. Actually restlessness, you could explain to your love, is an outcome of being in love. Having the love one wants, one wants to roam, taste, enjoy, discover, explore. It is an extension and continuation of the love. Love is at the roots. We choose our jailers. Thou shalt be my safety brakes, my hand brake, my foot brake, my automatic brake, my Brake. Some of these brakes are very attractive to touch and to hold. Otherwise you would fall in love with wilder and looser characters. Nurture your restlessness. It is a compass pointing to mirages.
     Quotation from unknown source:
     "The adventurer is within us, and he contests for our favour with the social man we are obliged to be. These two sorts of life are incompatible; one we hanker for, the other we are obliged to. There is no other conflict so bitter as this, whatever the pious say, for it derives from the very constitution of human life which so painfully separates us from all other human beings. We, like the eagle, were born to be free. Yet we are obliged, in order to live at all, to make a cage of laws for ourselves and to stand on the perch. We are born as wasteful, and unremorseful as tigers; we are obliged to be thrifty, or starve, or freeze. We are born to wander, and cursed to stay and dig. We are born adventurers. It is this double-mindedness of humanity that prevents a clear social excommunication of the adventurers. If he fails he is a mere criminal. One third of all criminals are nothing but failed adventurers. Society's benefactors as well as pests. These are men betrayed by contradictions inside themselves, a social man at war with a free man."

- Letter to Jim Herlihy, Anaïs Nin

Flippant with others' love.

Uff da

Memorable Quotes of the Week.

"Done is better than perfect."

A Poem About Baseballs.

for years the scenes bustled 
through him as he dreamed he was   
alive. then he felt real, and slammed

awake in the wet sheets screaming   
too fast, everything moves
too fast, and the edges of things   
are gone. four blocks away

a baseball was a dot against   
the sky, and he thought, my   
glove is too big, i will

drop the ball and it will be   
a home run. the snow falls   
too fast from the clouds,   
and night is dropped and

snatched back like a huge
joke. is that the ball, or is
it just a bird, and the ball is
somewhere else, and i will
miss it? and the edges are gone, my

hands melt into the walls, my   
hands do not end where the wall   
begins. should i move
forward, or back, or will the ball

come right to me? i know i will   
miss, because i always miss when it
takes so long. the wall has no   
surface, no edge, the wall

fades into the air and the air is   
my hand, and i am the wall. my   
arm is the syringe and thus i

become the nurse, i am you,   
nurse. if he gets
around the bases before the   
ball comes down, is it a home

run, even if i catch it? if we could   
slow down, and stop, we
would be one fused mass careening   
at too great a speed through
the emptiness. if i catch

the ball, our side will
be up, and i will have to bat,   
and i might strike out.

Denis Johnson

Love Song.

If I could write words
Like leaves on an Autumn Forest floor
What a bonfire my letters would make.
If I could speak words of water
You would drown when I said
'I love you'.

Spike Milligan

Make room for what exists already.

why

(Irrational) feeling of being disliked.

My tired body rebels.

The Arrival.

For years on end I have been sitting here,
impatiently awaiting potency: some explosive revelatory surge
that will carry me away and permit no looking back.
But this moment of deliverance has not arrived,
and I have done nothing to hasten it.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter.
Perhaps I wasn’t meant to do anything.
In which case, I have succeeded admirably.

John Tottenham

Looking out the Window.

The sounds of traffic  
die over the back lawn   
to occur again in the low   
distance.

The voices, risen, of
the neighborhood cannot   
maintain that pitch   
and fail briefly, start   
up again.

Similarly my breathing rises   
and falls while I look out   
the window of apartment   
number three in this slum,   
hoping for rage, or sorrow.

They don’t come to me   
anymore. How can I lament   
anything? It is all
so proper, so much
as it should be, now

the nearing cumulus   
clouds, ominous,   
shift, they are like the
curtains, billowy,   
veering at the apex
of their intrusion on the room.
If I am alive now,   
it is only

to be in all this
making all possible.   
I am glad to be
finally a part
of such machinery. I was   
after all not so fond
of living, and there comes
into me, when I see   
how little I liked
being a man, a great joy.

Look out our astounding
clear windows before evening.   
It is almost as if
the world were blue
with some lubricant,
it shines so.

Denis Johnson

"The doctor explained that the illness came from fatigue and worry, and prescribed inner peace."

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

Stand in the emptiness
Underneath is the desire to be loved
Energy comes from the blind spots
(I am inadequate)
To reach for higher things

you came in through the back door
no the front no the back
you saw me I didn't see you
but I must have because
I'm writing this now

Memorable Quotes of the Weekend.

"I used to party surprise people, often with a bit of a split."

"Splitting on things."

"I just need to lose this holiday weight... From the last seventeen holidays."

"You're the one... I met first."

 "Excess in moderation."

I read until the character's problems are bigger than my own. 
With Jonathan Franzen it takes three sentences.

Inanition.

Tender chicken?
Till 2am…
Succulent Steak?
Ask a waiter…

Cool to play pool to.

1. Bend your knees.
2. Get low.
3. Keep your elbow straight, in line with your cue.
4. Follow through.

 "This summer the roses are blue; the wood is of glass. The earth draped in its verdure has as much effect on me as a ghost. It is living and ceasing to live which are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere."

First Manifesto of Surrealism, Andre Breton

Odd limbo I find myself in.
No debate.

Jeans are never that dirty.

You don't meet a voice like that often.

Memorable Quotes of the Weekend.

"As empty as it shows, it reflects the fullness of existence."

"I will miss your suicidal tendencies."

Memorable Quotes of the Weekend.

"You can juggle depression with talent, I have."

"Decanted butter makes me restless."

"One cheese. And one cheese only."

"How does that make you feel?" 
"Drugs."

Office Haiku.

In a meeting you

I go to get a coffee

I don't even want

Once there hung a mess
A scribbled ball of thread
Woolly woolly woolly
Suspended in my head

Crocheted into a doilie
Dyed a deeper red
The mess is now carpeted
A musing emptiness in my head

Memorable Quotes of the Weekend.

"It's cheese puffs or nothing."
 
"What's that?"
"Wine."
"So what's the problem?"
 
"Sounds like you went there with my mindset."
"Yeah, and that's not fun."

The Death of My Expectant Self.

There is nothing to do.
There is nowhere to go.
There is nothing to achieve.
We are just sitting here doing nothing.

Memorable Weekend Quotes.

"Anxiety springs from a constant negotiation of your beliefs and morals."

"We don't need to eat to be happy, but still..."

"Please tell me you're joking."
"Yeah sure."

"If this makes sense to you, you're not getting it."

Résumé.

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Dorothy Parker

"Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a... merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and the equinox! This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table."

D.H. Lawrence

ESTRAGON: In the meantime let's try and converse  
     calmly, since we are incapable of keeping silent.

VLADIMIR: You're right, we're inexhaustible.

ESTRAGON: It's so we won't think.

VLADIMIR: We have that excuse.

ESTRAGON: It's so we won't hear.

VLADIMIR: We have our reasons.

ESTRAGON: All the dead voices.

VLADIMIR: They make a noise like wings.

ESTRAGON: Like leaves.

VLADIMIR: Like sand.

ESTRAGON: Like leaves.

[Silence.]

VLADIMIR: That passed the time.

ESTRAGON: It would have passed in any case.

- Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett

"Good words, But deeds must prove it also; ... remember you don't forget resolutions formed in the hour of fear."
a
- Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

                          MR FITZGERALD

         Did you notice the new secretary in my office? 

         A temp agency sent her to help out while Miss 

         Hamish was in the hospital. Her name's Samantha. 

         She's a really sweet girl. She's a newlywed, lives 

         here in town and... I could tell from the moment 

         she got here that she really wants to work here 

         permanently. I mean, a 5 minute commute, very 

         convenient for her, right here in town. It would 

         be a great job for her. Yeah. Anyway, this morning 

         she was trying to figure out through a series of 

         sideways questions exactly how serious Miss Hamish's 

         illness was. And, she was acting concerned of course, 

         but I could see in her eyes, you know, she doesn't 

         know Miss Hamish, she can't help it. There's a 

         part of her that wants Miss Hamish to die. It'll 

         get her the job.

                          TERRI

         So?

                          MR FITZGERALD

         So Miss Hamish is dead Terri. I got the call an 

         hour ago.

                          TERRI

         Sorry Mr Fitzgerald.

                          MR FITZGERALD

         Don't say things you don't mean Terri. You're not 

         sorry she's gone. You barely knew her.

                          TERRI

         Sorry.

                          MR FITZGERALD

         Now after I got off the phone with the hospital 

         I called the temp agency and I told them, you know,  

         we're going to hire Samantha permanently. And they 

         thanked me and they said they'd call her and give 

         her the news, and I said you know, if you don't mind, 

         I would rather do it, because I kind of wanted to 

         spring the news on her, you know, what a great way 

         for she and I to start working together, right? But 

         now, I have to tell her she's got the job, and I will  

         have to watch, while she pretends to be sad. 

         Life's a mess dude. But we're all just doing the best 

         we can. You know? You and me and Samantha. We're just 

         doing what we can. So if I hurt you or if I lied to 

         you, all I can tell you is I'm sorry, and I will try 

         to do better. Maybe I will do better, or maybe I'll 

         do even worse, I don't know. I screw up all the time.  

         Because that's what people do. You know?

Memorable Weekend Quotes.

"It's not about the bridges."

America.

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.
I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.
Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don't really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. Her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our filling stations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Allen Ginsberg

If you spend half a working Monday googling depression are you

a) More productive than you would have been shuffling tea bags
b) Less productive than your colleague who
c) Depressed
d) Apat

The Second Coming.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats

Lesbian sex with Kathy Bates.

Song Off #4.

vs.

Dam Days.

La Petit Mort.

Barber - Adagio for Strings

Memorable Weekend Quotes.

"Capitalism: God's way of determining who is smart and who is poor."

"Fish! For sport only, not for meat. Fish meat is practically a vegetable."

"As the sands of time move like Seabiscuit from the gate... ... um..."

"Acorns, acorns, acorns for freeeee!"

Me: "Oh, so is that why you go to church? For the cake?"
Father: "My girl, we go for anything that is free."

Memorable Weekend Quotes.

"There are many ways to live a life."
a
"I could do a lot more, but I won't put down my beer."

This weekend the sky was an absolute abyss. One glimpse at trees grounded would force my eyes and mental state into focus, but if I allowed them to blur and intentionally faded their lit leaves and roots too deep I could rise and fall into the chasm that was the sky. My eyes were drawn in and towards, so far-flung open they ached, but with an unveiling that is beautiful and only stabbingly surprising because it had for so long remained unseen. The sky was a deep ocean radially softening to a light, white blue. The clouds smoke-signal puffed from a cornered source and rippled as if reflections on water, the entire sky the bottomless surface of a freshwater lake. There was convergence and divergence as reliant on air temperature and wind as on my own fractal manipulation, the crystallised mass kaleidoscoping to my will and imagination. After days the clouds dissolved, seemingly while I stared too hard to notice, and there was left only the seamless gradient of a darkening dusk, purpled.

Nothing was different. 

Two days ago the water was soft if at all on my legs and rippled rainbows from surface wind and sunbeams. A petal shaped childlike rainbow tiled across the lucid blue, rising and twisting and falling in a chromatic vibration. Thousands and thousands until dispersion and light and a beauty undulating was all there was. Where the jet pumped out more water the movement made on the surface was fiction of the scientific sort. As if the water was being tugged, pulled tight like scarred skin. But it was translucent, with daggers of afternoon light. The water I had cupped in my hand and proceeded to drop from my fingers had a solidity, an invisible cloak-like quality; its matter ethereal, its temperament ambient.

Yesterday my body was unashamed. It housed my bits, my pieces — my unravelling insides — and it was assured of its practical form. Disposed of clothes, instead of a melding or a fusing there was simply air and flesh with no discernible difference, in quite the same way as the dark lavender above ends as a light mauve on the skyline. A statement my body did not make, it was not asserting its nakedness, it would have been as comfortable overlooking a balcony onto a crowded street. Shoulder blades celestial, stomach pale, a welcoming womanly moon bathed in dark blue, feet ancient and Roman, nipples pursed to welcome the paralleling stars; pleasure expansive, and unequivocal. My face was inconsequential.

Last night the stars were pinpricks in the black felt cloth of night, their fluttering rip revealing a light behind so blinding that if the curtain indeed came down the earth would be washed in an illuminated explosion. Today you are as important as I, a silent, radiant solace that I am indeed not one but an extension of another of the same understanding. Your hand in my hand is my hand in my hand as my hand is yours in yours. Today you matter as I matter. Your shadow more comforting to me than the fleshy body of any other, your presence my sunlit Secret Garden. Today you are my undying escort to Aristophanes’ dance.