steven norquist

what sages from every era have come to understand is this simple truth:  all that happens in this universe does so spontaneously, perfectly, and of its own accord.  yet simultaneously and equally true in this spontaneous manifestation that is the universe, is the knowledge that nothing is random, everything emerges exactly as it has to.

unknown (comment if you know)

when you realize at a very deep level that the winter of your death is inevitable, that nothing that you identify now as yourself will survive, at that moment the spring of your awakening will begin.

Advice to Myself - Louise Erdrich - Original Fire: Selected and New Poems

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.
Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.
Don't even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic - decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don't answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

Louise Erdrich

Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position. You wear your life like a garment from the mission bundle sale ever after - lightly because you realize you never paid nothing for it, cherishing because you know you won't ever come by such a bargain again.

Louise Erdrich

All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing. That in her creation of her children there should be the unspeakable promise of their death, for by their birth she had created mortal beings.

Jalal ad-Din Rumi

“Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absent-minded. Someone sober will worry about events going badly. Let the lover be.”

Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

“Illness reduces man to his basic state: a cloaca in which the chemical processes continue. The meaningless hegemony of the involuntary.”

Ovid, The Metamorphoses

”Nothing in the entire universe ever perishes, believe me, but things vary, and adopt a new form. The phrase “being born” is used for beginning to be something different from what one was before, while “dying” means ceasing to be the same. Though this thing may pass into that, and that into this, yet the sums of things remains unchanged.”

scott adams

how can one part be more important if each part is completely necessary?

Seneca

Life’s like a play; it’s not the length but the excellence of the acting that matters

Cid Corman

There are things to be said. No doubt.
And in one way or another
they will be said. But to whom tell

the silences? With whom share them
now? For a moment the sky is
empty and then there was a bird.

Ajahn Chah

“The Buddha wanted us to practice Dhamma. But what is practicing Dhamma? Dhamma means all things. The forms that the eyes see, sounds heard by the ears, these are all Dhamma, because Dhamma means conditions that are maintained in existence. Having come into being, they pass away. We don’t need to expect too much from them, because that is the way they are. We should internalize this truth and see it in our minds and bodies; it is not something far away. The components of body and mind are not stable or permanent. They have no inherent reality. Why would you want to see something that has no inherent reality as real? Appearing and disappearing, constantly in a state of change—where is the reality in that? The only reality is the insubstantiality itself. The Buddha wanted us to see this truth, the truth that things are impermanent, unsatisfactory in nature, and without self-essence. Not seeing this and grasping at things, the only result is suffering; seeing and letting go leads to freedom.”

Louise Erdrich

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

J. Krishnamurti

“…it is important to understand, not intellectually but actually in your daily life, how you have built images about your wife, your husband, your neighbor, your child, your country, your leaders, your politicians, your gods–you have nothing but images.

The images create the space between you and what you observe and in that space there is conflict, so what we are going to find out now together is whether it is possible to be free of the space we create, not only outside ourselves but in ourselves, the space which divides people in all their relationships.

Now the very attention you give to a problem is the energy that solves that problem. When you give your complete attention–I mean with everything in you–there is no observer at all. There is only the state of attention which is total energy, and that total energy is the highest form of intelligence. Naturally that state of mind must be completely silent and that silence, that stillness, comes when there is total attention, not disciplined stillness. That total silence in which there is neither the observer nor the thing observed is the highest form of a religious mind. But what takes place in that state cannot be put into words because what is said in words is not the fact. To find out for yourself you have to go through it.”

~  excerpt from Freedom from the Known

michael mallon

outwhere

the vanishing

k. c. cole

the energy you use to read this sentence is powered, ultimately, by sunlight - perhaps first soaked up by some grass that got digested by a cow before it turned into the milk that made the cheese that topped the pizza - but sunlight, just the same.