posted March 16, 2008 05:30 PM            

"If I were to name the three most precious resources of life, I should say books, friends, and nature; and the greatest of these, at least the most constant and always at hand, is nature."

~ John Burroughs

posted March 17, 2008 12:26 PM            

Reminds me,
I just saw the movie Into the Wild. Great movie. You might like.

P.S. One of the finest quotes I've come across in a long time that's in the movie:

posted March 24, 2008 01:39 AM            

— Anne Morrow Lindberg

Have you ever watched the unceasingness of a brook and imagined it to be the living waters of God, always accessible and always flowing?

— T.S. O’Rama

The reality that is present to us and in us: call it being…Silence. And the simple fact that by being attentive, by learning to listen (or recovering the natural capacity to listen) we can find ourself engulfed in such happiness that it cannot be explained: the happiness of being at one with everything in that hidden ground of Love for which there can be no explanations…. May we all grow in grace and peace, and not neglect the silence that is printed in the center of our being. It will not fail us.

— Thomas Merton

posted March 27, 2008 12:37 PM              

Seven times knocked down, eight times get up.
- Bodhidharma

Our life is frittered away by detail.
Simplify, simplify, simplify!
Simplicity of life and elevation of purpose.
- Thoreau

Humanity’s true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude toward those who are at tis mercy: animals.
And in this respect, human kind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
~ Sri Aurobindo

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees takes off his shoes.
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

posted March 28, 2008 12:42 PM              

"The genuine heart of sadness comes from feeling that your nonexistent heart is full. You would like to spill your heart's blood, give your heart to others. For the Warrior, this experience of a sad and tender heart is what gives birth to fearlessness... Real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. It comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw heart. You are willing to open up, without resistance or shyness, and face the world."

~ Chogyam Trungpa

posted March 28, 2008 10:37 PM            

“Each of us has an inner dream that we can unfold if we will just have the courage to admit what it is. And the faith to trust our own admission. The admitting is often very difficult.”
~ Julia Cameron

“I think we dream so we don't have to be apart so long. If we're in each other's dreams, we can be together all the time.”
~ Calvin & Hobbes

“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”
~ Epicurus

posted March 30, 2008 02:35 PM              

~ Valerian

posted April 02, 2008 10:25 AM              

Late, by myself, in the boat of myself,
no light and no land anywhere,
cloudcover thick. I try to stay
just above the surface, yet I’m already under
and living within the ocean.

Come to the orchid in Spring.
There is light and wine, and sweethearts
in the pomegranate flowers.
If you do not come, these do not matter.
If you do come, these do not matter.

Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy,
absentminded. Someone sober
will worry about things going badly.
Let the lover be.

Let yourself be silently drawn
by the stronger pull of what you really love.

Pale sunlight,
pale the wall.
Love moves away.
The light changes.
I need more grace
than I thought.

The wine we really drink is our own blood.
Our bodies ferment in these barrels.
We give everything for a glass of this.
We give our minds for a sip.

Thirst drove me down to the water
where I drank the moon’s reflection.

This is the sema of slavery and mastery
dancing together. This is not being.
Neither words, nor any natural fact
can express this.

Be melting snow.
Wash yourself of yourself.

You kiss a beautiful mouth,
and a key turns the lock of your fear.

The friend comes into my body
looking for the center, unable
to find it, draws a blade,
strikes anywhere.

I have a thirsty fish in me
that can never find enough
of what it’s thirsty for!

A night full of talking that hurts,
my worst held-back secrets.
Everything has to do with loving and not loving.
This night will pass.
Then we have work to do.

Just because you can’t drink all that falls
doesn’t mean you give up taking sips
of rainwater. If the nut
of the mystery can’t be cracked,
at least let me touch the shell.

Do you pay regular visits to yourself?
Don’t argue or answer rationally.
Let us die,
and dying, reply.

Most people guard against going into the fire,
and so end up in it.

I saw you and became empty.
This emptiness, more beautiful than existence,
it obliterates existence, and yet when it comes,
existence thrives and creates more existence!
...
To praise is to praise
how one surrenders
to the emptiness.

We rarely hear the inward music,
but we’re all dancing to it nevertheless,

When the ocean surges,
don’t let me just hear it.
Let it splash inside my chest!

Friends are enemies sometimes,
and enemies friends.

But knowing depends
on the time spent looking!

Nightingales are put in cages
because their songs give pleasure.
Whoever heard of keeping a crow?

A secret turning in us
makes the universe turn.
Head unaware of feet,
and feet head. Neither cares.
They keep turning.

Dance, when you’re broken open.
Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you’re perfectly free.

~ Rumi

posted April 02, 2008 03:32 PM              

To get your ideas across, use small words, big ideas, and short sentences.

~ John Henry Patterson

posted April 02, 2008 03:39 PM              

Ideas are a dime a dozen. People who implement them are priceless.
~ Mary Kay Ash

You can do what I can't do, I can do what you can't do. Together, we can do something Beautiful for God.

~ Mother Teresa

posted April 02, 2008 03:40 PM              

It is terrible to speak well and be wrong.
~ Sophocles

posted April 03, 2008 02:27 AM              

Advice doesn't help lovers!
They're not the kind of mountain stream
you can build a dam across.

An intellectual doesn't know
what the drunk is feeling!

Don't try to figure
what those lost inside love
will do next!

Someone in charge would give up all his power,
if he caught one whiff of the wine-musk
from the room where the lovers
are doing who-knows-what!

One of them tries to dig a whole through a mountain.
One flees from academic honors.
One laughs at famous mustaches!

Life freezes if it doesn't get a taste
of this almond cake.

The stars come up spinning
every night, bewildered in love.
They'd grow tired
with that revolving, if they weren't.
They'd say, "How long do we have to DO this!"

God picks up the reed-flute world and blows.
Each note is a need coming through us,
a passion, a longing-pain.

Remember the lips
where the wind breath originated,
and let your note be clear.
Don't try to end it.
BE YOUR NOTE
I'll show you how it is enough.

Go up on a roof at night
in this city of the soul.

Let EVERYONE climb on their roofs
and sing their notes!

Sing loud!

posted April 03, 2008 03:41 PM              

Love is the salutation of the angels to the stars.

How sad is the soul, when it is sad through love!

What a void in the absence of the being who, by herself alone fills the world! Oh! how true it is that the beloved being becomes God. One could comprehend that God might be jealous of this had not God the Father of all evidently made creation for the soul, and the soul for love.

The glimpse of a smile beneath a white crape bonnet with a lilac curtain is sufficient to cause the soul to enter into the palace of dreams.

God is behind everything, but everything hides God. Things are black, creatures are opaque. To love a being is to render that being transparent.

Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the attitude of the body may be, the soul is on its knees.

Parted lovers beguile absence by a thousand chimerical devices, which possess, however, a reality of their own. They are prevented from seeing each other, they cannot write to each other; they discover a multitude of mysterious means to correspond. They send each other the song of the birds, the perfume of the flowers, the smiles of children, the light of the sun, the sighings of the breeze, the rays of stars, all creation. And why not? All the works of God are made to serve love. Love is sufficiently potent to charge all nature with its messages.

Oh Spring! Thou art a letter that I write to her.

The future belongs to hearts even more than it does to minds. Love, that is the only thing that can occupy and fill eternity. In the infinite, the inexhaustible is requisite.

Love participates of the soul itself. It is of the same nature. Like it, it is the divine spark; like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable. It is a point of fire that exists within us, which is immortal and infinite, which nothing can confine, and which nothing can extinguish. We feel it burning even to the very marrow of our bones, and we see it beaming in the very depths of heaven.

Oh Love! Adorations! voluptuousness of two minds which understand each other, of two hearts which exchange with each other, of two glances which penetrate each other! You will come to me, will you not, bliss! strolls by twos in the solitudes! Blessed and radiant days! I have sometimes dreamed that from time to time hours detached themselves from the lives of the angels and came here below to traverse the destinies of men.

God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love, except to give them endless duration. After a life of love, an eternity of love is, in fact, an augmentation; but to increase in intensity even the ineffable felicity which love bestows on the soul even in this world, is impossible, even to God. God is the plenitude of heaven; love is the plenitude of man.

You look at a star for two reasons, because it is luminous, and because it is impenetrable. You have beside you a sweeter radiance and a greater mystery, woman.

All of us, whoever we may be, have our respirable beings. We lack air and we stifle. Then we die. To die for lack of love is horrible. Suffocation of the soul.

When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred and angelic unity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they are concerned; they are no longer anything more than the two boundaries of the same destiny; they are no longer anything but the two wings of the same spirit. Love, soar.

On the day when a woman as she passes before you emits light as she walks, you are lost, you love. But one thing remains for you to do: to think of her so intently that she is constrained to think of you.

What love commences can be finished by God alone.

True love is in despair and is enchanted over a glove lost or a handkerchief found, and eternity is required for its devotion and its hopes. It is composed both of the infinitely great and the infinitely little.

If you are a stone, be adamant; if you are a plant, be the sensitive plant; if you are a man, be love.

Nothing suffices for love. We have happiness, we desire paradise; we possess paradise, we desire heaven.

Oh ye who love each other, all this is contained in love. Understand how to find it there. Love has contemplation as well as heaven, and more than heaven, it has voluptuousness.

"Does she still come to the Luxembourg?" "No, sir." "This is the church where she attends mass, is it not?" "She no longer comes here." "Does she still live in this house?" "She has moved away." "Where has she gone to dwell?"

"She did not say."

What a melancholy thing not to know the address of one's soul!

Love has its childishness, other passions have their pettinesses. Shame on the passions which belittle man! Honor to the one which makes a child of him!

There is one strange thing, do you know it? I dwell in the night. There is a being who carried off my sky when she went away.

Oh! would that we were lying side by side in the same grave, hand in hand, and from time to time, in the darkness, gently caressing a finger,--that would suffice for my eternity!

Ye who suffer because ye love, love yet more. To die of love, is to live in it.

Love. A sombre and starry transfiguration is mingled with this torture. There is ecstasy in agony.

Oh joy of the birds! It is because they have nests that they sing.

Love is a celestial respiration of the air of paradise.

Deep hearts, sage minds, take life as God has made it; it is a long trial, an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny. This destiny, the true one, begins for a man with the first step inside the tomb. Then something appears to him, and he begins to distinguish the definitive. The definitive, meditate upon that word. The living perceive the infinite; the definitive permits itself to be seen only by the dead. In the meanwhile, love and suffer, hope and contemplate. Woe, alas! to him who shall have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will deprive him of all. Try to love souls, you will find them again.

I encountered in the street, a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat was worn, his elbows were in holes; water trickled through his shoes, and the stars through his soul.

What a grand thing it is to be loved! What a far grander thing it is to love! The heart becomes heroic, by dint of passion. It is no longer composed of anything but what is pure; it no longer rests on anything that is not elevated and great. An unworthy thought can no more germinate in it, than a nettle on a glacier. The serene and lofty soul, inaccessible to vulgar passions and emotions, dominating the clouds and the shades of this world, its follies, its lies, its hatreds, its vanities, its miseries, inhabits the blue of heaven, and no longer feels anything but profound and subterranean shocks of destiny, as the crests of mountains feel the shocks of earthquake.

If there did not exist some one who loved, the sun would become extinct.

posted April 03, 2008 07:16 PM            

Etty Hillesum

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~
What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world is immortal"~