Seeing, in Three Pieces
Kate Knapp
Somehow we must see
through the shimmering cloth
of daily life, its painted,
evasive facings of what to eat,
to wear? Which work
matters? Is a bird more
or less than a man?
Is a bird more or less
than a woman?
*
There have been people
who helped the world. Named
or not named. They weren’t interested
in what might matter,
doubled over as they were
with compassion. Laden
branches, bright rivers.
*
When a bulb burns out
we just change it—
it’s not the bulb we love;
it’s the light.
“I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,
as a healer of misery,
as a messenger of wonder,
as an architect of peace.
I will honor all life—wherever and in whatever form
it may dwell—on Earth my home,
and in the mansions of the stars.”
~ Diane Ackerman
"Keep your gaze on the wounded place. This is where the light enters."
~ Rumi
"If you stop to be kind, you must swerve often from your path."
~ Mary Webb
“Love says, 'I am everything.'
Wisdom says 'I am nothing.'
Between the two, my life flows.”
~ Nisargadatta Maharaj
"Much as I love to soul search, there are moments when you realize that perhaps today you are further complicating life by relentlessly seeking elusive answers to profound questions. Perhaps today is a day where you take what you already know to be true and apply it. Simple things we’ve had figured out for decades like the value of exercise, of dipping your feet in the nearest body of water, or having a good laugh with a few close friends. Fruits and vegetables are obvious in that way. Not too complicated, nothing really to fuss over, but simple, delicious, and just as good for you as they’ve ever been."
~ Dallas Clayton
"The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance."
~ Alan Watts
“Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
~ Mary Oliver
he followed the sun & she followed the stars & in dreams they listened closely for the beginning of all things, for that was where they knew they'd find each other.
*
In that moment, our eyes met & I remember thinking This is what it is like to be struck by lightning, knowing I would never be untouched by him again.
via storypeople. ♥
Lost
Stand still.
The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost.
Wherever you are is called
Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes.
Listen.
It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying
Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows Where you are. You must let it find you.
David Wagoner**
I heard part of this poem while listening to a Tara Brach podcast. I loved both. ♥
Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room. | Cheryl Strayed
Grief does not change you.... It reveals you. | John Green
This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something. | Elizabeth Gilbert
This is what I have to say to you. In the first stage of the journey you learned to replace harmful beliefs with helpful ones. It was such a relief to let go of negativity that it became a temptation to stay there - to make your home in those newly acquired positive thoughts. But a positive self image is still a mask. The next stage of your journey is becoming comfortable with the unknown. It involves being clear and courageous enough to rest in bare awareness without having to create another identity, without needing to tack yet another belief to the end of "I am."
Experience the expansion, the spaciousness that comes from resting in the truth of unknowing. It isn't comfortable, at least not now, but it is powerful and inherently creative. It's what your soul longs for. Use the sense of vertigo to leave behind the know, and let go of the need to tether your soul to anything solid or definable.
Let yourself go, over and over, until it is second nature to be weightless.
-Danna Faulds, From Root to Bloom
“In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.”
--Buddhist Saying
Do all the other things, the ambitious things – travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in wild jungle rivers (after first having it tested for monkey poop) – but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness. Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial. That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality – your soul, if you will – is as bright and shining as any that has ever been. Bright as Shakespeare’s, bright as Gandhi’s, bright as Mother Theresa’s. Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly. And someday, in 80 years, when you’re 100, and I’m 134, and we’re both so kind and loving we’re nearly unbearable, drop me a line, let me know how your life has been. I hope you will say: It has been so wonderful.
**I absolutely love this.
"The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That's the moment you may be starting to get it right.” --Neil Gaiman
”People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A soul mate’s purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life…”--Unknown
“Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.”--Rumi
“Should you ever feel too lonely...listen for the roar of the sea - for in it are all those who've been and all those who are to come.”--Simon Van Booy, 'The Coming and Going of Strangers'
"The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of it.”--Cheryl Strayed, 'Tiny Beautiful Things'
**sometimes your own words fail you, but comfort can be found in those who have been there. who have written about it, lived it. who understand what it's like to just go through it.
“Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.”
"My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger. So is yours."
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Descent of Species
by David Eagleman
In the afterlife, you are treated to a generous opportunity: you can choose whatever you would like to be in the next life. Would you like to be a member of the opposite sex? Born into royalty? A philosopher with bottomless profundity? A soldier facing triumphant battles? But perhaps you've just returned here from a hard life. Perhaps you were tortured by the enormity of the decisions and responsibilities that surrounded you, and now there's only one thing you yearn for: simplicity. That's permissible. So for the next round, you choose to be a horse. You covet the bliss of that simple life: afternoons of grazing in grassy fields, the handsome angles of your skeleton and the prominence of your muscles, the peace of the slow-flicking tail or the steam rifling through your nostrils as you lope across snow-blanketed plains. You announce your decision. Incantations are muttered, a wand is waved, and your body begins to metamorphose into a horse. Your muscles start to bulge; a mat of strong hair erupts to cover you like a comfortable blanket in winter. The thickening and lengthening of your neck immediately feels normal as it comes about. Your carotid arteries grow in diameter, your fingers blend hoofward, your knees stiffen, your hips strengthen, and meanwhile, as your skull lengthens into its new shape, your brain races in its changes: your cortex retreats as your cerebellum grows, the homunculus melts man to horse, neurons redirect, synapses unplug and replug on their way to equestrian patterns, and your dream of understanding what it is like to be a horse gallops toward you from the distance. Your concern about human affairs begins to slip away, your cynicism about human behavior melts, and even your human way of thinking begins to drift away from you. Suddenly, for just a moment, you are aware of the problem you overlooked. The more you become a horse, the more you forget the original wish. You forget what it was like to be a human wondering what it was like to be a horse. This moment of lucidity does not last long. But it serves as the punishment for your sins, a Promethean entrails-pecking moment, crouching half-horse halfman, with the knowledge that you cannot appreciate the destination without knowing the starting point; you cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the alternatives. And that's not the worst of your revelation. You realize that the next time you return here, with your thick horse brain, you won't have the capacity to ask to become a human again. You won't understand what a human is. Your choice to slide down the intelligence ladder is irreversible. And just before you lose your final human faculties, you painfully ponder what magnificent extraterrestrial creature, enthralled with the idea of finding a simpler life, chose in the last round to become a human.
##
I (clearly, but wish I could) did not write the above, but it is from "SUM: Forty Tales from the Afterlives" by David Eagleman. This is an excellent book filled with short stories perfect for the train.
thank you, ht, for the fantastic recommendation...as usual, you are spot on about what's awesome.
"Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final." — Rainer Maria Rilke
♫ spotify
“I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you'll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you'll make something that didn't exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind.” ― Neil Gaiman
sometimes everything to think has already been thought and everything to be said has already been said. thankfully, the interwebs makes it easy to go through the stacks of words and you find thoughts in beautifully stitched sentences ready to share. i've been riding the wave of winter blues. it's not terribly fun, but it will pass. one molecule at a time. i hope you all had a happy new year. here's to 2013. ❤
these photos were taken from a visit to pelham bay park in the bronx . so much fun was had that afternoon; exploring the woods and estuaries, sitting on rocks and laughing at inside jokes about pilgrims and airplanes. we watched the sky change colors and the reflection looked like someone was painting it with perfect brush strokes. walking back to the bus the sky turned pink behind us and darker clouds surrounded trees. we also happened upon a group of geese that seemed to be in a meeting. seriously, there was one squawking in the center with his cohorts listening. who knew so much beauty awaited me in the bronx!?happy weekend friends!
~ a letter from John Steinbeck totally worth reading
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”c.s. lewis
Your handwriting. The way you walk. Which china pattern you choose. It’s all giving you away. Everything you do shows your hand. Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a diary.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
*source*I didn't write this, but it was exactly what I needed to read today. And I couldn't agree more. Thank goodness there are other believers out there.**Because the Ally Sheedy character in The Breakfast Club is wrong, and you don’t have to let your heart die as you get older. I love my idealism, my naiveté, my stubborn insistence that I’m going to end up happy, and I refuse to let anyone tell me that I need to or have to settle or to tell me that compromise and negotiation needs to make me quietly sad all the time.Because I want what my grandparents have, a life that fits perfectly into faded photo albums and gives comfort and quilts to those around me, who aspire to know a love as inspiring and effortlessly photogenic as mine. I want love to be more than just faith, more than an empty longing and more than wishes that are never fulfilled, and like Stuart Smalley, I believe we can find the love we deserve if we believe we deserve it, if we know that we are worthy of being loved.Because Julia Roberts movies lied to us, because Bridget Jones lied to us, because Cosmo lied to us and there isn’t just somebody out there waiting for us, and we need to have the gumption to go get ourselves loved. Love isn’t just something that we should allow to exist in storybooks and novels; we should not accept that good sex should be what other people are having or people in magazines are having.Because the moment we let ourselves refuse that, we deny ourselves joy and hope; we allow ourselves to stop striving; we let ourselves think we deserve pain and heartache. Demanding a love that fulfills us helps us to demand a life that excites us, one that we would want to tell our grandchildren about, and helps us to push ourselves and take the chances to get what we want, rather than becoming complacent, like the emotional equivalent of the amorphous space people in Wall-E.Because believing that I can fully love another human being helps me remember that I can give my broken, egoistic, flawed self to something greater than me. I don’t need to believe in God to trust in a higher power, a force that compels us to strive, to ache, to want more than we have and accept nothing less than what fulfills us.Because I believe that romance and the act of loving does not have to be perfect and should not be perfect and look forward to the struggle of loving someone, the ways in which the difficult act of love forces me to be more selfless, more giving, more honest and more tough. I believe that love makes you a better person, that it need not make you co-dependent, symbiotic or weak but that it can make you stronger, because being a lover sometimes means being a fighter, too.Because I know for a fact that I don’t need to be in love to find myself, but I still want to continue to explore new parts of myself through that diving off into the romantic abyss, the fear that giving yourself to this transcendent unknown entails. I want to learn to give more fully and openly, and one day, I hope to give my mother — whose body only had the strength to give birth to me — the other child she always wanted, but one she won’t ever have to raise and can complain about me to on the phone when she thinks I’m not home.Because having had a terrible relationship with my dad my whole life, I know how important it is to be surrounded by people who love you, who affirm you, who help ground you in a sense of community and give you a purpose. I’m tired of being a child of divorce and know that my life doesn’t have to be broken homes, broken families and broken relationships, that I have the ability to go out and create community, to give affirmation and love to others.Because I believe that marriage shouldn’t belong to anyone in particular and that love deserves recognition and protection, even if the state of North Carolina disagrees with me. I know that someday having the right to marry whoever I want doesn’t mean I have to get married and have 2.5 children; I have the option to choose the life I want, with whomever I want.Because someday I’ll be ready for that choice and in the meantime, being a romantic makes me open to the life around me, to being in love with not just one person but a fractured, volatile world that needs my love, my care and my attention. I want to wake up every day and be ready to stand silent with awe at what the world has in store, whether those are small miracles, the biggest thing I could ever imagine or the romances beyond imagination.Because every time I doubt the future, every time I doubt myself, every time I doubt my ability to love and be loved I need to be proven wrong, to renew my faith in myself and in other people. I need to believe that life has a million romances in store for me, the ones that give me children and stress headaches and something to do with my 401K, the ones that keep me out drinking way past my bed time on a Saturday night, the ones I can find hidden between lines of Faulkner.Because I sincerely think that without fearlessly loving, even if it seems silly, pointless or hopeless, life isn’t worth living. I want to die saying that, even if love doesn’t exist, even if I end up unfulfilled by my career and personal relationships and even if I die alone in a ditch somewhere or half-eaten by wild dogs, I believed in the ecstasy of life. I dared to believe.--Nico Lang