4/10/2013

Waiting for the hour when a new clarity is born

"Always trust yourself and your own feeling, as opposed to argumentations, discussion, or introductions of that sort; if it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights. Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating." - Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter 3, Letters to A Poet.
 Rainer Maria Rilke (b December 4, 1875 – d. December 29, 1926)

Also, this excerpt on embracing difficulty, from Letter No. 8:
If we only arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.

4/06/2013

Longing and Fate

Before me my longing,
And behind me fate.
 - Umar ibn al-Farid (1181-1245), as quoted between chapters in Adina Hoffman's book, 'My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century.'

Unknown forces in nature

There are unknown forces in nature; when we give ourselves wholly to her, without reserve, she lends them to us; she shows us these forms, which our watching eyes do not see, which our intelligence does not understand or suspect. 
- Auguste Rodin

Shut your eyes

I shut my eyes in order to see.
 - Paul Gauguin

Our impurity is part of our glory

Our impurity is part of our glory. Unlike homogeneous societies, we have no cultural elite. This is a good thing, especially for the artist.
- Robert Pinsky

Music

"Truly there would be reason to go mad were it not for music."
- Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Eyes skywards

"One you have tasted flight, you will walk the earth with your eyes tuned skywards."
- Leonardo Davinci

Chaos and Order

"Chaos is the law of nature. Order is the dream of man" 
- Henry Brooks Adams
the abyss
gapes at us.

When shall we
dare to fly
    - Denise Levertov (Poem: Standoff, Book: Breathing The Water)

What love does to us

what love does to us is a Gordian knot, it's that
complicated.
 - Mary Oliver (The Porcupine)

Life is infinitely inventive

Life is infinitely inventive,
saying, what other amazements
lie in the dark seed of the earth...
    - Mary Oliver, in her poem, The Kitten.

The Universe and I

``I don't pretend to understand the universe -- it's a great deal bigger than I am. People ought to be modester.'' - Thomas Carlyle

7/15/2012

Unhappiness

"The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity." - Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

4/10/2011

The soul marching on

His body mouldering in the grave, his soul marching on.
- from a poem about John Brown, lines added over the years but one version is by William W. Patton

John Brown was an American abolitionist who believed that an armed insurrection was the only way to overthrow slavery in the United States. "On October 16, 1859, he led 21 men on a raid of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. His plan to arm slaves with the weapons he and his men seized from the arsenal was thwarted, however, by local farmers, militiamen, and Marines led by Robert E. Lee. Within 36 hours of the attack, most of Brown's men had been killed or captured." 

He was tried for treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, the murder of five men and inciting a slave insurrection, found guilty on all counts, and was hanged.

If you are interesting in finding out more, try to find this PBS documentary about his war against slavery.

3/28/2011

Everything is ecstasy, inside

"It’s all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born." Jack Kerouac

3/12/2011

Solitude

"Your solitude will be a support and a home for you." - Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet

"What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours — that is what you must be able to attain." - Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter 6, Letters To A Young Poet

Love

"Take love as an illustration. The one who truly loves does not love once and for all. Nor does he use a part of his love, and then again another part. For to change it into small coins is not to use it rightly. No, he loves with all of his love. It is wholly present in each expression. He continues to give it away as a whole, and yet he keeps it intact as a whole, in his heart. Wonderful riches! When the miser has gathered all the world's gold in sordidness—then he has become poor. When the lover gives away his whole love, he keeps it entire—in the purity of the heart." - Sören Kierkegaard (Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing)

12/11/2010

Wisdom

‘We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us.’ – Marcel Proust

7/17/2010

Work

We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do; and yet how much is not done by us!- Henry David Thoreau, Economy, Walden.

6/20/2010

Fate

"There ought to be no such thing as Fate. As long as we use this word, it is a sign of our impotence and that we are not yet ourselves." - Ralph Waldo Emerson (Journal Entry, April 1842)

4/26/2010

Imagination

The great successful men of the world have used their imagination . . . they think ahead and create their mental picture in all its details, filling in here, adding a little there, altering this a bit and that a bit, but steadily building – steadily building. – Robert Collier

1/07/2010

To let it go

Have so many favorites when it comes to Mary Oliver.. but because of the lines excerpted below, In Blackwater Woods has to be one of my favorite poems of Mary Oliver!

 

 

9/30/2009

Art and Existence

An entertainment is something which distracts us or diverts us from the routine of daily life. It makes us for the time being forget our cares and worries; it interrupts our conscious thoughts and habits, rests our nerves and minds, though it may incidentally exhaust our bodies. Art, on the other hand, though it may divert us from the normal routine of our existence, causes us in some way or other to become conscious of that existence. - Sir Herbert Read, British critic and poet in To Hell with Culture, ch. 13 (1963).







The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal. - George Santayana (1863-1952), U.S. philosopher and poet in Reason in Art, ch. 8, The Life of Reason (1905-1906, rev. edition 1953)

9/21/2009

Possibilities

If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoicating as possibility?
        - Soren Kierkegaard, the famous Danish philosopher wrote in his book Either/Or:

9/04/2009

Open your eyes

The great teachings unanimously emphasize that all the peace, wisdom, and joy in the universe are already within us; we don't have to gain, develop, or attain them. We're like a child standing in a beautiful park with his eyes shut tight. We don't need to imagine trees, flowers, deer, birds, and sky; we merely need to open our eyes and realize what is already here, who we really are --Anon