A thought, thought several times!

“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.”

— Henry David Thoreau

(Suggested by Marianne Henry)

Our Most Important Task

Who we know, who we love - these reflect who we are. Our most important task is to learn and know the truth - it frees us from illusion. Everyday, every life has infinite un-realized opportunities. Uncertainty is everywhere in a life. We can't control the future. "Live more and more in the Present which is ever beautiful and stretches away beyond the limits of the past and the future." --Meher Baba

There is a clearing

Beyond what is, not away from it but before it, 
there is still something else that happens. 
In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. 
There is a clearing, a lighting…. 
This open center is … not surrounded by what is; 
rather, the lighting center itself encircles all that is…. 
Only this clearing grants and guarantees 
to human beings a passage to those entities 
that we ourselves are not, 
and access to the being that we ourselves are.*
                                   - Martin Heidegger

* From passages selected/translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus.The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Edited by Charles B. Guignon. Cambridge University Press, 1993. Page 296.

Twenty Seconds

“My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.” 

- Joseph Conrad

The Whole Thing

Each of the sentences I write is trying to say the whole thing, i.e., the same thing over and over again; it is as though they were all simply views of one object seen from different angles.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Culture and Value
Translated by Peter Winch

Hermann Hesse - quote

We must become alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome and we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for in our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.

~ Hermann Hesse

You who where given a life

You who where given a life, 
   what did you make of it?
 Forrest Gander 
 Poetry - December 2017

Chaos Within You

"You must have chaos within you,

to give birth to a star."

~ Friedrick Nietzsche

Beyond Limits - Arthur C. Clarke

The only way to discover the limits of the possible 

is to go beyond them into the impossible.

~ Arthur C. Clarke

Martin Luther King Jr. ~ Keep Moving Forward

If you can't fly, then run,

if you can't run, then walk,

if you can't walk, then crawl,

but whatever you do,

you have to keep moving forward.

~ Martin Luther King Jr. 

Eleanor Roossevelt ~ Beautiful Young and Old People

Rain For Us

“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.”


-Hermann Hesse

Dimensions

If all time is eternally present 

All time is unredeemable. 

What might have been is an abstraction 

Remaining a perpetual possibility 

Only in a world of speculation. 

What might have been and what has been 

Point to one end, which is always present.

-TS Eliot 

Three to Five Servings

"Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow."


-William Blake

Usefulness in nothing

Thirty spokes converge on a single hub,
  but it is in the space where there is nothing
    that the usefulness of the cart lies.
Clay is molded to make a pot,
  but it is in the space where there is nothing
    that the usefulness of the clay pot lies.
Cut out doors and windows to make a room,
  but it is in the spaces where there is nothing
    that the usefulness of the room lies.
Therefore,
  Benefit may be derived from something,
    but it is in nothing that we find usefulness.
~Lao Tzu Tao Te Ching

Star Light

Sometimes, the most important lessons are understood by the silence within.

"When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars."

-Walt Whitman in 1865

Concentric Circles

“You will walk differently alone, dear, through a thicker atmosphere, forcing your way through the shadows of chairs, through the dripping smoke of the funnels. You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.”

-F. Scott Fitzgerald from his novel Tender is the Night

Text 'Messages'

"It's acceptance; complete surrender.
I fully believe that God is in control and that I am powerless.
It's a relief in some ways to not be responsible.
Not that I'm good at this.
I struggle every day. Every moment of every day to not give up.
But really throwing a fit and saying I can't do this anymore isn't productive.
I really have no other alternative. I HAVE to go on.
And surrendering to God makes it possible.
I also try to remember not to fight against "it" but fight for what I find the most challenging.
Like peace, sanity, acceptance.
I cannot do this life on my own.
I have to turn it over to God.

Do the action and your heart will follow."

-Laura Manzani in a text message protaining to life's stuggles

Proverb

If there is light in the soul,
there will be beauty in the person.
If there is a beauty in the person,
there will be harmony in the house.
If there is harmony in the house,
there will be order in the nation.
If there is order in the nation,
there will be peace in the world.

Whispers

“There's no vocabulary

For love within a family, love that's lived in 

But not looked at, love within the light of which 

All else is seen, the love within which 

All other love finds speech. 

This love is silent.”

T.S. Eliot