Pema Chödrön

“You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.”

Anthony de Mello

“As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. … That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life… Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.”

John O'Donohue

“Once the soul awakens, the search begins and you can never go back. From then on, you are inflamed with a special longing that will never again let you linger in the lowlands of complacency and partial fulfillment. The eternal makes you urgent. You are loath to let compromise or the threat of danger hold you back from striving toward the summit of fulfillment.”

Navajo Prayer

"Happily may I walk.

May it be beautiful before me.

May it be beautiful behind me.

May it be beautiful below me.

May it be beautiful above me.

May it be beautiful all around me.

In beauty it is finished."

May Sarton

"She became for me an island of light, fun, wisdom where I could run with my discoveries and torments and hopes at any time of day and find welcome."

Emily Dickinson

"Hope, is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul...
And sings the tune without words
And never stops... At all"

plato

"one of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics, is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."

sing

~Lennon~ "Imagine there's no heaven, It's easy if you try, No hell below us, Above us only sky, Imagine all the people, Living for today...

Imagine there's no countries, It isn't hard to do, Nothing to kill or die for, And no religion too, Imagine all the people, Living life in peace...

You may say I'm a dreamer, But I'm not the only one, I hope someday you'll join us, And the world will be as one...

Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can, No need for greed or hunger, A brotherhood of man, Imagine all the people, Sharing all the world...

~Osbourne~ "Gazing through the window at the world outside, Wondering will mother earth survive, Hoping that mankind will stop abusing her sometime...

After all there's only just the two of us, And here we are still fighting for our lives, Watching all of history repeat itself, Time after time...

I'm just a dreamer, I dream my life away, I'm just a dreamer, Who dreams of better days...

I watch the sun go down like everyone of us, I'm hoping that the dawn will bring a sign, A better place for those Who will come after us, This time...

Your higher power may be God or Jesus Christ, It doesn't really matter much to me, Without each others help there ain't no hope for us, I'm living in a dream of fantasy...

If only we could all just find serenity, It would be nice if we could live as one, When will all this anger, hate and bigotry, Be gone?"

22 October 1982

~ed abbey~
     "Once again we citizens of America confront the farce of another make believe election.  Tweedledum, tweedledee and tweedledoo - the bad, the worse, the ridiculous.  Once again we are supposed to try to figure out which is the lesser evil.  In truth there is no choice, all of the major candidates are financed by corporate money, all of them support and promote the industrial expansion and commercial greed which is gradually destroying this country. Politics has become a game for millionaires or the cronies of millionaires; no wonder that our quisling officials work for the interest of the rich and powerful.  As Will Rogers once said, 'We have the best politicians that money can buy.'
     To vote in such a rigged scheme amounts to tacit consent.  If it were not for the presence on the ballot of some propositions deserving our support (placed there by the citizens, of course, not by our cowardly politicians), one would be tempted to ignore the whole sick comedy.  But there is one more rule worth considering:  when in doubt, when there is little choice, always vote against the incumbent.  Keep the rascals rotating.  The one thing worse than a hack politician is a hack politician entrenched in power.  Power corrupts, and the longer in power, the more corrupt they become."

Gandhi

"True morality, consists not in following the beaten track, but in finding the righteous path for ourselves and following it fearlessly."

einstein

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious."

ed abbey

"There is no land more kind than home.  Where you have found your happiness!"

ed abbey

"I've imagined that maybe at the moment of death, the mind experiences the glory of eternity in that very instant.  In that flash between life and death.  And then everything shuts off but doesn't know that it shuts off because the last conscious perception was the realization of eternity.  Then the body decays and its elements meld with other forms of matter."

beloved

tiny feet

wandering in

sand

the salt

of your smell

engulfing

my senses

unconditionally

unconditional love

figure eights

running through

my mind

in times
past
my tears
comforted by
your tiny kisses

now needed
more than
ever, but
unable to
grasp...

long hikes

long walks

long time

your beauty

overwhelms
me

my heart
still

swollen

with love

the gifts I 

gave

were less 

than I 

received

did i think

that i could

keep you alive

forever?

yes.

daughter

companion

friend

you held my 

secrets

chased my

demons

and found

my laugh

first true trust

first true promise

first true love

a part of me...

has gone with you.

innocence, naivety

the lost child in me

her heart stopped

with yours

I laid
her in the
ground

with you

entwined in

each other

an eternal embrace

for our eternal slumber

goodbye my love.

Fry

"Shall we live in mystery and yet conduct ourselves as though everything were known?"

Lindbergh

"it is as if the intensity of grief fused the distance between you and the dead.  or perhaps, in reality, part of one dies.  like orpheus, one tried to follow the dead on the beginning of their journey.  but one cannot, like orpheus, go all the way, and after a long journey one comes back.  if one is lucky, one is reborn."

marcel proust

"We are healed of suffering only by experiencing it to the full."

Charles Dickens

"And can it be that in a world so full and busy, the loss of one weak creature makes a void in any heart, so wide and deep that nothing but the width and depth of vast eternity can fill it up!"

Kafka

"A book should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us."

Camus

"In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer."

on the mount

"Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted."

Proverb

"He that conceals his grief finds no remedy for it."

Hickman

"And in the holy distillations of this moment, how we are comforted by the blessing of warm sun, soft wind, the green earth."

Alfred Tennyson

"I sometimes hold it half a sin

To put in words the grief I feel;

For words, like nature, half reveal

And half conceal the Soul within."

proust

"there is no more ridiculous custom than the one that makes you express sympathy once and for all on a given day to a person whose sorrow will endure as long as his life.  such grief, felt in such a way, is always "present" and it is never too late to talk about it, never repetitious to mention it again."

martha hickman

"we were surprised and disappointed that people we thought were good friends became distant, uneasy, and seemed unable to help us.  others who were casual acquaintances became suddenly close, sustainers of life for us.  grief changes the rules, and sometimes rearranges the combinations."

steinbeck

“It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.” 

Winterson

“You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it” is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?” 

Louis de Pointe du Lac

"But all my passion went with her golden hair."

a hole in the world

“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night."
~St Vincent Millay~