You are me and I am you.
Isn’t it obvious that we inter-are?
You cultivate the flower in yourself
so that I will be beautiful.
I transform the garbage in myself
so that you do not have to suffer.
I support you you support me.
I am here to bring you peace

you are here to bring me joy.


~ Thich Nhat Hanh
(again, thanks to Love Is A Place)

.

in every breath
if you're the center
of your own desires
you'll lose the grace
of your beloved

but if in every breath
you blow away
your self claim
the ecstasy of love
will soon arrive

in every breath
if you're the center
of your own thoughts
the sadness of autumn
will fall on you

but if in every breath
you strip naked
just like a winter
the joy of spring
will grow from within

all your impatience
comes from the push
for gain of patience
let go of the effort
and peace will arrive

all your unfulfilled desires
are from your greed
for gain of fulfillments
let go of them all
and they will be sent as gifts

fall in love with
the agony of love
not the ecstasy
then the beloved
will fall in love with you

~ Rumi

(with thanks to Love Is A Place)
art by frederico bebber

I have walked through many lives,

some of them my own,

and I am not who I was,

though some principle of being

abides, from which I struggle

not to stray.

When I look behind,

as I am compelled to look

before I can gather strength

to proceed on my journey,

I see the milestones dwindling

toward the horizon

and the slow fires trailing

from the abandoned camp-sites,

over which scavenger angels

wheel on heavy wings.

Oh, I have made myself a tribe

out of my true affections,

and my tribe is scattered!

How shall the heart be reconciled

to its feast of losses?

In a rising wind

the manic dust of my friends,

those who fell along the way,

bitterly stings my face.

Yet I turn, I turn,

exulting somewhat,

with my will intact to go

wherever I need to go,

and every stone on the road

precious to me.

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

"Live in the layers,

not on the litter."

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written.

I am not done with my changes.

--Stanley Kunitz

artwork by Boris Indrikov

The Laughing Heart

poem by Charles Bukowski

with thanks to love is a place

‎
"Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night." -Rilke
artwork by Liza Corbett

It doesn't interest me if there is one God
or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel
abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know 
if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need
to change you. If you can look back
with firm eyes
saying this is where I stand. I want to know
if you know 
how to melt into that fierce heat of living
falling toward
the center of your longing. I want to know
if you are willing
to live, day by day, with the consequence of love
and the bitter
unwanted passion of your sure defeat.
I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even
the gods speak of God.

-- David Whyte
artwork by laren k. cannon

Slave to a
springtime passion for the earth.
How Love burns through the Putting
in the Seed
On through the watching for that early birth
When, 
just as the soil tarnishes with weed,
The sturdy seedling with arched
body comes
Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs. 
- Robert Frost

It doesn't interest me if there is one God
or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel
abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know 
if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need
to change you. If you can look back
with firm eyes
saying this is where I stand. I want to know
if you know 
how to melt into that fierce heat of living
falling toward
the center of your longing. I want to know
if you are willing
to live, day by day, with the consequence of love
and the bitter
unwanted passion of your sure defeat.
I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even
the gods speak of God.

-- David Whyte

Give all to love;

Obey thy heart;

Friends, kindred, days,
Estate, good fame,

Plans, credit, and the Muse--

Nothing refuse.



'Tis a brave master;

Let it have scope:

Follow it utterly,
Hope beyond hope:

High and more high

It dives into noon,

With wing unspent,

Untold intent;

But it is a god,

Knows its own path,

And the outlets of the sky.



It was never for the mean;

It requireth courage stout,

Souls above doubt,

Valour unbending:

Such 'twill reward;--

They shall return

More than they were,

And ever ascending.



Leave all for love;

Yet, hear me, yet,

One word more thy heart behoved,

One pulse more of firm endeavour--

Keep thee to-day,

To-morrow, for ever,

Free as an Arab

Of thy beloved.



Cling with life to the maid;

But with the surprise,

First vague shadow of surmise,

Flits across her bosom young,

Of a joy apart from thee,

Free be she, fancy-free;

Nor thou detain her vesture's hem,

Nor the palest rose she flung

From her summer diadem.



Though thou loved her as thyself,

As a self of purer clay;

Though her parting dims the day,

Stealing grace from all alive;

Heartily know,

When half-gods go

The gods arrive.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson
(artwork by Remedios Varo)

‎"One day the sun admitted, I am just a shadow.
I wish I could show you The Infinite Incandescence...
That has cast my brilliant image!
I wish I could show you,
When you are lonely or in darkness,
The astonishing Light of your own Being!" - Hafiz

‎"Ones philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes." -Eleanor Roosevelt

Out of your whole life give but a moment!
All of your life that has gone before,
All to come after it,--so you ignore
So you make perfect the present,--condense,
In a rapture of rage, for perfection's endowment,
Thought and feeling and soul and sense--
Merged in a moment which gives me at last
You around me for once, you beneath me, above me--
Me--sure that despite of time future, time past,--
This tick of our life-time's one moment you love me!
How long such suspension may linger? Ah, Sweet--
The moment eternal--just that and no more--
When ecstasy's utmost we clutch at the core
While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut and lips meet!
- Robert Browning
(photo: Close-up by David Terrazas)

As we sail thru life, don't avoid rough waters, sail on because calm waters won't make a skillful sailor. — Mang Kepweng
via Kind Over Matter

‎"People will do anything, no matter how
absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice 
Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, 
learn the literature of the whole world—all because they cannot get on 
with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful 
could ever come out of their own souls. Thus the soul had gradually been
turned into a Navareth from which nothing good can come. Therefore let
us fetch it from the four corners of the earth—the more far-fetched and
bizarre it is the better!" — C.G. Jung

‎"Travelers, it is late.

Life's sun is going to set.

During these brief days that you have strength,

be quick and spare no effort of your wings."
-Rumi

Love is invisible except here, in us.
Sometimes I praise love,
sometimes love praises me.
Love, a little shell somewhere
on the ocean floor,
open its mouth.
You and I and we, those imaginary beings,
enter that shell as a single sip of seawater.
-Rumi

A letter to his ex-wife

I have lots of things to teach you now,
in case we ever meet,
concerning the message that was transmitted to me
under a pine tree in North Carolina
on a cold winter moonlit night.

It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don’t worry.
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 ways
of cloudy 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,
or one universal self.
Self is only an idea, a mortal idea.
That which passes through everything, is one thing.
It’s a dream already ended.
There’s nothing 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 one vast awakenerhood,
empty and awake,
will never crumble away because it was never born.

The world you see is just a movie in your mind.

--Jack Kerouac

"Jellyfish" by Andrea Gibson

Henry Miller - To Paint Is To Love Again

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