Fishbowl Quotes


 

Aug 15, 2003

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares."  Henri Nouwen

Aug 16

"There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness."  Carl Jung

Aug 17:

"If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen."  Henry David Thoreau

 Aug 18:

"If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself....If you are accompanied by even one companion you belong only half to yourself, or even less, in proportion to the thoughtlessness of his conduct; and if you have more than one companion you will fall more deeply into the same plight."  Leonardo da Vinci

 Aug 19:

"Being able to say that one is a survivor is an accomplishment. For many, the power is in the name itself. And yet comes a time in the individuation process when the threat or trauma is significantly past. Then is the time to go to the next stage after survivorship, to healing and thriving. ... One can take so much pride in being a survivor that it becomes a hazard to further creative development. ... Once the threat is past, there is a potential trap in calling ourselves by names taken on during the most terrible time of our lives. It creates a mind-set that is potentially limiting. It is not good to base the soul identity solely on the feats and losses and victories of the bad times."  Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves

Aug 20:

"Psychically, it is good to make a halfway place, a way station, a considered place in which to rest and mend after one escapes a famine. It is not too much to take one year, two years, to assess one's wounds, seek guidance, apply the medicines, consider the future. A year or two is scant time. The feral woman is a woman making her way back. She is learning to wake up, pay attention, stop being naïve, uninformed. She takes her life in her own hands. To re-learn the deep feminine instincts, it is vital to see how they were decommissioned to begin with."  Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves

 

Aug 21:

"Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything, That's how the light gets in."  Leonard Cohen

 

Aug 22:

"The shadow is both the awful thing that needs redemption, and the suffering redeemer who can provide it."  Liz Green

 

Aug 23

"In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly hear it. The horse seemed to like it too; he gave the sort of whinny a horse would give if, after years of being a cab-horse, it found itself back in the old field where it had played as a foal, and saw someone whom it remembered and loved coming across the field to bring it a lump of sugar."  C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew

 

Aug 24:

"If we do not rise to the challenge of our unique capacity to shape our lives, to seek the kinds of growth that we find individually fulfilling, then we can have no security: we will live in a world of sham, in which our selves are determined by the will of others, in which we will be constantly buffeted and increasingly isolated by the changes round us."  Nena O'Neil

 

Aug 25:

"Birth and Death are the two noblest expressions of bravery."  Kahlil Gibran

 

Aug 26:

"Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction." Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

 

Aug 27:

"Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.  For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.  And stand together yet not too near together:  For the pillars of the temple stand apart, and the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow." Kahlil Gibran

 

Aug 28:

"When the apple is ripe it will fall. When the apple is ripe it will fall." Irish proverb

 

Aug 29:

"Mistakes are the portals of discovery."  James Joyce

 

Aug 30:

"The creative act, insofar as it depends on unconscious resources, presupposes a relaxing of controls and a regression to modes of ideation which are indifferent to the rules of verbal logic, unperturbed by contradiction, untouched by the dogmas and taboos of so called common sense. At the decisive stage of discovery the codes of disciplined reasoning are suspended - as they are in a dream, the reverie, the manic flight of thought, when the steam of ideation is free to drift, by its own emotional gravity, as it were, in an apparent 'lawless' fashion."  Arthur Koestler

 

Aug 31:

Hold on to what is good, Even if it's a handful of earth. Hold on to what you believe, Even if it's a tree that stands by itself.  Hold on to what you must do, Even if it's a long way from here.  Hold on to your life, Even if it's easier to let go.  Hold on to my hand, Even if I've gone away from you.    "Hold On" A Pueblo Indian Prayer

 

Sept 1;

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness concerning all acts of initiative and creation. There is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans; that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too, all sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen events, meetings and material assistance which no one could have dreamed would have come their way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now!”  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 

Sept 2:

"Tend to your vital heart, and all you worry about will be solved."  Rumi

 

Sept 3:

"There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos"  Jim Hightower

 

Sept 4:

"If we didn't live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I've no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged."  Virginia Woolf

 

Sept 5:

"Whether you and I and a few others will renew the world some day remains to be seen. But within ourselves we must renew it each day."  Herman Hesse

 

Sept 6:

"Another aspect of the vision quest is the encounter of demons.  Our demons are our own limitations, which shut us off from the realization of the ubiquity of the spirit.  And as each of these demons is conquered in a vision quest, the consciousness of the quester is enlarged, and more of the world is encompassed.  Basically the vision quest involves getting past your own limitations, which are within even as they appear to be without.  They are symbolized in myth as monsters and demons, and in each age the characteristics change; because as a people changes, so do its limitations.  "  Joseph Campbell

 

Sept 7:

Holy Spirit giving life to all life, moving all creatures, root of all things, washing them clean, wiping out their mistakes, healing their wounds, you are our true life, luminous, wonderful, awakening the heart from its ancient sleep."  Hildegard von Bingen

 

Sept 8

"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself."  Oscar Wilde

 

Sept 9

"We conceal it from ourselves in vain--we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it."  Blaise Pascal

 

Sept 10

“Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.”  The Dalai Lama

 

Sept 11

“I cling to my imperfection, as the very essence of my being”  Anatole France, The Garden of Epicurus, 1894

 

Sept 12

"It is amazing that our souls--our eternal essences, with all their hopes and dreams and visions of an eternal world--are contained within these temporal bodies. No wonder suffering is part of the human condition."  Marion Woodman

 

Sept 13

"In everyone's life at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the human spirit."  Albert Schweitzer

 

Sept 14

"The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. "  Carl Jung

 

Sept 15

“Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.” Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Sept 16

"Anybody can they say they are being "spiritual" -- and they are, because everybody has some type and level of concern.  Let us therefore see their actual conception, in thought and action, and see how many perspectives it is in fact concerned with, and how many perspectives it actually takes into account, and how many perspectives it attempts to integrate, and thus let us see how deep and how wide runs that bodhisattva vow to refuse rest until all perspectives whatsoever are liberated into their own primordial nature. "  Ken Wilber

 

Sept 17

If one advances confidently in the direction of one's dreams, and endeavours to live the life which one has imagined, one will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."  Henry David Thoreau

 

Sept 18

"What must I give more death to today, in order to generate more life? What do I know should die, but am hesitant to allow to do so? What must die in me in order for me to love? What not-beauty do I fear? Of what use is the power of the not-beautiful to me today? What should die today? What should live? What life am I afraid to give birth to? If not now, when?"  Clarissa Pinkola Estes

 

Sept 19

"Rain! whose soft architectural hands have power to cut stones, and chisel to shapes of grandeur the very mountains."  Henry Ward Beecher

 

Sept 20

"It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way."  Rollo May

 

Sept 21

"Courage is not the towering oak That sees storms come and go, It is the fragile blossom That opens in the snow"  Alice MacKenzie Swaim

 

Sept 23

Too lazy to be ambitious, I let the world take care of itself. Ten days' worth of rice in my bag; a bundle of twigs by the fireplace. Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment? Listening to the night rain on my roof, I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out."  Ryokan

 

Sept 24

"Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter."  William Ralph Inge

 

Sept 25

"When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies."  James M. Barrie

 

Sept 26

"You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world. You impoverish yourself if you forget this errand. "  Woodrow Wilson

 

Sept 27

"The choice to follow love through to its completion is the choice to seek completion within ourselves. The point at which we shut down on others is the point at which we shut down on life. We heal as we heal others, and we heal others by extending our perceptions past their weaknesses. Until we have seen someone’s darkness, we don’t really know who that person is. Until we have forgiven someone’s darkness, we don’t really know what love is. Forgiving others is the only way to forgive ourselves, and forgiveness is our greatest need. "  --Illuminata, Marianne Willamson

 

Sept 28

"The heart is forever inexperienced."  Henry David Thoreau

 

Sept 29

"Time has been transformed, and we have changed; it has advanced and set us in motion; it has unveiled its face, inspiring us with bewilderment and exhilaration. "  Kahlil Gibran

 

Sept 30

"The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way."  Goethe

 

Oct 1

"October is the fallen leaf, but it is also a wider horizon more clearly seen. It is the distant hills once more in sight, and the enduring constellations above them once again."  Hal Borland

 

Oct 2

"The right way to wholeness is made up of fateful detours and wrong turnings."  C. G. Jung

 

Oct 3

"... the search for lost things is hindered by routine habits and that is why it is so difficult to find them."  Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude 

 

Oct 4

"The real questions are the ones that obtrude upon your consciousness whether you like it or not, the ones that make your mind start vibrating like a jackhammer, the ones that you 'come to terms with' only to discover that they are still there. The real questions refuse to be placated. They barge into your life at the times when it seems most important for them to stay away. They are the questions asked most frequently and answered most inadequately, the ones that reveal their true natures slowly, reluctantly, most often against your will."  Ingrid Bengis

 

Oct 5

"Don't be dismayed at goodbyes. A farewell is necessary before we can meet again. And meeting again after a moment or lifetime is certain for those who are friends. "  Richard Bach

 

Oct 6

"I have a million yards of children out in the world. I am a professional birth-giver. I give birth every day: to sorrow, joy, work, fabrics, bread, sometimes even thoughts. "  Armi Ratia

 

Oct 7

"Anyone can become angry. That is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way... that is not easy."  Aristotle

 

Oct 8

"To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist."  Robert Schumann

 

Oct 9

"Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning. "  Igor Stravinsky

 

Oct 10

"The nurture for telling stories comes from the might and endowments of my people who have gone before me. In my experience, the telling moment of the story draws its power from a towering column of humanity joined one to the other across time and space, elaborately dressed in the rags and robes or nakedness of their time, and filled to the bursting with life still being lived. If there is a single source of story and the numen of story, this long chain of humans is it."  Clarissa Pinkola Estes

 

Oct 12

"No sooner met but they looked;  No sooner looked but they loved;  No sooner loved but they sighed;  No sooner sighed but they asked one another the reason;  No sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy. "  William Shakespeare

 

Oct 13

"It's important that people know what you stand for. It's equally important that they know what you won't stand for."  Mary H. Waldrip

 

Oct 14

"It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power."  Alan Cohen

 

Oct 15

"If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance towards oneself can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures."  Carl Jung

 

Oct 16

"Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet."  Plato

 

Oct 17

"Sometimes when I get up in the morning, I feel very peculiar. I feel like I've just got to bite a cat! I feel like if I don't bite a cat before sundown, I'll go crazy! But then I just take a deep breath and forget about it. That's what is known as real maturity."  Snoopy

 

Oct 18

"Pity is the experience of meeting pain with fear.  It makes one want to change the givens of the moment...But when we touch the same pain with love, letting it be as it is, meeting it with mercy instead of fear and hatred, then that is compassion."  Stephen Levine

 

Oct 19

"How am I fallen from myself, for a long time now I have not seen the Prince of Chang in my dreams."  Khoung-Fou-Tseu

 

Oct 20

"In dreams begins responsibility."  William Butler Yeats

 

Oct 21

"But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice -- guessed and refused to believe -- that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the rainbow, and they its children. . . ."  from Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

 

Oct 22

"Crooked spin can't come to rest, I'm damaged bad at best, she'll decide what she wants; probably be the last to know, no one says until it shows, see how it ends- they want you or they don't, say yes..." Elliott Smith -- Rest peacefully, tender anti-hero.

Oct 23

"What would it be like if you lived each day, each breath, as a work of art in progress? Imagine that you are a Masterpiece unfolding, every second of every day, a work of art taking form with every breath."" Thomas Crum

 

Oct 25

"Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything." Plato

Oct 26

“Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absentminded. Someone sober will worry about things going badly. Let the lover be.”  Rumi

 

Oct 27

"Who has not at one time or another felt a sourness, wrath, selfishness, envy and pride, which he could not tell what to do with, or how to bear, rising up in him without his consent, casting a blackness over all his thoughts, and then as suddenly going off again, either by the cheerfulness of the sun or air, or some agreeable accident, and again at times as suddenly returning upon him?  Sufficient indications are these to every man that there is a dark guest within him, concealed under the cover of flesh and blood, often lulled asleep by worldly light and amusements, yet such as will, in spite of everything, show itself... It is exceeding good and beneficial to us to discover this dark, disordered fire of our soul; because when rightly known and rightly dealt with, it can as well be made the foundation of heaven as it is of hell."  William Law

 

Oct 28

"Normal day, let me be aware of the treasure you are. Let me learn from you, love you, bless you before you depart. Let me not pass you by in quest of some rare and perfect tomorrow. Let me hold you while I may, for it may not always be so."  Mary Jean Iorn

 

Oct 29

"I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live--if what others are doing is called living--but to express myself. I realized that I had never the least interest in living, but only in this which I am doing now, something which is parallel to life, of it at the same time, and beyond it."  Henry Miller

 

Oct 30

"You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick... You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in."  Dylan Thomas

 

Oct 31

"Once more we need to see what writing is. We need to step away from all the business. We need to step to the personal. This is what I mean by flight. Business has become too heavy, too dominant. We need to remember friends, that we write deeply out of friendship, that we write to friends. We need to regain some of the energy, as writers and as readers, that people have on the Internet when for the first time they e-mail, when they discover that they can write anything, even to a stranger, even the most personal on matters. What they discover that strangers can communicate to each other." kathy acker

 

Nov 1

"It is one thing to sing the beloved. Another, alas,/  to invoke that hidden, guilty river-god of the blood./  Her young lover, whom she knows from far away- what does he know/  the lord of desire who often, up from the depths of his solitude,/  even before she could soothe him, and as though she didn't exist,/  held up his head, ah, dripping with the unknown,/  erect, and summoned the night to an endless uproar./  Oh the Neptune inside our blood, with his appalling trident./  Oh the dark wind from his breast out of that spiraled conch./  Listen to the night as it makes itself hollow."  R.M. Rilke

 

Nov 2

"Confidence is a plant of slow growth in an aged bosom."  William Pitt, Earl of Chatham

 

Nov 3

"The spiritual virtue of a sacrament is like light,--although it passes among the impure, it is not polluted."  Saint Augustine

 

Nov 4

“There are so many little dyings that it doesn't matter which of them is death.”  Kenneth Patchen

 

Nov 5

"All these stammerings, exclamations, slurrings, murmurs, rumblings, cooings, and laughter, all this noise we make when we are together makes it possible to view us as struggling, together, to jam the unequivocal voice of the outsider:  the facilitator of communication, the prosopopeia of maximal elimination of noise, so as to hear the distant rumble of the world & it's demons in the midst of the ideal city of human communication."  Alphonso Lingis

 

Nov 6

"To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to seat over lonely labor, to be given the chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy. As everyone else, I love to dunk my crust in it. But alone, it is not a diet designed to keep body and soul together." Bette Davis

 

Nov 7

"Thirst drove me down to the water where I drank the moon’s reflection." Rumi

 

Nov 8

"Most people guard against going into the fire, and so end up in it." Rumi

 

Nov 9

"Dance, when you’re broken open.  Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.  Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood.  Dance, when you’re perfectly free. " Rumi

 

Nov 10

"Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love. " Rumi

 

Nov 11

"Let us not be particular & sectional. The poet's mind & the scorpion's tail rise in glory from the same earth." Gibran

 

Nov 12

"Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.  I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?  I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.  The wild animals will honor me, the jackals and the ostriches;  for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people, the people whom I formed for myself so that they might declare my praise. " Isaiah 43:18

 

Nov 13

"We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art." Henry James

 

Nov 14

"Vision looks inward and becomes duty. Vision looks outward and becomes aspiration. Vision looks upward and becomes faith." Rabbi Stephen S. Wise

 

Nov 16

"Now, on the road to freedom, I was pausing for a moment near Temuco and could hear the voice of the water that had taught me to sing. "  Pablo Neruda

 

Nov 17

"Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another."  Fyodor Dostoevski

 

Nov 18

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar; Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home."  William Wordsworth

 

Nov 19

"...[W]hat Jung called 'the moral obligation' to live out and to express what one has learned in the descent or ascent to the wild Self. This moral obligation he speaks of means to live what we perceive, be it found in the psychic Elysian fields, the isles of the dead, the bone deserts of the psyche, the face of the mountain, the rock of the sea, the lush underworld - anyplace where La Que Sabe breathes upon us, changing us. Our work is to show we have been breathed upon - to show it, give it out, sing it out, to live out in the topside world what we have received through our sudden knowings, from body, from dreams and journeys of all sorts."  Clarissa Pinkola Estes

 

Nov 21

"History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats."  B. C. Forbes

 

Nov 24

"If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the 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 intoxicating, as possibility!"  Soren Kierkegaard

 

Nov 25

"Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf."  William James

 

Nov 26

"Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there... Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words."  Italo Calvino

 

Nov 27

"Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the human heart can hold."  Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald

 

Nov 28

"[Praying to God]  I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone. - - At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before."  Martin Luther King

 

Nov 29-30

"You kiss a beautiful mouth, and a key turns the lock of your fear. "  Rumi

 

Dec 1

"In the recent experiment, scientists took a photon, a particle of light, split it into two photons, and then sent the identical twins travelling in opposite directions, north and south of Geneva, through fibre-optical telephone lines. When the two particles were about seven miles apart, each was confronted with a fork in the road and had to decide which of two paths to follow, a short one or a long one.  Inevitably, the scientists found, the two particles would make the same decision. If the first particle chose path A, then its twin would do the same thing. This apparent connection between the particles was what Einstein derided as ''spooky action at a distance.'' How does one photon ''know'' what the other is doing?"  George Johnson, The Unspeakable Things That Particles Do

 

Dec 3
"Footfalls echo in the memory - Down the passage which we did not take - Towards the door we never opened - Into the rose-garden. "  T.S. Eliot

 

Dec 4

"The shadow is both the awful thing that needs redemption, and the suffering redeemer who can provide it."  Liz Green

 

Dec 5

"The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet, challenging us to be true to ourselves.... Some little, unassuming, unobtrusive choice presents itself before us slyly and craftily, glib and insinuating, in the modest garb of innocence. to yield to its blandishments is so easy."  Benjamin Cardozo

 

Dec 7

"Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt. Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench. Care about people's approval and you will be their prisoner. Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity."  Tao Te Ching

 

Dec 8

"There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself."  Herman Hesse

 

Dec 9

"They're black, they're brown, they're up, they're down * They're in, they're out, they're all about! * They're far, they're near, they're gone, they're here! * They're quick and slick, they're insincere! * Beware! Beware! Be a very wary bear * A heffalump or woozle is very confusil * A heffalump or woozle's very sly! * They come in ones and twosles but if they so choosles * Before your eyes you'll see them multiply * They're extraordinary so better be wary * Because they come in ev'ry shape and size * If honey's what you covet, you'll find that they love it * Because they'll guzzle up the thing you prize * Beware! Beware! Be a very wary bear"  The Heffalump Trap, from Adventures with Pooh

 

Dec 10

"Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations. "  Alan W. Watts

 

Dec 11

"Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have  drawn for it.  Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin. "  Herman Hesse

 

Dec 13

". . . even the enlightened person . . . is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky."  Carl Jung, Answer to Job

 

Dec 14

"As the moon retaineth her nature, though darkness spread itself before her face as a curtain, so the Soul remaineth perfect even in the bosom of the fool."  Akhenaton (d. c.1354 bc), Egyptian king

 

Dec 15

"Since Time is not a person we can overtake when he is gone, let us honor him with mirth and cheerfulness of heart while he is passing."  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 

Dec 16

"Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours."  Richard Bach

 

Dec 17

"You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self.  Don't turn away from possible futures before you're certain you don't have anything to learn from them.  You're always free to change your mind and choose a different future, or a different past."  Richard Bach

 

Dec 18

"You are never given a wish without being given the power to make it true.  You may have to work for it, however."  Richard Bach

 

Dec 19

"The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof."  Richard Bach

 

Dec 20

"One day seven years ago I found myself saying to myself -- I can't live where I want to -- I can't go where I want to go -- I can't do what I want to -- I can't even say what I want to ... I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to. "  Georgia O'Keeffe, 1923

 

Dec 23

"Consider the darkness and the great cold In this vale which resounds with mystery. "  Brecht, The Threepenny Opera

 

Dec 24th – Jan 24th (The Gospel According to Shug)

 

Jan 26

"If you're really listening, if you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly.  In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold ever-more wonders."  Andrew Harvey

 

Jan 27

"We're the bridge across forever, arching above the sea, adventuring for our pleasure, living mysteries for the fun of it, choosing disasters triumphs challenges impossible odds, testing ourselves over and again, learning love and love and LOVE!"  Richard Bach

 

Jan 28

"Most importantly, watch out for the dark side of your own idealism and of your moral sense. Both come from our arsenal of natural instincts. And both easily degenerate into an excuse for attacks on others. When our righteous indignation breathes the flames of anger against a 'villain,' we all too often become a fang in nature's scheme of tooth and claw. No martians or heavenly saviors will arrive to save us from our inborn evil. We must battle the nature outside of us and within us in order to save our selves."  Howard Bloom

 

Jan 30

"...all acts are expressions of love, either as skillful statements or calls for love in disguised forms. Love is the power that moves the universe, and is the aching need of our world. If only we stood for love as we have for fear!" Alan Cohen

 

Jan 31

"Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing." Camille Pissarro

 

Feb 2

"I would do what I pleased, and doing what I pleased, I should have my will, and having my will, I should be contented; and when one is contented, there is no more to be desired; and when there is no more to be desired, there is an end of it. " Don Quixote, Cervantes

 

Feb 4

"How can one's heart and brain stand all the things that are crowded into them?". Robert Schumann

 

Feb 11

"When one does not love too much, one does not love enough." Blaise Pascal

 

Feb 12

"All that we see or seem, Is but a dream within a dream." Edgar Allan Poe

 

Feb 13

"And one by one the nights between our separated cities are joined to the night that unites us."    Pablo Neruda

 

Feb 14

"To love is to tilt with the lightning, two bodies routed by a single honey's  sweet."    Pablo Neruda

 

Feb 15

"When I think of you, fireflies in the marsh rise like the soul's jewels, lost to eternal longing, abandoning my body."  Izumi Shikibu

 

Feb 16

"We have only to believe. And the more threatening and irreducible reality appears, the more firmly and desperately we must believe. Then, little by little, we shall see the universal horror unbend, and then smile upon us, and then take us in its more than human arms. "  Teilhard de Chardin

 

Feb 18

"the bed is too small for my tired head - bring me a hill soft with trees - tuck a cloud up under my chin - lord, blow the moon out please"  Hem, Rabbit Songs

 

Feb 19

“What you risk reveals what you value.”  Jeanette Winterson

 

Feb 21

"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."  Albert Camus

 

Feb 22

"If you have a talent, use it in every which way possible. Don't hoard it. Don't dole it out like a miser. Spend it lavishly like a millionaire intent on going broke."  Brendan Francis

 

Feb 23

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."  Mark Twain

 

Feb 24

"Live out of your imagination, not your history."  Stephen Covey

 

Feb 26

"When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge."  Tuli Kupferberg

 

Feb 27

"Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy."  Kahlil Gibran

 

Feb 28

"The search for meaning is not limited to science: it is constant and continuous--all of us engage in it during all our waking hours the search continues even in our dreams. There are many ways of finding meaning, and there are no absolute boundaries separating them. One can find meaning in poetry as well as in science in the contemplations of a flower as well as in the grasp of an equation. We can be filled with wonder as we stand under the majestic dome of the night sky and see the myriad lights that twinkle and shine in its seemingly infinite depths. We can also be filled wit awe as we behold the meaning of the formulae that define the propagation of light in space, the formation of galaxies, the synthesis of chemical elements, and the relation of energy, mass and velocity in the physical universe. The mystical perception of oneness and the religious intuition of a Divine intelligence are as much a construction of meaning as the postulation of the universal law of gravitation."  Ervin Laszlo

 

Feb 29

"Experience is an intact fruit, core and flesh and rind of it; once cut open, entered, it can't be the same, can it? Though that is the dream of the poem: as if we could look out through that moment's blushed skin."  Mark Doty

 

March 2

"The beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression more readily taken." Plato (The Republic)

 

Mar 3

"In the first grade, I already knew the pattern of my life. I didn't know the living of it, but I knew the line… From the first day in school until the day I graduated, everyone gave me one hundred plus in art. Well, where do you go in life? You go to the place where you got one hundred plus." Louise Nevelson

 

Mar 4

"Both abundance and lack exist simultaneously in our lives, as parallel realities. It is always our conscious choice which secret garden we will tend...when we choose not to focus on what is missing from our lives but are grateful for the abundance that's present--love, health, family, friends, work, the joys of nature and personal pursuits that bring us pleasure--the wasteland of illusion falls away and we experience Heaven on earth." Sarah Ban Breathnach

 

Mar 5

"When we must deal with problems, we instinctively refuse to try the way that leads through darkness and obscurity. We wish to hear only of unequivocal results, and completely forget that these results can only be brought about when we have ventured into and emerged again from the darkness. But to penetrate the darkness we must summon all the powers of enlightenment that consciousness can offer. " Carl Jung

 

Mar 6

"It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between."  Diane Ackerman

 

Mar 8

"I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it.  I want to have lived the width of it as well." Diane Ackerman

 

Mar 9

"Like Beauty embracing the Beast, our beauty is deepened as our beastliness is honored. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke realized this when he said he feared that if his devils left him, his angels would take flight as well."  excerpt from Meeting the Shadow by Connie Zwieg

 

Mar 10

"If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading." Lao-Tzu

 

Mar 11

"The most common form of despair is not being who you are."  Soren Kierkegaard

 

Mar 12

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."  Jesus

 

Mar 13