“There’s nothing wrong with being happy. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying something so much that it strips away all that irony and cynicism. And there’s nothing wrong with loving anything so much that it feels like it could pull your heart out of your chest and toss it on the floor. We build ourselves up to not do that, and then we build up the armor so thickly that we have trouble finding what’s underneath. We use that as an excuse to lash out at people who do feel stuff, who do like things (and I am, of course, mostly saying this about myself). It’s hard sometimes to remember that the world isn’t a place to glide through, so nothing can touch you. It’s a place to be experienced.”
—Todd VanDerWerff (via lucy-vanpelt)
December 2011
“
That winter when this thought came—how the river
held still every midnight and flowed
backward a minute—we studied algebra
late in our room fixed up in the barn,
and I would feel the curved relation,
the rafters upside down, and the cows in their life
holding the earth round and ready
to meet itself again when morning came.
At breakfast while my mother stirred the cereal
she said, “You’re studying too hard,”
and I would include her face and hands in my glance
and then look past my father’s gaze as
he told again our great race through the stars
and how the world can’t keep up with our dreams.
I would like to know just one person. To know all of what they think, all of who they are. All I see are fragments of what people want to show me. For once, I would like to know someone completely.
“We are led to believe a lie
when we see with, not through the eye” —William Blake (via hollobone)
when we see with, not through the eye” —William Blake (via hollobone)
a way out
As long as you are interested in your present way of living, you will not abandon it. Discovery cannot come as long as you cling to the familiar. It is only when you realize fully the immense sorrow of your life and revolt against it, that a way out can be found.
Nisargadatta Maharaj
“The soil in which the meditative mind can begin is the soil of everyday life, the strife, the pain, and the fleeting joy. It must begin there, and bring order, and from there move endlessly. But if you are concerned only with making order, then that very order will bring about its own limitation, and the mind will be its prisoner. In all this movement you must somehow begin from the other end, from the other shore, and not always be concerned with this shore or how to cross the river. You must take a plunge into the water, not knowing how to swim. And the beauty of meditation is that you never know where you are, where you are going, what the end is.”
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
