Here

"So we have to be patient with ourselves. Over and over again we think we need to be somewhere else, and we must find the truth right here, right now; we must find our joy here, now. How seductive it is, the thought of tomorrow. We must find our understanding here. We must find it here; it is always here; this is where the grass is green."

John Tarrant

http://calmthings.blogspot.in/2016/08/come-lonesome-one.html

The measure of your life

"The measure of your life is the amount of beauty and happiness of which you are aware."

Agnes Martin

From here.

Shallow

“I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths but a great fear of shallow living.”

Anais Ni

Holding the world together

There are so many unsung heroines and heroes at this broken moment in our collective story, so many courageous persons who, unbeknownst to themselves, are holding together the world by their resolute love or contagious joy.

Although I do not know your names, I can feel you out there.

David Abram

The great opportunity is where you are

“Look underfoot. You are always nearer to the true sources of your power than you think. The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Don't despise your own place and hour. Every place is the center of the world.”

John Burroughs

But I don't want comfort

"But I don't want comfort. I want poetry. I want danger. I want freedom. I want goodness. I want sin."

Aldous Huxley, 'Brave New World'

A fierce sanity

"Rilke recommended that when life became turbulent and troublesome, it was wise to stay close to one simple thing in nature. A friend of mine who had great trouble with her mind told me once that she had brought a stone into her apartment, and when she felt her mind going, she would concentrate on the stone.

She said, 'There is a fierce sanity in stone.'"

John O'Donohue from "To bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings"

Walking

"I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in."

John Muir

Waiting

"We are waiting for the seasons to change. We are waiting for our time to come around, or that opening to appear in the Tao where we can walk through and touch somebody. Whereas if we had moved before, everything would have been wrong - no point, no effect.

Sometimes the right thing to do is to wait. In the hexagram in the I-Ching about waiting, it says you should enjoy yourself with this kind of waiting, you should eat and drink and be of good cheer.

We do not need to be dour about waiting because we are in tune with the seasons. It is the right time to wait."

John Tarrant

What we see is what we are

There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.

Ernst Haas

Once

“Those who hate most fervently must have once loved deeply; those who want to deny the world must have once embraced what they now set on fire.”

Kurt Tucholsky

The quality of the day

"To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour."

Thoreau

The Function of Art

If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.

We are going to the moon, that is not very far.
Man has so much farther to go within himself.

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all,
there is only the meaning we each give to our life,
an individual meaning, an individual plot,
like an individual novel, a book for each person.

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

Anais Nin

Stage

"There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning, and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest."

Anais Nin

From here: http://or-so-i-feel.blogspot.com

For we are also what we have lost...

"For we are also what we have lost."

from the film Amores Perros

Words

"Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange."

J.M. Coetzee

Bridges

"We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered."

Tom Stoppard

Happiness

"Will and I could hardly wait for the morning to come, to get at something that interested us. That's happiness."
-- Orville Wright, co-inventor of the airplane

A Ray of Sunshine and a Free Bench

"We spend our life trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench."

Beckett, Texts for Nothing