• This whole blog post from Ivy
  • Karensu: Housekeeping well is a full-time job."
  • Ivy's Maxims (June 2018 ed.):
    • Religion that's easy is wrong
    • Don't get offended, get pissed off
    • Life is too short to eat shit
    • Everything always changes
    • It's better to look ordinary and actually be interesting than the reverse
    • Look where you want to go
    • Make your own sense
  • Ivy's Maxims (March 2021 ed.):
    • Religion that’s easy is wrong
    • Don’t get offended, get pissed off
    • Life is too short to eat shit
    • Look where you want to go
    • It’s better to look ordinary and actually be interesting
    • But it’s better to be interested than interesting
    • Make your own sense
    • Don’t just know yourself, grow yourself
    • Focus, don’t dwell
  • Camelia Elias: I hope your cards will be filled with ‘nothing’, as you realize that you CAN cling to nothing, you CAN believe nothing, and thus create a whole lot of spaciousness in your head, able to embrace the world in all its manifestations without judgment.
  • Professor Ian Stevenson: The wish not to believe can influence as strongly as the wish to believe.
  • Camelia Elias: What I appreciate here is not the ‘I know everything’ attitude, which can be very tiresome and tedious, but the Zen behind it: ‘Whatever I say right here and right now is the thing itself. There’s no right or wrong.’ Indeed, come to think of it, not everything necessitates analysis. The grand art is, however, to know the difference.
  • Anon.: you don’t need to look for something to ‘Be’. You happen while being curious with what is in front of you.
  • A dream I had: All dreams are real, somewhere.
  • Camelia Elias: What I find implicit in self-reflection is the idea that since you don’t know what and who you are, you might as well make it beautiful, that is to say, make the world you live in beautiful or more beautiful. ... all you do is remind yourself that you never have access to any kind of knowledge that’s real. The only thing you have access to is stories about life and things.
  • Nicole Piar: Each day, I walk out of my studio and take some time in nature. I watch vines overtake fences, flowers bloom and fall, and the grey herons come and go from the lagoon. When my mind runs out of human thoughts, eventually, I become like a creature, breathing, watching and moving with all the other organisms around me. ... Nature takes time. When you plant the seed, it isn't instantly a garden. Everything in nature has its own intrinsic timing and rhythm. ... Patience, when riding alongside desire, is the rapturous embrace of life itself.
  • Neil Gaiman: Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.
  • Ivy's Midwife: Everything always changes... good or bad. So when things are tough, hang in there because soon it will be better. And when things are good, enjoy it, because soon there will be a new challenge.
  • Connie Solera: I have to fill my well first. [when talking about how she prepares to teach a course: creating art is like filling a well]
  • Milla: Following the seasons is more than just sticking to a schedule of holidays, floral displays, latte flavors, and moon-phase calendars. It is about fine-tuning into a different calendar altogether, following an otherworldly tide-chart and mapping out a radically changed paradigm.
  • Faery Soul: Mother Earth sees the invisible link between how we feel and the destruction on the outside. She knows these actions are not really an aggressive attempt to diminish her, for they are manifestation of a confused and lost civilization. The unconscious acts of humans who suffer from not remembering who they truly are, being taught to hate themselves and to confuse consumerism with love. Every piece of trash in the ocean is a direct metaphor for how humans poison themselves and choose to ignore it. We’re running away- from ourselves, all the time. The whole post is really good, actually: http://www.faerysoul.com/2018/04/25/what-a-mountain-taught-me-about-guilt/
  • Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee:

“This work of connecting our light to the world does not need to be done through a mass movement, or by millions of people. The real work is always done by a small number of individuals. What matters is the level of participation: whether we dare to make a real commitment to the work of the soul.”

  • Camelia Elias: I have a weakness for ALL creators, even when I say no thanks to what they create. The fact that they create beats anything else.
  • Kathleen J: Don’t look down ... Just write a little bit. ... The more I write, the more I know what to write next.
  • Camelia Elias: I don’t go around saying to myself that I have to dig into the past, and waste time with this or that trauma that only my unconscious can remember. What I do is look at myself in the mirror, check with my breathing – I’m still breathing – and then check with my mind: ‘What new fiction are you concocting today?’ I ask it, and then I expect my face to produce a smile that then turns into hilarious laughter.
  • Ivy: Optimism is a better way to be in the world and makes our personal worlds better. It's like magic.
dec 27 2017 ∞
mar 31 2021 +