• There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of bodies, of body on body, wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone. It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even remember that it exists. ~Derrick Jensen, from A Language Older Than Words
• for your whole life you’ll be trying to Become & that’s alright!
• You are incapable of giving up. It’s the part of you that is not anchored to the floor. The part of you that is really you. The part of you that lasts forever. The part of you that never burns. ~Carole Maso, The Art Lover
• “What I had once mistaken for death was, instead, a door.” ~Rachel McKibbens, from “the second time,” published in Vinyl
• “I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved, / somehow –the central heart that deals not / in words, traffics not with dreams, and is / untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.” ~Jorge Luis Borges, from II of “Two English Poems,”
• “May you have the courage to go places that scare you.”
• the most personal is the most creative.
• Forgiveness is warm. Like a tear on a cheek. Think of that and of me when you stand in the rain. I loved you completely. And you loved me the same. That’s all. The rest is confetti ~Nellie Crain
• humility is not thinking less of yourself, humility is thinking of yourself less. “i’m never the center of attention, you’re the center of mine”
• The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart. ~Buddha
• “You’ll notice that I haven’t talked about love. Or about happiness. I’ve talked about becoming – or remaining – the person who can be happy, a lot of the time, without thinking that being happy is what it’s all about. It’s not. It’s about becoming the largest, most inclusive, most responsive person you can be.” ~Susan Sontag’s 2003 Commencement speech at Vassar–via Jac Jemc
• If you’re going through hell, keep going. ~Winston Churchill
• Nothing isn’t an absence. Silence isn’t nothing. I told a woman I loved her, and she never talked to me again. I told my mama a man hurt me, and her hard silence told me to keep my story to myself. Nothing is full of something, a mass that grows where you cut at it. ~Krysten Hill, from “Nothing,” published in Poem-a-Day
• Real loss is only possible when you love something more than you love yourself. ~Sean, Good Will Hunting
• “Would it be too childish of me to say: I want? But I do want: theater, light, color, paintings, wine and wonder.” ~Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
• I am out with lanterns looking for myself. ~Emily Dickinson
• whatever others say, if i don’t tell myself that i can do this, then as an athlete or a being, i cannot do it
• Your ability to remain soft is not a weakness. Don’t let life harden your soul. There is strength and bravery in vulnerability. ~Billy Chapata, Chameleon Aura
• I love borders. August is the border between summer and autumn; it is the most beautiful month I know.

Twilight is the border between day and night, and the shore is the border between sea and land. The border is longing: when both have fallen in love but still haven’t said anything. The border is to be on the way. It is the way that is the most important thing. ~Tove Jansson, Moominvalley in November

• when you let go of people you are painfully seeking approval or love from, you return to yourself. you return to what feels truer to you and to what brings you happiness. you are reminded that life does not always have to feel bad, that you do not always have to feel like you aren’t enough, that what you want for yourself and your future goes beyond a single person’s regard of you. you notice the energy start to shift and flow more fluidly. pay attention to all of this.
• Possession make you rich? I don’t have that type of richness. My richness is life. ~Bob Marley
• oh, i am finally old enough to know why my parents took so long to grab their coats. why they would ask us to get ready to go only to sit down for another round of coffee. what would i tell myself, at 10 years old? it’s okay. sit down with them too. take in the extra hour with your friend and her family. when you get home, write down every moment in your diary. one day you will be older and you will be waving goodbye to your best friend, and you will turn the key to start your beat up little car engine, and you will look back over your shoulder. her hair will be blowing in the wind and she will be beautiful and you will be, for a moment, struck by all of it. what you will feel is so wide and nameless that it will engulf you. and you will think of being 14 and kicking her under the table in math every time you wanted to whisper something behind the teacher’s back. you will think about how long the days felt, and how you could hold her hand whenever you wished, but you didn’t. and you will think about all of the people you could have lingered with. and you will wish, more than you have ever felt a wish, that the universe just gave you that - more time to linger. more time to say - i love you. i know i need to leave, but i don’t want to leave you. and when i go, i am leaving a piece of my heart that lingers too. one more round of coffee. the days are so short, and you are so lovely.
• “I was waiting for something extraordinary to happen, but as the years wasted on, nothing ever did unless I caused it” ~Charles Bukowski
• “It is the greatest possible victory to be, to continue to be, and to have been. No defeat can deprive us of the success of having existed for some moment of time in a universe that seems indifferent to us.” ~Norbert Wiener
• When I write my own Book of the Dead, my own Book of Life, I want to celebrate being alive to do it even while I acknowledge the painful savor uncertainty lends to my living. ~Audre Lorde, from “A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer,” The Selected Works of Audre Lorde
• To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing, red-hot iron; it burns into you and that is very painful.

Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. But in the long run, it comes back on us.

You cannot stay away from yourself forever. You have to return, have to come to that experiment, to know whether you really can love. That is the question - whether you can love yourself. And that will be the test. ~Carl Jung

• the greatest gift you can give yourself is release. release attachment, release resentment, release pain, release grief, release negativity. allow yourself release.
• when marina tsvetaeva said “wings are freedom only if they are open in flight. on one’s back they are a heavy weight”
• “Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.” ~Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
• “Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.”~Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide To Getting Lost
• im going to come out and say it: isolating is a self-destructive behavior. it might not be as obvious and immediately self-destructive as say, impulsive spending, drug use or risky behaviors, but it gradually decays relationships and can deepen your mental health issues. often, our impulse is to retreat from others and responsibilities for “self care” or to “work on ourselves” and obviously sometimes we need mental health breaks, but there’s a line you cross from “taking a break” to full on neglecting your relationships with others and your social needs that can be incredibly damaging to yourself and others over time
• “All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.” ~Jacques Lacan, Seminar II
• The missing part, the missing past, can be an opening, not a void. It can be an entry as well as an exit. It is the fossil record, the imprint of another life, and although you can never have that life, your fingers trace the space where it might have been, and your fingers learn a kind of Braille.

There are markings here, raised like welts. Read them. Read the hurt. Rewrite them. Rewrite the hurt. ~Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

• “You are alive, I whisper to myself, therefore something in you listens.” ~Ilya Kaminsky, from ‘Alfonso, in Snow’, Deaf Republic
• “It is a strange solitude that
  
  choose. Yet we do choose it so there is no point whatsoever in regretting it. It is like the solitude of a man who, for some reason, is able to see all the stars in the sky in the daylight. The other people in the street stare at him as he looks up at the sky, and then they look up themselves because they believe he can see an aeroplane. Which quite possibly he can. But it wasn’t why he was looking.” ~John Berger, A Painter of Our Time: A Novel
• “Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.” ~Alan Keightley
• ““I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I’m beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn’t pleasant, it’s not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.” ~Hermann Hesse, Demian
• “CHORUS: Why melt your life away in mourning? Why let grief eat you alive? ~sophokles, elektra
• We’ll become in our lives whoever the people we love the most say we are.

God did this constantly in the Bible. He told Moses he was a leader and Moses became one. He told Noah he was a sailor and he became one. He told Sarah she was a mother and she became one. He told Peter he was a rock and he led the church. Instead of telling people what they should do, we need to tell them who they are. This works every time. ~Bob Goff

• “Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist, there are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges and absorbs the impact.” ~Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
• Please remember that almost everyone around you is traumatized. I didn’t understand this when I was younger. I wondered why people acted so strangely and irrationally. Maybe all children wonder this. The author Robert Anton Wilson said (paraphrasing), “We have never seen a completely sane adult human.” No one makes it out of this life alive. It’s not their fault. Mercy, kindness, forgiving — these are what makes one human. They are other names for love. People break in the strangest of ways.“Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. we have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. we have never seen a totally sane human being.“ ~Robert Anton Wilson
• ““Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”” ~Robert Bresson
• Someone can be madly in love with you and still not be ready. They can love you in a way you have never been loved and still not join you on the bridge. And whatever their reasons you must leave. Because you never ever have to inspire anyone to meet you on the bridge. You never ever have to convince someone to do the work to be ready. There is more extraordinary love, more love that you have never seen, out here in this wide and wild universe. And there is the love that will be ready. ~Nayyirah Waheed
• “What I had once mistaken for death was, instead, a door.” ~Rachel McKibbens, from “the second time,” published in Vinyl
• “What is it, that you need so badly? Think about this.” ~Mary Oliver, excerpt of “Logan International”, in Thirst
• _“Writing down your thoughts is both necessary and harmful. It leads to eccentricity, narcissism, preserves what should be let go. On the other hand, these notes intensify the inner life, which, left unexpressed, slips through your fingers. If only I could find a better kind of journal, humbler, one that would preserve the same thoughts, the same flesh of life, which is worth saving. Moreover the writer invents himself [or herself] as a character in this form. He shapes himself from the shards of the everyday, from the truth of that daily life. Which is also a truth not to be scorned.” ~Anna Kamienska, from “In That Great River: A Notebook,” trans. Clare Kavanaugh, Poetry (June 2010)
• Just start walking is the best advice I’ve ever seen. If you wait until you find the perfect path, you may never take that first step. You will never go anywhere, let alone reach that final destination you have in your head.

You can’t really plan the twists and turns on your journey, if you try you’re likely to find yourself lost. But if you walk and wander and go where your feet take you, then you will end up right where you are meant to.

satsuti:

You don’t, you just start walking. You fuck around and find out. You don’t brand yourself, you learn from what and whom that gets thrown at you. You become interesting. You follow and adapt to every unexpected turn. You never get too comfortable.

magicknmischief:

How did yall figure out what path was right for you?

You don’t choose a path, but you start moving. You listen to your gut and start doing - the path will lay itself out.

And then you can set out on a new path._

• They hold each other’s hands…They know that if they let each other go, they will be lost, but if they hold on any longer, they will be just as lost. ~Stig Dagerman, A Moth to a Flame (Burnt Child)
• Be in love with your life. Every minute of it.
• “So music was always there and has always, always inspired me, but there was also a curiosity relating to doing great work. And doing work that survives the test of time, and doing work that is beyond time. Like [Beethoven’s] 9th symphony. Like the 5th symphony. Like the 6th symphony. Like [Vincent Van Gogh’s] “Starry Night.” Like [Fellini’s] La Strada. Like [Fellini’s] 8 ½. And this big question of, how does one, as a creator and a thinker and a human inhabiting our planet, in this particular moment in time, how do we enter a kind of a space where what we create remains? Forever. It’s not another product that sells well, but it rather is an expression of what it means to be human that is there forever. And the 9th Symphony, I think, is a pretty good example.

Or if you think of the 16th quartet, Opus 135, one of my favorites. In the notes, Beethoven writes “Must it be???” in the slow movement. And then it gets resolved later with “It must be.” I mean, very, very deep, deep questions that have to do with: What does it mean to be human? Where do we start? Where do we end? What legacy do we leave for those who come after us? What is the meaning behind the products that we produce?

And “Starry Night” is a good example. How is it that Van Gogh, in all of his “craziness”, managed to encapsulate the cosmic radiation? I mean, if you superimpose “Starry Night” with cosmic radiation images from NASA, it literally looks the same. How did he know? How was he connected to this deep, deep understanding of the world, of the universe, and of these forces and was able to represent them in his drawings? And yet, he has the spire from the church, and he has the huts, the rooftops. So that kind of combination between an astro-biological, humane existence and a kind of spirituality that is very much connected to human nature, and to culture, has always inspired me in the great works of these wonderful artists and creators.” ~Neri Oxman

• The dream is what is most truly, impenetrably, ineradicably ours. The Universe, Life — whether real or illusory — belongs to everyone, everyone can see what I see and possess what I possess or can, at least, imagine seeing or possessing it… But only I can see what I dream, only I can possess it. ~Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
• Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s. ~Anaïs Nin
• Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished. ~Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
• I can’t see you, but I know you’re here. I can feel it. ~Wings of Desire (1987), Dir. Wim Wenders
• You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go… ~Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Places You’ll Go!
• “This year has taught me the simple craft of belief. I believe in the things I’ve nurtured and built this year. Slowly but carefully. Such as understanding, knowledge, passion, strength; the hundreds of songs I’ve written, the 365 poems, the books I’ve read and the miles I’ve run. The resolution to breathe, to meditate, to not harm my mind or body even when I’ve felt like it.” ~Charlotte Eriksson, the year of learning patience
• The devil doesn’t come dressed in a red cape and pointy horns. He comes as everything you’ve ever wished for. ~Tucker Max
• “No, my soul is not asleep. It is awake, wide awake. It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches, its eyes wide open far off things, and listens at the shores of the great silence.” ~Antonio Machado
• ““When you start to live outside yourself, it’s all dangerous.” ~The Garden of Eden, Ernest Hemingway
• But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of today, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been. ~Edgar Allan Poe
• “Nothing to keep, nothing to lose. No possessions, no security, no concern about possessions, and no concern about security: in this mood it is possible to do exactly what makes sense, and nothing else: there are no hidden fears, no morals, no rules, no undercurrent of constraint, no subtle sense of concern for the form of what the people round about you are doing, and above all no concern for what you are yourself, no subtle fear of other people’s ridicule, no subtle train of fears which connect the smallest triviality with bankruptcy and loss of love and loss of friends and death, no ties, no suits, no outward elements of majesty at all. Only the laughter and the rain.” ~Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building
• The truly great person develops the original nature with which Nature endowed him, and expands upon the best, the greatest of the capacities of his original nature. This is what makes him great. Everything that comes from outside his original nature, such as restraints and restrictions, is cast aside by the great motive power that is contained within his original nature …. The great actions of the hero are his own, are the expression of his motive power, lofty and cleansing, relying on no precedent. His force is like that of a powerful wind arising from a deep gorge, like the irresistible sexual desire for one’s lover … All obstacles dissolve before him … Because he cannot be stopped or eliminated, he is the strongest, the most powerful. This is true also of the spirit of the great man and the spirit of the sage. For Paulsen, the great man is not one who acts according to a sense of duty that would temper and restrain the vitality of the impulses of his feelings. How true, how true! (Note: I see this as quite similar to the view that Mencius puts forward in the two chapters: ‘Haoran zhi qi’ and ‘Da Zhangfu’.) ~Mao Zedong, “Marginal Notes”
• will i ever feel fulfilled? yes. i have felt fulfilled before. i will feel fulfilled again. will i ever be content? yes. i have been content before. i will be content again. will i ever be happy? ecstatic? overcome with joy? will i ever feel surrounded by love? supported? encouraged? will i ever feel proud? will i ever feel hopeful? will i ever feel confident in myself? will i ever feel optimistic about my future? yes. yes. yes. yes. yes. yes. yes. yes. yes. yes. yes. my present is not my eternity.