From Kirshnamurti:
Sunday, September 19, 2010
From Kirshnamurti:
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Monday, September 06, 2010
Do you think this is possible or true?
Consider this, which I find extremely important in understanding life:
A person with multiple personalities, only some of which are diabetic, is only insulin-deficient when in the diabetic personality!
mg
Albert Einstein
1879-1955
Sunday, September 05, 2010
Wednesday, September 01, 2010
To paint over one dead animal may be regarded as a misfortune…
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
Today, as if there wasn’t enough sadness in the world, the Guardian gives us more to shake our heads about. Has the dignity of the dead hedgehog fallen foul of efficiency accountants? Apparently, the taking-away-roadkill department didn’t turn up in time, so the road painters painted on according to schedule. Even penguins (who I haven’t mentioned nearly recently enough) go round a static object, rather than over it. A spokesman for Hartlepool borough council said, clearly with a degree of satisfaction and relief: ‘This is obviously an unfortunate incident, but it was the only one reported during the massive project.’ But all may not be what it seems.
In July the BBC reported something similar: slightly better, slightly worse, depending on how you look at it, though, of course, it’s of no concern to the dead creatures involved. Questions avalanche. Does the painting around rather than over show more respect for nature? Or a greater respect for badgers than hedgehogs? Or are these two incidents not a statistically weird coincidence at all? Are both the work of guerilla anti-health-and-safety activists out to shame a world where road painters are not allowed to move roadkill except by special training and licence? The fact that the Guardian report is also in the Mail suggests that this may well be the answer.
But perhaps we are witnessing a new real-world meme: something along the lines of the crop circle artists but with road traffic accidents as their canvas – this does not bode well if taken too far. Or it might tell us that painting long lines (double yellow or single white) over miles of roads is so boring and the quest for fame so great that people have taken to bringing dead hedgehogs and badgers to work with them to liven things up a bit and get the papers round. This, too, if taken further and into other boring areas of life, may not be pleasant.
Jenni Diski London Review of Books
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Forgotten Days
You think I forgot
The bed and those yellowed sheets.
The iron bedstead,
The whiskey bottle on the nightstand,
Quiet music from the next room.
Your dress on the floor,
That fragrance of only you,
The sighs of oak leaves
Caressing the window pane.
And your whispers in my ear.
Did I bite, or was it you?
That, at last, I have forgot.
mek
Monday, August 16, 2010
On Growing Old
Be with me, Beauty, for the fire is dying;
My dog and I are old, too old for roving.
Man, whose young passion sets the spindrift flying,
Is soon too lame to march, too cold for loving.
I take the book and gather to the fire,
Turning old yellow leaves; minute by minute
The clock ticks to my heart. A withered wire,
Moves a thin ghost of music in the spinet.
I cannot sail your seas, I cannot wander
Your corn-land, nor your hill-land, nor your valleys
Ever again, nor share the battle yonder
Where the young knight the broken squadron rallies.
Only stay quiet while my mind remembers
The beauty of fire from the beauty of embers.
Beauty, have pity! for the strong have power,
The rich their wealth, the beautiful their grace,
Summer of man its sunlight and its flower.
Spring-time of man, all April in a face.
Only, as in the jostling in the Strand,
Where the mob thrusts, or loiters, or is loud,
The beggar with the saucer in his hand
Asks only a penny from the passing crowd,
So, from this glittering world with all its fashion,
Its fire, and play of men, its stir, its march,
Let me have wisdom, Beauty, wisdom and passion,
Bread to the soul, rain when the summers parch.
Give me but these, and though the darkness close
Even the night will blossom as the rose.
John Masefield
Sunday, August 15, 2010
"Calm is all Nature as a Resting Wheel."
Calm is all nature as a resting wheel.
The kine are couched upon the dewy grass;
The horse alone, seen dimly as I pass,
Is cropping audibly his later meal:
Dark is the ground; a slumber seems to steal
O'er vale, and mountain, and the starless sky.
Now, in this blank of things, a harmony,
Home-felt, and home-created, comes to heal
That grief for which the senses still supply
Fresh food; for only then, when memory
Is hushed, am I at rest. My Friends! restrain
Those busy cares that would allay my pain;
Oh! leave me to myself, nor let me feel
The officious touch that makes me droop again.
William Wordsworth
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
from "The Church & the Fiction Writer"
Flannery O'Conner
Friday, August 06, 2010
Sunday, August 01, 2010
Dreams
Here we are all, by day; by night we're hurl'd
By dreams, each one into a several world.
Robert Herrick
Sunday, July 11, 2010
“We are so addicted to looking outside ourselves that we have lost access to our inner being almost completely. We are terrified to look inward, because our culture has given us no idea of what we will find. We may even think that if we do, we will be in danger of madness. This is one of the last and most resourceful ploys of ego to prevent us from discovering our real nature.
So we make our lives so hectic that we eliminate the slightest risk of looking into ourselves. Even the idea of meditation can scare people. When they hear the words egoless or emptiness, they think that experiencing those states will be like being thrown out the door of a spaceship to float forever in a dark, chilling void. Nothing could be further from the truth. But in a world dedicated to distraction, silence and stillness terrify us; we protect ourselves from them with noise and frantic busyness. Looking into the nature of our mind is the last thing we would dare to do.”
— Sogyal Rinpoche via Glimpse of the Day, July 7 (via sharanam)
Reblogged from it's all dhamma..
Tags: Sogyal RinpocheWisdom TraditionsTibetan Buddhism
July 09, 2010, 9:52am 0 Comments and 0 Reactions
» Consider
"The word consider comes to us from around 1350 CE, and it traces its origins through the Middle English consideren and the Latin considerare, both words meaning “with the stars” or “in the company of the stars”. Those origins are shared with other English words like constellation and sidereal, the former describing a whole group of stars glowing up there in the night sky, and the latter meaning simply “starry” and by extension, celestial or heavenly…”
(from Beyond The Fields We Know)
“No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.”
— Annie Dillard (from Whiskey River)
Tags: Annie DillardDeathWisdom TraditionsQuotesWriters
“Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don’t stop to think, don’t interrupt the scream, exhale, release life’s rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life.”
V.Nabokov
Thursday, May 27, 2010
The chairs and lounges were taken from the beach
Friday, May 21, 2010
INVICTUS
by William Ernest Henley
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
If you had the choice of two women to wed,
(Though of course the idea is quite absurd)
And the first from her heels to her dainty head
Was charming in every sense of the word:
And yet in the past (I grieve to state),
She never had been exactly "straight".
And the second -- she was beyond all cavil,
A model of virtue, I must confess;
And yet, alas! she was dull as the devil,
And rather a dowd in the way of dress;
Though what she was lacking in wit and beauty,
She more than made up for in "sense of duty".
Now, suppose you must wed, and make no blunder,
And either would love you, and let you win her --
Which of the two would you choose, I wonder,
The stolid saint or the sparkling sinner?
Robert William Service
I don't know,I chose the saint and am much the happier for it.

