There will come a day or night, a morning or evening when... a fearful child will climb into your bed and cleave to you, a woman or man will weep, will laugh, will sleep with you in the sure belief that the one they abide with is governed by a good and honest love. There are mornings in our lives when beauty falls into our hands and when that happens, we must do what we can to nurture and protect it. That we sometimes fail must never preclude our striving. Patrick Lane
The End of Power: Why Being In Charge Isn't What It Used to Be - Moises Naim Those in power retain it by erecting powerful barriers to keep challengers at bay. Today, insurgent forces dismantle those barriers more quickly and easily than ever, only to find that they themselves become vulnerable in the process. A case of highly corrupt political elite showcasing grotesque extravagant projects while failing to provide basic services to the general public.
Joseph Conrad-comparative Essays By Adam Gillon
Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel it is, before all, to make you see . That - and no more, and it is everything.? I know that a novelist lives in his work. He stands there, the only reality in an invented world, among imaginary things, happenings, and people. Writing about them, he is only writing about himself. But the disclosure is not complete. He remains, to a certain extent, a figure behind the veil; a suspected rather than a seen presence — a movement and a voice behind the draperies of fiction. In these personal notes there is no such veil. Joseph Conrad-comparative Essays By Adam Gillon
It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams...No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence-that which makes its truth, its meaning - its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream-alone...but I like what is in the work-the chance to find yourself. Your own reality-for yourself not for others-what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Priests! Until you can explain a paving stone, do not try to explain God: Until your creeds can do as much as apples and hen’s eggs, let down your eyebrows a little...Walt Whitman
All has been consecrated. The Creatures in the forest know this, the earth does, the seas do, the clouds know as does the heart full of love. Strange a priest would rob us of this knowledge and then empower himself with the ability to make holy what already was. St. Cathrine of Siena, Love Poems from God
Wuzhen, China (Venice of the East- Bridge within a Bridge)
The End of Power: Why Being In Charge Isn't What It Used to Be - Moises Naim
When the universe was created, the Big Bang converted energy into matter and antimatter – two materials that destroy each other when they come into contact. “In some sense, we’re asking why anything exists at all, if it wasn’t annihilated by equal quantities of matter and antimatter. There’s some kind of imbalance that occurred when the matter became dominant...And it’s actually other members of the family that we believe are responsible for this imbalance in the universe.” Hirohisa Tanaka “The feeling of being rejected by your country is pretty devastating. You feel like the orphan child that’s being pushed aside,...I am anxious, apprehensive, hopeful, all of those things, because we never know, do we, what way the justice system will go.” Jackie Scott
When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy. When actions come from another section, the feeling disappears. Don't let others lead you. They may be blind or, worse, vultures. Reach for the rope of God. And what is that? Putting aside self-will. Because of willfulness people sit in jail, the trapped bird's wings are tied, fish sizzle in the skillet. The anger of police is willfulness. You've seen a magistrate inflict visible punishment. Now see the invisible. If you could leave your selfishness, you would see how you've been torturing your soul. We are born and live inside black water in a well. How could we know what an open field of sunlight is? Don't insist on going where you think you want to go. Ask the way to the spring. Your living pieces will form a harmony. There is a moving palace that floats in the air with balconies and clear water flowing through, infinity everywhere, yet contained under a single tent. Rumi - Moving Water
Matsukaze(wind in the pines) and Murasame (rain in Autumn) - Toshio Hosokawa
Every day you play with the light of the universe. Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water...A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body. I go so far as to think that you own the universe. I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells, dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses. I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees. Pablo Neruda
“Ansel Adams was able to tell an epic story in a single image. I’m trying to do the same thing with my music — to compress a whole life into a single frame.” Jordie Lane Lane’s music, his craft of storytelling and his ability to draw a compelling narrative out of a single inconspicuous detail covers his restless lifestyle that fuels his craft, which speaks with the plaintiveness, the poignancy, the melancholy and the eternal optimism of the leather-worn wanderer, fuelled by his experiences on his voyage.
How can we recognize evil in its early stages, especially when its human face can be banal? Evil’s uncertainty principle: There is perhaps no greater evil than the confident presumption of evil in others. The certainty that your belief is the only correct one and that everyone else must be wrong. Such certainty is so blinding that it refuses to acknowledge that yes, I, can be the cause of hurt and evil in the world. I can become the oppressor at times if I’m not careful about the way I treat people. When we demonize each other, it usually ends up being the most innocent that get hurt. Evil reigns when justice is undone and displaced by a malign will, where even instinctive human goodness is considered subversive. "It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us — the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-denying banality of evil." Hannah Arendt
“Little Boy” (Hiroshima) and “Fat Man” (Nagasaki) "...survivors with their skin melted or burned away by radiation, begging to die. Others were vaporized. No one was there to offer survivors even a sip of water, let alone comfort." Shirley Douglas
Traumatic events, such as the death of loved one, can exert a powerful force affecting later generations. Entangled with unhappiness from the past, family members often continue patterns of anxiety, depression, anger, guilt, fear, chronic illness and unfulfilled relationships. For the love in the family to flow in a healthy way certain governing principles must be restored and respected. Once you are free of entanglements from the past, new ways of giving and receiving love can begin to take root. Family Constellations
Antidepressants didn’t change me much at first. They brightened mornings, softened edges, padded landings, tilted my horizon by just one or two degrees. But I’ve come to believehat over time, those degrees came at a high cost, with hidden fees and a ballooning adjustable interest rate. Today I suspect there’s a price for spending a decade outsourcing grief and terror,... and keeping a whole mushy, messy part of life at a cool distance, while some crucial, unseen parts of you — the kind they don’t talk about in doctor’s offices or drug ads — eventually atrophy. By simply accepting a scrip, I signed on to a belief system that may be even more cynical than I’ve so long pretended to be. I made a blithe commitment to a medication whose long-term side effects just may be spiritual: “May cause detachment from parts of yourself that truly matter.” “May place all faith and agency in a pill bottle.” “May reduce sense of self and soul into dopamine, serotonin, neurons, milligrams.” The Medicated Me - Chris Norris
Family Constellations
he Effect of Moonlight (also known as St. Valery Canal) byEugène-Louis Boudin
Clair de Lune (Moonlight) is the third, of the four movements, of Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque. His inspiration was a poem of the same name by Paul Verlaine Your soul is a chosen landscape, where charming masqueraders and bergamaskers go playing the lute and dancing and almost sad beneath their fanciful disguises. All sing in a minor key of victorious love and the opportune life, they do not seem to believe in their happiness and their song mingles with the moonlight, with the still moonlight, sad and beautiful, that sets the birds dreaming in the trees and the fountains sobbing in ecstasy, the tall slender fountains among marble statues.
But We Emerge "Visions of ourselves find vigor in the calm of fresh air and fall colors. Enlivened senses stir us from our hiding spots - inadequate havens in which we shelter ourselves from the malaise of ceaseless motion. Our everyday has left us haggard and barely breathing beneath an ever-growing layer of self-doubt. But we emerge. When the world outside has become still, and our eyelids are not burdened by the weight of a slumber out-of-reach, we embrace our vitality once more. We find our moment. One moment to quietly reflect. One moment to allow our souls to float along the streams of the westerly winds and hover breathless in rays of afternoon sun. I fantasize about this kind of paradise – the kind that breathes, the kind that cleanses, the kind that numbs our overheated nerves. I dream it takes our heartbeat back to an un-caffeinated pace and delivers the peace for which we so humbly pray." Scott Foley
...no, they were not voices, they were not words, nor silence, but from a street I was summoned, from the branches of night, abruptly from the others, among violent fires or returning alone, there I was without a face and it touched me... And I, infinitesimal being, drunk with the great starry void, likeness, image of mystery, felt myself a pure part of the abyss, I wheeled with the stars, my heart broke loose on the wind. Poetry by Pablo Neruda
Surfaces are so incredibly fragile and fleeting, and ultimately empty of the deepest existential meaning or significance. Real beauty can only be known and experienced through a deep recognition and embodiment of its opposite. Only when there is no fear of the ugly and the dark can we truly touch into the deepest indestructible radiance that lies at the core of all things, and is each of our birthright. Vanessa D. Fisher
Poetry by Pablo Neruda
The Myth of Er is a legend that concludes Plato's The Republic. The name of Er, contracted form of ear means spring (the season). Sirens are not there to get men out of their way but to induce them to copy their harmony in their lives and singing in harmony with the Fates.
Once we start investigating the laws of matter either by mere chance, after our curiosity is aroused by the forces of nature which plays the role of a teacher, and not as a result of a thought out act of our will, or by force, constraint, pain and necessity we are faced with two choices from mother nature. We can either try to escape responsibility for our acts or ascend on the path of education from the chasm we live in up the hill toward the only truth that can free us from the invisible chains binding us to our cave and make us responsible leaders of others. If we realize that the laws of nature don't deprive us from our freedom of choice, all what's required is that we find the glitch in between the parts that must be fixed to turn a destiny around from a past already sealed into a future to be built. Plato's The Republic
No light; but rather darkness visible Served only to discover sights of woe, Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And rest can never dwell, hope never comes That comes to all, but torture without end Still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed With ever-burning sulphur unconsumed.
I lived for art, I lived for love, I never did harm to a living soul! With a secret hand I relieved as many misfortunes as I knew of. Ever in pure faith, my prayer rose to the holy shrines. Ever in pure faith, I gave flowers to the altar. In the hour of grief why, why, o Lord, why do you reward me thus? I gave jewels for the Madonna's mantle, and I gave my song to the stars, to heaven, which smiled with more beauty. In the hour of grief why, why, Lord, why do you reward me thus?
