How the stars used to shine there, How sweet the earth smelled, The orchard gate would creak...The time has run out and I die in despair! And I've never loved life so much.
Truth is my identity and I call upon the eternal Truth that resides in all of us.
Ek Ongkar. Sat Nam. Karta Purakh. Nirbhau. Nirvair. Akal Moorath. Ajooni Saibhang. Gurparsad. Guru Nanak Devji
One Eternal Light. Word is Truth. Creator Of All. Without Fear. Non-Vindictive. Ominipresent. Free from Birth and Death. Self-Illuminating. Realized through the Grace of the True Guru.
The 11th century Benedictine monk Guido d’Arezzo invented a mnemonic system using parts of the hand to indicate pitches for singers. The note names ut, re, mi, fa, sol and la were also placed on horizontal lines to notate pitch. These inventions evolved into solfeggio and staff notation as used today.
You've got to give a little, take a little. And let your poor heart break a little That's the story of, That's the glory of love. Otis Redding - Bette Midler
Life is a pleasant custom, Life wears wings as wide as death, It leaps to the dimensions of love. Life is nothing that might from my mind and your mind in the tip of habit’s shelf. Life is the attraction of a hand that reaps, Life is the first black fig in the acrid mouth of summer, Life is the dimension of a tree in the eyes of an insect, Life is the experience of bat in the darkness, Life is a strange sense experienced by a migrating bird, Life is the whistling of a train ringing in the sleep of a bridge, Life is like looking at a garden through the closed window of an airplane, The news of a rocket flying to the space touching the solitude of moon, The thought of smelling the flower in other planets...We should understand that life would miss something if no worm existed, And the law of the tree would be damaged if no caterpillars existed... Behind us lies the fatigue of history, Let’s walk to the beach, Let’s pick up a pebble from the ground, Feel the weight of existence. Sometimes the wound beneath my foot has taught the ups and downs of earth... Water`s Footsteps by Sohrab Sepehri
الهی نسوزی،تو گفتی بسوزم گذاشتی که هر شب به ره چشم بدوزم من از گریه هر شب یه دریا می سازم همه زندگیمو به چشمات می بازم صدای دلم رو تو نشنیده رفتی خراب تو گشتم کلامی نگفتی تو را می سپارم به دست خدایت فقط او شنیده همیشه صدایم یه شب عاشقانه برات گریه کردم تو هرگز ندیدی به لب آه سردم تو با بی وفای به خاکم نشوندی من ساده دل رو به غربت کشوندی نمی بخشمت من،ببین روزگارم ببین از جدای چه بر سینه دارم تو را می سپارم به دست خدایت فقط او شنیده همیشه صدایم
بی تو طوفانزده دشت جنونم،صیدافتاده به خونم تو چسان می گذری غافل از اندوه درونم بی من از کوچه گذر کردی و رفتی بی من از شهر سفر کردی و رفتی قطره ای اشک درخشید به چشمان سیاهم تا خم کوچه بدنبال تولغزید نگاهم تو ندیدی........... نگهت هیچ نیفتاد به راهی که گذشتی در خانه چو بستم ،دگر از پای نشستم گوئیازلزله آمد ، گوئیا خانه فروریخت سر من بی تو من در همه شهر غریبم بی تو ،کس نشنود از این دل بشکسته صدائی برنخیزد دگر از مرغک پر بسته نوائی تو همه شعر و سرودی، تو همه بود و نبودی چه گریزی زبر من،که زکویت نگریزم گر بمیرم زغم دل ، با تو هرگزنستیزم من و یک لحظه جدایی؟ نتوانم ، نتوانم بی تو من زنده نمانم.......
رو سر بنه به بالین تنها مرا رها کن ترک من خراب شب گرد مبتلا کن ماییم و موج سودا شب تا به روز تنها خواهی بیا ببخشا خواهی برو جفا کن از من گریز تا تو هم در بلا نیفتی بگزین ره سلامت ترک ره بلا کن ماییم و آب دیده در کنج غم خزیده بر آب دیده ما صد جای آسیا کن خیره کشی است ما را دارد دلی چو خارا بکشد کسش نگوید تدبیر خونبها کن بر شاه خوبرویان واجب وفا نباشد ای زردروی عاشق تو صبر کن وفا کن دردی است غیر مردن آن را دوا نباشد پس من چگونه گویم کاین درد را دوا کن در خواب دوش پیری در کوی عشق دیدم با دست اشارتم کرد که عزم سوی ما کن گر اژدهاست بر ره عشقی است چون زمرد از برق این زمرد هی دفع اژدها کن بس کن که بیخودم من ور تو هنرفزایی تاریخ بوعلی گو تنبیه بوالعلا کن
He said, Where is there safety? I said, In service and renunciation. He said, What is there to renounce? I said, The hope of salvation. He said, How do you benefit from this life? I said, By keeping true to myself.
Woman by Woman: New hope for the villages of India by Dorothy Fadiman documents the stories of women in some of the least developed areas of rural India as they progress toward personal freedom. Vivid images portray the humanity of the people, the beauty of the countryside, as well as the toll of centuries of poverty. In the film we meet women who are stepping forward, out of seclusion, to serve in their communities. Bageshwari
Investments in ways to boost agriculture productivity in the poorest areas of the world will go further towards long-term global security than the millions of dollars a year spent on intensive military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Jeffrey Sachs.
Women in the Dezda district of Malawi pounding corn to make nsima, the thick cornmeal porridge that is the national staple. Photo: Evelyn Hockstein
همیشه سعی کن لبخند بر لبانت,عشق در قلبت, لطف در نگاهت, محبت در چهره ات, بخشش در رفتارت وحق در زبانت جاری باشد و بس
A Himba woman in her traditional attire and her body painted red with a mixture of fat, ash and ochre-colored mud, stands beside a red wall in northwest Namibia. Evelyn Hockstein
Connection and wholeness are the foundation of all healthy functioning – personally. The more connected we are, the more we know that who we are and what we do has an impact. Our spiritual journey is about coming to know who we really are – as not separate, but a part of everything that is, which includes our sense of the sacred. Spirit is no longer transcendent only, but imminent in all of life. It gives rise to an identity shift in the human, away from the separated, individual, isolated self to a radically interconnected self with all that is.
And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things. Therefore am I still a lover of the meadows and the woods, and mountains; and of all that we behold from this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear, - both what they half create, and what perceive; well pleased to recognise...And this prayer I make, knowing that Nature never did betray the heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege, through all the years of this our life, to lead from joy to joy: for she can so inform the mind that is within us, so impress with quietness and beauty, and so feed with lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all the dreary intercourse of daily life, shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb our cheerful faith, that all which we behold is full of blessings. Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth
Seamus Heaney's Exposure is a poem about self-doubt in which Heaney exposes to the light of his own judgement - and ours - his fear of failing either his vocation as a poet who must be open to all truth and feel “every wind that blows”, or to articulate the losses and longings of the tribe to which he belongs. At another level, it is a poem about a vision or epiphany which has been missed: Consciously, he is longing for his doubts to be met with by some dazzling finality, a “million tons of light”. He indulges the fantasy of himself being able to blaze away, free from ambiguities and second thoughts: but his honesty will not allow such escapism; we have not arrived at the eschaton, we have still to contend with our darkness and shifting perspectives. But does this mean that we have nothing to go by, no light for the interim, no standard by which to be judged, and so liberated?
Seamus Heaney's Nobel Lecture: To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against. In a poem called "Exposure" I wrote then: Imagining a hero on some muddy compound, his gift like a slingstone whirled for the desperate. How did I end up like this? I often think of my friends'beautiful prismatic counselling and the anvil brains of some who hate me. As I sit weighing and weighing my responsible tristia. For what? For the ear? For the people? For what is said behind-backs? Rain comes down through the alders, its low conducive voices mutter about let-downs and erosions and yet each drop recalls the diamond absolutes. I am neither internee nor informer; An inner emigre, a grown long-haired and thoughtful; a wood-kerne. Escaped from the massacre, taking protective colouring from bole and bark, feeling every wind that blows;
As a defiant statement of poetry's gift for telling truth but telling it slant, this is both cogent and corrective. Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself...We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there blue with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin's regime and asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her art could be equal to it. And this is the want I too was experiencing in those far more protected circumstances when I wrote the lines I have just quoted, a need for an order "true to the impact of external reality and ... sensitive to the inner laws of the poet's being."
The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings were symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly, but change nevertheless, and for me living there, the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which my wife's adult children were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities could have to be based.
... a well-disposed mind could still hope to make sense of the circumstances, to balance what was promising with what was destructive and "to hold in a single thought reality and justice." ...however, such a hope proved impossible. The dream of justice became subsumed into the callousness of reality, and we settled in life-waste and spirit- waste, of hardening attitudes and narrowing possibilities that were the natural result of political solidarity, traumatic suffering and sheer emotional self-protectiveness.
Cristo de San Juan de la Cruz by Salvador Dalí. When the dark wood fell before me and all the paths were overgrown. When the priests of pride say there is no other way I tilled the sorrows of stone. Lorena Mckennitt - Dante's Prayer
Everyone is capable of sensing the situation in the world today. There is no one who cannot sense the very deep despair that everyone feels. But it is not a question of only fixing what is external. It is a question also of going within and taking care of the egoistic source of these external problems.
Today there are a lot of things that are being taken care of to preserve our planet on the outside. People are coming to the consciousness that is needed to address these external social problems...but even if these efforts go to even greater lengths than they are going to now, if we don't take care of what's happening within ourselves, it's not going to work. The inner problem is something that each person has to do for themselves. And that is the problem of the heaviness of the ego. There is no one who doesn't feel that...Shodo Harada Roshi
... the Will becomes satanic pride and rebellious self-idolatry in the relations of the spirit to itself, and remorseless despotism relatively to others...in short, by the fearful resolve to find in itself alone the one absolute motive of action, under which all other motives from within and from without must be either subordinated or crushed... And wherever it has appeared, under whatever circumstances of time and country, the same ingredients have gone to its composition; and it has been identified by the same attributes. Hope in which there is no cheerfulness; steadfastness within and immovable resolve, with outward restlessness and whirling activity;... And from inattention to the possibility of such a character as well as from ignorance of its elements, even men of honest intentions too frequently become fascinated. Nay, whole nations have been so far duped by this want of insight and reflection as to regard with palliative admiration, instead of wonder and abhorrence... The Statesman’s Manual, or The Bible the Best Guide to Political Skill and Foresight by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
