L.

reverence for all of life

natural sincerity

gentlenesss

supportiveness

When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past.

I want to be like water, I want to slip through fingers but hold up a ship.

“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca-Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca-Cola, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.”

circusfolk:

amazing, how grimly we hold onto our
misery,
ever defensive, thwarted by
the forces.
amazing, the energy we burn
fueling our anger.
amazing, how one moment we can be
snarling like a beast, hen
a few moments later,
forgetting what or
why.

not hours of this or days or
months or years of this
but decades,
lifetimes
completely use up,
given over
to the prettiest
rancor and
hatred.

finally
there is nothing here for death to
take
away.

I take off my hands and I give them to you but you don’t want them, so I take them back and put them on the wrong way, the wrong wrists. The yard is dark, the tomatoes are next to the whitewashed wall, the book on the table is about Spain, the windows are painted shut. Tonight you’re thinking of cities under crowns of snow and I stare at you like I’m looking through a window, counting birds. You wanted happiness, I can’t blame you for that, and maybe a mouth sounds idiotic when it blathers on about joy but tell me you love this, tell me you’re not miserable. You do the math, you expect the trouble. The seaside town. The electric fence. Draw a circle with a piece of chalk. Imagine standing in a constant cone of light. Imagine surrender. Imagine being useless. A stone on the path means the tea’s not ready, a stone in the hand means somebody’s angry, the stone inside you still hasn’t hit bottom.

The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn; the bird waits in the egg; and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities. 

As the smallest drop of water detached from the ocean contains all the qualities of the ocean, so man, detached in consciousness from the Infinite, contains within him its likeness; and as the drop of water must, by the law of its nature, ultimately find its way back to the ocean and lose itself in its silent depths, so must man, by the unfailing law of his nature, at last return to his source, and lose himself in the great ocean of the Infinite.

The soul attracts that which it secretly harbors; that which it loves, and also that which it fears. It reaches the height of its cherished aspirations. It falls to the level of its unchastened desires - and circumstances are the means by which the soul receives its own.

Man is made or unmade by himself; in the armory of thought, he forges the weapons by which he destroys himself. He also fashions the tools with which he builds for himself heavenly mansions of joy and strength and peace.

Every man is where he is by the law of his being; the thoughts which he has built into his character have brought him there.

and you told me you wanted to eat up my sadness