quote by Leon Bloy

Joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God.

Nigerian proverb

Hold a true friend with both your hands.

an ancient Chinese adage

When parents and children combine efforts,
Mountains are fashioned into gems;
When elder and younger children are harmonious,
The earth is changed into gold.

Work Can Be Fun

The thing I recall most from my father is that working wasn't working, it was fun.

- Gertrude Ramsey Crain, founder, Crain Communications (fortune estimated over $300 million)

quote by Thomas Merton

A prophet is one who cuts through great tangled knots of lies.

quote by George Sand

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

quote by Pearl S. Buck

Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that is where I renew my springs that never dry up.

quote by William James

The greatest revolution in our generation is that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds can change the outer aspects of their lives.

from The Voice for Love

To watch another struggle or experience pain is an opportunity

to open your heart and allow God's love to pour forth,

unconditionally and without reservation.

Allow your love to wash away the pain, not only of your brothers and sisters,

but of the pain you feel as well in watching them suffer.

- an inspirational quote emailed from http://www.thevoiceforlove.com/

from the play Our Town, by Thorton Wilder

Emily:  It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back - up the hill - to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by, Good-by world. Good-by, Grover's Corner's . . . Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking . . . and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths . . . and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do human beings ever realize life while they live it? - every, every minute?

on Adulthood

We will never have a firm grasp of how to raise children until we have come to some collective understanding of what it means, morally as well as occupationally, to be an adult.  One of the things that the dropouts and other misfits of the 60s were trying to tell the grown-up world was that the available models of adulthood were not acceptable - at least not to young people who had learned to distinguish the worthy from the absurd.

- Barbara Ehrenreich, reviewing Bruno Bettleheim's book A Good Enough Parent, New York Times Book Review, May 24, 1987

Happiness, by Dale Carnegie

Happiness does not depend on who you are or what you have; it depends soley on what you think.

selections from the book: Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

bel far niente: the beauty of doing nothing

  *  *  *

She said to me once, while regarding herself in a mirror, "Admittedly, I am not the one who looks fantastic in everything, but still I cannot help loving myself."

  *  *  *

"You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not." - Epictetus

 *  *  *

Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away from your endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and your surroundings with poise.  Only from that point of even-mindedness will the true nature of the world (and yourself) be revealed to you.  True Yogis, from their seat of equipoise, see all this world as an equal manifestation of God's creative energy - men, women, children, turnips, bedbugs, coral: it's all God in disguise.

 *  *  *

One of the boys spends all day scrubbing beside me, lecturing me earnestly on how to best perform my work here: "Take seriously.  Make punctual.  Be cool and easy.  Remember - everything you do, you do for God.  And everything God does, He do for you."

  *  *  *

Look for God, suggests my Guru.  Look for God like a man with his head on fire looks for water.

  *  *  *

     So I stood up and did a handstand on my Guru's roof, to celebrate the notion of liberation.  I felt the dusty tiles under my hands.  I felt my own strength and balance.  I felt the easy night breeze on the palms of my bare feet.  This kind of thing - a spontaneous handstand - isn't something a disembodied cool blue soul can do, but a human being can do it.  We have hands; we can stand on them if we want to.  That's our privilege.  That's the joy of a mortal body.  And that's why God needs us.  Because God loves to feel things through our hands.

  *  *  *

I close my eyes and let the mantra come.  I climb down that ladder into my own hub of stillness.  When I get there, I can feel the world halt, the way I always wanted it to halt when I was nine years old and panicking about the relentlessness of time.  In my heart, the clock stops and the calendar pages quit flying off the wall.  I sit in silent wonder at all I understand.  I am not actively praying.  I have become a prayer.

  *  *  *

He keeps his body strong, he says, by meditating every night before sleep and by pulling the healthy energy of the universe into his core.  He says that the human body is made of nothing more or less than the five elements of all creation - water, fire, wind, sky and earth - and all you have to do is concentrate on this reality during meditation and you will receive energy from all of these sources and you will stay strong.  "The microcosm becomes the macrocosm.  You - microcosm - will become same as universe - macrocosm."

  *  *  *

God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now.

Proverb

Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly.

Four in All, by Nina Payne (2001)

eyes ears nose mouth
east west north south

oats wheat corn rye
sun moon stars sky

floor table chair bed
yellow green blue red

one two three four
roof window chimney door

bird fish bear snake
ocean river puddle lake

fork plat knife spoon
morning evening midnight noon

earth air fire water
mother father son daughter

Suddenly one day

Suddenly one day everything is empty like space, and you are aware of one principle pervading all the 10,000 things.  You know then that your heart is so vast that it can never be measured.

- Daikaku

Your Body

Your body is an extension of basic goodness.

It is the closest implement, or tool,

that you have to express basic goodness,

so appreciating your body is very important.

- Chogyam Trungpa

How to Spend an Hour

If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master's presence.  And even if you did nothing during the whole of your hour but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord's presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

- Saint Francis de Sales

Albert Einstein

Out of clutter, find simplicity
From Dischord, find Harmony.
In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Again and again some people in the crowd wake up,
They have no ground in the crowd,
And they emerge according to much broader laws.
They carry strange customs with them
And demand room for bold gestures.
The future speaks ruthlessly through them.

on being yourself

As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
- Goethe

When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everybody will respect you.
- Lao-Tzu

Healing may not be so much about getting better as about letting go of everything that isn't you - all of the expectations, all of the beliefs - and becoming who you are.
- Rachel Naomi Remen

When you are not trying to become anybody else, when you accept yourself, then you simply relax into what you are, . . . and grace and harmony and splendor arise . . . the tremendous beauty of being yourself.
- Tishan

The Preface, from The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde (first published in 1891)

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

The critic is he who can translate into another manner or
a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming.  This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated.  For these there is hope.  They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but
the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

No artist desires to prove anything.  Even things that are true can be proved.

No artist has ethical sympathies.  An ethical sympathy in an artist is
an unpardonable mannerism of style.

No artist is ever morbid.  The artist can express everything.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.

Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician.  From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type.

All art is at once surface and symbol.

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Those who read the symbols do so at their peril.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it.  The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art if quite useless.