certainty

Certainty
is nothing more than
what results from the
inability to imagine otherwise.


Wittgenstein

The Inner Eye of Love

Not infrequently one meets people who have spent years in dryness, in inner suffering, in darkness. Their meditation is sleepy and uncomfortable and seems like a waste of time: they think they are doing nothing. But the tiny flame of love is burning quietly in the depths of their being; the loving knowledge is there in secret; their experience is profoundly mystical. This will seem less strange if we reflect that human love is often just the same. It grows secretly at night when no one is watching like the seed scattered upon the ground. Then one morning we wake up - and there it is! Quite often it is only in moments of separation and death that we advert to the depth of our own love. Or again human love may at first be filled with rapturous love; but the lean and fallow years have to come.


The Inner Eye of Love
William Johnston

madness

There are some who think this man mad,
But I prefer the madness of this man
to the sanity of others.


Wordsworth on William Blake

Some Kind of Wonderful

All you have to do is touch my hand
To show me that you understand
And something happens to me
That's some kind of wonderful
Anytime my little world turns blue
I just have to look at you
Everything seems to be some kind of wonderful

I know I can't express this feeling of tenderness
There's so much I wanna say
But the right words just don't come my way
I just know when I'm in your embrace
This world is a happy place
And something happens to me
That's some kind of wonderful

I know I can't express this feeling of tenderness
There's so much I wanna say
But the right words just don't come my way
I just know when I'm in your embrace
This world is a happy place
And something happens to me
That's some kind of wonderful
Oh wonderful, some kind of wonderful


Performed by Peter Cincotti
Music & Lyrics by Gerald Goffin & Carole King

the unsolved in your heart

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart
and try to learn to love the questions themselves.....

strong or miserable

We make ourselves miserable
or we make ourselves strong.

The amount of work is the same.


Carlos Castaneda
Don Juan, Journey to Ixtian

disease of superficiality

The habit of prematurely cutting off processes of
thought, or slurring over them, has assumed serious proportions
in the man of modern urban civilization. Restlessly
he clamours for ever new stimuli in increasingly
quicker succession just as he demands increasing speed
in his means of locomotion. This rapid bombardment of
impressions has gradually blunted his sensitivity, and
thus he always needs new stimuli, louder, coarser, and
more variegated. Such a process, if not checked, can
end only in disaster. Already we see at large a decline
of finer aesthetic susceptibility and a growing incapacity
for genuine natural joy. The place of both is taken
by a hectic, short-breathed excitement incapable of giving
any true aesthetic or emotional satisfaction.


Nyanaponika Thera
The Power of Mindfulness

Written in the stars

I am here to tell you we can never meet again
Simple really, isn't it, a word or two and then
A lifetime of not knowing where or how or why or when
You think of me or speak of me or wonder what befell
The someone you once loved so long ago so well

Never wonder what I'll feel as living shuffles by
You don't have to ask me and I need not reply
Every moment of my life from now until I die
I will think or dream of you and fail to understand
How a perfect love can be confounded out of hand

Is it written in the stars
Are we paying for some crime
Is that all that we are good for
Just a stretch of mortal time

Is this God's experiment
In which we have no say
In which we're given paradise
But only for a day

Nothing can be altered, there is nothing to decide
No escape, no change of heart, no anyplace to hide
You are all I'll ever want, but this I am denied
Sometimes in my darkest thoughts, I wish I'd never learned
What it is to be in love and have that love returned


Music by Elton John
Lyrics by Tim Rice
Produced by Peter Collins and Wilbur Rimes
Duet with Leann Rimes
Available on the album Elton John and Tim Rice's Aida