living life

Are we living our life
or is life living us?


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life for rent - dido

"Life For Rent" by Dido

I haven't ever really found a place that I call home
I never stick around quite long enough to make it
I apologize once again I'm not in love
But it's not as if I mind
that your heart ain't exactly breaking

It's just a thought, only a thought

But if my life is for rent and I don't learn to buy
Well I deserve nothing more than I get
Cos nothing I have is truly mine

I've always thought
that I would love to live by the sea
To travel the world alone
and live more simply
I have no idea what's happened to that dream
Cos there's really nothing left here to stop me

It's just a thought, only a thought

But if my life is for rent and I don't learn to buy
Well I deserve nothing more than I get
Cos nothing I have is truly mine

If my life is for rent and I don't learn to buy
Well I deserve nothing more than I get
Cos nothing I have is truly mine

While my heart is a shield and I won't let it down
While I am so afraid to fail so I won't even try
Well how can I say I'm alive

If my life is for rent and I don't learn to buy
Well I deserve nothing more than I get
Cos nothing I have is truly mine

If my life is for rent and I don't learn to buy
Well I deserve nothing more than I get
Cos nothing I have is truly mine
Cos nothing I have is truly mine
Cos nothing I have is truly mine
Cos nothing I have is truly mine

J. D. Salinger

From L.A TImes, written by David L. Ulin

And yet, our collective fascination with his life rather than his writing suggests another bit of code, or at least a set of clues. Wasn't this, after all, what Salinger was rejecting, a culture of celebrity in which the most important thing was appearance and no one cared about the level of the soul?

"I just quit, that's all," Franny Glass tells her boyfriend early in "Franny and Zooey," explaining why she gave up acting. " . . . I don't know. It seemed like such poor taste, sort of, to want to act in the first place. I mean all the ego. And I used to hate myself so, when I was in a play, to be backstage after the play was over. All those egos running around feeling terribly charitable and warm."

For all that "The Catcher in the Rye" made him famous, "Franny and Zooey" is Salinger's masterpiece, an evocation of loss and longing within the bonds of family. Composed of two novellas, it introduces the youngest members of the Glass family, about whom Salinger would devote more than half of his published work.

Read full article from LA Times here

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rest

Rest for the tired body,
Poetry for the soul.


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among my friends love is a great sorrow

Among my friends love is a great sorrow.
It has become a daily burden, a feast,
a gluttony for fools, a heart's famine.
We visit one another asking, telling one another.
We do not burn hotly, we question the fire.
We do not fall forward with our alive
eager faces looking thru into the fire.
We stare back into our faces.
We have become our own realities.
We seek to exhaust our lovelessness.

Among my friends love is a painful question.
We seek out among the passing faces
a sphinx-face who will ask its riddle.
Among my friends love is an answer to a question
that has not been asked.
Then ask it.

Among my friends love is a payment.
It is an old debt for a borrowing foolishly spent.
And we go on, borrowing and borrowing
from each other.
Among my friends love is a wage
that one might have for an honest living.

Robert Duncan

jhana

Jhana is called the pleasure of renunciation,
the pleasure of seclusion,
the pleasure of peace,
the pleasure of enlightenment.
I say of this kind of pleasure that it should be pursued,
that it should be developed,
that it should be cultivated,
that it should not be feared.

Majjhima Nikaya 66


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essence of holy life

This holy life is led not for gain honour and fame,
not for endowment of virtues, not for endowment of concentration,
and not for the endowment of knowledge and vision.

It is for the unshakeable release of mind.
This is the essence of the holy life,
it is the heartwood and the end of the holy life.

Majjhima Nikaya 30

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