Friday

December 2017

This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.
 - D. H. Lawrence
2:00 PM Dec 31st
Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down,
we don't move, today is today, always today.
 - Octavio Paz
8:30 AM Dec 31st
Never ever go by the book. They will want you to, but you mustn't. If the lust is too strong, tear one page from a hundred books and make your own way. There is no formula for life, no equation on how to be a human being.
- Christopher Poindexter
9:30 AM Dec 30th
Love in all its forms is the most important matter that we will ever face, but also the most dangerous, the most unpredictable, the most maddening.
 - Etel Adnan
9:00 AM Dec 29th
The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even - if you will - eccentricity.
 - Joseph Brodsky
12:00 PM Dec 28th
Prior to the advent of brain, there was no color and no sound in the universe, nor was there any flavor or aroma and probably rather little sense and no feeling or emotion. Before brains the universe was also free of pain and anxiety.
 - Roger Sperry
6:00 AM Dec 28th
They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?
 - Jeanette Winterson
8:00 AM Dec 27th
If you have a body, you are entitled to the full range of feelings. It comes with the package.
 - Anne Lamott
7:15 AM Dec 26th
And me
I travel the old roads again and again
wearing a different life
 - Naomi Shihab Nye
5:00 PM Dec 25th
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in
 - Leonard Cohen
8:30 AM Dec 24th
Three o'clock on a December afternoon; the rain drizzling; A moment's blankness - then, what are you thinking?
 - Virginia Woolf
3:00 PM Dec 23rd
It's a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realize what's changed is you.
 - Eric Roth
8:30 AM Dec 23rd
Skating backwards tells another story -
the risky star above the freezing town,
a way to walk on water and not drown.
 - Cynthia Zarin
5:00 PM Dec 22nd
For all my inner struggles, I know that as a writer I ended on exactly the 22nd of December, 1967. Now it's just convulsions.
 - Anna Kamieńska
8:30 AM Dec 22nd
Don't be ashamed because you're human: be proud! Inside you, vaults behind vaults open endlessly. You will never be finished, and that's as it should be.
 - Tomas Tranströmer
7:30 AM Dec 21st
We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.
 - Rebecca Solnit
7:30 AM Dec 20th
In politics, as in every other sphere of life, there are two important principles for a man of any sense: don't cherish too many illusions, and never stop believing that every little bit helps.
 - Italo Calvino
12:00 PM Dec 19th
I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks.
 - Seamus Heaney
8:00 AM Dec 19th
Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about
You are not alone.
 - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
10:30 AM Dec 18th
Imagine if our negative feelings, or at least lots of them, turned out to be illusions, and we could dispel them by just contemplating them from a particular vantage point.
 - Robert Wright
7:00 AM Dec 18th
Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.
 - Robert Wright
2:00 PM Dec 17th
I look for my heart
by the lamp where the light is
skitter in the wet black leaves
 - Cynthia Zarin
12:30 PM Dec 17th
Written words can be a source of entanglement as well as of liberation;
Unless the right person takes it at the right time, the elixir turns to poison.
Please be careful.
 - Tōrei Enji
9:00 AM Dec 16th
Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you're already in heaven now.
 - Jack Kerouac
12:00 PM Dec 15th
It's always surprising to be reminded that while you're watching and thinking about people, all knowing and superior, they're watching and thinking about you, right back at you.
 - Terry Pratchett
8:00 AM Dec 15th


It takes a certain amount of intelligence and imagination to realize the extraordinary queerness and mysteriousness of the world in which we live. The fools, the innumerable fools, take it all for granted, skate about cheerfully on the surface and never think of inquiring what's underneath.
 - Aldous Huxley
History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme
 - Seamus Heaney
I refuse to be intimidated by reality anymore. After all, what is reality anyway? Nothin' but a collective hunch . . .  I made some studies, and reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it.
 - Jane Wagner
2:30 PM Dec 12th
Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself
 - Mark Strand
8:45 AM Dec 12th
Step off assuredly into the blank of your own mind. Something will come to you.
 - Richard Wilbur
8:00 AM Dec 11th
For what are we, if not a body taking a mind for a walk, just to see what's there?
 - Cory Taylor
8:00 AM Dec 10th
Rumi advised me to keep my spirit
up in the branches of a tree and not peek
out too far, so I keep mine in the very tall
willows along the irrigation ditch out back
 - Jim Harrison
2:00 PM Dec 9th
Sometimes we live without noticing it.
 - Jim Harrison
7:00 AM Dec 8th
Even as
you tend these lines, attend for a moment
to your breath as you draw it in:

 regard
the breath's cool descent, a stream from mouth
to throat to the furnace of the heart.

 Observe that queer, cool confluence of breath
and blood, and do your thinking there.
 - Scott Cairns
7:30 AM Dec 7th
If self is a location, so is love:
Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points,
Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance,
Here and there and now and then, a stance.
 - Seamus Heaney
8:30 AM Dec 6th
Not believing in anything better means we don't have to do anything about it.
 - Michael Augros
7:30 AM Dec 5th
I at least have the advantage of being me, and not some random stranger.
 - Clarice Lispector
8:00 AM Dec 4th
So far the days keep coming.
Seize the day gently as if you loved her.
 - Jim Harrison
8:00 AM Dec 3rd
Seeing the moonlight
spilling down
through these trees,
my heart fills to the brim
with autumn.
 - Ono No Komachi
6:15 PM Dec 2nd
Suspect too much sweet-talk
but never close your mind.
 - Seamus Heaney
8:00 AM Dec 2nd
The nature of mind is like empty space, like the sky, which at present is filled with clouds and fog and mist and periodically has all kinds of activity such as hailstorms, snowstorms, rainstorms and thunder and lightning.
 - Kalu Rinpoche
7:00 AM Dec 1st