remote from pain

“ The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from pain…Music expresses only the quintessence of life and of its events, never these themselves.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, as quoted in Oliver Sacks’ insanely good 2007 book, Musicophilia
via Psychobabble

Dr. Suresh love.

Not a tumbler blog...not a tumbler blog

“ One of my philosophy professors lectured wildly about love once, yelling: “When you’re in love with someone, that person is the lighthouse of your universe.” (I scrawled it inside Science and Poetry in pencil—lighthouse of your universe—as if I would ever forget that phrase.) He was a delightful caricature of his position. I could swear he literally tore his hair out while howling at us. He went on, “Nothing means as much without that person.”
One of the men in the class repeated, incredulous, half-laughing “so you’re saying you can’t enjoy, like, a vacation, without someone if you’re really in love with them?”
“Of course not.” the professor replied. “Not completely. You recognize beauty, but beauty means less if they don’t witness it with you. Beauty is less. You see something sublime and your first thought is that they should be there with you. It’s not as good without them. They illuminate. They make everything more.

— Nightmare Brunette: Endings (via sleepanddream) (via finallyseeing) (via lovebot) (via fives)

via unicornology

Swingin' on a star

We are who we are. No apologies, no kowtowing. No cowing or shying away.

We deserve beauty.

One of my dearest friends of the past 5 years is moving to NYC to follow her dreams. She called me tonight to tell me. And suddenly, the fogginess of yesterday and the precipice that is tomorrow fall away. This is it people.

The clarity. Reaching out and reaching past to not care about age. To not care about what we do, have or don't have. But knowing that there is something out there for us. I am not striving or confused for the first time in years. I have a plan. And that plan is good. And those plans may fall through tomorrow.

And it'll still be good.

"He sat looking at the sky for a long time. Then he took from his knapsack a bottle of wine, and drank some. He remember the night in the desert when he had sat with the alchemist, as they looked at the stars and drank wine together. He thought of the many roads he had traveled, and of the strange way God had chosen to show him his treasure. If he hadn't believed in the significance of recurrent dreams, he would have not met the Gypsy woman, the king, the thief, or...'Well, it's a long list. but the path was written in the omens, and there was no way I could go wrong,' he said to himself."
-The Alchemist, Paul Coelho


"What ravages of spirit /Conjured this temptuous rage/ Created you a monster/ Broken by the rules of love /And fate has led you through it /You do what you have to do / And fate has led you through it /You do what you have to do ..."
-Sarah McLachlan 'Do What You Have To Do'

every little step

Remembering why it is that I do what it is that I do.

“If you can see your path laid out
in front of you step by step, you know
it’s not your path. Your own path you
make with every step you take. That’s
why it’s your path.”

- Joseph Campbell (one of my all time favorite authors)

Rerooting.

I stepped outside today - still not engaged with the world - one step in and one step out. Half fooled I stopped to stare at all the people and thought, "How silly am I?" It's my world and there are all these other people there. Here. too many people in this world to make even one of them my focus. And yet I still get to chose don't I God? I am so much closer aren't I? Right now I can only see the negative- I wonder how much perspective it will take to get to the positive. And finally to the place where it doesn't matter at all. The place where it seemed too long ago that it was a life time away from anything that is or was me.
I'm growing God - but sometimes I wonder at what cost. What cost happiness and what does it look like? Certainly not like someone who can't and won't open themselves to love. In the span of 10 minutes I have probably seen and been seen by 200 people and I am concerned with one? Why? Why let one insignificant person affect me that much? Why make my world that small and limited of a place? It deosn't make a whole lot of sense. So the question now is; what do I want?

-written January 2009

do you love Gus?

A recent conversation with me and my father.
Mr. Jones: "So I don't get it, what's the church about?"
Pen: "Well, it just takes a world view on issues. Because human spirituality, we as a species are so separated by what we call god."
Mr. Jones: "Uh huh."
Pen: "People get into so much trouble because they call the same thing by different names. You know, so we call it 'apple'. But in China...what do they call it?"
Mr. Jones: "Ping-gwa.'
Pen: "Right. So you know, here, an apple is an apple is an apple and in China, ping-gwa is a ping gwa. But it's just knowing you're talking about the same thing. God is the same thing everywhere."
Mr. Jones: "So what if you call God, 'Gus'?"
Pen: "Dude! You can totally call him Gus if you want to! I mean, if in your head, you talk to Gus all the time, it's god! Or I guess, it's Gus!"
Mr. Jones: "I just said that to be funny."

Apparently Wrath wins. happy birthday Mayabird!

Stolen from Wakeboard's post to Herr Direktor on her b-day. Cause I'm full of love.

'Eliza Haywood's Life's Progress through the Passions; or, The Adventures of Natura (1748)... explains that for each emotion there is a ... grief and joy alternately succeed each other;--hope has its period in possession;--fear ceases, either by the cause being removed, or by a fatal certainty of some dreaded evil;--ambition dies within us, on a just sense of the folly of pursuing it;--hate is often vanquished by good offices; even greedy avarice may be glutted; and love is, for the most part, fluctuating, and may be terminated by a thousand accidents. (23)

Placing a time limit on each emotion and finding that each has "its antidote," Haywood concludes, "REVENGE alone is implacable and eternal, not to be banished by any other passion whatsoever"'

Happy Birthday

You're the result of yourself

Don’t blame anyone, never complain of anyone or anything
Because basically you have made of your life what you wanted.
Accept the difficulties of edifying yourself
And the worth of starting to correct your character.
The triumph of the true man arises from the ashes of his mistakes.
Never complain of your loneliness or your luck.
Face it with courage and accept it.
Somehow, they are the result of your acts and
It shows that you’ll always win.
Don’t feel frustrated of your own failures, neither unload them to someone else.
Accept yourself now or you’ll go on justifying yourself like a child.
Remember that any time is good to start
And that no time is so good to give up.
Don’t forget that the cause of your present is your past,
As the cause of your future will be your present.
Learn from the brave, from the strong,
From who doesn’t accept situations
From who will live in spite of everything.
Think less of your problems and more of your work.
Learn to arise from your pain,
And to be greater than the greatest of your obstacles.
Look at the mirror of yourself and you’ll be free and strong
And you’ll stop being a puppet of circumstances.
For you yourself are your destiny.
Wake up and stare at the sun in the mornings and breathe the sun of dawn.
You’re part of the strength of your life now,
Rise up, fight, walk, be sure and you’ll win in life.
Don’t ever think of ‘fate’
For fate is the excuse of failures.
-Pablo Neruda

why we need you.

I think what Elephant 6 meant for us is very simple: there’s something pure and infinite in you, that wants to come out of you, and can come out of no other person on the planet. That’s what you’ve got to share, and that’s as real and important as the fact that you’re alive. We were able, at a really young age, to somehow protect each other so we could feel that. The world at large, careerism, money, magazines, your parents, the people at the rock club in your town, other kids, nothing is going to give you that message, necessarily. In fact, most things are going to lead you away from it, sadly. Because humanity is really confused at the moment. But you wouldn’t exist if the universe didn’t need you. And any time I encounter something beautiful that came out of a human somewhere, that’s them, that’s their own soul. That’s just pure, whatever its physicality is, if the person can play piano, if they can’t play piano, if they’re tone deaf, whatever it is, if it’s pure, it hits you like a sledgehammer. It fills up your own soul, it makes you want to cry, it makes you glad you’re alive, it lets you come out of you. And that’s what we need: we desperately need you.
-Julian Koster