Meditation

Who are our thoughts?
Where do they live?
They flutter by my ears
And have tea with my mind

Memories and theories
Conjured spontaneously
Floating and swimming through air
Or something more different

Growing from bodily relations
Lingering long past the experience
Like fruit on a withering vine
Cozy out in their nests
They visit me when it suits them
or when I make space
They leave notes under my pillow
And gently whisper to my heart

Mr. Raven's Sense of Home

"The only way to come to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at home."
"How am I to begin that where everything is so strange?"
"By doing something."
"What?"
"Anything; and the sooner you begin the better!"

-from George MacDonald's "Lilith" p13 Ch3

Norman Maclean on Story Telling

"If I am a story teller, I got my early training in a bunkhouse, and, if you are familiar with the bunkhouse variety of the narrative art, you can see readily that my present stories still have these humble origins. When I first went in the woods I was so young I just listened to the masters--but even then things fundamental to the art began to appear. I saw early that oral stories have to be short... Early, too, I learned that your friends won't listen to a story unless a lot happens in it... [A]nother characteristic of the western story is that practically always it has something to do with the truth, but it was only later that I realized how complicated the relations are."

--Norman Maclean, foreword to "A River Runs Through It and other stories"

Flies Also Exist

"I only wanted to tell you that I am doing things I consider very important now. If I could not do these things, my life would have no value. Merely to live, merely to exist--what sense is there to it? A fly also lives." - Chaim Potok (p205 of "The Chosen")

Non Violence Demands Attention

Tomato Color Spectrum

Mitya on Self Reflection (from The Brother's Karamazov)

"I just keep wondering now how people can live and think nothing about these things"

(Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, p 593, line 9)