Sweet Darkness 

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.
When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.
Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.
There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your womb
tonight.
The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.
You must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.


-david white

Stendhal Syndrome

" ... a psychosomatic illness that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art, usually when the art is particularly beautiful or a large amount of art is in a single place. The term can also be used to describe a similar reaction to a surfeit of choice in other circumstances, e.g. when confronted with immense beauty in the natural world."

....http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/the_shock_of_the_old/

Nine drawings

LSD + Art

http://www.cowboybooks.com.au/html/acidtrip1.html

Yes.

alice

i want to do with you what spring does to the cherry trees

t

• Pooh: this is the best part of the day
• Christopher Robin: what part is that?
• Pooh: when "you" and "me" become "we"

Searching

Katy needs...

-to put her ego in check.

-rescue to get out alive (and that's just the bathroom stall)

-to understand that her outlook could negatively affect the performance of her department.

-adjustments

-a level table or surface to put papermaking equipment on

-to wear a ball gown

-to stop going to so many anime conventions...

-a pony

-to be inspiring in order to be productive

-full sun with a rich wet soil mix

Emma needs...

-a belt rather badly

-a real man

-a love song (I am going to sing to her)

-You

-a loving owner

- to learn to wear her bra!

-to finish her dvar torah!!

-to change my headlight at lunch

-to tell you something.

-no sidekicks

-an icepack

My tears are milagros

Monsters are the best

"There's a stream that runs up in the rockies and it runs into a bigger stream and finally makes it's way to a river but never the ocean and I was thinking about being whole again and that you don't have to make it to the ocean to be whole again maybe you freeze and become a snow witch or maybe a sandwich and melt away and that's o.k. i think."

I keep telling this story-different people, different places, different times-but always you, always me, always this story, because a story is a tightrope between two worlds.

walk with me, hand in hand through the neon and styrofoam. walk the razor blades and the broken hearts. walk the fortune and the fortune hunted. walk the chop suey bars and the tract of stars.

i know i am a fool, hoping dirt and glory are both a kind of luminous paint; the humiliations and exaltations that light us up. i see like a bug, everything too large, the pressure of infinity hammering at my head. but how else to live, vertical that i am, pressed down and pressing up simultaneously? i cannot assume you will understand me. it is just as likely that as i invent what i want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. some story we must have. stray words on crumpled paper. a weak signal into the outer space of each other.

the probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. the lure of it is immense. we send starships. we fall in love.

Sunrise Stay Curious

‘only connect’

"Every human being is a puppet on strings, but the strings do not ascend to some anonymous Maker, but are glistening golden strands that connect one puppet to another. Each strand is sensitive to the vibrations of every other strand. Every vibration sings in not only one heart, but in the hearts of many, so that if you listen carefully, you can hear a low hum as of many hearts singing together…When a strand snaps, when it breaks for love, or lack of love, or from hatred, or from pain…every other connected strand feels it, and every other connected heart feels it — and since every strand and every heart are, in theory, connected, even if at their most distant limits, this means the effect is universal. All through the darkness where shining strings are the only light, a woundedness occurs. And this hurt affects each strand and each of us in a different way, because we all hurt and are hurt. And all the strings shimmer on regardless, and all of our actions, no matter how small, have consequences to others…"

from Shriek: An Afterword, Jeff VanderMeer

Clown in the Moon

My tears are like the quiet drift
Of petals from some magic rose;
And all my grief flows from the rift
Of unremembered skies and snows.

I think, that if I touched the earth,
It would crumble;
It is so sad and beautiful,
So tremulously like a dream.

-Dylan Thoma

Ancient Writing like the Sea

In Dream
anna achmatova

Black and enduring separation
I share equally with you.
Why weep? Give me your hand,
Promise me you will come again.
You and I are like high mountains
and we can't move closer.
Just send me word,
At midnight sometime through the stars.

Pixies have to be one thing or the other, because being so small they unfortunately have room for one feeling only at a time. They are, however, allowed to change, only it must be a complete change.

In Southeast Asian mythology, the Nagas are serpents considered to be rain givers and guardians of the water and of the riches of the deep. They carry a precious jewel in their foreheads.
The daughter of the Nagas is Naga Kanya, whose upper body is human and lower body that of a snake. She is the Goddess of the Three Realms and pours her blessings of water on these worlds. She brings the Ultimate Treasure, represented by the diamond-pattern on the back of a cobra's hood and by the jewel embedded in Kanya's forehead. Naga Kanya is protector of the Law of Dharma. She is a gate-keepter, protecting thresholds and temple doors; she guards underwater treasure and spiritual knowledge. She is often presented holding a conch shell, representing the sound current which carries forth her water blessings.

'The big problem when you're an artist is that the times of creation don't come often. Most of the time I stay here in my studio and groan, and after that I go to my room, look at the TV."

Texture of Life

Tenderness towards oneself is incredibly sweet. Though you crave gentleness - and everyone does - the sweetness can be hard to take. It seeps right through the protective crust, all the way down to the core. Your whole being, body included, softens in that sweet nurturance, and the frozen, untouched places deep inside begin to thaw. As you melt, don't be surprised if tears seep out as well. Cherish the tears. They are the water of your soul.

With the soft touch of inner compassion, the texture of outer life softens as well, and the world suddenly seems more compassionate too. Your belly and chest breathe more freely and you have softened into your core. You begin to live from the inside out, so you are bathed in your own atmosphere no matter where you go. With every breath you drink in the sweetness and your entire body is saturated with tender joy. Without any effort or abstract rule, tender joy for others bleeds through. Sensing this, people respond in kind, and even chance meetings in the market or street can be rich with heart. You are permeable, connected and available for life. You have melted into the stream of love that pulses through every body, the unchanging reality behind the changing shapes. Like a river pulled toward the ocean, you glide into deeper waters, the eternal now beneath the passage of time. Slowly, quietly, tenderly, you slide home.

Your Passion, Pleasure, and Inner Peace"
© Camille Maurine & Lorin Roche, Ph.D. (HarperOne, 2001)

Say I Am You

I am dust particles in sunlight,
I am the round sun.

To the bits of dust I say, Stay.
To the sun, Keep moving.

I am morning mist,
and the breathing of evening.
I am wind in the top of a grove,
and surf on the cliff.

Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel,
I am also the coral reef they founder on.

I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branches.
Silence, thought, and voice.

The musical air coming through a flute,
a spark of stone, a flickering
in metal. Both candle,
and the moth crazy around it.
Rose, and the nightingale
lost in the fragrance.

I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,
the evolutionary intelligence, the lift,
and the falling away.

What is, and what isn’t.

You who know Jelaluddin,
You the one in all, say who I am.
Say I am You.

-Rumi

http://vimeo.com/channels/tomoveyou

I tried to build an igloo out of orange peel but it kept falling down and even when it stood up I didn't have an eskimo to put in it, so I had to invent a story about 'How Eskimo Got Eaten', which made me even more miserable. It's always the same with diversions; you get involved

"The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love."

"What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don't want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don't want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you."
— Jeanette Winterson

Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember.
Lies 2: Time is a straight line.
Lies 3: The difference between the past and the future is that one has happened while the other has not.
Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time.
Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word "finite" (the world, the universe, experience, ourseleves...)
Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon.
Lies 7: Reality as truth.

All times can be inhabited, all places be visited. In a single day the mind can make a millpond of the oceans. Some people who never have crossed the land they were born on have travelled all over the world. The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body. The self is not contained in any moment or any place, but it is only in the intersection of moment and place that the self might, for a moment, be seen vanishing through a door, which disappears at once. (p. 80)

from: Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson

It is not so much light that falls over the world
spreading inside your body its suffocating snow,
as brightness, pouring itself out of you,
as if you were on fire from within.

Under your skin the moon is alive

Neruda. Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks

All these fellows were there inside when she entered
utterly naked.
They΄d been drinking and began to spit at her,
recently come from the river, she understood nothing.
She was a mermaid who had lost her way,
the taunts flowed over her glistening flesh
Obscenities drenched her golden breasts.

A stranger to tears, she did not weep,
A stranger to clothes, she did not dress.
They pocked her with cigarette ends and with burnt corks
And rolled on the tavern floor in raucous laughter
She did not speak, since speech was unknown to her
Her eyes were the colour of far away love
Her arms were matching topazes
Her lips moved soundlessly in coral light
And ultimately she left by that door
Hardly had she entered the river than she was cleansed
Gleaming once more like a white stone in the rain
And without a backward look, she swam once more
Swam towards nothingness, swam to her dawn.

"Yet the traveler, once in a long while, comes to a place he is sure, never having seen it before, is the one he was seeking. He enters. At first everything inside is so saturated with strangeness it is hard to breathe -- but look now: already it is drying in from the edges like rainwater and he will in fact never after be able to recover that blankness in which he saw it first, the surgery of the first look. That moment of pure anthropology."

"I used to think when I was younger and writing that each idea had a certain shape and when I started to study Greek and I found the word morphe it was for me just the right word for that, unlike the word shape in English which falls a bit short morphe in greek means the the sort of plastic contours that an idea has inside your all your senses when you grasp it the first moment and it always seemed to me that a work should play out that same contour in its form. So I can’t start writing something down til I get a sense of that, that morphe. And then it unfolds, I wouldn’t say naturally, but it unfolds gropingly by keeping only to the contours of that form whatever it is."

— Anne Carson

just listen wildly

Nothing is ever the same

we are supporters of slow revolutions...

To institute means to begin, and the school – cultivating consciousness of time – is about beginnings in space. I hope to establish a school of questions rather than of answers; of uncertainty and doubt. It is my firm belief that we can cultivate a relationship with these unstable modes of being, letting questions spawn new questions. Currently, it seems productive to acknowledge one’s insecurity rather than progressing according to rationalised and standardised modes of understanding. By accommodating uncertainty, I think we strengthen our ability to re-negotiate our surroundings. Let me therefore suggest a principle: the success of a model lies in its ability to re-evaluate itself. It thus emerges that no artistic formula is waiting at the end of our inquiries.

http://www.raumexperimente.net/text-en.html

Mono no aware

物の哀れ mono no aware^?, lit. "the pathos of things"), also translated as "an empathy toward things," or "a sensitivity of ephemera," is a Japanese term used to describe the awareness of mujo or the transience of things and a bittersweet sadness at their passing.

The word is derived from the Japanese word mono, which means "things" and aware, which was a Heian period expression of measured surprise (similar to "ah" or "oh"), translating roughly as "pathos," "poignancy," "deep feeling," or "sensitivity." Thus, mono no aware has frequently been translated as "the 'ahh-ness' of things."

I want the light
locked inside to awaken:
crystalline flower,
wake as I do:

Eyelids raise the curtain
of endless earthen time
until deeply buried eyes
flash clear enough again
to see their own clarity

~Pablo Neruda

I make things, but I need somebody else to see it with me. I look at an object on the table, and I have no empathy with it. I think, I am in a way senseless, but then you come into the room and the object starts to glow. I need you to know the world is there, which is why I am so obsessed with the structure of the world." -Olafur Eliasson

starglow

Messes

Whispers

i ii iii

Let's do this

You'll be given love
You'll be taken care of
You'll be given love
You have to trust it

Maybe not from the sources
You have poured yours
Maybe not from the directions
You are staring at

Twist your head around
It's all around you
All is full of love
All around you

All is full of love
You just ain't receiving
All is full of love
Your phone is off the hook
All is full of love
Your doors are all shut
All is full of love!

All is full of love
All is full of love
All is full of love
All is full of love
All is full of love

It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.



-Mary Oliver

"The words "I" and "Love" and "You" are the watermark of humanity. Strung together, they convey our deepest sense of humility, of power, of truth. It is our most common sentiment, even as the feeling of it is so infinitely uncommon: each to proclaim these three words with his or her very own heart and mindset of reason (or lack thereof); a proclamation completely and perfectly new each time it is offered. Uttered daily and nightly by millions, the words are said in an unending array of circumstances : whispered to a newborn in a mothers arms; shared between best friends on the playground; in the form of sympathy - said by a girl to a boy, as the respect continues but the relationship does not. It is said too loudly by parents to embarassed children in the company of their friends, and by grown children - to their fading parents in hospital beds. The words are thought in the company of the photograph and said in the company of the gravestone. It is how we end our phone calls and our letters... the words at the bottom of the page that trump all those above it, a way to gracefully finish a message, however important or trivial, with the most meaningful gifl of all : the communication of love. And yet the words themselves have been the victims of triviality, a ready replacement for lesser salutations among near strangers, burst forth casually as "love ya." Truly? To what degree? Why, how much, and for how long? These are questions befitting of the stature of love, though not the everyday banter of vague acquaintance. The words have also been twisted by the dark nature of deceit : To say "I love you" with a dramatic measure of synthetic emotion; a snare set by those who prey uponn fellow humanity, driven to whatever selfish end, to gain access to another's body, or their money, or their opportunity. In this realm, the proclamation is disgraced by one seeking to gain rather than to give. In any case, and by whatever inspiration, these words are woven deeply in to the fibers of our existence. Our longing to hear them from the right place is maddeningly and simultaneously our finest strength and our most gentle weakness.The album "I and Love and You" is inashamedly defined by such a dynamic of duality. As living people, we are bound by this unavoidable parallel. We are powerful yet weak, capable yet temporary. Inevitably, an attempt to place honesty within an artistic avenue will follow suit. This is a piece which shows us as we are : products of love surrounded by struggle. The music herein is, in many ways, readable as both a milestone and an arrival. A chapter in the story of young men, it bridges the space between the uncertainty of youth and the reality of it's release. The record is full with the quality of the question and response. As far as questions go, there are plenty-normally residing within the tone and delivery of the lyrics themselves, which, ironically, are sung with so much confidence. Among songs and thoughts so driven and purposeful, the most basic relatable doubt comes through with a resounding clarity. Outside of the eternal theme of romantic love, the album speaks thankfully upon a landscape of light-filled rooms, word-filled pages, time machines, forgiveness, singing birds, ocean waves, art, change, confessions of shortcomings, and reasons to continue on. Hope and a cause for smiling follow naturally. In the midst of all this, there are allusions to the less-than-ideal conditions of life : the loss of memory, the inability to control temper, insecurity, indecision, jaded indifference, and the general plague of former and current weakness. "I and Love and You" is an album of obvious human creation, chracterized by it's best and it's worst. Emotional imperfection is a reality for those who recorded the piece, just as it is for those who will hear it. The conclusion of the song from which the title is taken admits that the words "I love you" have become "hard to say". And perhaps that difficulty is as common as it's counterpart. Perhaps the inability to say these heaviest of words is as much a part of life as the lighthearted candor of those who say them without any difficulty at all. And so it ends with the phrase whispered to and by those of us most defeated and most elated... I and love and you."

- The Avett Brothers

the lover
is the loved,
the horizon
and everything
within it...
- rumi

PAINT

Terrible destruction dances and the world’s days darken.
If you want Supreme Reality, hide from fame.
You’re looking for the Pearl? Plunge, now to the sea’s bottom.
What’s on the shore is only foam.

~Rumi

Don't forget love;
it will bring all the madness you need
to unfurl yourself across
the universe.

So he continued his quest, and if it was lonely, well, most quests are. That was what art was for. When you are born lost at sea, without compass or directions, you learn to navigate by the sun and moon and stars, those gorgeous baubles. You follow what light you have. You make your own.

http://annwood.net/blog/

so nice

in the blue sky we and a bee

a supercute song

“snippings.” A snipping is where you see or hear something that you find interesting or odd. You snip it and put it in your notebook.

Jane Hirschfield says,

Three times my life has opened.
Once, into the darkness and rain.
Once, into what the body carries at all times within it and
starts to remember each time it enters the act of love.
Once, to the fire that holds all.
These three were not different.
You will recognize what i am saying or you will not.
But outside my window all day a maple has stepped from
her leaves like a woman in love with winter, dropping
the colored silks.
Neither are we different in what we know.
There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip
of light stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on
the floor, or the one red leaf the snow releases in March.

void

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joteva/4006666671/in/set-72157622574347864/

You are stunned, powerless.
You thought you knew
What was going on.
Now you realize you don't have a clue.

You are stopped in your tracks.
Everything within your skin is shaking.
Enter this shaking...

Right here, in the midst of commotion -
Get curious, look around inside with wonder.
All the walls have fallen down.
Unmind your mind!
Go ahead and dissolve.

The One Who Has Always Been,
Who has seen much worse than this,
Is still here.

Excerpt from The Radiance Sutras
© by Lorin Roche, Ph.D. 2008

LIZARD

 
click for big love

I have the feeling as if I were dissolving

dame darcy

half moon

Casey says, fill up on the big bird and sing the dark gravy blues and a humble pie for the ancestors and holy gratitude i exude thank you for this food and this beautiful human brood Love love love love crazy love give me love...........crazy love Heavenly father, Earthly mother Your blessings I feel in my heart. I AM your infinite child of glory Aho!!!

white rib smile

“This is love:

to fly toward a secret sky,

to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment.

First to let go of life.

Finally, to take a step without feet.”

Rumi

Enigmas by Pablo Neruda

You've asked me what the lobster is weaving there with
his golden feet?
I reply, the ocean knows this.
You say, what is the ascidia waiting for in its transparent
bell? What is it waiting for?
I tell you it is waiting for time, like you.
You ask me whom the Macrocystis alga hugs in its arms?
Study, study it, at a certain hour, in a certain sea I know.
You question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal,
and I reply by describing
how the sea unicorn with the harpoon in it dies.
You enquire about the kingfisher's feathers,
which tremble in the pure springs of the southern tides?
Or you've found in the cards a new question touching on
the crystal architecture
of the sea anemone, and you'll deal that to me now?
You want to understand the electric nature of the ocean
spines?
The armored stalactite that breaks as it walks?
The hook of the angler fish, the music stretched out
in the deep places like a thread in the water?

I want to tell you the ocean knows this, that life in its
jewel boxes
is endless as the sand, impossible to count, pure,
and among the blood-colored grapes time has made the
petal
hard and shiny, made the jellyfish full of light
and untied its knot, letting its musical threads fall
from a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl.

I am nothing but the empty net which has gone on ahead
of human eyes, dead in those darknesses,
of fingers accustomed to the triangle, longitudes
on the timid globe of an orange.

I walked around as you do, investigating
the endless star,
and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked,
the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind.

faeries & shopping in the forest

mm fun

reflexology/handchart

footchart

when you come, let's make our movie

bring costumes

it will be a docu-fable.


i ii iii

Feather to Fire, Fire to Blood, Blood to Bone, Bone to Marrow, Marrow to Ashes, Ashes to Snow

http://www.ashesandsnow.org/en/flash-popup.php#codex

the whales do not sing because they have an answer
they sing because they have a song

xxo

Both of us must swear to this

or neither of us can

live forever.

Dreaming, Dreaming - A Sutra for the Equinox

Dreaming, dreaming, sleeping, awakening -
Rhythms of darkness and light.
Day and night, night and day, wondering...
...Who am I? Who AM I?
Who is morphing through this
Ever-shifting flow?

Beloved, wake up!
Dance in your true body before time,
Shimmering energy without end.

from The Radiance Sutras
© by Lorin Roche, Ph.D. 2008

Always check your inner state

with the lord of your heart.

Copper does not know it’s copper,

until it’s changing into gold.

Your loving does not know its majesty,

until it knows its helplessness.

- Rumi

"If it is a rose, it will come into bloom sooner or later"

francesca woodman

"I wondered will there come a time when we won't be joking? And what would that look like? And how would that feel?
When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.
I spent my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."

- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

if nobody speaks of remarkable things

He says my daughter, and all the love he has is wrapped up in the tone of his voice when he says those two words, he says my daughter you must always look with both of your eyes and listen with both of your ears. He says this is a very big world and there are many many things you could miss if you are not careful. He says there are remarkable things all the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are.

He says, if nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?

He looks at her and he knows she doesn't understand, he doesn't think she'll even remember it to understand when she is older. But he tells her these things all the same, it is good to say them aloud, they are things people do not think and he wants to place them into the air.

Angels, he says, and she leans forward as if she is expecting him to pass on a secret. I do not know about angels he says, perhaps there are many, perhaps they are here now he says, and she looks around and stands closer to him and he smiles. But there are people too he says, everywhere there are people and I think it is easier to hold hands with people than it is with angels, yes?

from If nobody speaks of remarkable things by Jon McGregor

Shira Sela, "Healing."
(http://www.shirasela.com/)

STARHEART

The beginning of something tiny and grand...