*in sorrow, pretend to be fearless. in happiness, tremble.md (146B)

#pinned 24

No one becomes light in a day. While pleasure may be natural and easy, happiness must be learned; one must become conscious of all the values that lightness and happiness have in common.

- Gaston Bachelard, on lightness

01

well i really enjoyed forgetting. when i first come to a place, i notice all the little details. i notice the way the sky looks, the color of white paper, the way people talk, doorknobs. everything. then i get used to the place and i don't notice those things anymore. so only by forgetting can i see the place again as it really is.

- True Stories (David Byrne, 1986)

02

"You have to fill the tank. You have to move your body and get out and look at things. You have to talk to people and eat strange food, travel if you can, watch movies with subtitles, listen to music outside of your habits, go to art galleries and concerts, do things you're bad at. You have to challenge yourself, keep learning new things, participate. And all of these things fall under the umbrella of 'Stay curious.' And you have to have fun. My housemate is being fussy with me today because I am talking to the dogs in Spanish about how my father fought in the clone wars. Sometimes I am ridiculous, but sometimes he is joyless."

- A Conversation with Richard Siken by Thomas Hobohm

03

you said once that the life of a poet oscillates between ecstasy and agony, and what mitigates those extremes is the necessary daily business of living. 

yes. friends, conversation, gardens. daily life. it's what we have. i believe in the world. i trust it to provide me.

- Louise Glück, from an interview with poet in Poets & Writers

04

All sins are attempts to fill voids.

- Simone Weil

05

Ideally, he would be out on a shoot right now. Until then there are books. Herzog reads voraciously; he says that all the good directors do. It doesn’t even have to be great literature. His friend, the documentary maker Errol Morris, recently recommended that he read a real piece of crap. “It was a bad book by a failed lion tamer. His arm was bitten off by a lion. He wrote with the other arm. And it’s a wonderful book to read because you have to comb the content against the texture and it gives you fabulous insights into human nature. It is the same with trash movies, trash TV. WrestleMania. The Kardashians. I’m fascinated by it. So I don’t say read Tolstoy and nothing else. Read everything. See everything. The poet must not avert his eyes.”

- Werner Herzog interviewed in The Irish Times, June 30, 2020.

06

"The owner is a man who loves mosses, and the exercise of power. I have no doubts of his sincerity in wishing to protect them from harm, once they conformed to his landscape design.  But I think you cannot own a thing and love it at the same time. Owning diminishes the sovreignty of a thing, enriching the possessor and diminishing the possessed. If he truly loved mosses more than control, he would have left them alone, and walked each day to see them."

- Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer 

07

You are so young, all still lies ahead of you, and I should like to ask you, as best I can, dear Sir, to be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

08

There is a very simple secret to being happy. Just let go of your demand on this moment. Any time you have a demand on the moment to give you something or remove something, there is suffering. Your demands keep you chained to the dream state of conditioned mind. The problem is that when there is a demand, you completely miss what is now. Letting go applies to the highest sacred demand, and even to the demand for love. If you demand in some subtle way to be loved, even if you get love, it is never enough. In the next moment, the demand reasserts itself, and you need to be loved again. But as soon as you let go, there is knowing in that instant that there is love here already. The mind is afraid to let go of its demand because the mind thinks that if it lets go, it is not going to get what it wants - as if demanding works. This is not the way things work. Stop chasing peace and stop chasing love, and your heart becomes full. Stop trying to be a better person, and you are a better person. Stop trying to forgive, and forgiveness happens. Stop and be still.

- Adyashanti, Emptiness Dancing

09

"Addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure. A good life is a progressive expansion of the things that being you pleasure. Btw"

- Sam Jumex, 2023

10

To be human is much more than being born, getting an education, finding the right partner, and getting a pretty house on. nice street, just so that you can sleep, wake, work, go to bed, and do it all over again. It is an invitation to feel everything, to come into direct contact with the strange, beautiful, horrible, and often perfectly ordinary thing we call life. 

- Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully (Flatiron Books, Mar 14, 2017)

11

I wrote a pep talk recently to myself on a bar napkin: 'no matter which road you take, it will be both glorious and unbearable'. Every road is lonely. Every road, holy. The only error is not walking forth". 

Yesterday, a friend in California, when giving me directions, told me I could take the trail toward the tall pines or turn left and find a field of poppies, growing gold and savage at the end of the valley. 

When I asked which to choose, she simply said: 'either way, it's all heaven'.

- Joy Sullivan, from “Culpable”, Instructions for Traveling West

12

GQ: What were the specific things that used to make you happy when you were a child?

David Lynch: Freshly-mown lawn smell. Sunshine. Trees. Friends. A feeling in the air of optimism. Beautiful automobiles. Girls. A girl's face. A smile. A sparkle in the eye. The shape...the smell...the dream. Daydreaming. Daydreaming on a warm summer's day with planes in the sky, drone propeller planes, big propeller planes droning in the sky, with blue skies, sunshine, and being with my friends, carving weapons out of wood, working with wood, working with wood and smelling wood, drawing, drawing pictures, and discovering things like insects in the earth or in the grass and watching them—watching nature.

- David Lynch Tells GQ His Secrets to Happiness

13

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes—you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It's the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand.

- Rebecca Solnit, from Hope in the Dark

14

“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”

— Bell Hooks

15

I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep.

- May Sarton, The Journals of May Sarton Volume One

16

“They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.  You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love. 

The Wobblies used to say don't mourn, organize, but you can do both at once and you don't have to organize right away in this moment of furious mourning. You can be heartbroken or furious or both at once; you can scream in your car or on a cliff; you can also get up tomorrow and water the flowerpots and call someone who's upset and check your equipment for going onward. 

A lot of us are going to come under direct attack, and a lot of us are going to resist by building solidarity and sanctuary. Gather up your resources, the metaphysical ones that are heart and soul and care, as well as the practical ones. 

People kept the faith in the dictatorships of South America in the 1970s and 1980s, in the East Bloc countries and the USSR, women are protesting right now in Iran and people there are writing poetry. There is no alternative to persevering, and that does not require you to feel good. You can keep walking whether it's sunny or raining. Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.”

- Rebecca Solnit

17

I have learned in these last years to forget the desk and everything on it as soon as I leave this room. The key to being centered seems to be for me to do each thing with absolute concentration, to garden as though that were the essential, then to write in the same way, to meet my friends, perfectly open to what they bring. And most of the time that is how it is.

- May Sarton, The House by the Sea

18

You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again.

- "The Brothers Karamazov", Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by Constance Garnett)

19

To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful. Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. But in the long run, it comes back on us. You cannot stay away from yourself forever, you have to return, have to come to that experiment, to know whether you really can love. That is the question-whether you can love yourself, and that will be the test.

— C.G. Jung, "Memories, Dreams, Reflections" (Pantheon Books, 1961) (via Dylan O'Sullivan)

20

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. Even if one were to walk for one's health and it were constantly one station ahead - I would still say: Walk! Besides, it is also apparent that in walking one constantly gets as close to well-being as possible, even if one does not quite reach it - but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Health and salvation can be found only in motion. If anyone denies that motion exists, I do as Diogenes did, I walk. If anyone denies that health resides in motion, then I walk away from all morbid objections. Thus, if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.

- Søren Kierkegaard, in a letter to his niece Henriette Lund, 1847

21

start seeing everything as God, but keep it a secret 

- hafez

22

“How, then, does one become an activist?

The easy answer would be to say that we do not become activists; we simply forget that we are. We are all born with compassion, generosity, and love for others inside us. We are all moved by injustice and discrimination. We are all, inside, concerned human beings. We all want to give more than to receive. We all want to live in a world where solidarity and companionship are more important values than individualism and selfishness. We all want to share beautiful things; experience joy, laughter, love; and experiment, together.”

- Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

23

"To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go."

- Mary Oliver, from "In Blackwater Woods" in American Primitive 

congratulations.md (390B)