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After A While

Posted by Ravenous Butterflies
“After a while you learn the subtle difference
Between holding a hand and chaining a soul,
And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning
And company doesn’t mean security.
And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts
And presents aren’t promises,
And you begin to accept your defeats
With your head up and your eyes open
With the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child,
And you learn to build all your roads on today
Because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans
And futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight.
After a while you learn…
That even sunshine burns if you get too much.
So you plant your garden and decorate your own soul,
Instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
And you learn that you really can endure…
That you really are strong
And you really do have worth…
And you learn and learn…
With every good-bye you learn.”
Jorge Luis Borges – You Learn, c.1940.
Oskar Zwintscher – Portrait with Yellow Daffodils,1907

I wish it were true. I wish that after a while I learned. In my lifetime I’ve been big on repeating mistakes. Even when I knew they were mistakes, I thought “this time it will be different.” Of course it wasn’t. And I really thought I could make something happen by sheer will. Not so. Certainly not so when it comes to other people. The problem is you don’t know until you are tested. Given the opportunity I wonder, have I learned? I might have. Maybe. Maybe so.

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A Word From Our Sponsors

There are those men and women whom we turn to always, to rediscover their ideas and words and wisdom. Those people who encourage us to recommit ourselves to our path in life. Those folks who make us say, “Ah, yes, of course!” The ones to whom we say, “Thank you, I needed to hear that.” So I think of them for our purposes here as our Sponsors. They do sponsor us, save us from the world of needs and wants. Here’s two of them.

Posted by Simon Bartholomé

“Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born.”
~ Nikola Tesla

“Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. Make your life worth living.”
~ Albert Einstein

“We are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable. These ties cannot be seen, but we can feel them. To know each other, we must reach beyond the sphere of our sense perceptions.”
~ Nikola Tesla

“When something vibrates, the electrons of the entire universe resonate with it. Everything is connected. The greatest tragedy of human existence is the illusion of separateness.”
~ Albert Einstein

“Instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We have, undoubtedly, certain finer fibers that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction, or any other willful effort of the brain, is futile.”
~ Nikola Tesla

“The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why.
I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me.”
~ Albert Einstein

“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.
Our senses enable us to perceive only a minute portion of the outside world.”
~ Nikola Tesla

“One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike. We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us. It is entirely possible that behind the perception of our senses, worlds are hidden of which we are unaware.”
~ Albert Einstein

“Most certainly, some planets are not inhabited, but others are, and among these there must exist life under all conditions and phases of development.”
~ Nikola Tesla

“Given the millions of billions of earth-like planets, life elsewhere in the universe without a doubt does exist. In the vastness of the universe we are not alone.”
~ Albert Einstein

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Kafka Memories

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” ~Franz Kafka (Book: Letters to Friends, Family and Editors

Posted by Lithub

Our dear Franz. Not many read him anymore, unless in some far-away lit class. I wonder if The Metamorphosis is still taught. I recall that he wrote some small piece about us wanting to be a wild Indian. I thought of it one way and was so moved by it, long ago. How we all want to be a wild Indian, riding on that horse across the prairie. When I looked it up some time ago, it was not the same. Of course my memory was better. But what had set the imagination in play was the original.

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To The Spirits

To our Ancestors, to the Past, to all things mastered and of repent…All Hallows Eve…

  • Posted by Spirit of Old

Nightmares past and present lament, let us now go forth renewed. May all the souls have flown from purgatory, their penance done!

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We Are Light

And now, hearing from another corner about that which we already know.

Tao & Zen
Your body is composed of atoms that are billions of years old, that were born long ago in stellar clouds and the hearts of stars. The energy in those atoms is spinning light that can trace its beginnings to the dawn of the Universe. And that’s just what Science “knows.”
The great masters of numerous spiritual traditions tell us that we are in truth the Field of Consciousness that has created all things, inhabits all beings. This is our deeper Self & Source, core spiritual identity, a hidden “truth” we share with every other person, animal, river, flower, cloud, galaxy, butterfly and tree.
What the mystics of history call “waking up” is when we come back and align with (tune into) this deeper sense of identity. Which is not really “identified” with the limited story of any one person, object or thing.
Spiritual practices like yoga, meditation, chanting and prayer can help us to align in that way. Help us let go of identification with our social thoughts and limited ideas of identity. Help us to go deeper, and return to Source…
~Christopher Chase

Empty yourself of everything.
Let the mind become still.
All things in the Universe rise and fall
while the Self watches their return.
They grow and flourish
and then return to the Source.
Returning to the Source is stillness,
which is the Way of Nature.
~ Lao Tsu ~
Tao Te Ching
The Way of Waking Up – Alan Watts