November 2011
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October 2011
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Cultivating Mindfulness
Beginning or Deepening a Personal Meditation Practice
Jon Kabat-Zinn
1. The real meditation is how you live your life.
2. In order to live life fully, you have to be present for it.
3. To be present, it helps to purposefully bring awareness to your moments – otherwise you may miss many of them.
4. You do that by paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally to...
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“Haiku is an open-eyed engagement with the word and with the world. It is not so...”
– Gabriel Rosenstock, “Haiku Enlightenment.” With thanks to The Awakened Eye.
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“Book store owners and record store owners used to be oracles, in that way; you’d...”
– Tom Waits (Thank you, buffleheadcabin & nedhepburn)
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“Learn to be internally alone. Don’t allow people and things to invade your...”
– Edward Salim Michael, “The Law of Attention”
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“Speak and write not according to human speech or human inventiveness but to the...”
–
Hildegard Von Bingen (1098-1179)
(Thank you, silencesounds & shamansun)
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“All houses are haunted. All persons are haunted. Throngs of spirits follow us...”
– Barney Sarecky. From Whiskey River.
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“I feel as if I am an ad
for the sale of a haunted house:
18 rooms
$37,000...”
– Richard Brautigan, with thanks to Whiskey River.
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Why do I write?
I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being. Any new metaphor is a telescope, a canoe in...
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“The true poem rests between the words.”
– Vanna Bonta, novelist and poet (Thank you, A Poet Reflects & Silence Sounds).
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“When I close a book
I open life.”
– Pablo Neruda, Ode to the Book - I, translation by Nathaniel Tarn (Thank you, arsvitaest)
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“From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an...”
– Katsuhika Hokusai (Thanks to theshipthatflew)
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“A man can’t know where he is on the Earth except in relation to the moon or a...”
– Paul Auster, American author known for works blending absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction and the search for identity and personal meaning, Effing in Moon Palace, Viking Press, 1989 (Thank you, amiquote)
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“…Vast and spacious, like sky and water merging during autumn, like snow and moon...”
– Hongzhi Zhenjue (1091–1157) Thank you, it’salldhamma.
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Silence | Sounds: Along the Lines →
I Sun glints from the frozen river. This is the world’s roof. Silence. I sit on an overturned boat, pulled up on shore, swallow the silence-potion, I am slowly turning. II A wheel stretches out endlessly, is turning. The hub is here, is nearly motionless. Some motion farther out: tracks in the snow, words that begin to slide past building fronts. The hum of traffic from the highway and the...
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“I don’t experience life in a linear fashion, in any kind of continuum. It’s...”
– Amy Hempel, BOMB 59 (Thank you human-voices & invisiblestories)
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“O my good friends gathered here,
If you desire to listen to the thunderous...”
– Dai-o Kokushi (Thank you, sharanam)
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Sitting without a sitter →
“It’s not often you find an article on “just sitting” or choiceless awareness practice. Highly relevant to my post from the other day! Thanks Bodhipaksa.”
Great article, and also very timely. Thank you, sharanam.
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“Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we’re going to...”
– On today’s Fresh Air, poet Marie Howe discusses several of her poems, which deal with topics such as loss, love, spirituality, gender, sexuality and intimacy. (Thank you, W.W. Norton & nprfreshair).
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“Being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than...”
– Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Thank you, redviena & simplicityduplicity)
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“It is the only life I care about—to write, to go out occasionally and ‘lose...”
– Katherine Mansfield, from a letter dated 11 August 1917 (Thank you proustitute & katherine-mansfield)
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“I’d like to have spent my life making
Clothespins. Nothing would be harmed,...”
– Robert Bly, Clothespins (Thank you, paynehollow & whiskey river)
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“What is the self? What is personality? Don’t be afraid of being a personality,...”
– Ajahn Sumedho, Self-view, Personality and Awareness (This a great talk. and very timely. Thank you, sharanam)
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“How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren’t, after...”
– Galway Kinnell, from “Another Night in the Ruins” (Thank you, proustitute)
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“There has to be an invisible sun
It gives its heat to everyone
There has to be...”
– The Police: “Invisible Sun”
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Utterly and Magnificently… Useless. →
“In other words, art is useless, at least when compared, say, to the work of a plumber, or a doctor, or a railroad engineer. But is uselessness a bad thing? Does a lack of practical purpose mean that books and paintings and string quartets are simply a waste of our time? Many people think so. But I would argue that it is the very uselessness of art that gives it its value and that the...
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“This is the theory … that anything that is art … is presumably about some...”
– Edward Gorey (Great! Thank you, francine) 