Only Love Lasts

The dawn is not distant, nor is the night starless;
love is eternal.

H.W. Longfellow

The Mind And Awareness

There is no ideal in observation.
When you have an ideal,
you cease to observe,
you are then merely
approximating the
present to the idea,
and therefore there
is duality, conflict,
and all the rest of it.

The mind has to be in the
state when it can see, observe.
The experience of the observation
is really an astonishing state.

In that there is no duality.
The mind is simply—aware.

—Jiddu Krishnamurti

A Poem For Xenia

"I put this on,

my big sister's dress

and you take some snaps,

and some more snaps...

here, here, like this

as I sniff the rose."

Animated laughter

Snorting, Roaring,

Giggling,

All those yellings

Xenia zapping

my serial disquiet. :)

With Much, Much Love,
Tita N.

Live your best life

And if you can’t shape your life the way you want,
at least try as much as you can
not to degrade it
by too much contact with the world,
by too much activity and talk.

Try not to degrade it by dragging it along,
taking it around and exposing it so often
to the daily silliness
of social events and parties,
until it comes to seem a boring hanger-on.

C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems, "As Much As You Can"

The Sacred in Everyday Life

Photograph: Tarhata Estacaan "Rustic Kitchen", March 2012

  “Daily”

A poem by Naomi Shihab Nye

These shriveled seeds we plant,
corn kernel, dried bean,
poke into loosened soil,
cover over with measured fingertips

These T-shirts we fold into
perfect white squares

These tortillas we slice and fry to crisp strips
This rich egg scrambled in a gray clay bowl

This bed whose covers I straighten
smoothing edges till blue quilt fits brown blanket
and nothing hangs out

This envelope I address
so the name balances like a cloud
in the center of sky

This page I type and retype
This table I dust till the scarred wood shines
This bundle of clothes I wash and hang and wash again
like flags we share, a country so close
no one needs to name it

The days are nouns: touch them
The hands are churches that worship the world

accepting others

When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.

― Donald Miller

real strength

I've come to know, 

the better I feel about myself, 

the less I feel the need to show off.

~Indigo Girl

On Clarity

For those who confuse you, 

recognize that their confusion is theirs 

and your clarity is yours.

― Barbara Marciniak,
Family of Light: Pleiadian Tales and Lessons in Living

The poet dreams of the mountain

Sometimes I grow weary of the days, with all their fits and starts.
I want to climb some old gray mountains, slowly, taking
The rest of my lifetime to do it, resting often, sleeping
Under the pines or, above them, on the unclothed rocks.

I want to see how many stars are still in the sky
That we have smothered for years now, a century at least.
I want to look back at everything, forgiving it all,
And peaceful, knowing the last thing there is to know.

All that urgency! Not what the earth is about!
How silent the trees, their poetry being of themselves only.
I want to take slow steps, and think appropriate thoughts.
In ten thousand years, maybe, a piece of the mountain will fall.

― Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems

Carl Gustav Jung

Simple things are always the most difficult. In actual life it requires the greatest art to be simple, and so acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the acid test of one’s whole outlook on life. That I feed the beggar, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy… all these are undoubtedly great virtues…

But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yea, the very fiend himself-that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved-what then?

—Carl Gustav Jung