How goes a life? Something like the ocean building dead coral.
Tenderness contains an element of sadness. It is not the sadness of feeling sorry for yourself or feeling deprived but it is a natural situation of fullness. You feel so full and rich, as if you were about to shed tears. Your eyes are full of tears, and the moment you blink, the tears will spill out of your eyes and roll down your cheeks. In order to be a good warrior, one has to feel this sad and tender heart. If a person does not feel alone and sad, he cannot be a warrior at all.
I saved a snowflake for each single hour you were away.
“I want the peace of God.” To say these words is nothing. But to mean these words is everything. . . . No one can mean these words and not be healed. He cannot play with dreams, nor think he is himself a dream. He cannot make a hell and think it real. He wants the peace of God, and it is given him. For that is all he wants, and that is all he will receive. Many have said these words. But few indeed have meant them. You have but to look upon the world around you to be sure how very few they are.
Many we have worked with who were not in pain had less of a tendency to investigate, had less motivation to examine and begin to let go of their suffering. Because things weren’t “so bad after all,” they imagined they could somehow hide from death in the same way they had hidden from life.
The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.
Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars It is my emptiness among them While they drift farther away in the invisible morning.
The Chinese say that poetry is the direction of your will. If that is not enough, you add a sigh. If that does not express what you mean completely, you chant or sing it. If that is not enough, you move your arms and legs, too; you dance. That is poetry.
The poem is the point at which our strength gave out.
How simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. . . . All that is required to feel that here and now is happiness, is a simple, frugal heart.
The face is masklike. It does not smile. It does not want to charm the mirror, or deceive the mirror, or flirt with it and gain a false answer. . . . You can never catch the face alive, laughing or loving.
The ring always believes that the finger lives for it.
All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence, in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song — but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.
The melody is in the eyes.
What is this darkness? What is its name? Call it: an aptitude for sensitivity. Call it: a rich sensitivity which will make you whole. Call it: your potential for vulnerability.
The blues is the truth. You’d better believe that what they’re telling you is the truth.
When mind soars in pursuit of the things conceived in space, it pursues emptiness. But when the man dives deep within himself, he experiences the fullness of existence.
It’s all soul.
