Journey In Word
"The longest journey of any person
is the journey inward."
Drumsound rises on the air,
its throb, my heart.
A voice inside the beat
says, “I know you’re tired,
but come. This is the way.”
– Jeláluddín Rúmí
(trans. by Coleman Barks)
"Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool
where you least expect it, there will be a fish."
"To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand."
"He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder."
"The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting
for our wits to grow sharper."
"The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention."
"You can observe a lot by watching."
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious."
"The job of the artist is to deepen the mystery."
"I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery
than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it."
"The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest."
"The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is."
"One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of
the shore for a very long time."
"A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving."
"It’s hard to make a comeback when you haven’t been anywhere."
"We don’t go anywhere. Going somewhere is for squares.
We just go!"
"If you’re not where you are, you’re nowhere!"
"Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart."
"Being on the tightrope is living; everything else is waiting. "
"The spider’s touch, how exquisitely fine!
Feels at each thread, and lives along the line."
"Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."
"Adventure is worthwhile."
"Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path
and leave a trail."
"When you come to a fork in the road, take it."
"If you don’t know where you are going, you can never get lost."
"Mum reckoned that getting lost and finding your way were just different
sides of the same coin. You couldn’t have one without the other."
"Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn,
whatever state I may be in, therein to be content."
"When it gets dark enough you can see the stars."
"We carry with us the wonders we seek without us."
"Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the Earth are
never alone or weary of life."
"Bitterness imprisons life; love releases it."
"If a thing loves, it is infinite."
"This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils
to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without
feet."
"Revelations are found in clouds."
"Where there is no vision, people perish."
"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
"There’s a wonder in the way we’re always free
To change the world by changing how we see."
Craven (from "Love’s Shining Peace")
"The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your
spirit, till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the
merest puff."
"In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism and skepticism and
humbug and we shall want to live more musically."
"The music in my heart I bore long after it was heard no more."
"Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance
on the head of a pin, but materialists have always known it depends on whether
they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek."
"If you are going to walk on thin ice, you might as well dance."
"He who does not dance does not know what happens."
"It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing."
"Every tree and plant in the meadow seemed to be dancing, those which
average eyes would see as fixed and still."
"And everything comes to One,
As we dance on, dance on, dance on."
"We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows."
"Look within! … The secret is inside you."
"A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait."
"Now is the dwelling place of God himself."
"The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and
the circumference is nowhere."
"God is so omnipresent…God is an angel in an angel, and a stone in
a stone, and a straw in a straw."
"Lift the stone and you will find me;
cleave the wood and I am there."
"Therefore, if you want to discover nature’s nakedness, you must destroy
its symbols, and the farther you get in the nearer you come to its essense.
When you come to the One that gathers all things up into itself, there your
soul must stay."
"I suppose what makes me most glad is that we all recognize each other
in this metaphysical space of silence and happening, and get some sense, for
a moment, that we are full of paradise without knowing it."
"The drum of the realization of the promise is beating, we are sweeping
the road to the sky. Your joy is here today, what remains for tomorrow?"
"Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. And today? Today is a
gift. That’s why we call it The Present."
"Ever notice that the area of a department store containing completely
useless objects is called ‘gifts?’"
"One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach; one can
collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few."
"You can’t have everything… where would you put it?"
"Keep your hands open, and all the sands of the desert can pass through
them. Close them, and all you can feel is a bit of grit."
"I have held many things in my hands, and I have lost them all; but
whatever I have placed in God’s hands, that I still possess."
"What you pursue, you don’t get. But what you allow to grow slowly
in its own way, comes to you."
"Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form."
"In the hour of adversity be not without hope
For crystal rain falls from black clouds."
"When we long for life without difficulties, remind us that oaks grow
strong in contrary winds and diamonds are made under pressure."
"Good timber does not grow with ease. The stronger the wind the stronger
the trees."
"Sometimes I go about pitying myself
And all the while I am being carried across the sky
By beautiful clouds."
"What the caterpillar calls the end of the world the master calls a
butterfly."
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared
to what lies within us."
"What I am is good enough if I would only be it openly."
"Be yourself. The world worships the original."
"If I try to be like him, who will be like me?"
"God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM."
"Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing
it."
"This above all: to thine own self be true."
"When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville."
"Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no
birds sang except those that sang best."
"You don’t get harmony when everybody sings the same note."
"Pay no attention to what the critics say;
no statue has ever been erected to a critic."
"Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around."
"Find the seed at the bottom of your heart and bring forth a flower."
"Don’t be afraid to be amazing."
Andy Offutt Irwin
(during a late night Waffle House conversation)
"Don’t dream it – be it!"
"Do, or do not. There is no try. "
"Love the earth and sun and animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labor to others . . .
And your very flesh shall be a great poem."
"Wise sayings often fall on barren ground, but a kind word is never
thrown away."
"The highest form of wisdom is kindness."
"Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind.
The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind."
"They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you
made them feel."
"To ease another’s heartache is to forget one’s own."
"We are here on Earth to do good for others. What the others are here
for, I do not know."
"If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to
be happy, practice compassion."
"If you would be loved, love, and be loveable."
"To receive everything, one must open one’s hands and give."
"To give pleasure to a single heart by a single kind act is better
than a thousand head-bowings in prayer."
"Light is good from whatever lamp it shines."
"To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it."
"Anger is a wind which blows out the lamp of the mind."
"Keep your words sweet—you may have to eat them."
"I don’t let my mouth say nothin’ my head can’t stand."
"Sometimes it’s worse to win a fight than to lose."
"Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there."
"Muddy water,
let stand
becomes clear."
"When people bother you in any way, it is because their souls are trying
to get your divine attention and your blessing."
"Life is an adventure in forgiveness."
"And God said love me, love them, and love it, and don’t forget to
love yourself."
"If we could share this world below, If we could learn to love…
If we could share this world below, We’d need no world above."
"Some set more by such things as come from a distance, but I rec’lect
mother always used to maintain that folks was meant to be doctored with the
stuff that grew right about ‘em."
"The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it
under his feet."
"The same stream of life that runs through the world runs through my
veins night and day in rhythmic measure. It is the same life that shoots in
joy through the dust of the earth into numberless waves of flowers."
"God bless the roots! Body and soul are one."
"Every blade of grass has its Angel that bends over it and whispers,
"Grow, grow."
"We are each others angels, we meet when it is time."
"I’ve seen and met angels wearing the disguise of ordinary people living
ordinary lives."
"The difference from a person and an angel is easy. Most of an angel
is in the inside and most of a person is on the outside."
"Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads."
"The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great
opportunity is where you are."
"You are invited to the festival of this world and your life is blessed."
"To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites."
"A hand-rolled
Dumpling of
Heaven-and-earth:
I’ve gulped it down
And easily it went."
"If you have two loaves of bread, sell one and buy a lily."
"Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would
still plant my apple tree."
"When the world is falling apart around you, drink tea."
"We come spinning out of nothingness, scattering stars like dust."
"Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while."
"In wildness is the preservation of the world."
"Every now and again take a good look at something not made with hands—a
mountain, a star, the turn of a stream. There will come to you wisdom and
patience and solace and, above all, the assurance that you are not alone in
the world."
"Be still and know that I am with you."
"Inside the Great Mystery that is, we don’t really own anything. What
is this competition we feel then, before we go, one at a time, through the
same gate?"
"We do not want churches because they will teach us to quarrel about
God."
"Every day people are straying away from church and going back to God."
"Re-examine all you have been told . . . Dismiss what insults your
Soul."
"It is difficult to make a man miserable while he feels worthy of himself
and claims kindred to the great God who made him."
"God never made His work for man to mend."
"Civilization has been thrust upon me… and it has not added one whit
to my love for truth, honesty, and generosity."
"We are all born charming, fresh, and spontaneous and must be civilized
before we are fit to participate in society."
"The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization."
"Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been
sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious,
and immature."
"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided
missiles and misguided men."
"Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms."
"If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong
to each other."
"Peace is not a relationship of nations. It is a condition of mind
brought about by a serenity of soul. Lasting peace can come only to peaceful
people."
"I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent
less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness
and respecting her seniority."
"Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other
alternatives."
"Wisdom is a life that knows it is living."
"A wise man is nothin’ but a fool with a good memory."
"Be happy. It’s one way of being wise."
"Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your
smile can be the source of your joy."
"Although the world is very full of suffering, it is also full of
the overcoming of it."
"This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad
in it."
"A day without laughter is a day wasted."
"Don’t worry… be happy."
"I want to know God’s thoughts…..the rest are details."
"The best way to know God is to love many things."
"Knock,
And He’ll open the door
Vanish,
And He’ll make you shine like the sun.
Fall,
And He’ll raise you to the heavens.
Become nothing,
And He’ll turn you into everything."
"The universe is made of stories, not of atoms."
"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination
is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles
the world."
"Imagination has always had powers of resurrection that no science
can match."
"Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, and a dark side,
and it holds the universe together."
"We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of
course, powerful muscles, but no personality."
"What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the
whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup."
"Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit."
"A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed
that uses it."
"We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is
moonshine."
"The heart has it’s reasons, of which reason knows nothing."
"I am certain of nothing but the Holiness of the Heart’s affections
and the Truth of the Imagination."
"I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words Bother me.
"When you are deluded and full of doubt, even a thousand books of scripture
are not enough. When you have realized understanding, even one word is too
much."
"It does not require many words to speak the truth."
"No one’s mouth is big enough to utter the whole thing."
"Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things."
"Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees takes off his shoes."
"Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off
your shoes."
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that
counts can be counted."
"Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over
to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know
everything there is to be known."
"Go to you bosom: Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know."
"When your heart speaks, take good notes."
"Faith is an oasis in the heart which can never be reached by the caravan
of thinking."
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential
is invisible to the eye."
"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."
"To those who can dream there is no such place as faraway."
"Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart …
Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens."
"Each indecision brings its own delays and days are lost lamenting
over lost days… What you can do or think you can do, begin it. For boldness
has magic, power, and genius in it."
"The beginning is always today."
"Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight
very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and puts itself in our hands. It
hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday."
"It is human nature to think wisely and act foolishly."
"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm."
"Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the
soul."
"The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt
the impossible, and achieve it, generation after generation."
"Anyone who lives within his means suffers from a lack of imagination."
"If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith."
"In order for you to profit from your mistakes, you have to get out
and make some."
"A man on a mission is far different from a drone on a deadline."
"We’re on a mission from God."
"One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly
making exciting discoveries."
"One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a
dancing star."
"You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus."
"Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do
good things."
"Ideas run wild without discussion."
"Without deviation, progress is not possible."
"The past is a guidepost, not a hitching post."
"I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened
of the old ones."
"To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk."
"Art my slats! I can paint with a shoestring dipped in lard!"
"You can play a shoestring if you’re sincere."
"I’ll play with it first and tell you what it is later."
"Art is running away without ever leaving home."
"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once
he grows up."
"It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are."
"How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?"
"It takes one a long time to become young."
"Things do not change: we change."
"To change one’s life: 1. Start immediately. 2. Do it flamboyantly.
3. No exceptions."
"The aging process has you firmly in its grasp if you never get the
urge to throw a snowball."
"If you never did, you should.
These things are fun, and fun is good."
"It’s never too late to have a happy childhood."
"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a
year of conversation."
"Anything on earth you want to do is play. Anything on earth you have
to do is work. Play will never kill you, work will. I never worked a day in
my life."
"Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome
for children to be always and forever explaining things to them."
"You grow up the day you have your first real laugh at yourself."
"We cannot really love anybody with whom we never laugh."
"Blessed is the person who can laugh at himself—
he’ll never cease to be amused."
"Those who do not know how to weep with their whole heart don’t
know how to laugh either."
"Life is too important to be taken seriously."
"It’s best not to be too moral. You cheat yourself out of too much
life. Aim above morality. If you apply that to life, you’re bound to live
it fully."
"I threw my cup away when I saw a child drinking from his hands at
the trough."
"Water which is too pure has no fish."
"Where there are humans
you’ll find flies,
and Buddhas."
"To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few."
"Unthinking, idle, wild, and young,
I laugh’d and danc’d and talk’d and sung."
"I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of
suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure
joy!"
"I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable …
but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a
grand thing."
"As long as you live, keep learning how to live."
"Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough."
"Look to this Day! For it is Life, the very Life of Life."
"Isn’t it wonderful? All around us, living things!"
"People need joy. Quite as much as clothing. Some of them need it far
more."
"From three to four, he planned to stand perfectly still and think
of what it was like to be alive."
"So you see, imagination needs moodling—long, inefficient, happy
idling, dawdling and puttering."
"All of the animals except man know that the principal business of
life is to enjoy it."
"We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different
and yet the same."
"The purpose of our lives is to be happy."
"If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless
manner, you have learned how to live."
"Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy."
"Punctuality is the thief of time."
"The sooner I fall behind, the more time I have to catch up."
"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."
"Take rest; a field that has rested gives a beautiful crop."
"I take a nap
making the mountain water
pound the rice."
"How beautiful it is to do nothing, and then rest afterward."
"Sit quiety, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself."
"One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing
to do and always a clever thing to say."
"The good and the wise lead quiet lives."
"Patience is the key to paradise."
"The highest happiness of man … is to have probed what is knowable
and quietly to revere what is unknowable."
"The feeling remains that God is on the journey, too."
"Who says the eternal being does not exist?
Who says the sun has gone out?
Someone who climbs up on the roof and closes his eyes tight,
and says, I don’t see anything."
"As I walk, As I walk
The Universe is walking with me."
"The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily
require happiness."
"True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self,
but the point is not only to get out—you must stay out; and to stay out
you must have some absorbing errand."
"Don’t refuse to go on an occasional wild goose chase.
That’s what wild geese are for."
"Geese are friends to no one, they badmouth everybody and everything.
But they are companionable once you get used to their ingratitude and false
accusations."
"If I didn’t start painting, I would have raised chickens"
"Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend.
Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read."
"I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat
us as equals."
"A cat is more intelligent than people believe, and can be taught any crime."
"I love cats. I even think we have one at home."
"I have an Egyptian cat. He leaves a pyramid in every room."
"He looked a fierce and quarrelsome cat, but claw he never would;
He only bit the ones he loved, because they tasted good."
"I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become
its visible soul."
"If cats could talk, they would lie to you."
"If cats could talk, they wouldn’t."
"Every creature is a word of God."
"Every animal knows more than you do.
"Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away."
"Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in."
"If people concentrated on the really important things in life, there’d
be a shortage of fishing poles."
"If you’re too busy to go fishin’, you’re too busy."
"If it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would get done."
"Things are more like they are now than they ever were before."
Tom Seaver: "Hey, Yogi, what time is it?"
Yogi Berra: "You mean now?"
"Look to the future, because that is where you’ll spend the rest of
your life."
"The future will be better tomorrow."
"Life is so short we must move very slowly."
"God knows no distance."
"If I’m not back in five minutes, wait longer."
"Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time."
"To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."
"May you live all the days of your life."
"It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning
to live."
"Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved."
"TODAY."
"Whatever you do may seem insignificant to you, but it is most important
that you do it."
"Old age was simply a delightful time, when the old people sat on the
sunny doorsteps, playing in the sun with the children, until they fell asleep.
At last they failed to wake up."
"A painting is never finished—it simply stops in interesting places."
"I look back on my life like a good day’s work; it was done
and I am satisfied with it."
"Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first
or last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory."
"If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘thank you,’ that
would suffice."
"Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small
ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep
in peace. God is awake."
"Now comes the mystery."
"It is time now for us to rise from sleep."
"Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, "Surely the Lord is
in this place."
"…the fog is rising."
"I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark."
"Get my swan costume ready."
"More light!"
"It’s a magical world, Hobbes, Ol’ Buddy…let’s go exploring!"
. . .
"Well, then I must be off. We shall have to meet again…."
