24 Hours Of Silence

If you get with yourself and you find out that you are all of yourself a very strange thing happens. You find out that your body knows that you are one with the universe, in other words that the so called involuntary circulation of your blood is one continuous process with the stars shining. If you find out that it's you who circulates your blood you at the same moment find out that you are shining the sun.

I entered a void, I left my body, I was above everything, a wormhole, a spiral, a light, I was consciousness, I was wisdom. I was myself, looking at myself. A wave and a particle. I am the universe and the universe is me.

I don't know who I am unless I know who you are, and you don't know who you are unless you know who I am. A wise rabbi once said "If I am I because you are you and you are you because I am I, then I am not I and you are not you." In other words we are not separate, we define each other, we are all backs and fronts to each other.

There was a young man who said "Though it seems I know that I know, what I would like to see is the eye that knows me when I know that I know that I know."

We are symptomatic of the scheme of things, as the apple is symptomatic of the apple tree and the rose is symptomatic of the rose bush. The earth is not a big rock infested with living organisms anymore than your skeleton is bones infested with cells. The earth is geological, yes, but this geological entity grows people and our existence on the earth is a symptom of the solar system and its balances, as much as the solar system in turn is a symptom of our galaxy.

The drop merges into the ocean, and the ocean merges into the drop.
I am everything and nothing, I don't end at my skin.
Recursive, holographic, isomorphic.

Your body is a miracle of harmony. Even the corpuscles and creatures that are fighting each other in the bloodstream and eating each other up, if they weren't doing that you wouldn't be healthy. What is discord at one level of your being is harmony at a higher level, similarly the discords of your life and the discords of people's lives which are a fight at one level at a higher level of the universe are healthy and harmonious. And you suddenly realize that everything that you are and do is, at that level, as magnificent and as free of any blemish as the patterns in waves, the markings in marble, the way a cat moves and that this world is really okay.

The rounded world is fair to see,
Nine time folded in mystery:
Though baffled seers cannot impart
The secret of its laboring heart,
Throb thine with Nature’s throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west,
Spirit that lurks each form within
Beckons to spirit of its kin;
Self-kindled every atom glows,
And hints the future which it owes.

You may become the Buddha as soon as you know that you have always been the Buddha.

Illumination Of Heart

huhhhhh

blah blah blah WHATEVER.

you don't exist (sorry) you are dismissed (sorry) I excuse you from the premises of my mind (thank you) regardless of the scars you've forged (slowly) I will soar above your walls (of control) I dare you to shuffle your deck (tricks) I reject your premise and despise your conclusion (bane and banal) and am moving on as soon as your pious purity is purged from the canyons of my insecurities (fuck you).

I welcome only soulfulness (please) embrace ecstatic life reaffirming experiences (each moment) forget the inconsequential, live now. now. now (forever) pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe (alive) express being (flux) struggle with, not against (grow) maintain balance (keep moving) and focus on pieces at a time (neverwhelmed) but always open soaking up whatever this is that we call life and pursuing existential passion be it bliss or despair there is no separation merely two sides of the same coin there is too much wisdom piled against the collapse of mystery and magic it will endure it lives right here and everywhere within you and without you let it be known that this is my position you're a quack not a physician.

that may be unfair and I may be wrong but when my soul writes a song I will sing along and let the rest come later. layer up on fucking layer. I'm not in a very good place to put this out in to space in fact I'll likely rescind my reaction but let it be known I'll never print a retraction only build upon the action. the rhythms of my brain and the wiring of my heart. this is where we start.

~Brittany Pendleton

Soul receives from soul that knowledge,
therefore not by book nor from tongue.

If knowledge of mysteries come after
emptiness of mind, that is illumination of heart.

To Watch

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget. - Arundhati Roy

You Pin Both The Wings On Us

Say no more, use your eyes

The world goes and flutters by...

I see the walls and see them fall

You break through them all
I see you crawl, now you stand tall
Grow and grow till tall

In storm we scream against the stream, our eyes watering
Jump into lakes, the surface breaks
We swim underwater, and our mouths - In tune

I see forest, a treasure chest full of labyrinth
I see a door, holes in the floor
We'll breed seeds - We grow

We all want to grow with the seeds we will sow

We all want to go with the trees we will grow
We all want to know when we're all meant to go
To a place you and I - Will call home

There's songs, songs you bring to us

You pin both wings on us
I hear it, I see you sing for us
You go tie a string around us

We all grow, use your life,

The world goes and flutters by.

Once Upon A Time...

I am unwritten, can't read my mind,

I'm undefined, I'm just beginning,
The pen's in my hand, ending
unplanned.....

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun. ~The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. ~The Call of Cthulhu', by H. P. Lovecraft

My purpose is to tell of bodies which have been transformed into shapes of a different kind. ~Metamorphoses by Ovid

It was a pleasure to burn. ~Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. ~One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Marquesas

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. ~The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

If you're going to read this, don't bother. ~Choke by Chuck Palladium

My suffering left me sad and gloomy. ~ Life of Pi by Yann Martel

The trawler plunged into the angry swells of the dark, furious sea like an awkward animal trying desperately to break out of an impenetrable swamp.

~ The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. ~Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

Call me Ishmael. ~Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. ~Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood

Midway on our life's journey, I found myself in dark woods, the right road lost. ~The Inferno by Dante Alighieri

Charlie lived in a place where the illegal was legal, where the immoral was moral, and where some people’s fantasies were other people’s realities. ~An Island Away by Daniel Putkowski.

Once upon a midnight dreary, as I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
~The Raven', by Edgar Allan Poe.

I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased. ~Notes from Underground by Fedora Dostoevsky

A screaming comes across the sky. ~Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. ~The Go-Between by L. P. Hartleyn

The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was. ~Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams

To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die.'" ~The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

Seahorse

I'm high and I'm happy and I'm free.

I have my whole heart
laid out right in front of me.
And I finally can see
the way it's always been,
the need for peace
starts from within.

So I leave my possessions to the wind,
and I'm done with ever wanting anything.
Well I can die satisfied,
no desires do I hide.
Not today, not today,
nor for the next one thousand lives.

I'm scared of ever being born again.
If it's in this form again.
I want to know how, why, where, when and then,
I want to see you be the bright night sky.
I want to see you come back as the light.

A Step Without Feet

This is love: to fly toward a secret sky,

to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment.

First, to let go of life.

In the end, to take a step without feet;

to regard this world as invisible,

and to disregard what appears to be the self.

I Am, I Am Not

I’m drenched

in the flood
which has yet to come

I’m tied up
in the prison
which has yet to exist

Not having played
the game of chess
I’m already the checkmate

Not having tasted
a single cup of your wine
I’m already drunk

Not having entered
the battlefield
I’m already wounded and slain

I no longer
know the difference
between image and reality

Like the shadow
I am

And

I am not

Uncovered

The majestic curve of a river cutting through rolling plains can be seen in the enigmatic expanse of the spine's journey across a back. The monumental simplicity of a single atom is no more awe inspiring than the ridges and valleys, lines and curves of the human neck. The towering power of a mountain is held within the stunning peaks of a bottom laid bare. The mysterious draw of the moons path across the sky hints at the pilgrimage of the eye as it wanders across the sweep of a leg.

Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story.

She arches her body like a cat on a stretch. She smells of the sea. She smells of rockpools when I was a child. She keeps a starfish in there. I crouch down to taste the salt, to run my fingers around the rim. She opens and shuts like a sea anemone.

In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun. This place will warm me, feed me and care for me. I will hold on to this pulse against other rhythms. The world will come and go in the tide of a day but here is her hand with my future in its palm.

Begin to see yourself as a soul with a body rather than a body with a soul.

Photos by Stan Trampe, to see more click here .
Selected quotes written by Jeanette Winterson.

Eccentricities

They refuse to see the world through the rose colored glasses of the masses nor through the cynical spectacles of the disenchanted. Rather they watch reality unfold as if on a psychedelic journey - finding deeper, more profound dimensions than most people imagine possible, finding inspiration in the ordinary. They exist on the fringes of society, never quite fitting in to the social mainstream of everyday life, usually preferring it that way. Astonishingly simple in their miraculousness and surprisingly intricate in their simplicities they inspire us and we, in turn, inspire them. Some call them strange, some call them crazy, some say they are fucked up, others say they are eccentric, most find them confusing, I find them beautiful.

They are artists in the purest sense of the word, masters of the amazing they are capable of drinking deeply from the wellspring of the void. The works they create speak to the depths of my soul, calling to that part of me that each of us share, the unconscious mind that is, in a word, human. The mediums through which they touch my life vary, from poetry to paintings, from music to movies, yet the manner in which their magic has shaped me is penetratingly universal. To my mind they are more enlightened, their souls have swam in the abyss and have discovered a higher state of being. Through the power of their vision they pull me through the looking glass, carrying me along on the wave of their eccentricity...

The words swim before me as the language fades, replaced by an immense dreamscape. I am carried along by the river as my mind wanders across mountains and meadows, through forests and plains. The landscape curves about me and the fathomless beauty of the poet's imagination consumes me entirely.

As I study the oil soaked canvas my thoughts sprout wings and take flight, lifting from my mind and soaring from this world. The power of those thoughts and emotions pull away the curtains of ignorance from my sight and lay bear to me the majesty and mystery of existence. Though the span of a thousand years separates us I am taken by the hand to unknown places, innumerable worlds, lifetimes unimagined.

Standing in a crowd the vibrations and tone fill my body, shaking the mortar that holds my soul in place, filling me so completely that there is no room left for my conscious self. I lift away on a crescendo, my body and the crowd are left behind as I drift along the current of sound. Impressions are lost within me and I lose myself inside of them. A journey spanning the heavens, I am the same yet fundamentally I am changed.

I Am With You

When the rain begins to fall and the rainbows paint the sky, I will dance with you. When the winter creeps, I'll stand beside you and watch as the snowflakes fall like poetry upon the boughs. When the rays of summer's sun kiss our skin, I will hold your hand and lie with you in the grass making pictures in the clouds. And when the night falls upon us, I will dream with you.

When we are apart, just look around, you will always be able to find me in small and beautiful things: the leaves of fall as sunlight passes through, footprints in the snow, the song of windchimes, springtime flowers, April rains and the stars at night. You will find me in those places and in your memory, and above all, in every song that brings peace to your heart.

Remember

From as far back as I can remember one of my deepest feelings was that I did not belong to this world, that the reality society perceived was not reality at all. Even my very senses seemed to be in flux, at times more like a surreal painting than a photograph. Light, color and dimension rippled like the waters of a pond. Smells and tastes held worlds of their own, opening like new dimensions before me.

Persistent was an overwhelming longing to return to someplace other than the everyday world we move about in. While most people fall asleep and have unreal and confusing dreams or experience altered realities under an intense fever, the surreal realm of the dreamscape was where I felt most at peace. I spent my childhood in meditation, pushing aside the layers of delusion that keep our minds eye chained to the day to day world, and escaping back to the deeper realm I called home.

Space and time come unraveled, colors come into being that had never existed, ideas fall from the sky like drops of rain, and the laws of this reality hold no sway. In this world you are not trapped within the confines of your body, it becomes inconsequential. You recognize that you are intrinsically connected to everyone and everything that ever has been and ever will be.

Remember that you are not really here.

Remember where you must be.
Your eyes are about to tell you something that your mouth already knows.
Your ears are about to tell you something your feet already know.
Remember that you've never really been here.
Remember that you have never really been here.
Your nose picks up a fragrance and lets it go.
Your mouth picks up a taste,
and lets it swallow itself up into the very oceans of your body.
Remember you have not really ever, ever been here.
~ pulled from my mind by Alex Caldiero

Perfection

I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem;

I whisper with my lips close to your ear,
I have loved many, but I love none better than you.

I have been dilatory and dumb;
I should have made my way straight to you long ago;
I should have talked of nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you.

I will leave all, and come and make the hymns of you;
None have understood you, but I understand you;
None have done justice to you—you have not done justice to yourself;
None have found you perfect—I only find no imperfection in you;
Some seek to subordinate you—I only am she who will never consent to subordinate you; I only am she who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.

I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you!
You have not known what you are—you have slumbered upon yourself all your life; Your eye-lids have been the same as closed most of the time.

Underneath you, and within you, I see you.
I pursue you where none else has pursued you;
Silence, the flippant expression, the accustomed routine, if these conceal you from others, or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me.

I give nothing to any one, except I give the like carefully to you;
I sing the songs of the glory of none, sooner than I sing the songs of the glory of you.

Glósóli: Glowing Sun

The rhythmatic, underwater beat of the drum makes me feel as if I am dreaming, searching and progressing toward an enlightened new day.

When the low notes empathize,
And the high notes inspire me,
Where the enigma enchants me,
The beats put forth motion,
Which my heart commands,
There lies a boundless existence,
That can exist without dimensions or words,
Within my mind.

Hold My Heart

I love it when you dream with me

and when you hold me tight
I love the way you look at me
you make my soul take flight.

I love the way you talk to me
and the way you make me laugh
I love the way you see the world
even cynical at that.

I love the way you give me strength
and when I feel you near
I love the way you read my mind
and take away my fear.

I love the way you look at me
and the happiness you bring
I love the way we fantasize
with you everyday is spring.

I love the way that we make love
and hurt when we're apart
but mostly I love the way I feel
and the way you hold my heart.

I Would...

I would live in your love as the sea-grasses live in the sea,

Borne up by each wave as it passes, drawn down by each wave that
recedes.

I would empty my soul of the dreams that have gathered in me,
I would beat with your heart as it beats, I would follow your soul as it
leads.

I would carry you with me through all of time and space,
Holding you tightly against me, breathing you, tasting you,
becoming you.

Leaves

Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

~Walt Whitman

The Prince of Pop

When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.

I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of "work," because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don't always want to do. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.

I try to think of what time is and all I can think is.... Time is, time was.

I never understood why when you died, you didn't just vanish, everything could just keep going on the way it was only you just wouldn't be there. I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say 'figment.'

I like boring things.

I have Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumors to my dogs.

Fantasy love is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting.

Love and sex can go together and sex and unlove can go together and love and unsex can go together. But personal love and personal sex is bad.

Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.

Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone's got to take care of all your details.

The symptom of love is when some of the chemicals inside you go bad. So there must be something in love because your chemicals do tell you something.

During the 1960s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered.

Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.

I used to think that everything was just being funny but now I don't know. I mean, how can you tell?

Everybody has a different idea of love. One girl I know said, "I knew he loved me when he didn't come in my mouth."

I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.

I'm the type who'd be happy not going anywhere as long as I was sure I knew exactly what was happening at the places I wasn't going to. I'm the type who'd like to sit home and watch every party that I'm invited to on a monitor in my bedroom.

I've decided something: Commercial things really do stink. As soon as it becomes commercial for a mass market it really stinks.

If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.

Some people, even intelligent people, say that violence can be beautiful. I can't understand that, because beautiful is some moments, and for me those moments are never violent.

Isn't life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?

It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look, how you feel about it.

America is really The Beautiful. But it would be more beautiful if everybody had enough money to live.

Once you 'got' Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.

People need to be made more aware of the need to work at learning how to live because life is so quick and sometimes it goes away too quickly.

Death, I don't believe in it, because you're not around to know that it's happened. I can't say anything about it because I'm not prepared for it.

Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets.

The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.

The most exciting thing is not doing it. If you fall in love with someone and never do it, it's much more exciting.

Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.

In the 60's everybody got interested in everybody else.

Since people are going to be living longer and getting older, they'll just have to learn how to be babies longer.

People should fall in love with their eyes closed. Just close your eyes. Don't look.

Numberless Forms

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times,
in life after life, in age after age forever.
My spell-bound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs
that you take as your gift, wear round your neck in your many forms
in life after life, in age after age forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,
its ancient tale of being apart or together,
as I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge
clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
you become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount
at the heart of time love of one for another.
We have played alongside millions of lovers, shared in the same
shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell--
old love, but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you,
the love of all man's days both past and forever:
universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life,
the memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours--
and the songs of every poet past and forever.

~Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)