The older I get and the more I find myself weighed down by the responsibilities and burdens of age and mortality (my own and that of loved ones), the more comfort I take in the fact that I see and feel Beauty and the Beast everywhere and in everything I experience… and it’s very bittersweet.
Having lost my best friend and only remaining family, my father, in late November 2023, the prevailing circumstances of my life and health are so painful and precarious that finding time to do anything creative much less write the fan fiction that was previously my greatest joy, feels impossible to do.
So instead I collect all the images, quotes, and fragments of everything and anything that evokes the magic, the powerful sense of having found the secret and hidden but most truly real world that changed my life forever… I can say with no exaggeration that Beauty and the Beast “rewired” my right brain, permanently altered me, and left me with painful sense of being an outcast— completely out of place up here trying to fit in with Topsiders.
I hope you enjoy scrolling through the prompts; I hope some of them resonate within you in ways that make it clear why for me they so powerfully call to mind both our beloved show and the ancient myth itself.
She anchors the heavens He anchors the earth
C. Ara Campbell
Truth to tell, I have a very high opinion of fantasy. To me, it is actually the maternally creative side of the masculine spirit.
CG Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
Children’s literature I grew up on: filled with talking animals. Me: as an adult, still searching for them.
Elliot Blackwell
If you were a blade of grass or a tiny flower, I will pitch my tent in your shadow. Only your presence revives my withered heart. You are the candle that lights the whole world and I am an empty vessel for your light.
Jalāl al-Din Muhammad Rumi
The heart creates through dreams/images; these manifest through feelings and emotions. This form of creation does not use logic.
Drunvalo
When we dream we become animals, and go softly home. (Art: Marie Muravski)
Green was the silence, wet was the light, the month of June trembled like a butterfly.
Pablo Neruda
I choose to hold you in my dreams, for in my dreams, you have no end.
Rumi
Art is restoration; the idea is to repair the damages that are inflicted in life, to make something that is fragmented – which is what fear and anxiety do to a person – into something whole.
Louise Bourgeois
Real tenderness can’t be confused, It’s quiet and can’t be heard.
Anna Akhmatova
~*~ The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. ~Arthur C. Clarke
She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantments.
Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
is there a zone of darkness between all languages, a black river that swallows words and stories and transforms them? here sentences must disrobe, begin to roam, learn to swim, not lose the memory that nests in their bodies, a secret nucleus. will the columbine’s blue be a shade of violet when it reaches the other side, and the red bee balm become a pear, cinnamon-sweet? will my tench be missing a fin in the light of this new language? will it have to learn to crawl or to walk upright? does language know how to draw another toward it or only how to turn the other one away? can each word, then, risk the transit, believe itself invulnerable, dipped in pitch and hard as steel?
What is life without this exchange of soul essence between the human and the wildness of the world?
Stephen Harrod Buhner
I am in the middle of it: chaos and poetry; poetry and love and again, complete chaos. Pain, disorder, occasional clarity; and at the bottom of it all: only love; poetry. Sheer enchantment, fear, humiliation. It all comes with love.
And what you said remains and is my own To make a living gladness of my gloom The firelight leaps & shows your empty chair And all our harmonies of speech are stilled: But you are with me in the voiceless air My hands are empty, but my heart is filled.
Siegfried Sassoon
To go out of your mind once a day is tremendously important, because by going out of your mind you come to your senses.
Alan Watts
To be here on earth is to be part of …universal life, to be a channel for this energy. It is a new love affair, a new marriage of forces, receiving this energy so it can penetrate deeper and work through you. And it can open you. We can become sensitive to a quality that dwells within us, among us. The mystery is always there, from the first moment to the last. At [these] moments, abandon everything [else and] enter it.
Michel de Salzmann
When Sir Andrew [Aguecheek] says “I was adored once,” we feel that we hold him in the hollow of our hands; a novelist would have taken three volumes to bring us to that pitch of intimacy.
Virginia Woolf
Nothing makes time pass…like a thought that absorbs in itself all the faculties of the one who is thinking. External existence is then like a sleep of which this thought is the dream. Under its influence, time has no more measure, space has no more distance.
Alexandre Dumas
But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.
Madeline Miller, Circe
When you reach the end of what you should know, you will be at the beginning of what you should sense.
Khalil Gibrán, Sand and Foam
You can start your Active Imagination by asking: “Where is the obsession? Who is obsessed? Where does this feeling come from? Who is the one inside me who feels this way? What is its image? What does he or she look like?”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work
Although every image embodies a way of seeing, our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our own way of seeing.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.
-Italo Calvino
Those who sleep in this room can close their eyes to such a view, reconciled with the infinite complexity of the layers and levels of reality. ~ John Berger (Mantegna, Oculus of the Camera degli Sposi, Mantua)
my peace is there in the receding mist when I may cease from treading these long shifting thresholds and live the space of a door that opens and shuts
Samuel Beckett, “2” (from Four Poems)
A heaven so clear, an earth so calm, So sweet, so soft, so hushed an air
Emily Brontë
Forget the reasons, we don’t need or want them in the wild, siren-filled sea.
Stardust, GhostLibraries
And then in a strange, grey hour We lay mouth to mouth, with your face Under mine like a star on the lake, And I covered the earth, and all space
The silent, drifting hours Of morn after morn And night drifting up to the night Yet no pathway worn.
D.H. Lawrence, History
We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.
Yeats
I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.
Jack Gilbert
We are in a prison of our own making when we act as if the common world is not only the real world, but also the only world.
Anish Kapoor
The universe is a slumbering animal that has visions.
Edward Dahlberg
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
T.S. Eliot
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment.
Carl Sandburg, Tentative Definitions of Poetry in Complete Poems, 1950
and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other
Adrienne Rich
And you were to me the radiance of a new light, From the darkness of the unknown, Revealed by Fate… —Fadwa Tuqan
Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind
He who desires the soul, who plays with the soul, who makes love with the soul, who attains ecstasy in the soul, becomes his own master and wanders at will through the worlds.
Chandogya Upanishad
Between the night workers and the day workers lies the interface of light…
Susan Stewart, On Longing
Somewhere in-between is a spacious place a liminal space alone with the Alone known yet unknown everything is possible grief enters, yes…and is gathered up in mercy~
Joyce Budenberg
[Re: hope] You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings…
Rebecca Solnit
But behind the flower is that other flower which is ageless, the idea of the flower, the one we smell when we imagine it, that as often as it is picked blossoms again, that has the perfection of all flowers, the purity without the fragility.
R.S. Thomas, Flowers
It is here, my daughters, that love is to be found – not hidden away in corners but in the midst of occasions of sin. And believe me, although we may more often fail and commit small lapses, our gain will be incomparably the greater. Saint Teresa of Avilanature does not wait for the best moment – nature creates it. a woman does not wait for better times – she is the best time. for everything ~Anastasia Kovtun
The difference between a good life and a bad life is how well you walk through the fire.
Carl Gustav Jung
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper. ― W.B. Yeats
That house with its remoteness and the islands going down like soft gongs all the time into the amazing blue, and I shall never, never forget a youth spent there, discovered by accident, it was pure gold.
Lawrence Durrell, speaking of the Mulberry House, Corfu
Your acts of kindness are iridescent wings of divine love, which linger and continue to uplift others long after your sharing.
Rumi
Since fictional environments are much more comfortable than natural ones, we try to read life as if it, too, is a work of art.
Umberto Eco
It is surely our responsibility to do everything within our power to create a planet that provides a home not just for us, but for all life on Earth. - Sir David Attenborough Artist: Ben Myhre
O naive heart— We wander aimlessly Why do we wander in wasteland & wildernesses?
Why does it seem that the wave is thirsty in its own river?
What restlessness is this? What is this turmoil for?
Whose shadow is it that follows my soul?
Jan Nisar Akthar
I looked at the sky and the earth and straight ahead and since then I’ve been writing a long letter to the dead on a typewriter that doesn’t have a ribbon.
Tomas Transtromer
Fantastic to feel how my poem grows while I myself shrink. It is growing, it takes my place It pushes me out of its way.
Tomas Transtromer
The love of beauty gives the strength to withstand the worst things.
Patrick Bentolila
Hold tight to those who give you the luxury of being fragile.
Mario Bucci
You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover is yourself.”
Alan Alda
Now far from those harsh lights and the glare over cities, alone By a clearing in a forest, we lie down For the first time in our lives Together under stars And, keeping the earth in its place behind our backs, we stare Upward into the ancient stream of starlight, Down-curved ravines of space The unconstellated burning rubble of godlings, outcast spilled from the zodiac constantly falling As they have always fallen As they slant to us past hemlocks, as rich And clear as our silence. poem David Wagoner art Michael Menefee
I’ll Recognize you
by the way Silence speaks your Original Name
and the way I burned every poem to build a Holy Fire
for you
Leaf@Elfhood (Twitter)
I want to be bewildered
by the impossible magnetic map
of your uncharted touch
Leaf@Elfhood (Twitter)
The love that still sees beauty beyond the light.
Nilofar Hossain
‘How quiet the city is, I said (…) I heard the snows of your childhood Begin to fall.’ Charles Simic, The Clocks of the Dead photo: Andreas Feininger, 1956
Sometimes, as I recently learned there’s a part of me hidden in the angst. If I can stay with it, that buried part surfaces and generally just wants me to accept and love it.
Rachael Clyne, poet, psychologist
Yesterday I felt more and more anguished as day turned to night. This morning there’s only one thing I could do to help, I read the best very recent poems I’ve written. Let’s see if this helps. Creating something new that feels alive can save your life.
Pascale Petit
When I speak of poetry I am not thinking of it as a genre. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality. So poetry becomes a philosophy to guide a man throughout his life.
Andrei Tarkovsky
Open my soul to the vast dark places.
Ursula K. Le Guin, January Night Prayer
the thing about doorways is that as you move thru them you come out the other side completely transformed and you feel yourself breathing in the sweet air of a brand new world
anonymous
I am the unbounded deep In whom the waves of all the worlds Naturally rise and fall.
But I do not rise and fall.
Ashtavakra Gita
There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life. Alain de Botton
Instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We have, undoubtedly, certain finer fibers that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction, or any other willful effort of the brain, is futile.
Nikola Tesla
My voice rings down through thousands of years To coil around your body and give you strength You who have wept in direct sunlight Who have hungered in invisible chains Tremble to the cadence of my legacy: An army of lovers shall not fail.
Rita Mae Brown, ‘Sappho’s Reply’
Perhaps the poem you’ve been waiting to write boils down to “you must forgive yourself.”
Write it anyway.
Allow your capacity for grace to link with a reader who doesn’t know they need it yet.
Poems are the miraculous made language.
Steven Leyva
This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.
~Ursula K. Le Guin. pic: Mikko Lagerstedt Tweet your reply
I am obsessing
about a hundred different things,
but one of them
is how the Ancient Romans dotted city streets with cold marble. Stone fragments reflected moonlight. Guided
travelers.
As sometimes happens,
even in the dark, a hard thing delivers a small mercy.
Ray Ball, Because I Have To Pack My Suitcase Again
The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.
James Baldwin
Every great work of art has two faces, one towards its own time and one towards the future, towards eternity.
Daniel Barenboim
A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.’
Susan Sontag
What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.’
John Ciardi Dialogue with an audience, 1963
We owe the cultural achievements of humanity—which include philosophy—to deep, contemplative attention. Culture presumes an environment in which deep attention is possible. Increasingly, such immersive reflection is being displaced by an entirely different form of attention: hyperattention. A rash change of focus between different tasks, sources of information, and processes characterizes this scattered mode of awareness. Since it also has a low tolerance for boredom, it does not admit the profound idleness that benefits the creative process. Walter Benjamin calls this deep boredom a “dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.” The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han
The world is too old for us to talk about it with our new words.
Jack Kerouac
The infinite vibratory levels, the dimensions of interconnectedness are without end. There is nothing independent. All beings and things are residents in your awareness.
Alex Grey
the world is awash with colours unseen and abuzz with unheard frequencies
@Quantum
If you only knew all I see! all I sense! all I comprehend in your hair! My soul is transported by its perfume as other men may be by music.
Charles Baudelaire
Desire sustains language and language sustains itself through desire.
Christina Tudor-Sideri
You don’t know what lies in that darkness, but you have heard rumors: there are troglodytes, dark elves, a long-dead wizard, terrible creatures, treasure. You are here to learn the truth. So strike a light: you’re going in. -Paul La Farge Destroy All Monsters *
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
Robert Frost
Do you not know about the acres of shining Eden here?
Sarah Berti
We are the same, you and I. We have been cut, two halves, from the same piece of shining matter.
Affinity, Sarah Waters
The luminous creature emerging from the cracks of you is shaking from a million years of dreaming; the radiant beast has quickened enough and is trembling to take off the ancient future chrysalis.
Sarah Berti
Stop the words now.
Open the window
in the center of your chest, and let the spirits fly in –
and out.
Rumi
He wanted to meet her for the first time, over and over… He told himself the story that this was the great tragedy of his heart. The great tragedy of his heart was that it always needed to be told a story.
Zadie Smith, The Autograph Man
Your creativity largely benefits from you acknowledging the deep-seated obsessions, ravenous appetites and morbid cravings lurking in the shadowy crevices of your Soul.
Cristina Rombi
wild smooth beauty very soft sand ellipse a lake at the bottom of the eye
Believe nothing of me except that I felt your beauty more closely than my own. I did not see any cities burn, I heard no promises of endless night, I felt your beauty more closely than my own. Promise me that I will return.
Leonard Cohen, A Poem to Detain Me
It was the love of love, the love that swallows up all else, a grateful love, a love of nature, of people, of animals, a love engendering gentleness and goodness that moved me and that I saw in you.
William Carlos Williams
The spirit is not only there to make us think deeply. It exists to take us into places where thinking becomes useless and even our own cleverest ideas are left behind.
~Peter Kingsley, Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity
I shall love everything in the things created by you. […] It is so sweet to play with all these words from your books, which are now the sacred alphabet of all thought, that I could write to you forever without dreaming that it is absurd, audacious and derisive…
Marcel Proust to Anna Brâncoveanu de Novailles
The night dictates its magical task to us.
— Jorge Luis Borges, Sleep
I did a road trip all over my mind and heart and there you were kneeling by the roadside with your little toolkit fixing something.
—Anne Carson, O Small Sad Ecstasy of Love
I’d like to be a shrine, so I can learn from peoples’ prayers the story of hearts. I’d like to be a scarf so I can place it over my hair and understand other worlds. I’d like to be the voice of a soprano singer so I can move through all borders and see them vanish with every spell-binding note. I’d like to be light so I illuminate the dark. I’d like to be water to fill bodies so we can gently float together indefinitely. I’d like to be a lemon, to be zest all the time, or an olive tree to shimmer silver on the earth. Most of all, I’d like to be a poem, to reach your heart and stay.
Nathalie Handal, Love Letter
There are two of us here. Touch me.
Take my hand. There are two of us in this cave. The sound you hear is water; you will hear it forever. The ground you walk on is rock. I have been here before. People come here to be born, to discover, to kiss, to dream, and to dig and to kill. Watch for the mud. Summer blows in with scent of horses and roses; fall with the sound of sound breaking, winter shoves its empty sleeve down the dark of your throat. You will learn toads from diamonds, the fist from the palm, love from the sweat of love, falling from flying. There are a thousand turnoffs. I have been here before. Once I fell off a precipice. Once I found gold. Once I stumbled on murder, the thin parts of a girl. Walk on, keep walking, there axes above us. Watch for the occasional bits and bubbles of light— birthdays for you, recognitions: “yourself, another”. Watch for mud. Listen for bells, for beggars. Something with wings went crazy against my chest once. There are two of us here. Touch me.
Lisel Mueller, The Blind Leading The Blind
Silence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings.
Charlotte Brontë
One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light.”
James Baldwin, from Part 4 of “Nothing Personal” (originally written w/Richard Avedon, 1964)
You smell of the love of life, of sunrise, sunset and the fragrance of all springs…
Simona@fragrance_soul
When I am with him, …talking quietly or whatever it may be… I see, beyond my own happiness, the intimacy, occasional glimpses of the happiness of 1000s of others whose names I shall never hear, and know that there is a great unrecorded history.
—E. M. Forster
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
Seamus Heaney
My responsibility is to speak the truth as I feel it, and to attempt to speak it with as much precision and beauty as possible. ~Audre LordeI am in love with words. They are doves falling out of the ceiling. ~Anne Sexton, from WordsSurrealism is based on the belief in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought. ~André Breton, Manifeste du surréalisme, 1924
Your heart is a giant cathedral. Let it open. Let it love. Do not let your gorgeous loyalty to the deceased stop you from experiencing the marvels and terrors of your short, mortal, precious life. It’s OK to live, and to love.”
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love
we turn to each other and turn to each other in the mother air of what we want
Robert Hass, Praise
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility: whose texture compels me with the colour of its countries, rendering death and forever with each breathing
—e.e. cummings, ‘somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond’
The purpose of poetry is to return that which is familiar to its original strangeness.
Charles Simic
In order to tell a certain story, sometimes we must tell another story, and go so far as to burn it.
Hélène Cixous, First Days of the Year; trans. Catherine MacGillivray
There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious unity is wisdom, the mother of us all, natura naturans. There’s in all things an inexhaustible sweetness.
Thomas Merton
I had simply climbed the tree for something to do on a summer day. Alone, in the crown of the tree, I went to China, I went to Prague; I died, and was born in the spring; I found you, and loved you, again.
Mary Oliver, Hummingbirds
Could you uproot love without leaving a wound?
Hunger and Thirst, Eugène Ionesco
~*~
What is important, it seems to me, is not so much to defend a culture whose existence has never kept a man from going hungry, as to extract, from what is called culture, ideas whose compelling force is identical with that of hunger. ~ Antonin Artaud
I am so in love with you that there isn’t anything else.
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.
Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena
[From the very first, it] inspired me to want to come alive and live mindfully rather than mindlessly and to see the holy everywhere.
Bill Johnson, re: poetry [of Mary Oliver]
And because paint and words are useless to fill the gap you lean forward and blow out the lamp, and sit listening, smelling the dense pure odour of the wick, and watching the silver rings play on the ceiling. — Lawrence Durrell, Prospero’s Cell (1945) art: Lawrence DurrellStained Glass Window (Allegory), Odilon Redon, 1908Now the sea is in me: we are risen, tangled together, certain to fall back to the sea. Out of pain, we are nourished by the mystery. ~Mary Oliver art: Howard Pyle[T]hey were, in part at least, golden. I held my breath as we do sometimes to stop time when something wonderful has touched us… What matters is that, when I saw them, I saw them as through the veil, secretly, joyfully, clearly. ~Mary OliverI [didn’t realize immediately what it] was. But that soon changed after [seeing that moment]. It opened me up to a whole new world and I began [searching for] everything I could find [on the show.] For some reason at that moment in time I needed [to discover] this [show] [and who it allowed me to become, as I fell willingly into its overwhelming depth and power.] It spoke to me. It touched me. I experienced [both the show and the ancient myth it was based on] as a[n intimate] way to connect with God, with life, and with myself. [Since that first moment that November night in 1988, I have continued] to find that [giving myself over utterly, to any and every aspect of that realer-than-real experience of the world of the show] is my favorite way to “do” spiritual reading. [Because upon seeing the show] that very first time, [I was] thunderstruck… and it inspired me to want to come alive and live mindfully rather than mindlessly, and to see the holy everywhere. And since then as I’ve continued to [give myself over to] it, I’ve [internalized every moment and every] line. [And ever since then I am so grateful for that gift: that I cannot help but see the holy everywhere.]
~Bill Johnson again— partially expanded upon by yours truly, because I see— in Johnson’s reaction to finding the poetry of Mary Oliver— a corollary to my own experience of stumbling, one freezing Hartford night in November of 1988, across the BatB season 2 episode ‘A Kingdom by the Sea,’ and feeling my entire life change completely and permanently in a split second. There was no going back to my life— my old vision, my old horizon— and who I had thought I was before I discovered BatB.Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity. ~ Simone Weil
He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. ~ Ecclesiastes 3:11At the end of my suffering there was a door;
whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice
~Louise Glück
They turn the light off, and its white globe glows an instant and then dissolves, like a tablet in a glass of darkness. Then a rising. The hotel walls shoot up into heaven’s darkness.
Their movements have grown softer, and they sleep, but their most secret thoughts begin to meet like two colors that meet and run together on the wet paper in a schoolboy’s painting.
Tomas Tranströmer, The Couple, tr. Robert Bly
like bootleg licker drinkers in the fog let your breath be moist against me
(her words play softly up and down dewy corridors)
then with your tongue remove the tape and press your lips to mine til they are incandescent
Jean Toomer, Her Lips Are Copper Wire
[W]e interpret [a fairy tale] for the same reason as that for which fairy tales and myths were told: because it has a vivifying effect and gives a satisfactory reaction and brings one into peace with one’s unconscious.
Marie-Louise von Franz
The truth has to be found not by taking easy route of flying off to heaven in some brilliant blaze of light but by following the path of the sun down into the depths of night where everything, including darkest reaches of ourselves, is connected to the sacred. ~Peter Kingsley
Each person enters the world imbued with inner nobility born both of ancestry & of eternity. Yet it is also the nature of this world that the innermost qualities of a person remain mostly hidden from family and self until extraordinary circumstances call them forth. ~Michael MeadThose who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.
~Theodore Roethke
All the variety, all the delight, all the beauty of life is made up of shadow and light.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical. ~Ludwig Wittgenstein
I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still. Rimbaud
Not only all knowledge, but all feeling, is in perception.
~T.S. Eliot
There are as many forms of love as there are moments in time.
Jane Austen
Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.
Saul Bellow
Art is a form of supremely delicate awareness and atonement – meaning atoneness, the state of being at one with the object.
D. H. Lawrence
I do not write to keep. I write to feel. I write to touch the body of the instant with the tips of words.
Hélène Cixous
she plunged into the heart of me (…) and I couldn’t think of anything except her.
The Secret Skin, Wendy N. Wagner
Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.
C. S. Lewis, from Till We Have Faces
Portals also exist in what we call “inner space” or more accurately, subtle realities perceived psychically. The tunnel described in accounts of many near-death experiences is an example of this, but there are also other kinds of portals, such as symbols. ~Lisa M. Christie, PhDShe is overtaken by the fierce, fearsome moon-longing to surrender her soul to the truth of that faraway world. #IndigoSky
“Problem” stories are often studded with holes that lead to other worlds, worlds that are themselves forged and fortified by stories about how we’d prefer things to be…
Jessica Dore
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
~Aldous Huxley
If dark nights must come, let them come. Open your doors. Let them come, my dear, and ask them what they want. Maybe all they want is your presence. Nothing else. Maybe all they want to do is to hold you so close and polish you secretly, without telling anyone.
Maybe that is all they want. Know that deep inside they hold ten thousand fragrant mornings. They hold the source of laughter. They hold life.
Guthema Roba
It is pointless trying to know where the way leads. Think only of the first step. The rest will come.
Shams Tabrizi
She discovered herself in this huge exterior night in the core of her being, no longer needing to pass before a bitter and tormented soul to arrive at peace.
Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure
At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book […] shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.
Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
Don’t just ask for one mercy Let them flood in. Let the sky open under your feet. ~RumiThe moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself. ~Henry Miller
If after I read a poem the world looks like that poem for 24 hours or so I’m sure it’s a good one.
Elizabeth Bishop
A room like a dream, a room truly spiritual, whose stagnant atmosphere is lightly tinted with pink and blue. It’s a thing of the dusk, something bluish, pinkish; a sensual dream during an eclipse. ~Charles Baudelaire (Marc Chagall)
It occurred to me that some of my most fundamental assumptions about #reality might not be true.
