Start a path

Have you ever started a path?
    No one seems willing to do this.
        We don't mind using existing paths,
            but we rarely start new ones.

Do it today.
    Start a path.
        Even if it doesn't lead anywhere.

                George Carlin, Napalm & Silly Putty

Part of divine power

That by desiring what is perfectly good,
    even when we don’t quite know what it is
        and cannot do what we would,
            we are part of divine power against evil –
                widening the skirts of light
                    and making the struggle with darkness narrower. 

                                            George Eliot, Middlemarch

Poem: I didn't go to church today

I didn't go to church today,
I trust the Lord to understand.
The surf was swirling blue and white,
The children swirling on the sand.
He knows, He knows how brief my stay,
How brief this spell of summer weather,
He knows when I am said and done
We'll have plenty of time together.

                        Ogden Nash

 

 

 

 

 

A journey

Our life is a constant journey, from birth to death.
The landscape changes, the people change,
our needs change, but the train keeps moving.
Life is the train, not the station.
And what you’re doing now isn’t traveling,
it’s just changing countries, which is completely different.
Understand what is going on inside you
and you will understand what is going on inside everyone else.

Paulo Coelho, Aleph

Get the most you can

The purpose of life is living. 

Men and women should get the most they can out of their lives. 

The smallest, tiniest intellect may be quite as valuable to society as the largest. 

It may be still more valuable to itself: 

it may have all the capacity for enjoyment that the wisest has. 

The purpose of man is like the purpose of the pollywog — 

to wriggle along as far as he can without dying; or to hang on until death takes him.

                        Clarence Darrow, Infidels and Heretics 

Pull down the stars

And New York is the most beautiful city in the world?
        It is not far from it.

No urban night is like the night there...
        Squares after squares of flame,
                set up and cut into the aether.

Here is our poetry,
        for we have pulled down the stars to our will.

                                Ezra Pound, Patria Mia

What are we doing here?

We are not here to fit in, be well balanced, or provide examples for others.
    We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange,
        perhaps merely to add our small piece,
            our little clunky, chunky selves,
                to the great mosaic of being.
As the gods intended,
    we are here to become more and more ourselves.

        James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life