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“Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.”

Charles Bukowski

By letting go of when and how, you show that you believe that it is already yours. Because only he who is certain of the outcome can afford to wait.

The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

What are days for? Days are where we live.

Philip Larkin

"The only wrong I've ever done is believe that wrong exists and go around with that idea in my head and look at everybody through such eyes. But when I am dead I will look back on life only with love, as though nothing that happened really mattered that way, and therefore I will see that everything was only piteous after all, and so strangely dear. Why is it that we forget in one moment what we did the moment before? Because it doesn't matter, and the only wrong is in our heads. All we do is wonder what we're doing, while love leads us by the hand and the Graces fall like snowflakes all around. O Beatitude!"

Kerouac ~ from his second uncompleted Road book, 1949.

Wild Geese

by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Rather, I think one should write, as nearly as possible, as if he were the first person on earth and was humbly and sincerly putting on paper that which he saw and experienced and loved and lost; what his passing thoughts were and his sorrows and desires.

Neal Cassady to Jack Kerouac

In a recent reading appearance at Village Vanguard I was universally attacked, but all I did was stand there and read my heart out, not caring how I looked or what anybody thought, and I am satisfied because the dishwasher (an old Negro named Elton Stratton) said: 'All I wanta do is get 2 quarts of whiskey and lie down in bed and listen to you read to me.' Also, the musicians (Lee Konitz, Billy Bauer, Wilbur Little) said I was 'singing' when I read and said they heard the music, and since I consider myself a jazz poet, I am satisfied with that. What intelligentsia says makes little difference, as I've always spent my time in skid row or in jazz joints or with personal poet madmen and never cared what 'intelligentsia' thinks. My love of poetry is love of joy.

[Kerouac, 1957]

A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our live trying to be less lonesome. And one of our ancient methods is to tell a story, begging the listener to say, and to feel, 'Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought.

John Steinbeck

Love, if you love me, lie next to me. Be for me, like rain, the getting out of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi- lust of intentional indifference. Be wet with a decent happiness.

-Robert Creeley

Nothing outside yourself can cause any trouble ~ Shunryu Suzuki http://justdharma.com/s/8wxba Nothing comes from outside your mind. Usually we think of our mind as receiving impressions and experiences from outside, but that is not a true understanding of our mind. The true understanding is that the mind includes everything; when you think something comes from outside it means only that something appears in your mind. Nothing outside yourself can cause any trouble. You yourself make the waves in your mind. If you leave your mind as it is, it will become calm. This mind is called big mind. – Shunryu Suzuki from the book "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" ISBN: 978-1590308493 - https://amzn.to/1aWVOsE source: https://www.lionsroar.com/mind-waves-september-2012/

“All that was good in me thrilled in my heart at that moment, all that I hoped for in the profound, obscure meaning of my existence. Here was the endlessly mute placidity of nature, indifferent to the great city; here was the desert beneath these streets, around these streets, waiting for the city to die, to cover it with timeless sand once more. There came over me a terrifying sense of understanding about the meaning and the pathetic destiny of men. The desert was always there, a patient white animal, waiting for men to die, for civilizations to flicker and pass into the darkness. Then men seemed brave to me, and I was proud to be numbered among them. All the evil of the world seemed not evil at all, but inevitable and good and part of that endless struggle to keep the desert down.”

John Fante, Ask the Dust

I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust, and when sometimes I have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh hour, or four o’clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled with the daylight, have felt as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for — I confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, aye, and years almost together...

H. D. Thoreau

Meditation is rest, absolute rest, a full stop to all activity - physical, mental, emotional. When you are in such a deep rest that nothing stirs in you, when all action as such ceases, as if you are fast asleep yet awake, you come to know who you are. Suddenly the window opens. It cannot be opened by effort, because effort creates tension, and tension is the cause of our whole misery. Hence this is something very fundamental to be understood that meditation is not effort. One has to be very playful about meditation, one has to learn to enjoy it as fun. One has not to be serious about it - be serious and you miss. One has to go into it very joyously. And one has to keep aware that it is falling into deeper and deeper rest. It is not concentration, just the contrary, it is relaxation. When you are utterly relaxed, for the first time you start feeling your reality; you come face to face with your being. When you are engaged in activity you are so occupied that you cannot see yourself. Activity creates much smoke around you, it raises much dust around you; hence all activity has to be dropped, at least for a few hours per day. That is only so in the beginning. When you have learnt the art of being at rest you can be both active and restful together, because then you know that rest is something so inner that it cannot be disturbed by anything outer. The activity goes on at the circumference and at the center you remain restful. So it is only for beginning that activity has to be dropped for a few hours. When one has learned the art then there is no question : for twenty-four hours a day one can be meditative and one can continue all the activities of ordinary life. But remember, the key word is rest, relaxation. Never go against rest and relaxation. Arrange your life in such a way, drop all futile activity, because ninety per cent is futile; it is just for killing time and remaining occupied. Do only the essential and devote your energies more and more to the inner journey. Then that miracle happens when you can remain at rest and in action together, simultaneously. That is the meeting of the sacred and the mundane, the meeting of this world and that, the meeting of materialism and spiritualism. Osho - excerpts from the book What is Meditation?

Acknowledging our unimportance liberates us from the grips of the self-centered voice in our head causing a lot of life’s difficulties.

Knowing how the narcissist thinks can help you understand toxic individuals.

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