Aptitude of Stillness

The civilized people have lost the aptitude of stillness, and must take lessons in silence from the wild before they are accepted by it... In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be.

Out of Africa
Isak Dinesen
Karen Blixen (who wrote under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen)

So Pushed as to Rupture!

The ungainly man ... came into view, with as much rapidity as he could excite his meager beast to endure without coming to an open rupture.

When their foes... were within a few rods, the rifle of Hawkeye slowy rose... and pured out it's fatal contents.

Life is an obligation which friends often owe each other in the wilderness.

James Fenimore Cooper
The Last of the Mohicans

Students and Hospitals

The train I took from the airport gradually filled with students.  They all seemed to be wearing T-shirts with messages on them.  Signaling each other like fireflies.

Geraldine Brooks
People of the Book

Grace

Grace, she comes with a heavy load.

Lyric from NEEDTOBREATH

Cast-iron Conciences & Copper Bellies

The last time I was on the border I discovered one Pablo Ranes, whose dishes smoked with the concentrated essence of hell-fire. I returned to his abode of digestional-damnation until my once powerful constitution was but a shell of itself. I aided Pablo's atrocities with some wine bottled in Spain that kicked like an army mule, and eventually came to the conclusion that the border is a place only for men with cast-iron consciences and copper bellies.

1932 - Robert E. Howard in a letter to H.P. Lovecraft

You are the Universe and the Universe is You

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves. 

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.  This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.

... and when you get with it you suddenly realize its doing you.  Now whats the difference between you and it?  Self and other... You're doing it and it's doing you.  It's all one.

You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.

You are actually--if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning-- you're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as--Mr so-and- so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so--I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm that, too. But we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it.


Amalgamation of Alan Watts

Writing

“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.”

Alan Watts