on repeat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jfFgLikaWA

blossom

by mary oliver
from new and selected poems

in april
     the ponds
          open
               like black blossoms,
the moon
     swims in every one;
          there's fire
               everywhere: frogs shouting
their desire,
     their satisfaction. what
          we know: that time
               chops at us all like an iron
hoe, that death
     is a state of paralysis. what
          we long for: joy
               before death, nights
in the swale -- everything else
     can wait but not
          this thrust
               from the root
of the body. what
     we know: we are more
          than blood -- we are more
               than our hunger and yet
we belong
     to the moon and when the ponds
          open, when the burning
               begins the most
thoughtful among us dreams
     of hurrying down
          into the black petals,
               into the fire,
into the night where time lies shattered,
into the body of another.

defeated

all quotes from start where you are by pema chodron

"it is unconditional compassion for ourselves that leads naturally to unconditional compassion for others. if we are willing to stand fully in our own shoes and never give up on ourselves, then we will be able to put ourselves in the shoes of others and never give up on them. . . when we hear about compassion, it naturally brings up working with others, caring for others. the reason we're often not there for others -- whether for our child or our mother or someone who is insulting us or someone who frightens us -- is that we're not there for ourselves. there are whole parts of ourselves that are so unwanted that whenever they begin to come up we run away."

"only to the degree that we've gotten to know our personal pain, only to the degree that we've related with pain at all, will we be fearless enough, brave enough. . . to be willing to feel the pain of others."

"the basic message of the lojong teachings is that if it's painful, you can learn to hold your seat and move closer to that pain. reverse the usual pattern, which is to split, to escape. go against the grain and hold your seat. lojong introduces a different attitude toward unwanted stuff: if it's painful, you become willing not just to endure it but also to let it awaken your heart and soften you. you learn to embrace it.

if an experience is delightful or pleasant, usually we want to grab it and make it last. we're afraid that it will end. we're not inclined to share it. the lojong teachings encourage us, if we enjoy what we are experiencing, to think of other people and wish for them to feel that. share the wealth. be generous with your joy. give away what you most want. be generous with your insights and delights. instead of fearing that they're going to slip away and holding on to them, share them."

"'gain and victory to others, loss and defeat to myself' . . . in essence what this little saying is getting at is that words like victory and defeat are completely interwoven with how we protect ourselves, how we guard our hearts. our sense of victory just means that we guarded our heart enough so that nothing got through, and we think we won the war. the armor around our soft spot -- our wounded heart -- is now more fortified, and our world is smaller. maybe nothing is getting in to scare us for one whole week, but our courage is weakening, and our sense of caring about others is getting completely obscured. did we really win the war?

on the other hand, our sense of being defeated means that something got in. . . this vulnerability that we've kept armored for ages -- something touched it. . . these words defeat and victory are so tied up with how we stay imprisoned. . . the confusion deepens each time we buy into this win/lose logic: if you touch me, that is defeat, and if i manage to armor myself and not be touched, that's victory."

mistakes

"when i look at my life i realize that the mistakes i have made, the things i really regret, were not errors of judgment but failures of feeling." -jeanette winterson

why the pain

all quotes from in the realm of hungry ghosts by gabor mate

"some people are attracted to painful places because they hope to resolve their own pain there. others offer themselves because their compassionate hearts know that here is where love is most needed. yet others come out of professional interest: this work is ever challenging. those with low self-esteem may be attracted because it feeds their egos to work with such powerless individuals. some are lured by the magnetic force of addictions because they haven't resolved, or even recognized, their own addictive tendencies. my guess is that most of us physicians, nurses, and other professional helpers who work in the downtown eastside are impelled by some mixture of these motives. . .

there's another factor in the equation. many people who've worked in the downtown eastside have noticed it: a sense of authenticity, a loss of the usual social games, the surrender of pretense -- the reality of people who cannot declare themselves to be anything other than what they are.

yes, they lie, cheat, and manipulate -- but don't we all, in our own way? unlike the rest of us, they can't pretend not to be cheaters and manipulators. they're straight up about their refusal to take responsibility, their rejection of social expectation, their acceptance of having lost everything for the sake of their addiction. that isn't much by the straight world's standards, but there's a paradoxical core of honesty wrapped in the compulsive deceit any addiction imposes. . . perhaps there's a fascination in that element of outrageous, unapologetic pseudoauthenticity. in our secret fantasies, who among us wouldn't like to be as carelessly brazen about our flaws?"

"people jeopardize their lives for the sake of making the moment livable. nothing sways them from the habit -- not illness, not the sacrifice of love and relationship, not the loss of all earthly goods, not the crushing of their dignity, not the fear of dying. the drive is that relentless."

"like patterns in a tapestry, recurring themes emerge in my interviews with addicts: the drug as emotional anesthetic; as an antidote to a frightening feeling of emptiness; as a tonic against fatigue, boredom, alienation, and a sense of personal inadequacy; as stress reliever and social lubricant."

"addictions always originate in pain, whether felt openly or hidden in the unconscious. . . the very same brain centers that interpret and 'feel' physical pain also become activated during the experience of emotional rejection. . . when people speak of feeling 'hurt' or of having emotional 'pain', they are not being abstract or poetic but scientifically quite precise."

"the question is never 'why the addiction?' but 'why the pain?'"

"the addict's reliance on the drug to reawaken her dulled feelings is no adolescent caprice. the dullness is itself a consequence of an emotional malfunction not of her making: the internal shutdown of vulnerability.

from the latin word vulnerare, 'to wound', vulnerability is our susceptibility to be wounded. this fragility is part of our nature and cannot be escaped. the best the brain can do is to shut down conscious awareness of it when pain becomes so vast or unbearable that it threatens to overwhelm our capacity to function. the automatic repression of painful emotion is a helpless child's prime defense mechanism and can enable the child to endure trauma that would otherwise be catastrophic. the unfortunate consequence is a wholesale dulling of emotional awareness. 'everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression,' wrote the american novelist saul bellow in the adventures of augie march; 'if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.'

intuitively, we all know that it's better to feel than not to feel. beyond their energizing subjective charge, emotions have crucial survival value. they orient us, interpret the world for us, and offer us vital information. they tell us what is dangerous and what is benign, what threatens our existence and what will nurture our growth. . . our emotions are an indispensable part of our sensory apparatus and an essential part of who we are. they make life worthwhile, exciting, challenging, beautiful, and meaningful.

when we flee our vulnerability, we lose our full capacity for feeling emotion. we may even become emotional amnesiacs, not remembering ever having felt truly elated or truly sad. a nagging void opens, and we experience it as alienation, as profound ennui, as the sense of deficient emptiness described earlier.

the wondrous power of a drug is to offer the addict protection from pain while at the same time enabling her to engage the world with excitement and meaning."

"many addicts report similar improvements in their social abilities under the influence, in contrast to the intolerable aloneness they experience when sober. . . we shouldn't underestimate how desperate a chronically lonely person is to escape the prison of solitude. it's not a matter here of common shyness but of a deep psychological sense of isolation experienced from early childhood by people who felt rejected by everyone, beginning with their caregivers."

"another powerful dynamic perpetuates addiction despite the abundance of disastrous consequences: the addict sees no other possible existence for himself. his outlook on the future is restricted by his entrenched self-image as an addict. no matter how much he many acknowledge the costs of his addiction, he fears a loss of self if it were absent from his life."

"i've often been struck by the childlike insouciance of my addicted patients when they lie to me. a naive manipulation like the one serena attempted is simply part of the game, and being caught is no more shameful than being found while playing hide-and-seek."

"imprinted in the developing brain circuitry of the child subjected to abuse or neglect is fear and distrust of powerful people, especially of caregivers. in time this ingrained wariness is reinforced by negative experiences with authority figures such as teachers, foster parents, and members of the legal system or the medical profession. whenever i adopt a sharp tone with one of my clients, display indifference, or attempt some well-meant coercion for her benefit, i unwittingly take on the features of the powerful ones who first wounded and frightened her decades ago. whatever my intentions, i end up invoking pain and fear."

what the living do

by marie howe

johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably
     fell down there.
and the drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes
     have piled up

waiting for the plumber i still haven't called. this is the everyday we
     spoke of.
it's winter again: the sky's a deep headstrong blue, and the sunlight
     pours through

the open living room windows because the heat's on too high in here, and
     i can't turn it off.
for weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street,
     the bag breaking,

i've been thinking: this is what the living do. and yesterday, hurrying
     along those
wobbly bricks in the cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my
     wrist and sleeve,

i thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: this is it.
parking. slamming the car door shut in the cold. what you called
     that yearning.

what you finally gave up. we want the spring to come and the winter to
     pass. we want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss - we want more and more and
     then more of it.

but there are moments, walking, when i catch a glimpse of myself in the
     window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and i'm gripped by a cherishing
     so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that i'm
     speechless.
i am living, i remember you.

to live in the disquiet

all quotes from between the world and me by ta-nehisi coates

"my mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers - even the answers they themselves believed. i don't know that i have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. but every time i ask it, the question is refined. that is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being 'politically conscious' - as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty."

"you preserved your life because your life, your body, was as good as anyone's, because your blood was as precious as jewels, and it should never be sold for magic, for spirituals inspired by the unknowable hereafter. you do not give your precious body to the billy clubs of birmingham sheriffs nor to the insidious gravity of the streets."

"'white america' is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). but however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, 'white people' would cease to exist for want of reasons."

"your grandparents... were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental 'firsts' - first black five-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor - always presented in the bemused manner of a category of trivial pursuit."

"i did not find a coherent tradition marching lockstep but instead factions, and factions within factions. . . things i believed merely a week earlier, ideas i had taken from one book, could be smashed to splinters by another. . . by my second year, it was natural for me to spend a typical day mediating between frederick douglass's interrogration into america and martin delany's escape into nationalism. perhaps they were somehow both right. i had come looking for a parade, for a military review of champions marching in ranks. instead i was left with a brawl of ancestors, a herd of dissenters, sometimes marching together but just as often marching away from each other. . . the pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books."

"i was only beginning to learn to be wary of my own humanity, of my own hurt and anger - i didn't yet realize that the boot on your neck is just as likely to make you delusional as it is to ennoble."

"i was learning the craft of poetry, which really was an intensive version of what my mother had taught me all those years ago - the craft of writing as the art of thinking. poetry aims for an economy of truth - loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts. poetry was not simply the transcription of notions - beautiful writing rarely is. i wanted to learn to write, which was ultimately, still, as my mother had taught me, a confrontation with my own innocence, my own rationalizations. poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the slag of justifications fell away and i was left with the cold steel truths of life."

"i began to see discord, argument, chaos, perhaps even fear, as i kind of power. i was learning to live in the disquiet i felt in moorland-springarn, in the mess of my mind. the gnawing discomfort, the chaos, the intellectual vertigo was not an alarm, it was a beacon. it began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort. . ."

"this heap of realizations was a weight. i found them physically painful and exhausting. true, i was coming to enjoy the dizziness, the vertigo that must come with any odyssey. but in those early moments, the unceasing contradictions sent me into a gloom. there was nothing holy or particular in my skin; i was black because of history and heritage. there was no nobility in falling, in being bound, in living oppressed, and there was no inherent meaning in black blood. black blood wasn't black; black skin wasn't even black."

"i grew up in a house drawn between love and fear. there was no room for softness. but this girl with the long dreads revealed something else - that love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism."

"the same softness that once made me a target now compelled people to trust me with their stories."

the woman who could not live with her faulty heart

by margaret atwood

i do not mean the symbol
of love, a candy shape
to decorate cakes with,
the heart that is supposed
to belong or break;

i mean this lump of muscle
that contracts like a flayed biceps,
purple-blue, with its skin of suet,
its skin of gristle, this isolate,
this caved hermit, unshelled
turtle, this one lungful of blood,
no happy plateful.

all hearts float in their own
deep oceans of no light,
wetblack and glimmering,
their four mouths gulping like fish.
hearts are said to pound:
this is to be expected, the heart's
regular struggle against being drowned.

but most hearts say, i want, i want,
i want, i want. my heart
is more duplicitous,
though no twin as i once thought.
it says, i want, i don't want, i
want, and then a pause.
it forces me to listen,

and at night it is the infra-red
third eye that remains open
while the other two are sleeping
but refuses to say what it has seen.

it is a constant pestering
in my ears, a caught moth, limping drum,
a child's fist beating
itself against the bedsprings:
i want, i don't want.
how can one live with such a heart?

long ago i gave up singing
to it, it will never be satisfied or lulled.
one night i will say to it:
heart, be still,
and it will.

"the real function of a spiritual friend is to insult you"

all quotes from the places that scare you by pema chodron

"it's important to recognize that we don't usually want to investigate laziness or any other habit. we want to indulge or ignore or condemn. . . we want to continue to escape into comfort orientation, to talk to ourselves endlessly about our loss of heart, or to chew on the fatalism of couldn't care less."

"we train. . . in 'not afraid to be a fool'. we cultivate a simple, direct relationship with our being -- no philosophizing, no moralizing, no judgments. whatever arises in our mind is workable."

"he taught that when we understand that there is no final attainment, no ultimate answer or stopping place, when our mind is free of warring emotions and the belief in separateness, then we will have no fear. . . to the extent that we stop struggling against uncertainty and ambiguity, to that extent we dissolve our fear. . . by learning to relax with groundlessness, we gradually connect with the mind that knows no fear."

"when we start to interrupt our ordinary ways of calling ourselves names and patting ourselves on the back, we are doing something extremely brave. slowly we edge toward the open state, but let's face it, we are moving toward a place of no handholds, no footholds, no mindholds. this may be called liberation, but for a long time it feels like insecurity."

"with ongoing patience and kindness toward this inevitable process, we will never trust that it's wise and compassionate to relax into the egoless state. we have to gradually develop the confidence that it is liberating to let go. . . it takes time to develop enthusiasm for how remaining open really feels."

"when our attitude toward fear becomes more welcoming and inquisitive, there's a fundamental shift that occurs."

"the practice is compassionate inquiry into our moods, our emotions, our thoughts. . . we are encouraged to be curious about the neurosis that's bound to kick in when our coping mechanisms start falling apart. this is how we get to the place where we stop believing in our personal myths, the place where we are not always divided against ourselves, always resisting our own energy."

"this relationship will show us if our heart is big enough to welcome the whole gamut of life -- not just the part that we approve of. to the degree that we are capable of remaining steadfast with our spiritual friend, to this degree we can remain steadfast with the world as it is, with all its violence and tenderness, with its meanness and moments of courage. we find ourselves opening up in a way we never thought was possible."

"once we click into solid views of justification or blaming, our minds become very small. closing down in any form causes suffering to escalate. our solid views could take the form of 'the teacher is perfect and can do no wrong' or 'the teacher is a charlatan and can never be trusted.' both are expressions of freezing the mind. we love to talk about vast, open mind, completely clear and spacious. but can we abide in the openness that presents itself when the bottom falls out of our dream?"

"in working with a spiritual friend we learn to love in an open-ended way -- to love and to be love unconditionally. we're not used to this kind of love. it's what we all want but what we all have difficulty giving. in my case i learned how to love and be loved by watching my teacher. when i saw how unconditionally he loved other people, i began to trust that he could also love me. i saw for myself what it means to never give up on anybody."

"this unconditional commitment to ourselves and to others is what is meant by limitless love. . . this mutual warmth, this heart connection, allows for a meeting of minds."

"anxiety, heartbreak, and tenderness mark the in-between state. it's the kind of place we usually want to avoid. the challenge is to stay in the middle rather than buy into struggle and complaint. the challenge is to let it soften us rather than make us more rigid and afraid. becoming intimate with the queasy feeling of being in the middle of nowhere only makes our hearts more tender. when we are brave enough to stay in the middle, compassion arises spontaneously. by not knowing, not hoping to know, and not acting like we know what's happening, we begin to access our inner strength."

a visceral experience

quotes from between the world and me by ta-nehisi coates

"and you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. it does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. it does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. it does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. . . destruction is merely the superlative form a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. all of this is common to black people."

"there is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. the destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. it is hard to face this. but all our phrasing -- race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy -- serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. you must never look away from this. you must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body."

"to be black in the baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. the nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. the nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear. the law did not protect us. and now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body. but a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker. . . it does not matter if the agent of those forces is white or black -- what matters is our condition, what matters is the system that makes your body breakable."

"not being violent enough could cost me my body. being too violent could cost me my body. we could not get out. i was a capable boy, intelligent, well-liked, but powerfully afraid. and i felt, vaguely, wordlessly, that for a child to be marked off for such a life, to be forced to live in fear was a great injustice."

"your grandmother was not teaching me how to behave in class. she was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the subject that elicited the most sympathy and rationalizing -- myself. here was the lesson: i was not an innocent. my impulses were not filled with unfailing virture. and feeling that i was as human as anyone, this must be true for other humans. if i was not innocent, then they were not innocent. could this mix of motivation also affect the stories they tell? the cities they built? the country they claimed as given to them by god?"

indiscriminate love

from the hours by michael cunningham

"what is wrong with her? she loves richard, she thinks of him constantly, but she perhaps loves the day slightly more. she loves west tenth street on an ordinary summer morning. she feels like a sluttish widow, freshly peroxided under her black veil, with her eyes on the eligible men at her husband's wake. of the three of them - louis, richard, and clarissa - clarissa has always been the most hard-hearted, and the one most prone to romance. she's endured teasing on the subject for more than thirty years; she decided long ago to give in and enjoy her own voluptuous, undisciplined responses, which, as richard put it, tend to be as unkind and adoring as those of a particularly irritating, precocious child. she knows that a poet like richard would move sternly through the same morning, editing it, dismissing incidental ugliness along with incidental beauty, seeking the economic and historical truth behind these old brick town houses, the austere stone complications of the episcopal church and the thin middle-aged man walking his jack russell terrier (they are suddenly ubiquitous along fifth avenue, these feisty, bowlegged little dogs), while she, clarissa, simply enjoys without reason the houses, the church, the man, and the dog. it's childish, she knows. it lacks edge. if she were to express it publicly (now, at her age), this love of hers would consign her to the realm of the duped and the simpleminded, christians with acoustic guitars or wives who've agreed to be harmless in exchange for their keep. still, this indiscriminate love feels entirely serious to her, as if everything in the world is part of a vast, inscrutable intention and everything in the world has its own secret name, a name that cannot be conveyed in language but is simply the sight and feel of the thing itself. this determined, abiding fascination is what she thinks of as her soul (an embarrassing, sentimental word, but what else to call it?); the part that might conceivably survive the death of the body. clarissa never speaks to anyone about any of that. she doesn't gush or chirp. she exclaims only over the obvious manifestations of beauty, and even then manages a certain aspect of adult restraint. beauty is a whore, she sometimes says. i like money better."

getting free

all quotes from the places that scare you by pema chodron

"because they challenge us to the limits of our open-mindedness, difficult relationships are in many ways the most valuable for practice. the people who irritate us are the ones who inevitably blow our cover. through them we might come to see our defenses very clearly."

"when we practice generating compassion, we can expect to experience our fear of pain. compassion practice is daring. it involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently towards what scares us. the trick to doing this is to stay with emotional distress without tightening into aversion, to let fear soften us rather than harden into resistance."

"the essence of bravery is being without self-deception. . . seeing ourselves clearly is initially uncomfortable and embarrassing. as we train in clarity and steadfastness, we see things we'd prefer to deny -- judgmentalness, pettiness, arrogance. these are. . . temporary and workable habits of mind. the more we get to know them, the more they lose their power."

"we can love someone for his own sake, not because he is worthy or unworthy, not because he is loving toward us or he isn't."

"it is our vulnerability in difficult encounters that causes us to shut down. when a relationship brings up old memories and ancient discomforts, we become afraid and harden our hearts. just at the moment when tears could come to our eyes, we pull back and do something mean."

"there are three near enemies of compassion: pity, overwhelm, and idiot compassion. pity or professional warmth is easily mistaken for true compassion. when we identify ourselves as the helper, it means we see others as helpless. instead of feeling the pain of the other person, we set ourselves apart. if we've ever been on the receiving end of pity we know how painful it feels. instead of warmth and support all we feel is distance. with true compassion these up-down identities are stripped away."

"overwhelm is a sense of helplessness. we feel there is so much suffering -- whatever we do is to no avail. we've become discouraged. . . the second way of training with overwhelm is to keep our attention on the other person. this one takes more courage. when someone else's pain triggers fear in us, we turn inward and start erecting walls. we panic because we feel we can't handle the pain. sometimes, we should trust this panic as a sign that we aren't yet ready to open so far. but sometimes instead of closing down or resisting we might have the courage to do something unpredictable: turn our attention back toward the other person. this is the same as keeping our heart open to the pain."

"the third near enemy of compassion is idiot compassion. this is when we avoid conflict and protect our good image by being kind when we should say a definite 'no'. compassion doesn't imply only trying to be good. when we find ourselves in an aggressive relationship, we need to set clear boundaries. the kindest thing we can do for everyone concerned is to know when to say 'enough'. . . it is said that in order not to break our vow of compassion we have to learn when to stop aggression and draw the line. there are times when the only way to bring down the barriers is to set boundaries.

the far enemy or opposite of compassion is cruelty. when we reach the limit of how much suffering we can take, we sometimes use cruelty as a defense against our fear of pain. this is common for anyone who was abused as a child. instead of feeling kindness for those who are defenseless and weak, we can feel an irrational desire to hurt them. we protect our vulnerability and fear by hardening. if we do not recognize that by doing this we hurt ourselves as much as we hurt others, we'll never get free. booker t. washington was right when he said, 'let no man pull you so low as to make you hate him.' cruelty when rationalized or unacknowledged destroys us.

the near enemy of joyfulness is overexcitement. we can churn ourselves into a manic state and mistake riding high above the sorrows of the world for unconditional joy. again, instead of connecting with others, this separates us. authentic joy is not a euphoric state or a feeling of being high. rather, it is a state of appreciation that allows us to participate fully in our lives. we train in rejoicing in the good fortune of self and others.

the far enemy of joy is envy. until i started working with the practice of rejoicing in the good fortune of others, i never realized i could be so envious. to say that this was humbling is an understatement. i was amazed to see how frequently i react to others' success with resentment."

"there is a simple practice we can do to cultivate forgiveness. first, we acknowledge what we feel - shame, revenge, embarrassment, remorse. then we forgive ourselves for being human. then, in the spirit of not wallowing in the pain, we let go and make a fresh start. we don't have to carry the burden with us anymore. we can acknowledge, forgive, and start anew. if we practice this way, little by little we'll learn to abide with the feeling of regret for having hurt ourselves and others. we will also learn self-forgiveness. eventually, at our own speed, we'll even find our capacity to forgive those who have done us harm."

mío

where to put

this craving
where to put
these words
this craving
where

poder, poner
to be able     to put

puedo tener poder

(a question)

to reach to succumb

i must find

other tongues

i: grasp without warning

i: choose without choices

write and rewrite revise and revisit

that: memory, jagged, flexed and exact

this: wished, clipped. narration, corrosion.

you: tell me

i: tell you

don't

with
draw
al
is
a

s

low

breath

skin

crawl

hand

cuff

hand 

slap

{(([<<>>]))}

but what is worse

(a question)

pick me up

pick me

trick me

prick

me: bondad verdad o belleza

let me get there

but not just yet
yes why not now

how silly

how sobering

how the addict

pivots, turns
into
someone's drug

(dios, mierda)

i forbid you

quotes from adam haberberg by yasmina reza

"i can't picture the world. i can see only scattered fragments, shards, i can make no sense of it. i'm not capable of renting bicycles for my family because i'm simply not capable of grappling with the idea of joy, pedaling along amid the idea of joy kills me. whistling along amid salt breezes with happy families is beyond my strength. if i get onto a bicycle with the little one on the saddle behind, what'll overcome me is the desire to weep. to avoid having the desire to weep, one would need to have made a success of everything else, to feel oneself in one camp or the other. whistling along in single file with your wife and children amid the salt breezes is not the least you can do, it's the ultimate achievement."

"what gives her the right to judge what state i'm in, he thinks, what gives her the right to deliver an assessment of the state i'm in, this limping female rat in the rain with her bags of samples. what gives her the right to decree that i'm not well, this nauseatingly robust ghost from the past. it's not that i'm not well marie-therese, i'm extremely unwell, i'm experiencing indescribable grief and i've no idea where consolation might come from, but you cannot know that. you cannot imagine it, marie-therese, because your energy betrays you and your courage betrays you. a being who can live in this hole without being annihilated, who can open their shutters onto this barren landscape without weeping bitter tears, cannot judge the state i'm in. a being who can face that long, narrow kitchen and that lineup of domestic appliances without feeling mortally bereft cannot judge the state i'm in. i have no admiration for your energy, it injures me. i have no admiration for your good temper, it confounds and revolts me. nothing in you speaks to me and nothing in me can speak to you. and just because fate put me into your jeep wrangler today it doesn't mean you can claim the least complicity and tell me, with such gall, that i look as if i've hit rock bottom, and with what stupefying authority, that you could see clearly that i'm not well and that you'd seen it right away back at the jardin des plantes. you can understand nothing about my life because you, marie-therese, were damned from the start. you accepted this damnation and you live with it. you've blended into the mass, you've ironed out all the discords between the world and yourself, and made your nest there, you say bottom line, you talk about the image of the washing machine, you say i have positively bloomed, a woman who talks about my business with that fervor is forever alien to me. you're one of those people who never long for the impossible and one way or another have avoided expecting it. homespun sages, i'd call you. people who succeed because they're genuine and authentic in a milieu in which any sensitive spirit withers and disintegrates. i refuse to believe that god has departed, leaving the field open to your sort of humanity. there's no parity between you and me. we don't resemble each other in any way, i forbid you to think we might be equals to the extent that i could allow myself to confide in you. defeat and the sense of desolation are beyond your ken. you don't know what solitude is. you get up alone, you have no children, you've bypassed the universal model, but you do not experience my solitude. if you experienced it you couldn't survive for two minutes between your burrow in viry and your operation setting up outlets in amusement parks. my own solitude clings to me, i'm never free of it. whether i'm with irene, or with the children amid the family life that'll be the death of me, in which a man only demeans himself and sells himself cheap, whether i'm in company or on my own, the feeling of solitude never leaves me. it's what rules my life. if it had ruled yours, marie-therese, you would be lying at the bottom of the lake, for you wouldn't be able to endure opening your shutters onto that dead water and those distant cries. at one moment in the jeep you said to me: we're not even fifty, you said we, as if we were from the same stable, you and i, as if the absurd class we were in at the lycee had any meaning. marie-therese, i hardly remember you at the lycee, you were the most invisible being ever. when you came up to me with your bags of samples and your umbrella, i pretended to be renewing a nonexistent link out of the kindness of my heart. when in the wrangler you said we, i realized my mistake, i realized it didn't strike you as an immense honor for me to be sitting on the seat beside you and an immense honor that i could accept your unthinkable invitation. now i learn that i was not even your equal but your protege. i made your heart bleed, bald and alone on my damp bench, and you loaded me into your four-by-four the way you would one of the zoo animals if they could be taken out of their cages. one cannot be too wary of people of your type, supposedly inoffensive people who crush one with a sentence. people who bring you down in the worst possible way, without you asking anything of them, without you granting them the privilege of the least familiarity, and who take advantage of your weakness to demolish you. marie-therese, i've held on to the naive dream of becoming a writer, that is to say a man who tries to save himself from himself. a man who, in order to hold on to a little momentum toward the future, attempts to exchange his own existence for that of words. i don't want to hear i'm not well. such phrases are of abject insignificance coming from you, marie-therese. my hair is turning white, my teeth are turning yellow, and my hands are shrinking. i forbid you to notice. even if i'm in the throes of death, i forbid you to notice that i'm in the throes of death, you have no right to notice anything at all about me, you can understand nothing about what i am, you have chosen to live as marie-therese lyoc, you have chosen to be part of the hoi polloi of humanity, we do not belong to the same caste, i forbid you to notice my decline."

the body of the condemned

all quotes from discipline and punish by michel foucault

"undercover of the relative stability of the law, a mass of subtle and rapid changes has occurred. certainly the 'crimes' and 'offences' on which judgment is passed are juridical objects defined by the code, but judgment is also passed on the passions, instincts, anomalies, infirmities, maladjustments, effects of environment or heredity; acts of aggression are punished, so also, through them, is aggressivity; rape, but at the same time perversions; murders, but also drives and desires. but, it will be objected, judgment is not actually being passed on them; if they are referred to at all it is to explain the actions in question, and to determine to what extent the subject's will was involved in the crime. this is no answer. for it is these shadows lurking behind the case itself that are judged and punished."

"knowledge of the offence, knowledge of the offender, knowledge of the law: these three conditions made it possible to ground a judgment in truth. but now a quite different question of truth is inscribed in the course of the penal judgment. the question is no longer simply: 'has the act been established and is it punishable?' but also: 'what is this act, what is this act of violence or this murder? to what level or to what field of reality does it belong? is it a phantasy, a psychotic reaction, a delusional episode, a perverse action?' it is no longer simply: 'who committed it?' but: 'how can we assign the causal process that produced it? where did it originate in the author himself? instinct, unconscious, environment, heredity?' it is not longer simply: 'what law punishes this offence?' but: 'what would be the most appropriate measures to take? how do we see the future development of the offender? what would be the best way of rehabilitating him?' a whole set of assessing, diagnostic, prognostic, normative judgments concerning the criminal have become lodged in the framework of penal judgment."

"the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. this political investment of the body is bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations, with its economic use; it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination; but, on the other hand, its constitution as a labour power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection (in which need is also a political instrument meticulously prepared, calculated and used); the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body. this subjection is not only obtained by the instruments of violence or ideology; it can also be direct, physical, pitting force against force, bearing on material elements, and yet without involving violence; it may be calculated, organized, technically thought out; it may be subtle, make use neither of weapons nor of terror and yet remain of a physical order. that is to say, there may be a 'knowledge' of the body that is not exactly the science of its functioning, and a mastery of its forces that is more than the ability to conquer them: this knowledge and this mastery constitute what might be called the political technology of the body. of course, this technology is diffuse, rarely formulated in continuous, systematic discourse"

skin

in fact this vein

it shows and scourges it is never

too cold           for blue becomes

it shows! and scrubs the skin clear eyed

freckles and filth this skipped silt

wrapped taut and without warning

blew sky skimmed simply it burst

open it showed every inch and scratch i cried i swear i could do no harm

what i wanted was the sound of “opening”

but every however slammed the opposite

like this stretch of touch slapped out loud

out of place here as if white

ruffles and

black lace were a thing that crawled              

from dirty bugs

however budging however cut with muscles

the shape of a back i swear i swear

who looked with cutting eyes out of this place out

we spill

every time the door is knocked someone gets up

it makes no difference

why the body sways left to right left

to right

left

to right

this front

or around this wind spinning

the body makes hoops

the body curls itself like a catch

the skin a hasp, then a lock

the flesh forwards all and every

the motion       the blood

which is it. the lines the lake the store

or slivered sea.

i can't do this anymore

is what someone thinks

was said.

//////////////

june 2015

grab bag

"The poems I have loved the most are those I have understood the least." - T.S. Eliot

 

"The only thing that separates the writer from others—and far from making him or her a better or wiser person, let alone a more amenable one, as it redoubles the force of solitude, 'one’s ultimate hard irreducible inorganic singleness'—is that the reading of a poem, or the pondering of a crucifixion, becomes an event. Not a diversion, a flight, or a release from chores, but an experience no less transformative than a day in bed with a lover." - Samuel Beckett

 

"The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person."

- Czesław Miłosz

 

“I forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”

- Marcel Duchamp

 

“There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction.” - Franz Kafka

 
"Wisdom is tolerance of cognitive dissonance." ~ Robert Thurman

 

“In the artist of all kinds, one can detect an inherent dilemma, which belongs to the co-existence of two trends, the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found.” - D. W. Winnicott

 
“My identifying features / are rapture and despair.” - Wisława Szymborska 

 

“Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.” - Ian McEwan

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” - Simone Weil

“Poems do not endure as objects but as presences. When you read anything worth remembering, you liberate a human voice; you release into the world again a companion spirit.” - Louise Glück

 

"In poetry, you become infinitely small without disappearing." - Roberto Bolaño

 

"The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity." - Anne Truitt

 

"All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman." - W.H. Auden

“Let's not forget that small emotions are the great captains of our lives.” - Vincent van Gogh

stability

all quotes from the places that scare you by pema chodron

"even though peak experiences might show us the truth and inform us about why we are training, they are essentially no big deal. if we can't integrate them into the ups and downs of our lives, if we cling to them, they will hinder us. we can trust our experiences as valid, but then we have to move on and learn to get along with our neighbors. then even the most remarkable insights can begin to permeate our lives."

"it is possible to move through the drama of our lives without believing so earnestly in the character we play. that we take ourselves so seriously, that we are so absurdly important in our own minds, is a problem for us. . . self-importance hurts us, limiting us to the narrow world of our likes and dislikes. we end up bored to death with ourselves and the world. we end up never satisfied."

"it is only by practicing through a continual succession of agreeable and disagreeable situations that we acquire true strength. . . we expect that what is always changing should be graspable and predictable. we are born with a craving for resolution and security that governs our thoughts, words, and actions. . .  our prejudices and addictions are patterns that arise from the fear of a fluid world. because we mistakenly take what is always changing to be permanent, we suffer."

"only when we relate with ourselves without moralizing, without harshness, without deception, can we let go of harmful patterns."

"training with kindness results in someone who is flexible and confident, who doesn't become upset when situations are unpredictable and insecure. . . we need self-compassion to stabilize our minds. we need it to work with our emotions. we need it in order to stay."

"transformation occurs only when we remember, breath by breath, year after year, to move toward our emotional distress without condemning or justifying our experience."

"when our emotions intensify, what we usually feel is fear. thus we train in opening the fearful heart to the restlessness of our own energy. we learn to abide with the experience of our emotional distress."

not

you

are not chosen

any stone

can sing

we come to languages

not lives

your tongue is useful

not unique

-lucille clifton, from mercy

i too

poor skin poor poem poor people someone was waiting for it

someone was poor

someone wants me to say

in spirit

but bored, i won't

i will not i say i will

scratch

kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk

(pretending.

                        letters are streaks of lightning.)

it matters with whom you converse about such things.

this the fix, the poor poor shot smoke drip dry

we wring. hands and things. i carved a simple cigarette

from false teeth. she smiled. her walk half hearted,

a dismount.

waves of carsickness become her. i prick up such ears

and cough. i am one of the “them”. i am “we” which is

sung with spirit

in unison

i am the start or the swipe

full-throated with a clench of fluid or fabric.

i too display

i too perform

i too

i too

june 2015