JOSEPHINE BAKER

The white imagination is sure something when it comes to blacks.

LAURA INGALLS WILDER

As you read my stories of long ago I hope you will remember that things truly worthwhile and that will give you happiness are the same now as they were then. It is not the things you have that make you happy. It is love and kindness and helping each other and just plain being good.

DAISAKU IKEDA

The great American poet Walt Whitman writes in Leaves of Grass:

“All comes by the body, only health puts you rapport with the universe.”

I am sure you are all very busy, but I hope you will advance in good health and with optimism and enjoy the power of your faith, which is what puts you in rhythm with the universe.

GUY DAVENPORT 

There is nothing like being a soldier for confidence or learning your limits or enduring utter humiliation.

CLOWN BALLOON PIERROT

Sébastien Tixier

TOM WAITS
Intro to “Better Off Without A Wife”

For all the bachelors out there tonight, yeah for anybody who’s never whistled this song.

Maybe you whistled it but you lost the sheet music.

Um … this is um … well actually I don’t mind going to weddings or anything, as long as they’re not my own I show up. But I’ve always kinda been partial to calling myself up on the phone and asking myself out, you know? Oh yeah, you call yourself up too huh? Yeah, well one thing about it, your always around.

Yeah I know, yeah you ask yourself out, you know, some class joint somewhere. The Buretto King or something, you know. Well I ain’t cheap you know. Take yourself out for a couple of drinks maybe. Then there’d be some provocative conversation on the way home. Park in front of the house you know. Oh yeah, you smoothly put a little nice music on, maybe you put on like uh, you know, like shopping music, something thats not too interruptive you know and then uh slide over real nice and say ‘Oh I think you have something in your eye’.

Well maybe it’s not that romantic with you but Christ I don’t know, you know I get into it you know. Take myself up to the porch, take myself inside or maybe uh, or may get a little something, a brandy snifter or something. “Would like you like to listen to some of my back records? I got something here.”

Uh … Well usually about 2.30 in the morning you’ve ended up taking advantage of yourself. There ain’t no way around that, you know. Yeah, making a scene with a magazine, there ain’t no way around.

I’ll confess you know, I’m no different you know. I’m not weird about it or anything, I don’t tie myself up first. I just kinda spend a little time with myself.

So this is kind of a little anthem here.

Bill Jewett from Monochrome Landscapes

Bill Jewett from Monochrome Landscapes

HAKUUN YASUTANI
Flowers Fall - A Commentary on Zen Master Dōgen’s Genjōkōan

Enlightenment means waking up to the world of oneness. Unenlightened people look at everything dualistically: self and other, subject and object, delusions and enlightenment, this world and the Pure Land, unenlightened persons and buddhas, form and emptiness. Even if one tries to get rid of that duality by mouthing the theory that “form is emptiness,” the seam of “is” remains. It’s not the seamless stupa.

The actual experience of enlightenment comes springing forth in the realm of true oneness. And with that, one sometimes cries out in astonishment. One becomes aware that the whole universe is just the single seamless stupa. It’s not some simplistic kind of thing like a reflection in a mirror.

BONNIE 'PRINCE' BILL
“Cursed Sleep”

I slept sweetly unpretending
That the night was always ending
She breathed lightly right next to me
And I dreamed of her inside of me

And in my dream she sang so sweetly
A melody I hope to sing
So enslaved by her sweet wonder
It cut my legs and fingered hunger

She sang my name and so engulfed

I cried and felt my legs fail
In her arms I trembled electric
Oh and she let me and she held me

Then waking she was older still
And holds my love against its will
In spell cast with her palms extended
Cursed love is never ending

Cursed eyes are never closing
Cursed arm are never closing
Cursed children never rising
And cursed me never despising

Oh I am loving always holding
While she sleeps her song enfolding
Epic song it tells of how
She and I are living now

Cursed love

DŌGEN 

Do not ask me where I am going. I travel in this limitless world, where every step I take is my home.

Buddhaghosa (5th century), the most important Abhidharma scholar of Theravāda Buddhism, presenting three copies of the Visuddhimagga.

How do you caption it?

Christianity 101 or American History 101?

FUCK 1

Marcel Theodor Anthony Bosch

HAROLD PINTER from Old Times

There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.

JETSUNMA TENZIN PALMO

To have a much broader, more open mind, it is very important for Buddhists in the West to recognize that the Dharma is huge and to read some really authoritative books by genuine scholars and practitioners. Not just the new-agey stuff. This is always the problem - the Buddha never intended it to be a feel-good therapy; it’s supposed to push your buttons.

SAMUEL BECKETT
Ohio Impromptu

So the sad tale a last time told they sat on as though turned to stone. Through the single window dawn shed no light. From the street no sound of reawakening. Or was it that buried in who knows what thoughts they paid no heed? To light of day. To sound of reawakening. What thoughts who knows. Thoughts, no, not thoughts. Profounds of mind. Buried in who knows what profounds of mind. Of mindlessness. Whither no light can reach. No sound. So sat on as though turned to stone. The sad tale a last time told.

GUY DAVENPORT
The Geography of the Imagination

The poet is at the edge of our consciousness of the world, finding beyond the suspected nothingness which we imagine limits our perception another acre or so of being worth our venturing upon.

bell hooks
Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work

No black woman writer in this culture can write “too much.” Indeed, no woman writer can write “too much.” No woman has ever written enough.

Robyn Hitchcock, 2017

MARGARET MEAD
"The Energy Crisis - Why Our World Will Never Again Be the Same" (1974)

We are living beyond our means. As a people we have developed a life-style that is draining the earth of its priceless and irreplaceable resources without regard for the future of our children and people all around the world.

Alen MacWeeney
Chimney Sweep and Children, Ireland, 1965

Rockwell Kent

LAURA INGALLS WILDER
On The Banks of Plum Creek

She heard Pa shouting,"Jiminy crickets! It's raining fish-hooks and hammer handles!"

LAURA INGALLS WILDER

A good laugh overcomes more difficulties and dissipates more dark clouds than any other one thing.

Artist unknown.

SAMUEL BECKETT
The Unnamable

I have to speak, whatever that means. Having nothing to say, no words but the words of others, I have to speak. No one compels me to, there is no one, it’s an accident, a fact. Nothing can ever exempt me from it, there is nothing, nothing to discover, nothing to recover, nothing that can lessen what remains to say, I have the ocean to drink, so there is an ocean then.

YUAN MEI
“Climbing the Mountain”

I burned incense, swept the earth, and waited
              for a poem to come…

Then I laughed, and climbed the mountain,
              leaning on my staff.

How I’d love to be a master
              of the blue sky’s art:

see how many sprigs of snow-white cloud
              he’s brushed in so far today.

David Colin Onze

Let's come together this lord's day.

GUY DAVENPORT
The Geography of the Imagination

Imagination is like the drunk man who lost his watch and must get drunk again to find it.

ZELDA FITGERALD
“Eulogy on the Flapper”

She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring.



HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
“The Little Mermaid”

She laughed and danced with the thought of death in her heart.