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You’re Weird, Irene

The woman sits there a while and then we can see her face changing. It looks like she’s got all the troubles in the whole world. Her face crinkles up and she starts to cry. She wipes away her tears but they keep coming down and flowing into her toothless mouth.

The Pure In Heart

The voice is unmistakable. At the first intonation, the first rolling syllable, Swain wakes, feeling the murmuring life of each of a million cells. Each of them all at once. He feels the line where his two lips touch, the fingers of his left hand pressed against his leg, the spears of wet grass against the flat soles of his feet, the gleaming half-circles of tears that stand in his eyes. His own bone marrow hums inside him like colonies of bees. He feels the breath pouring in and out of him, through the damp, red passages of his skull. Then in the slow way that fireworks die, the knowledge fades. He is left again with his surfaces and the usual vague darkness within. He turns back around to see if Julie has heard.

Unseen Rain: Quatrains Of Rumi

A Paul Griffith Reader

I may well be wrong in my impression that people exist who have not had to earn their spiritual lives by means of suffering. It is difficult if not impossible to know enough about a person to be able to make such a judgement on such a matter with any certainty.

Sunbeams

The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.

Richard Bach, Illusions

Doing Something Wrong

Sunbeams

If we could get over that idea of sin, get rid of guilt, then I think a great many things that disturb people would be accepted as normal and natural, and nothing made of it.

Henry Miller

Zen In Texas

Spirituality’s Shadow

An Interview With William Irwin Thompson

We talk about the “new age,” but eighty percent of it is filled with atavisms, really archaic stuff that is not futuristic but just the dredging up of all the old knowledge, of dowsing and palmistry and reflexology and acupuncture.

Sunbeams

The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms