These were good people and they had been good to us and we had therefore had a good time. To conclude otherwise was frightening, raising the specter of some unnameable quantity without which we could not abide, but which we could not summon on demand, least of all by proceeding in virtuous accordance with an established formula.You regarded redemption as an act of will. You disparaged people (people like me) for their cussedly nonspecific dissatisfactions, because to fail to embrace the simple fineness of being alive betrayed a weakness of character. You always hated finicky eaters, hypochondriacs, and snobs who turned their noses up at Terms of Endearment just because it was popular. Nice eats, nice place, nice folks- what more could I possibly want? Besides, the good life doesn’t knock on the door. Joy is a job. So if you believed with sufficient industry that we had had a good time with Brian and Louise in theory, then we would have had a good time in fact. The only hint that in truth you’d found our afternoon laborous was that your enthusiasm was excessive.

When I was little and running on the race track at school, I always stopped and waited for all the other kids so we could run together even though I knew (and everybody else knew) that I could run much faster than all of them! I pretended to read slowly so I could "wait" for everyone else who couldn't read as fast as I could! When my friends were short I pretended that I was short too and if my friend was sad I pretended to be unhappy. I could go on and on about all the ways I have limited myself, my whole life, by "waiting" for people. And the only thing that I've ever received in return is people thinking that they are faster than me, people thinking that they can make me feel bad about myself just because I let them and people thinking that I have to do whatever they say I should do. My mother used to teach me "Cinderella is a perfect example to be" but I have learned that Cinderella can go fuck herself, I'm not waiting for anybody, anymore! I'm going to run as fast as I can, fly as high as I can, I am going to soar and if you want you can come with me! But I'm not waiting for you anymore.

The last thing we want to admit is that the forbidden fruit on which we have been gnawing since reaching the magic age of twenty-one is the same mealy Golden Delicious that we stuff into our children’s lunch boxes. The last thing we want to admit is that the bickering of the playground perfectly presages the machinations of the boardroom, that our social hierarchies are merely an extension of who got picked first for the kickball team, and that grown-ups still get divided into bullies and fatties and crybabies. What’s a kid to find out? Presumably we lord over them an exclusive deed to sex, but this pretense flies so fantastically in the face of fact that it must result from some conspiratorial group amnesia. […] In truth, we are bigger, greedier versions of the same eating, shitting, rutting ruck, hell-bent on disguising from somebody, if only from a three-year-old, that pretty much all we do is eat and shit and rut. The secret is there is no secret. That is what we really wish to keep from our kids, and its supression is the true collusion of adulthood, the pact we make, the Talmud we protect.

I have realized; it is during the times I am far outside my element that I experience myself the most. That I see and feel who I really am, the most! I think that's what a comet is like, you see, a comet is born in the outer realms of the universe! But it's only when it ventures too close to our sun or to other stars that it releases the blazing "tail" behind it and shoots brazen through the heavens! And meteors become sucked into our atmosphere before they burst like firecrackers and realize that they're shooting stars! That's why I enjoy taking myself out of my own element, my own comfort zone, and hurling myself out into the unknown. Because it's during those scary moments, those unsure steps taken, that I am able to see that I'm like a comet hitting a new atmosphere: suddenly I illuminate magnificently and fire dusts begin to fall off of me! I discover a smile I didn't know I had, I uncover a feeling that I didn't know existed in me... I see myself. I'm a shooting star. A meteor shower. But I'm not going to die out. I guess I'm more like a comet then. I'm just going to keep on coming back.

[…] di lì a poco tutti noi, cioè il principe, Ivan Ivanyč ed io, ci saremmo separati e non per un'estate, per un anno e per due, ma per sempre. Sì, né più e né meno che per sempre e per non rivederci più, in nessun tempo, fino alla fine del mondo, mai! Un pensiero che, nonostante la sua evidente bizzarria, mi riempì di terrore. In realtà, noi che viviamo per un determinato periodo sulla terra con le stesse gioie e tristezze della vita, che guardiamo lo stesso cielo, che amiamo e odiamo in fin dei conti le stesse cose, tutti condannati a una stessa pena, a una stessa cancellazione dalla superficie della terra, dovremmo provare l'uno per l'altra un'infinita tenerezza, un commovente sentimento di vicinanza. Dovremmo gridare di terrore e dolore quando il destino ci divide disponendo ogni volta della completa possibilità di trasformare ogni nostra separazione, magari di pochi minuti, in separazione eterna. M a come si sa, sentimenti del genere ci sono del tutto estranei, e spesso ci separiamo persino dalle persone più care con la massima indifferenza.

Oh, why fill the heart with yesterday and tomorrow when this moment is all the heart needs? Let the heart be present, let the mind be here, let the eyes see, let the ears hear, let the soul witness, let the words flow ... down this gentle river, you know the way. Why must the eyes know exactly where and why must the mind know exactly how and why must the heart know exactly what and why must the soul know exactly when? It doesn't matter. In the same way that the headlights do not need to show from here all the way to your home before you get there, the headlights just need to show the next few feet. And if the car continues to move, with the headlights showing just the next few feet, you can make it home from anywhere.So in the same way, let the heart, let the eyes, let the mind, let the ears, let the soul, let the touch of this moment feel what is here ... without focusing on what will be there. Allow the essence of this, and this, and this, and this to enrich your life. Be with this now. Witness the tree as you pass by and watch the birds fly to it, drawn to it in the same way that bugs are drawn to lights. Let your heart be drawn to this moment, let your soul be guided by what is here, now.

Me"( Notice Me)I was sent here on a journey that has no end.I hear you joke of going nowhere fast.Well, maybe life’s a joke and I’m the foolThat dreams of being first but ends up last.Life’s a trial—a sentence I can’t escape.Confusion and desperation tear me down and turn to hate.There’s so much more to figure out,But it’s growing way too late.If I could answer half the questions in my mind,If I could find the place where I belong,If words were near as strong and deep as the wall of emotions I climbThen sorrow wouldn’t be so wrong.There’s no way to make you understand.An entire symphony could not play the broken notes in one child’s soul.That child screams and no one hears her,Until the tears have dried and now she’s just too old.I don’t want to hear the philosophies, the opinions,The remarks, the horrible reasonings.Words are to pad the mind and fight with the solitude of the heart.Still, silence chills to the bone and tears the soul apart.She never means to hurt or harm, only to belong.To find the truth ‘mid mortal lies, to sing her only song.But someday this race will end, and if she comes in last,I pray the first will look deeper than the others, smile, and then pass."Copyright 1985

Their home was nice, the food was nice, the girls were nice – nice, nice, nice.I disappointed myself by finding our perfectly pleasant lunch with perfectly pleasant people inadequate. […] These were good people and they had been good to us and we had therefore had a good time. To conclude otherwise was frightening, raising the specter of some unnameable quantity without which we could not abide, but which we could not summon on demand, least of all by proceeding in virtuous accordance with an established formula.You regarded redemption as an act of will. You disparaged people (people like me) for their cussedly nonspecific dissatisfactions, because to fail to embrace the simple fineness of being alive betrayed a weakness of character. You always hated finicky eaters, hypochondriacs, and snobs who turned their noses up at Terms of Endearment just because it was popular. Nice eats, nice place, nice folks- what more could I possibly want? Besides, the good life doesn’t knock on the door. Joy is a job. So if you believed with sufficient industry that we had had a good time with Brian and Louise in theory, then we would have had a good time in fact. The only hint that in truth you’d found our afternoon laborious was that your enthusiasm was excessive.

Love is soul work. Love can be met and joined with attraction and infatuation and all of that, but love will not fade when those things do. You can choose to close your heart to love, and run away, and avoid it for as long as you can in every way you can think of but if it was really, truly, the other-worldly, almost supernatural kind of love that we can only hope to be graced with at least once in this life experience, it will not leave you. You can love many people, but at the end of the day, the love you need to choose is the love that, even if you close your heart to, still moves you. The love you still write about. The love you can’t face. The love you’re still not okay with losing, that you’re angry about; the love that uprooted your life and contorted your being. The love you ran away from because it showed you who you are without the guise of worth given from someone else. This is love because these are all signs that you are closing your heart and to be doing so, there has to be something going through you for you to be able to close off. Real love will be the love you realize that remains even after you close your heart to it, because it sustains itself. It drives you forward. It brings up all the unhealed parts of you that you have to reconcile.

ဆင္ဆိုသည္မွာ ဘာႏွင့္တူပါသလဲဆိုသည္ကို ေျဖဖို႕ စံုစမ္းၾကေသာ မ်က္မျမင္ပုဏၰားေျခာက္ေယာက္လိုပင္ လူတိုင္းသည္ ကိုယ့္အသိဥာဏ္၊ ပညာအရည္အခ်င္းႏွင့္ ဘဝအေတြ႕အၾကံဳကို အားကိုးျပဳျပီး ေမးခြန္းမ်ားစြာရဲ့ အေျဖကိုရွာၾကရသည္။

I open my arms wide and let the wind flow over me. I love the universe and the universe loves me. That’s the one-two punch right there, wanting to love and wanting to be loved. Everything else is pure idiocy—shiny fancy outfits, Geech-green Cadillacs, sixty-dollar haircuts, schlock radio, celebrity-rehab idiots, and most of all, the atomic vampires with their de-soul-inators, and flag-draped coffins. Goodbye to all that, I say. And goodbye to Mr. Asterhole and the Red Death of algebra and to the likes of Geech and Keeeevin. Goodbye to Mom’s rented tan and my sister’s chargecard boobs. Goodbye to Dad for the second and last time. Goodbye to black spells and jagged hangovers, divorces, and Fort Worth nightmares. To high school and Bob Lewis and once-upon-a-time Ricky. Goodbye to the future and the past and, most of all, to Aimee and Cassidy and all the other girls who came and went and came and went. Goodbye. Goodbye. I can’t feel you anymore. The night is almost too beautifully pure for my soul to contain. I walk with my arms spread open under the big fat moon. Heroic “weeds rise up from the cracks in the sidewalk, and the colored lights of the Hawaiian Breeze ignite the broken glass in the gutter. Goodbye, I say, goodbye, as I disappear little by little into the middle of the middle of my own spectacular now

This is life.Learning to love through loss. Seeking warm pockets in the bitter cold. Finding the worth of a smile on a cloudy day. Carrying the weight of the world on weary shoulders—mistakes, sins, injustices—added upon daily. Enduring burdens that spur greater strength. This is life.Sorting through layers of expressions staring you straight in the eye. A battle to be right when wrong, to be good when bad, to be content when in need, and to laugh when tearing up. This is life.Valuing things of no worth. Reevaluating dreams. Laboring ceaselessly against the current. Seeing less, wanting more, having enough.This is life.Chasing the moon when the sun would extend its warmth. Slapping the hand that would offer a gentle caress. Cowering at personal, monstrous shadows. Giving and taking in unbalanced weights. Diminishing the majesty of mountains in order to form our own lowly hills. Hoping for more than we deserve. This is life.Hurting. Despairing. Losing. Weeping. Suffering. Laboring. Sinking. Mourning. Appreciating with greater capacity and sincerity a learned knowledge that these adversities do have their opposites. This is life.A taste. A revelation. A banishment. A mercy. A test. An experience. A turbulent sea-voyage that shall assuredly reach the unseen shore, making seasoned sailors of us all.This is life.

The majority of people have successfully alienated themselves from change; they tediously arrange their lives into a familiar pattern, they give themselves to normalcy, they are proud if they are able to follow in auspicious footsteps set before them, they take pride in always coloring inside the lines and they feel secure if they belong to a batch of others who are like them. Now, if familiar patterns bore you, if normalcy passes before you unnoticed, if you want to create your own footsteps in the earth and leave your own handprints on the skies, if you are the one who doesn't mind the lines in the coloring book as much as others do, and perchance you do not cling to a flock for you to identify with, then you must be ready for adversity. If you are something extraordinary, you are going to always shock others and while they go about existing in their mundaneness which they call success, you're going to be flying around crazy in their skies and that scares them. People are afraid of change, afraid of being different, afraid of doing things and thinking things that aren't a part of their checkerboard game of a life. They only know the pieces and the moves in their games, and that's it. You're always going to find them in the place that you think you're going to find them in, and every time they think about you, you're going to give them a heart attack.

You're going to meet many people with domineering personalities: the loud, the obnoxious, those that noisily stake their claims in your territory and everywhere else they set foot on. This is the blueprint of a predator. Predators prey on gentleness, peace, calmness, sweetness and any positivity that they sniff out as weakness. Anything that is happy and at peace they mistake for weakness. It's not your job to change these people, but it's your job to show them that your peace and gentleness do not equate to weakness. I have always appeared to be fragile and delicate but the thing is, I am not fragile and I am not delicate. I am very gentle but I can show you that the gentle also possess a poison. I compare myself to silk. People mistake silk to be weak but a silk handkerchief can protect the wearer from a gunshot. There are many people who will want to befriend you if you fit the description of what they think is weak; predators want to have friends that they can dominate over because that makes them feel strong and important. The truth is that predators have no strength and no courage. It is you who are strong, and it is you who has courage. I have lost many a friend over the fact that when they attempt to rip me, they can't. They accuse me of being deceiving; I am not deceiving, I am just made of silk. It is they who are stupid and wrongly take gentleness and fairness for weakness. There are many more predators in this world, so I want you to be made of silk. You are silk.

When Your Life Looks Back,When your life looks back--As it will, at itself, at you--what will it say?Inch of colored ribbon cut from the spool.Flame curl, blue-consuming the log it flares from.Bay leaf. Oak leaf. Cricket. One among many.Your life will carry you as it did always,With ten fingers and both palms,With horizontal ribs and upright spine,With its filling and emptying heart,That wanted only your own heart, emptying, filled, in return.You gave it. What else could do?Immersed in air or in water.Immersed in hunger or anger.Curious even when bored.Longing even when running away."What will happen next?"--the question hinged in your knees, your ankles,in the in-breaths even of weeping.Strongest of magnets, the future impartial drew you in.Whatever direction you turned toward was face to face.No back of the world existed,No unseen corner, no test. No other earth to prepare for.This, your life had said, its only pronoun.Here, your life had said, its only house.Let, your life had said, its only order.And did you have a choice in this? You did--Sleeping and waking,the horses around you, the mountains around you,The buildings with their tall, hydraulic shafts.Those of your own kind around you--A few times, you stood on your head.A few times, you chose not to be frightened.A few times, you held another beyond any measure.A few times, you found yourself held beyond any measure.Mortal, your life will say,As if tasting something delicious, as if in envy.Your immortal life will say this, as it is leaving.