In Silence :: 3.2011

Who are you?
Who
are you? Whose
silence are you?
Who (be quiet)
are you (as these stones
are quiet). Do not
think of what you are
still less of
what you may one day be.
Rather
be what you are (but who?)
be the unthinkable one
you do not know.

by Thomas Merton

In an instant :: 3.20.2011

Identity independence :: 3.12.2011

Always seeking independence
Like Armenians always have
This is the way I also am of this race
It's in the makeup of my cells,
encoded
In my DNA
There is no denying it.
Just discovering these truths
Bit by bit
With age.
Constructing my cultural identity
In my own way
My own pace.
Resonating with the most simplest of descriptions of a people's continuous struggle
to be free
How much of me and the struggles I have is of this?
What is the memory retention capacity of our DNA?
Within the depths of me
For the first time
I felt a sense of belonging
Without the longing to belong.

by me

John Lennon

There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life,

Meditation

Everything is meditation in this practice, even while eating, drinking, dressing, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking. Whatever you are doing, everything should be done mindfully, dynamically, with totality, completeness, thoroughness, Then it becomes meditation, meaningful, purposeful. It is not thinking but experiencing from moment to moment, living from moment to moment, without clinging, without condemnation, without judging, without evaluating, without comparing, without selecting, without criticizing—choiceless awareness.

Meditation is not only sitting; it is a way of living. It should be integrated with your whole life. It is actually an education in how to see, how to hear, how to smell, how to eat, how to drink, how to walk with full awareness. To develop mindfulness is the most important factor in the process of awakening.

Anagarika Munindra-ji as quoted in “Living this life fully. Stories and teachings of Munindra” by Mirka Knaster; page 1

Chris Hedges

Civilizations rise, decay and die. Time, as the ancient Greeks argued, for individuals and for states is cyclical. As societies become more complex they become inevitably more precarious. They become increasingly vulnerable. And as they begin to break down there is a strange retreat by a terrified and confused population from reality, an inability to acknowledge the self-evident fragility and impending collapse. The elites at the end speak in phrases and jargon that do not correlate to reality. They retreat into isolated compounds, whether at the court at Versailles, the Forbidden City or modern palatial estates. The elites indulge in unchecked hedonism, the accumulation of vaster wealth and extravagant consumption. They are deaf to the suffering of the masses who are repressed with greater and greater ferocity. Resources are more ruthlessly depleted until they are exhausted. And then the hollowed-out edifice collapses. The Roman and Sumerian empires fell this way. The Mayan elites, after clearing their forests and polluting their streams with silt and acids, retreated backward into primitivism.

Richard Wright

I have no race except that which is forced upon me. I have no country except that to which I am obliged to belong. I have no traditions. I am free. I have only the future.

Albert Camus

And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from.

Danielle Marie Crume

Don’t expect others to treat you better than they treat themselves. If you choose to deal with them (or must), it is best to come from a place of compassion toward their ignorance and lack of love. Be solid enough to deal with it or step back to work on yourself first.

Refuser

By Eve Ensler

From the Lebanese mountains
To the Kenyan village of El Doret
We are practicing self-defense
Versed in Karate, Tai Chi, Judo, and Kung Foo
We are no longer surrendering to our fate.

Now, we are the ones who walk our girl friends home from school.
And we don’t do it with macho. We do it with cool.

Our mothers are the Pink Sari Gang
Fighting off the drunken men
With rose pointed fingers and sticks in
Uttar Pradesh.
The Peshmerga women
in the Kurdish mountains
with barrettes in their hair
and AK47s instead of pocket books.

We are not waiting anymore to be taken and retaken. We are the Liberian women sitting in the Africa sun blockading the exits til the men figure it out. We are the Nigerian women babies strapped to out backs occupying the oil terminals of Chevron. We are the women of Kerala who refused to let Coca Cola privatize our water. We are Cindy Sheehan showing up in Crawford without a plan.

We are all those who forfeited husbands boyfriends and dates Cause we were married to our mission. We know love comes from all directions and in many forms.

We are Malalai who spoke back to the Afghan Loya Jurga And told them they were “raping warlords” and She kept speaking even when they kept trying to blow up her house.

And we are Zoya whose radical mother was shot dead when Zoya was only a child so she was fed on revolution which was stronger than milk

And we are the ones who kept and loved our babies even though they have the faces of our rapists.

We are the girls who stopped cutting ourselves to release the pain And we are the girls who refused to have our clitoris cut And give up our pleasure.

We are: Rachel Corrie who wouldn’t couldn’t move away from the Israeli tank. Aung San Suu Kyi who still smiles after years of not being able to leave her room. Anne Frank who survives now cause she wrote down her story. We are Neda Soltani gunned down by a sniper in the streets of Tehran as she voiced a new freedom and way And we are Asmaa Mahfouz from the April 6th movement in Egypt Who twittered an uprising.

We are the women riding the high seas to offer Needy women abortions on ships. We are women documenting the atrocities in stadiums with video cameras underneath our Burqas. We are seventeen and living for a year in a tree And laying down in the forests to protect wild oaks. We are out at sea interrupting the whale murders. We are freegans, vegans, trannies But mainly we are refusers. We don’t accept your world Your rules your wars We don’t accept your cruelty and unkindness. We don’t believe some need to suffer for others to survive Or that there isn’t enough to go around Or that corporations are the only and best economic arrangement And we don’t hate boys, okay? That’s another bullshit story.

We are refusers But we crave kissing. We don’t want to do anything before we’re ready but it could be sooner than you think and we get to decide and we are not afraid of what is pulsing through us. It makes us alive.

Don’t deny us, criticize us or infantilize us. We don’t accept checkpoints, blockades or air raids We are obsessed with learning. On the barren Tsunamied beaches of Sri Lanka In the desolate and smelly remains Of the lower ninth We want school. We want school. We want school.

We know if you plan too long Nothing happens and things get worse and that Most everything is found in the action and instinctively we get that the scariest thing isn’t dying, but not trying at all.

And when we finally have our voice and come together when we let ourselves gather the knowledge when we stop turning on each other but direct our energy towards what matters when we stop worrying about our skinny ass stomachs or too frizzy hair or fat thighs when we stop caring about pleasing and making everyone so incredibly happy- We got the Power.

If Janis Joplin was nominated the ugliest man on her campus And they sent Angela Davis to jail If Simone Weil had manly virtues And Joan of Arc was hysterical If Bella Abzug was eminently obnoxious And Ellen Sirleaf Johnson is considered scary If Arundhati Roy is totally intimidating and Rigoberta Menchu is pathologically intense And Julia Butterfly Hill is an extremist freak Call us hysterical then Fanatical Eccentric Delusional Intimidating Eminently obnoxious Militant Bitch Freak Tattoo me Witch Give us our broomsticks And potions on the stove We are the girls who are aren’t afraid to cook.

“Refuser” is published in Eve’s newest work - I AM AN EMOTIONAL CREATURE: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World

Herman Hesse on Trees

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow. 

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. 

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail. 

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live. 

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all. 

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother. 

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

Alan Watts

It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it's dense, isn't it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as

being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time.

Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. 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.

Anais Nin :: 3.2011

I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.

Lonely Whale :: 3.2011

A comment from a 2004 article by the NY Times about the loneliest whale in the world. Scientists have been tracking her since 1992 and they discovered the problem:


She isn’t like any other baleen whale. Unlike all whales, she doesn’t have friends. She doesn’t have a family. She doesn’t belong to any tribe, pack or gang. She doesn’t have a lover. She never had one.


Her songs come in groups of two to six calls, lasting for five to six seconds each. But her voice is unlike any other baleen whale. It is unique—while the rest of her kind communicate between 12 and 25Hz, she sings at 51.75Hz.


You see, that’s precisely the problem. No other whales can hear her. Every one of her desperate calls to communicate remains unanswered. Each cry ignored. And with every lonely song, she becomes sadder and more frustrated, her notes going deeper in despair as the years go by.


from Gizmodo