daily zen

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[daily zen @dailyzen]

"It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done!"

— Vincent van Gogh, Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh

[daily zen @dailyzen]

"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters."

— Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

[daily zen @dailyzen]

"The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnified world in itself."

— Henry Miller, Plexus

[daily zen @dailyzen]

"I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am."

— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

[daily zen @dailyzen]

"He said not: Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be afflicted; but He said: Thou shalt not be overcome."

— Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

[daily zen @dailyzen]

"The world of dew
is the world of dew.
And yet, and yet—"

— Kobayashi Issa, The Essential Haiku (trans. Robert Hass)

[daily zen @dailyzen]

"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."

— Marie Howe, "What the Living Do"

[daily zen @dailyzen]

"To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, 'I am listening to this music,' you are not listening. To understand joy or fear, you must be wholly and undividedly aware of it. So long as you are calling it names and saying, 'I am happy,' or 'I am afraid,' you are not being aware of it. Fear, pain, sorrow, and boredom must remain problems if we do not understand them, but understanding requires a single and undivided mind. This, surely, is the meaning of that strange saying, 'If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.'"

— Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

[daily zen @dailyzen]

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

— John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra

[daily zen @dailyzen]

"In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
'Live in the layers,
not on the litter.'
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transfigurations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes."

— Stanley Kunitz, "The Layers," The Collected Poems

[daily zen @dailyzen]

"If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death."

— Pablo Neruda, "Keeping Quiet," Extravagaria (trans. Alastair Reid)

[daily zen @dailyzen]

"Life is everything. Life is God. Everything changes and moves and that movement is God. And while there is life there is joy in consciousness of the divine. To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in innocent sufferings."

— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (trans. Louise & Aylmer Maude)

[daily zen @dailyzen]

@PerrySolem The takeaway here isn’t some generational grievance politics, it’s that if you’re smart and motivated you need to start a business

[daily zen @dailyzen]

"The world today is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot."

— Henry Beston, The Outermost House

[daily zen @dailyzen]

"To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour"

— William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence"

[daily zen @dailyzen]

"Nature is not a place to visit, it is home—and within that home territory there are more familiar and less familiar places. Often there are areas that are difficult and remote, but all are known and even named."

— Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild

[daily zen @dailyzen]

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could."

— Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

[daily zen @dailyzen]

@Slogs1231 dont forget about Proust

[daily zen @dailyzen]

"When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; yes, and when I walk alone in the beautiful orchard, if my thoughts have been dwelling on extraneous incidents for some part of the time, for some other part I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, and to me."

— Michel de Montaigne, "Of Experience," The Complete Essays (trans. Donald Frame)

[daily zen @dailyzen]

"I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important."

— Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good