"Light is All"

"From within or from behind,
a light shines through us upon things,
and makes us aware that we are nothing,
but the light is all."
   --Ralph Waldo Emerson 

"Shamans lived at the edge of the village where they communicated with the village but were healed by the wildness."
David Abrams

“The art of communion with the earth we can relearn from the Indian. Thus a reverse dependence is established. Survival 

in the future will likely depend more on our learning from the Indian than the Indian’s learning from us. In some ultimate 

sense we need their mythic capacity for relating to this continent more than they need our capacity for mechanistic 

exploitation of the continent.”   — Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth

The man who speaks with primordial images speaks with a thousand tongues; he entrances and overpowers, while at the same 

time he raises the idea he is trying to express above the occasional and the transitory into the sphere of the 

ever-existing. He transmutes personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, thus evoking all those beneficent forces that 

have enabled mankind to find a rescue from every hazard and to outlive the longest night. That is the secret of effective 

art.

—C. G. Jung, Seelenprobleme der Gegenwart. Zurich: Rascher, 1931.

"The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself." Albert Camus

"We're all just walking each other home.” ― Ram Dass

"The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war." - Sun Tzu

"Reality doesn't get much traction here." - Scott T. Starbuck

“I would rather have the free spontaneity of a child who knows nothing than the verbal knowledge and intellectual 

deformation of one that has experienced the existing system of education.” — Francisco Ferrer

“Many people die at twenty-five and aren’t buried until they are seventy-five.” ― Benjamin Franklin

"Ancient Advice Left in cave by Wise French Caveman: 'When Bigbad Shit come, no run scream hide. Try paint picture of it 

on wall. Drum to it. Sing to it. Dance to it. This give you handle on it.'" Ken Kesey Letter to Allen Ginsberg (August 1993)

"That ain't me, that ain't my face. It wasn't even me when I was trying to be that face. I wasn't even really me them; I was just being the way I looked, the way people wanted."
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

"Problems cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness that created them." Einstein

There is no rushing a river. When you go there, you go at the pace of the water and that pace ties you into a flow that 

is older than life on this planet. Acceptance of that pace, even for a day, changes us, reminds us of other rhythms 

beyond the sound of our own heartbeats.

―― Jeff Rennicke, River Days: Travels on Western Rivers

"The world is full of enormous lights and mysteries, and man shuts them from himself with one small hand." 

―— the Baal Shem Tov

“Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.” 
―― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

“It is a miracle that 
curiosity survives a formal education.” ~ Albert Einstein

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." -- John Muir

“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, 

a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to 

fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt 

and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, 

run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, 

the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to 

the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, 

over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. 

I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.” Edward Abbey

“Corporations spend $2 billion each year targeted specifically on the young,intending to lure them into a life of unthinking consumption. [. . .] Young people on average can recognize over 1000 corporate logos but only a handful of  plants and animals native to their places.”
— David W. Orr, quoted in Children And Nature

"Astronomers are precise as they number the stars; a baby can’t count its toes. It’s all so overwhelming, at first."
— Mylène Dressler in The Compiler (Nonfiction)

"Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance." - James Baldwin in The Paris Review

"Time is the one incorruptible judge." Creon in Sophocles' play Oedipus

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you." ~Ray Bradbury

"Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry."

— W B Yeats

Hail to you, psychoneurotics,

        For you perceive sensibility

               in the insensibility of the world,

               uncertainty in its certainty.

        For you are often as conscious of others

               as of yourself,

        For you feel the anxiety of the world,

               its limits and its false unlimited assurance . . . .

        For your fear of the absurdity of existence.

        . . . For your awkwardness,

               for your transcendental realism

               and your lack of daily realism . . .

        For your creativity and your ecstasy,

        For your maladjustment to what is

               and your adjustment to what ought to be,

        For your immense possibilities not yet actualized . . . .

        For what is unique, original, intuitive and infinite in you.

        For the solitude and the oddness of your paths.

Hail to you.

                               K. Dabrowski (1970)

"I'm not an atheist and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangements of the books, but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God."  Einstein

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.” ~ Albert Einstein

"Ask questions to find out something about the world itself, not to find out whether or not someone knows it." ~ John Holt

“As far as I have seen, at school...they aimed at blotting out one's individuality.” ~ Franz Kafka

“Just as eating against one’s will is injurious to health, so studying without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in.”
~ Leonardo da Vinci

“Where is the wisdom lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge lost in information?” ~ T. S. Eliot

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” ~ Mark Twain

“What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch out of a free, meandering brook.” ~ Henry David Thoreau

“The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones 

who have gone over.”  Hunter S. Thompson

“One leading concern of the Trilateral scholars was the failure of the institutions responsible for the ‘indoctrination of the young’—the schools, the universities, the churches. They’re not indoctrinating the young properly. That’s why we have these uprisings in the streets and the efforts of the special interests to press their demands in the political arena. The Trilateral scholars therefore urged more ‘moderation in democracy’ if the national interest is to be protected, and more effective indoctrination of the youth.” —“Chomsky: The Corporate Assault on Public Education: Our kids are being prepared for passive obedience, not creative, independent lives” from Part II of the transcript of a speech Noam Chomsky published at AlterNet.org March 8, 2013

"We do not seek words rooted in mere surface, confusion, whimsy, or bursts of ego, where the least of living happens, but 

poetry that holds up to time’s intelligent eye, that serves not the poet, but the spirit. Your spirit, and the hungry 

spirit 2000 years from now if we survive, as Li Po feeds us now, in another age, country, world from his own." Robert Brady

“Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of 

the human spirit -- in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.”  Chinua Achebe

“The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home 

in the capitals.”  Edward Abbey

“But I was only a poet—that is to say, a maker of stone axes – and she felt a real pity for me because of it . . .”
 — from Pictures From An Institution, Randall Jarrell

“Judging a work of art is virtually the same mental operation as judging human beings, and requires the same aptitudes: 

first, a real love of works of art … an inclination to praise rather than blame, and regret when a complete rejection 

is required; second, a vast experience of all artistic activities; and last, an awareness, openly and happily accepted, 

of one’s own prejudices. Some critics fail because they are pedants whose ideal of perfection is always offended by a 

concrete realization. Others fail because they are insular and hostile to what is alien to them; these critics, yielding 

to their prejudices without knowing they have them and sincerely offering judgments they believe to be objective, are more 

excusable than those who, aware of their prejudices, lack the courage to enter the lists to defend their personal tastes.” 

 — W.H. Auden