in five years, i see myself five years older...

...don't get freaked out by the pure light within you
no, don't let it freak you out
just go with it
because if you don't go with it
it will just take you where it wants to be
which is cool too, if you have the time

-chris robinson

as i start to turn my gaze toward graduation in May, the questions are cropping up again. no longer am i free to flow into something (new place to live, new job, new program of study) because first i must flow out. and for some reason, this means i must know the direction of my flow. or so they say.

'where do you see yourself in 5 years?' and 'what are your career goals?' seem to come up every day, and its silly really. talking to a friend last night, he had a great answer, 'i have no plans to stay and i have no plans to leave.' having no plans is what it should be all about. because once you think you have it all figured out, you are just asking to be proven wrong. in any situation. plans, while some people need the security of knowing WHERE they are going, are mostly limiting. what if my friend had plans to leave and a month before doing so, he is faced with a great opportunity? likely he will not view the same opportunity in the same light because he's 'on his way out,' likely the opportunity may not have presented itself to begin with because he's been busy planning his exit and looking to the future, no longer cultivating the same friendships, community bonds, and work bonds, no longer rooting himself to this place.

And anyway, why and for what/who do you need a plan? I suppose if you are looking to make a real impact on the world, make some kind of change that matters, then yes you need a plan, but most of us are just trying to live. So for most of us, what does a plan give us besides a sense, albeit inflated, of importance, a sense of meaning to our lives. But when you get there, to this end point in your goal, do you feel fulfilled? Maybe but I bet its so short lived because it that is how you see the world, you are already onto the next goal, already thinking about the future, never there in the present really enjoying what in reality is all we have, the now.

and while i feel uprooted and in limbo lately, i know it just means i'm staying OPEN to all the possibilities.

its like relationships and marriage...they represent plans as well. plans for a future, plans to stay loyal to this person. once you are in that spot, do you go out as often and meet new people? lets say you do, even...do you approach the new people you meet with the same openness, curiosity, sense of 'what if' and possibility? most people do not. and so you've closed yourself off to possibility. and i'm not saying possibility of meeting another mate, although that IS there, but even just the possibility of an intimate friendship, a deep rewarding bond, but now instead, there are social conventions blocking you from getting to know that person on such a level because it may be perceived the wrong way by your mate, their mate, outside parties, etc. And you assume they have nothing much to offer you since you've already found that 'person for you.' we're so inhibited by our plans and our decisions that we *think* are carved out, set in stone. burn your carvings. throw that stone into the ocean and watch it change form.
stay open.

plans usually limit you because plans are made by you; creations of only what you can imagine, and while some may dare to dream, most of us live in the realm of practicality and likelihood because its safer. you can't imagine something greater, something outside yourself, you don't imagine there are others as enlightening as those people that you've met and know at that moment. and you plan on a narrow foundation. not planning allows you to be open to a wider scope of probabilities, to all those things you thought could never happen, but somehow do (usually right around or after the time you think you've got it all figured out).

there's a quote on my wall that says 'dwell in possibility' and it doesn't mean to always be wanting something else or always be thinking about the future. at least not to me, to me it says, be open, be aware, that it is possible for anything to change at any time, for new doors to open, for old doors you thought would never shut to now be locked, you just never know.

love,

aimless peacock

can questions lie?

must a funk be analyzed,
broken down,
categorized,
justified,
explained
to be gotten out of?
because i don't want to know why i'm here.
i just don't want to be.
or maybe i do? maybe i don't want to face the truth of what i am feeling and why?

can't i just leave question marks?
and use them as a ladder?
is there an escape?
is that the answer?

Positively Priceless

SO GRATEFUL to be able to spend my last day with these 2 "shtunks."

Ah-un

"You approach Shinto shrines...and the entrances are usually guarded by a pair of stone lion-dogs...komu-inu, "Korean dogs"...One lion-dog has a mouth that is always open, the other has a mouth that is always closed. The open mouthed lion-dog is named Ah, the other is named Un, or more properly, nn. "Ah" is the first sound you make when you are born, "nn" the last sound you make when you die. "Ah" is the breath inhaled that begins life, "nn" the exhale of release, the breath that allows life to escape. Between the two lies all of existence, a universe that turns on a single breath. Ah is also the first symbol in the Japanese alphabet, n the last. And so, between these two lion-dogs, you also have the A and the Z, the Alpha and Omega. In the original Sanskrit, ah-un means, "the end and the beginning of the universe; infinity unleashed."

In Japan, people who are in perfect tune with each other, such as a pianist and a violinist playing in duet, are called ah/un-no-kokyu. Kokyu means "breathing," and the phrase suggests perfect, exquisite harmony: ah/un-no-kokyu, two or more breathing as one. If self-actualization is the ideal to which the Western world aspires, then common breath is the ideal to which Japan-and indeed, much of Asia-aspires. The word harmony in Japanese has the same cachet that the word freedom has in the West...

On a less esoteric level, ah-un also refers to old married couples (or even old friends) who have been together for so long that they no longer have to finish their sentences. One begins with "Ah..." and the other agrees with "Nn..." (which is the Japanese equivalent of "uh-huh") and the entire meaning is understood."

-Hitching Rides with Buddha, Will Ferguson

evolution of a non-thought

i sit.
here.
cross legged.
in a black swivel chair.
at a black desk.
in a brick walled room.
with carpet.
my mind...

[empty]

nothing to think
only observation
people here drive red cars
more than where i'm from
where everything is silver
because no one wants to really say anything
or stand out
not that they do here
all they are probably saying here
may be blind patriotism
or maybe just...
today,
there are lots of red cars.

there are a lot of things i don't know
things i know nothing of
things i couldn't answer correctly regarding
things i don't know i don't know
and perception is a funny thing
and where you are coming from in your mind
will often answer for you
before the question asked, nevermind pondered

and where all of these things may be
uncertain
unimportant
insignificant
is where the
certain
important
significance
of this begins

the significant
importance
of (whatfeelslikebutiwouldneversayis) certainty

my eyelids are so heavy
weighed down
by all the ~unbelievable~ beauty they've (be)held
in the last three days
and tired from staying awake
to savor such scarce magical reality
tired,
-its why i have no brain
with which to think right now-
and without need
-oftimes knowing requires no thought-
its simplicity
truth just is
and allows me
to just be.
peaceful. free. here.

does a gypsy grow up?

Getting coffee this morning, i overheard a lady saying her husband was leaving her to see the world, leaving today with the Black Crowes. Turns out he is 'tech' and travels around with different bands on tour. This has resulted in their divorce. The discussion of freedom in relationships and long distance is for another post and another time, but it got me thinking again...
I wonder when and if it will ever happen, and i wonder what i'll do if it doesn't.
What i'm talking about is the idea of being settled in to a place or job. As it stands now, i'm so very excited about the idea that i don't yet know where my life will lead me. I have no definite plan or goal for it to be anywhere in particular in 3, 5, or 10 years, and i love the mystery. What scared me away greatly from my last relationship was the idea that i saw it all unfolding before me very tangibly and visibly, the marriage, the house, the job, the dogs, the kids even. And it would have been just fine, certainly nothing to objectionable for any normal person's life really, but i didn't like the idea that i knew, predictably, how things would go for years to come in my future. In addition, i was not ready to say at that point, and really am still not, that marriage and kids are for me. Keeping me afloat right now is that idea that i will soon sail away from this place and my job, with its disillusioning effects on my idealism, and start a new lifestyle in a new, unfamiliar place. I sauntered out of the gym after a work out last night, looked up at the damp sky and realized how freeing it felt to NOT know if and when i would be married, if and when i would have a house, if and when i would have children, if and when i would have a job with real responsibilities. Some might even consider me immature for this viewpoint, but i say to them, who says i have to live my life according to their timetable of "mature" stepping stones if i choose not to? I know and hold this to be true, but the fact remains that i'm likely to need and find a job that keeps me in one place for some extended period of time, no? Or maybe it will happen when i'm happy to stay in one place for an extended period of time and it will cause no dissonance. I still feel concerned, however, that just the simple IDEA of being in one place for too long will creep in and begin to erode the happiness i may have found. I consider myself to be happy in this place and job and still, if i saw myself here for any more than 4 years...the thought of that turns my stomach. Could it be just a phase? For now, this post being published is the extent and conclusion of my concern, as my 'unsettlement' thus far has brought me into my most authentic self yet, and i've never felt better.

found snow friday

this morning
my bed
whispered to me this:

"turn the snow up
leave it on
and come back to me
nestle yourself in
like the snow piled
in the crooks of those branches
tangle yourself in the sheets
like those twigs in the cold
twisting together for warmth
let the guitars' notes fall
around your face
like the flakes
and be the inspiration
to a
snow drift in and out
of that peaceful dream
when you are ready
and only when good and ready
rise from the soft jersey sheets
still warm from your body
(oh how happy your body makes us)
and makeacuppa
mochacappu
savor it
but savor more
the found time"

"Everyday Osho" indeed.

Osho's wisdom on some of the things in the discussion rotation as of late, some with which I agree, and some which pose further questions...

"Stay open to a change in your own learnings, beliefs, and knowledge:"
"Amateurs and Experts:
...It always happens that when you start new work, you are very creative, you are deeply involved, your whole being is in it. Then by and by, as you become acquainted with the territory, rather than being inventive and creative you start being repetitive. This is natural, because the more skilled you become in any work, the more repetitive you become...
So all great discoveries are made by amateurs, because a skilled person has too much at stake. If something new happens, what will happen to the old skill? The person has learned for years and now has become an expert. So experts never discover anything; they never go beyond the limit of their expertise...
Here is the lesson: It is good to attain skill, but it is not good to settle with it forever. Whenever the feeling arises in you that now the thing is looking stale, change it. Invent something, add something new, delete something old. Again be free from the pattern...again become an amateur. It needs courage and guts, to become an amateur again, but that's how life becomes beautiful."

~all i take from this is the importance of anti-stagnation, and the awareness that you never stop learning, and should never assume you've got it all figured out...
On a more literal level, I think it is unfortunately true that experts don't use their expertise to the full extent and to benefit most from it. Luckily, some always remain inventive, creative, and passionate by retaining their appreciation for attainment of knowledge and the everchanging property of information.

"Changing the World
You are your world, so when you change your attitude you change the very world in which you exist. We cannot change the world--that's what politicians have been trying to do down through the ages, and they have utterly failed...
The only way to change the world is to change your vision, and suddenly you will live in a different world."

~this speaks to both the conversations of having control over your misery if you change your perspective and priorities as well as it does the idea that changing the world happens through change in individual minds.

"The Unplanned Life
There is no planning in existence. An unplanned life has tremendous beauty, because there is always some surprise waiting in the future.
The future is not going to be a repetition; something new is always happening, and one can never take it for granted.
Secure people life a bourgeois life. A bourgeois life means getting up at seven-thirty, taking your breakfast at eight, at eight-thirty catching the train to the town, returning home at five-thirty, taking your tea, reading your newspaper, watching TV, having supper, making love to your partner without any love, and going to bed. Again the same thing starts the next day. Everything is settled, and there is no surprise: The future will be nothing but the past repeated again and again. Naturally there is no fear. You have done these things so many times that you have become skillful. You can do them again.
With the new comes fear, because one never knows whether one will be able to do it. One is doing always for the first time, so one is always shaky, uncertain about whether one is going to make it or not. But in that very thrill, in that adventure, is life-- aliveness, let us say, rather than life, because life has also become a dull and dead word-- aliveness, the flow."

"Failure
If you feel frustrated, it is because of the mental goal you have imposed on life. By the time you have reached your goal, life has left it; just a dead shell of the ideals and the goals remain, and you are frustrated again. The frustration is created by you.
Once you understand that life is never going to be confined to a goal, goal oriented, then you flow in all directions with no fear. Because there is no failure, there is no success either -- and then there is no frustration. Then each moment becomes a moment in itself; not that it is leading somewhere, not that it has to be used as a means to some end -- it has intrinsic value..."

~simply the idea that people set up plans and blueprints in their lives, and for what? to simply create unneeded self importance and likely, eventual frustration when these goals are not met. I'm sure someone has said to you "What's your five year plan?" "Where do you see yourself in 10 years?" Me personally? I may have some abstract vision of what it may be like, but stay detached from the outcome, because in all truthfulness, I don't know and don't WANT to know exactly how my life will play out. I'll figure it out when I get there, because I'm too busy enjoying today right now tout de suite!

questions, answers, existence: for discussion

"There is no answer. There are only two ways for the mind to be: full of questions and empty of questions.

Maturity is coming to a point where you can live without answers; that is what maturity is. And to live without answers is the greatest and most courageous act. Then you are no longer a child. A child goes on asking questions, wanting answers for everything. A child believes that if he can formulate a question, there must be an answer, there must be somebody to supply the answer.
...You think that because you can formulate a question, there is bound to be an answer; maybe you don't know it, but somebody must know the answer, and some day, you will be able to discover it. That's not so. All questions are man-created, manufactured by man.
Existence has no answer. Existence is there, with no answers, completely silent. If you can drop all questions, a communication happens between you and existence. The moment you drop questions, you drop philosophy, you drop theology, you drop logic, and you start living. You become existential. When there are no questions, that state itself is the answer."
-Osho, Everyday Osho

my morning sun

the clouds' persistance pervades
the fog a stubborn standstill
but the window is ajar
it's a warm damp
and the crows caw
like they are
spilling spring's secret
it's hiding
under its covers
groggy
unwilling to awake
no use is your impatience
time will always
act on its own terms
and no need really
for me
i turn my back on the windows
curl back
upunder
the covers
and watch my sun rise

choose

Dear (youknowwhoyouare),
I hope you read this, and the entry before this...

"Generally people are not even that fortunate. Their whole life passes and the sun never rises, the morning never comes in their lives...
Life is a vast treasure trove, but we do nothing with it except waste it, lose it, squander it. Even before knowing what life is, we have discarded it. Life is dissipated without experiencing what was hidden in it - what secret, what mystery, what paradise, what bliss, what liberation...
I want to say a few things about the treasures of life. But it is very difficult for those who have already taken them to be pebbles to open their eyes and see that they are diamonds...But no matter how much treasure has been lost, if even a single moment of life remains, something can be salvaged. Something can still be known...it is never so late that one has to feel despair...
The first thing: We have created such viewpoints about life, we have established such ideas about life, we have raised such philosophies about life that we are deprived of seeing the truth of life. We have already concluded what life is...without any realization of our own. We have understood only some predecided, preconceived idea about life...we have been taught only one thing repeatedly...:life is meaningless, life is futile, life is a suffering, life is only worth renouncing...Because of this, life has begun to be a suffering and to seem futile. Because of this, life has lost all joy, all love, all beauty...
If you have accepted that life is ugly, why would you search for beauty in it?...what sense remains in trying to decorate it, in trying to cleanse it and refine it, to beautify it?...
...And the point is not only that we could have beautified where we were staying, that we could have created a loving milieu, that we could have sung a song of joy where we were staying. The point is that the one who sings a song of joy has opened the possibility for more joy in himself. The one who beautifies the house has attained the capacity for finding greater beauty...
We are formed by what we do...What we are doing in life decides the directions our soul will travel, the paths it will move on, the new worlds it will explore...
how you experience life depends on how you look at it. If life seems to be dark and miserable it is because of your wrong way in living it. This very life can become a shower of blissfulness if only you know the right way to live it."
-osho

"We can't cure the world of sorrows but we can choose to live in joy"
-Joseph Campbell

the way...

people spend their lives consumed by the "next step," the future, their blueprint for how their life is supposed to go or was supposed to be...I only ask, for what?

..."I felt numb as I said farewell to my team in Arizona and boarded a jet, heading back to Berkeley, and Socrates...I looked aimlessly at the clouds below, drained of ambition. All these years I had been sustained by an illusion - happiness through victory - and now that illusion was burned to ashes. I was no happier, no more fulfilled, for all my achievements.
Finally I saw through the clouds. I saw that I had never learned how to enjoy life, only how to achieve. All my life I had been busy seeking happiness, not finding it...
'Wake up! If you knew for certain that you had a terminal illness - if you had little time left to live - you would waste precious little of it! Well, I'm telling you, Dan - you DO have a terminal illness: It's called birth. You don't have more than a few years left. No one does! So be happy now, without reason - or you will never be at all...'
...be content with this knowledge: There is no need to search; achievement leads to nowhere. It makes no difference at all, so just be happy now! Love is the only reality of the world, because it is all One, you see. And the only laws are paradox, humor, and change. There is no problem, never was, and never will be. Release your struggle, let go of your mind, throw away your concerns, and relax into the world. No need to resist life; just do your best. Open your eyes and see that you are far more than you imagine. You are the world, you are the universe; you are yourself and everyone else, too!...Wake up, regain your humor. Don't worry, you are already free!"

Dan Millman, Way of the Peaceful Warrior

flow through you

"Love comes like a fresh, fragrant breeze into your home, fills it with freshness and fragrance, remains as long as existence allows it, and then moves out. You should not try to close all your doors, or the same fresh breeze will become absolutely stale. In life, everything is changing and change is beautiful; it gives you more and more experience, more and more awareness, more and more maturity"


"By the time you are ready to explore the world of love, you are filled with so much rubbish about love that there is not much hope for you to be able to find the authentic and discard the false...For example, every child everywhere has been told in a thousand and one ways that love is eternal: once you love a person you love the person always. If you love a person and later on you feel that you don't love, it only means you never loved the person in the first place. Now this is a very dangerous idea. It is giving you and idea of a permanent love and in life nothing is permanent. The flowers blossom in the morning and by the evening they are gone...
It is possible that if you are enlightened your love has gone beyond the ordinary laws of life. It is neither changing nor permanent; it simply is. It is no more a question of how to love; you have become love itself, so whatever you do is loving...But before enlightenment you love is going to be the same as everything else; it will change...For a lighter life, for a more playful life, you need to be flexible. You have to remember that freedom is the highest value and if love is not giving you freedom then it is not love. Freedom is a criterion: anything that gives you freedom is right, and anything that destroys your freedom is wrong. If you can remember this small criterion your life, slowly, will start settling on the right path about everything: your relationships, your meditations, your creativity, whatever you are."

-Osho, 'Being in Love'

a reply: insistence on the proof

love is not a fantasy. love exists.

When it exists in reality, it is a world of beautiful truth, a world that admits it knows no 'forever' and cannot and does not fathom 'always.' It is the world of two becoming, never one, but TWO happier individuals, a world of real love, of falling in love, and of appreciating love and its potentially fleeting composition which lends to its beauty. Its not to be worshipped, but respected, admired, and cultivated, only to the extent that it is never a chore or an obligation. It is patient with pains that don’t need or want to heal,and there to help in whatever way it can or is asked to. It can captivate, but is never the pinnacle of all things, only the rungs on the ladder to freedom and happiness. It most certainly can inspire, but should not be a sole source of inspiration.

What the wise see as love is the sometimes synchronistic tendency of two individuals’ thoughts, smiles, emotions, hormones, and intellect. It should never attempt to join these individuals as one, because what should have brought the two together in the first place was the admiration for the other’s wholeness, not the admiration for the other’s admiration. Real love understands that its okay to never completely know, understand, think, or feel as one, and this ensures an attainable reality with lack of expectations that will inevitably be incredibly satisfying for both individuals. There will always be wonder and novelty in rediscovering the other, and watching from the sidelines as the other makes their own discoveries to share if they wish. Real love knows that this love should not become everything in the other's life, and understands that it is not possible find or be all the things that one needs in another person. Completeness should come from within one’s self, not from being with or possessing the parts of another.

Love should never become a tangled web of obligation and expectation where consolation is found by the pacification of long term fears with short term joys. Desires and demands must be dropped, and attachment will not have the roots to grow. Only then will the truth shine through allowing moments of beauty that overshadow any fantasy that could have been imagined (but fantasizing should be dropped as its simply expectation’s easy cousin).

If there is ANY greediness revealed, it should only be a hankering for the other’s happiness to be found wherever it occurs naturally, without claiming credit. Love should never be pursued, only found in the flow of one’s own life, allowing the other to share where they fit. Time has no bearing, as there is only now, and the present IS the present, the best gift to receive. Shared interests and activities should only enhance and should diverge when the flow of energy diverts those things to other people and places, like the two people themselves. When the beauty is overshadowed by efforts, struggles, bargains, and fights, the two should admit their purpose in each other’s lives has been served and move on with their individual lives once again. If others observe the love, that is fine, but its not something to be shown off or worn like a medal of conquest. Real love should be impossible to pin down, and undesirable once fenced in, a product of the appreciation of its free spirit, intangibility, and inability to be defined or put in any sort of box, impossible to be collected in any sort of way, and an expression of an honest overflowing of happiness.

Only then is love right, and only for as long as these qualities can be felt...

Love is "...not its meaning, but its feeling; not its permanence, but its moment; not its fulfillment of our expectation, but its truth; not its “fantasy”, but its reality.”

...only then will love become so much more...

Time to Eternity

"This is our problem, you see. We are not alive. We are not awake. We are not living in the present. Take education. What a hoax. As a child, you are sent to nursery school. In nursery school, they say you are getting ready to go to kindergarten. And then first grade is coming up and second grade and third grade. They say you are gradually climbing the ladder, making progress. And then, when you get to the end of grade school, they say, "You've been getting ready for high school." And then in high school, they tell you you're getting ready for college. And in college you're getting ready to go out into the business world with your suit and your diploma. And you go to your first sales meeting, and they say, "Now get out there and sell this stuff." They say you'll be going on up the ladder in business if you sell it, and maybe you'll get a promotion. And you sell it, and they up your quota. And then, finally at about the age of forty-five, you wake up one morning as vice president of the firm, and you say to yourself, "I've arrived. But I've been cheated. Something is missing. I no longer have a future." "Wrong," says the insurance salesman. "I have a future for you. This policy will enable you to retire in comfort at sixty-five, and now you can look forward to that." And you're delighted. You...retire, thinking that this is the attainment of the goal of life. Except that now you have prostate trouble, false teeth, and wrinkled skin. And you're a materialist. You're a phantom. You are an abstraction. You are nowhere, because you were never told, and you never realized, that eternity is now. There is no time...
...Time is a fantasy. It is a useful fantasy, just as the lines of latitude and longitude are. But they aren't real lines....Time is a convenience...But let us not be fooled by convenience. It is not real...
...People who believe in time and who believe that they are living for the future make plenty of plans. But when the plans mature, the people are not there to enjoy them. They are busy planning for something else...they are never here. They never get there. They are never alive. They are perpetually frustrated...the future is the thing with them. Someday it is going to happen, they think. And because it never does, they feel frantic...They are terrified of death, because death stops the future...
Please wake up.
I'm not saying that you should be improvident, that you shouldn't have an insurance policy, that you shouldn't be concerned about how you are going to send your children to college. Except that there is no point in sending your children to college and providing for their future if you don't know how to live in the present, because all you will do is teach your children how not to live in the present. You will end up dragging yourself through life for the alleged benefit of your own children, who will in turn drag out their lives in a boring way for the alleged benefit of their children...
...In our colleges, we value the record of what has happened more than we value what is happening. The records in the registrar's office are kept in safes under lock and key, but not the books in the library...
...When the record becomes more important than the event, we are really up the creek with no paddle...our education system is pretty abstract. It neglects the absolute fundamentals of life and instead teaches us to be bureaucrats, bank clerks, accountants, and insurance salesmen. It entirely neglects our relationships to the material world of which there are five: farming, cooking, clothing, housing, and lovemaking...
...it is time to get back to reality, to get back from time to eternity, to get back to the eternal now, which is what we have, always have had, and indeed always will have."

-Alan Watts, 'From Time to Eternity'

herenow prayer

Now I lay me down to dream,
I thank the universe for what i've seen
If I should die before I wake,
a smile is all I'll need to take.
and if I wake to greet the day,
with gratefulness and wonder i will say,
thank you for the peace of heart and mind
I'm so amazingly lucky to continue to find.

"We can't cure the world of sorrows but we can choose to live in joy." -Joseph Campebll

Grow, Change, Learn: Self as a work in progress

"Adolescence seems to provoke this difficult inner quest, since growth away from one's parents forces one to come to grips with life on one's own, but the quest for self-knowledge out not to be regarded as a "stage" that one passes through and leaves behind. Finding and maintaining self-identity can be a lifelong process. While it makes sense to expect that we can carry on the process without the pain and desperation often experienced in adolescence, it is a mistake to assume that once the pain has stopped the process is over. Rather than suffer the doubts and uncertainties of growth toward an indeterminate destination, many people fix a destination very early in life and then define themselves in terms of that destination: "I am a good parent"; "I am an engineer"; "I am a dropout." Many people imagine they can settle the account of self-identity once and for all and then live in the security of their certainty. But that premature decision is a subtle form of suicide. It amounts to opting out of life, for to live is to grow and change. "

(Self and World: Readings in Philosophy by James Ogilvy)

If you are alive you HAVE to be inconsistent -- you have grown, the world has changed, the river is flowing into new territory. Yesterday the river was passing through a desert, today it is passing through a forest; it is totally different. Yesterday's experience should not become your definition forever...one should be able to go on moving with time. Once should remain a process, one should never become a thing. That is intelligence." (Osho)

"Once you are in a relationship, you start taking each other for granted-that's what destroys all love affairs. The woman thinks she knows the man, the man thinks he knows the woman. Nobody knows either! It is impossible to know the other, the other remains a mystery...they are processes, they are not things. The woman that you knew yesterday is not there today. Relate again, start again, and don't take for granted." (Osho, "love, freedom, aloneness")

we made it...

(so I should say that I PREFER the "in" for its connotation: inner, inside, in love, into, within, whereas "out" is linked to out of, outer, put out, go out, run out, all out. but, as pondered on the PATH train, here you go...)

out of the notes in the songs
out of righting my wrongs
out of finding my way
(from thinking of what you'd say)
out of just being us
out of abstaining from lust
out of discipline of temptation
out of building a foundation
out of the beauty of trust
out of abandonment of must
out of the cards in the hand
out of supply, not demand
out of the words from those lips
out of carbonated sips
out of packages and email
thanks to msn and gmail
out of markers and a board
out of a very long phone cord
out of everything thats free
out of letting me be me...

Trishna>Nirvana>Marga

"This is the wonderful thing about a great human being. He is like an animal or a flower. When a flower bud opens, it has no hesitation or doubts...when a bird sings, or the chicken egg breaks or a flower buds, there is no doubt about it at all. It just comes forth...
...He notices everybody around him looking dreadfully serious. Looking as if they had a problem. Looking as if the act of living were extremely difficult. But from the standpoint of the person who has had this experience, they look funny. They don't understand that there isn't any problem at all.
...the meaning of being alive is just to be alive...and this is what we are all here for, as well: to be. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves. The funny thing is, they are not even quite sure what they need to achieve...
...this frenzy of activity all seems very weird, absurd. It is not to be criticized in an unkindly way, however. It's just a pity that they don't see their own absurdity..."

-Alan Watts

"I Want To Sing"

I want to sing to you my love ...
Don't be so blue so blue my love
Take off your shoes take off my dress
I want to sing to you my love ...
Don't be so blue so blue my love
This too shall pass this too shall pass

But tell me, what have I done to deserve you?
Must have done something cause that's how it works
Must have been kind to kittens and birds,
In a previous life must have thought happy thoughts...

'cause there, you were there right beside me
Then somehow inside me while inside myself
Books on the shelf thoughts on the shelf
Hands to myself, i should definitely keep my hands to myself

Love is a dangerous pastime
Caught between madness and gladness of flight
Nothing is wrong and nothing is right
Falling asleep in your arms every night

But Love's such a strange situation
Full of frustration and anger and fear
Everything's tears
Nobody hears
Nobody's here, and nobody hears...

I want to sing to you my love ...
Don't be so blue so blue my love
Take off your shoes take off my dress
I want to sing to you my love ...
Don't be so blue so blue my love
This too shall pass, this too shall pass...

-Regina Spektor