Slow Lane

“Reading books is an antidote to urgency and chaos because it cannot be rushed. Every book has its own rhythm and a physical intimacy that E-mail and similar instant information can never achieve. Media glut often confuses information with understanding. Just when you seem to be most pressed, books miraculously expand time for reflection, cogitation, and mental rest.”

– Richard E. Cytowic, The Man Who Tasted Shapes.

The Road Less Taken

"All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware." Martin Buber

No Day At the Beach

"I love women, they love me, fat and all, and my sister always said I would be one. I even gave it the good old college try. Not once, but twice. It would have been so easy if I could have been a lesbian. But no, I had to settle for heterosexuality, which, as some of you know, is no day at the beach." Camryn Manheim

This Is How I Run

"Nature does not hurry,
Yet everything
Is accomplished."
-Lao Tzu

Onwards

Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace. My thirst, my boundless desire, my shifting road!
Dark river-beds where the eternal thirst flows and weariness follows, and the infinite ache.
~ from “Body of A Woman”, by Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, first published in Chile, 1924

Why I Blog

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it - Jean-Paul Sartre

Then Don't Work in a Hagwon

"There is no more obnoxious way to punish a man than to force him to perform acts which make no sense to him."

Simone de Beauvoir

Tend Your Thought Garden

“What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so much we are.”

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tattoo?

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - Albert Einstein

Stay Hungry

Ben Okri's "Mental Fight"

Is humanity exhausted?
Individuals are, nations are,
Some civilisations are becoming so;
But humanity isn't.

The hungry nations are hungry still.
The starving people dream of food.
The unfree fight for freedom.
The oppressed plan for liberation.
The small scheme for might.
The invisible prepare for higher visibility.

They are only exhausted
Who think they are.
They are only exhausted who no longer
Have a reason to strive
And dream and hope.

They are only exhausted who think
That they have arrived
At their final destination,
The end of their road,
With all of their dreams achieved,
And with no new dreams to hold.

The exhausted are those who have
Come to the end of their powers
Of imagination, who have limited
Their possibilities, who have thought
Themselves into dead ends
That they call the highest
Points of civilisations.

Those who are exhausted have lost
The greater picture,
The greater perspective.

Hope

Diane Ackerman, "School Prayer"

I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,
as a healer of misery,
as a messanger of wonder,
as an architect of peace.

Goals

When I Grow Up

by Sekou (tha Misfit)

Ask me now mommy.
Am I too late?
Ask me now what I want to do for a living.
Am I too late? Cause I think I finally figured it out

I don't want to do for a living
I want to be for a living

I want to be life.
I want to make things grow, and move, and breath, and reproduce, and respond.
I just want to make things respond and react and rejoice and relax and relate and release and receive
as soon as I recite.
When I grow up,
I don't want to be like those other kids mommy who want to be doctors and ballers and astronaughts.
I want to be passion, and heat and energy.

When I grow up,
I don't want to be a fireman mommy, let me be the fire
The explosion behind the soul's big bang theory that leaves in its place… desire
That burning within that gives life to the word "aspire"
Let me warm the cold souls of the despairing and heartless
Let me light the paths of those wandering in darkness
And provide children with their first definition of "hot"
And when the artists of the world have become so infatuated with ice that the whole world freezes over,
Let me be the poet that melts the ice-caps, drowns the planet, and starts this world over -
2 poets at a time like Noah…
When I grow up

I don't want to be an astronaut mommy, I want to be the space that he explores -

Not the doctor mommy, let me be the cure.
The prescription for a better life…
the way through which the sick and the shut-in can find hope, health, happiness, and healing.
I want to be the pill of which they take two, and the call that is placed that next morning.
I want to be the white blood cell that strengthens the immune system,
the clot that stops the bleeding,
the antidote that counters the poison;
I want to speak antibiotic poetry that defeats your life's viruses,
but only if you take my words in 3 times a day until the entire bottle is gone;
I want to be the perspective of the world through the eyes of an autistic child who is diagnosed with a sickness when in fact she merely sees the world with a clarity that the rest of us could only dream of having…
When I grow up

I don't want to be a preacher mommy, I want to be the word

Not the artist mommy, I want to be the art
Not the painter, let me be the canvas
Not the choreographer, let me be the dances
Not the poet, let me be the stanzas

When I grow up

I don't want to be a singer mommy, I want to be the sound!
The song you sing the way you sing it when you think aint nobody else around

When I grow up,
I don't want to be a lawyer mommy I want to be justice.
Not the philosopher, but the philosophy that the brilliant minds try to follow,
Or the brilliance in those minds,
Or even the elusive concepts that they can't quite figure out like
hope, purpose, faith… and time.

I wanna be time mommy!

So that the world will go to sleep every night feeling like they never got enough of me.
And will panic when they feel me slipping away.
Time! So that I will never feel this depression I feel now for being abandoned by it
Time! So that I will never again be before myself, never be out of myself,
Never be too late, never be too early,
So that for once in this life of unfulfilled dreams that have left my cheeks streaked from salt water erosion and my mouth pertpetually coated with the bitter aftertaste of disappointment,
for once I can be right on me!

When I grow up,

I want to be the antonym of void,
the antithesis of without,
the contradiction of silence,
the inverse of absence,
the reverse of regression,
the antilogy to emptiness,
the illumination of shadows,
the opposite of darkness…
I wanna be the opposite of darkness when I grow up mommy!

So that when the greatest poet in existence
recites the first line
of the greatest poem ever written

"let there be light"

…then I can begin.

Impetuosity

"Wisdom may be admired. But what really inspires mankind, what quickens the pulse and lifts the spirit, is its opposite: a display of magnificent, reckless impetuosity.
Just think about it. It's not wisdom that wins the Victoria Cross. It's the insane dash against impossible odds. It's not wisdom that paints the Mona Lisa or composes the "Eroica" Symphony. Wise people would never go into the arts in the first place. It's not wisdom that compels people to push themselves to the limits of endurance in order to realise some mad dream. It's a glorious perversity deep in their souls. And it's not wisdom that inspires people to risk everything in pursuit of a seemingly hopeless love affair. It's uncontrollable passion, and the existential urge to taste danger before you die."

Richard Morrison, The Times

Thresholds

"Within you lies all the courage you need - solitude opens all the closed doors, even those nailed shut." ~ Nancy Wood

Found on the video here.