Secrets of Your life by Margaret Atwood

Daniel Gerhartz Art

I wonder which is preferable,to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them,or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph,every sentence,every word of them,so at the end you're depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold,as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone - and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?
Margaret Atwood

Learning Wisdom:Contemplation From our Youth by Marcel Proust

Music:
Give me life - Eldar Mansurov

Learning Wisdom:Contemplation From our Youth
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past:

There is no man," he began, "however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.

And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man—so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise—unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded.

I know that there are young fellows,the sons and grandsons of famous men, whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement in their schooldays. They have, perhaps, when they look back upon their past lives, nothing to retract; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile.

We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.

The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you are not the result of training at home, by a father, or by masters at school, they have sprung from beginnings of a very different order, by reaction from the influence of everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory.

I can see that the picture of what we once were, in early youth, may not be recognisable and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in later life. But we must not deny the truth of it, for it is evidence that we have really lived, that it is in accordance with the laws of life and of the mind that we have, from the common elements of life, of the life of studios, of artistic groups—assuming that one is a painter—extracted something that goes beyond them.

What is Enlightenment? by Immanuel Kant

Perhaps a fall of personal despotism or of avaricious or tyrannical oppression may be accomplished by revolution, but never a true reform in ways of thinking. Farther, new prejudices will serve as well as old ones to harness the great unthinking masses.

For this enlightenment, however, nothing is required but freedom, and indeed the most harmless among all the things to which this term can properly be applied. It is the freedom to make public use of one's reason at every point. But I hear on all sides, "Do not argue!" The Officer says: "Do not argue but drill!" The tax collector: "Do not argue but pay!" The cleric: "Do not argue but believe!" Only one prince in the world says, "Argue as much as you will, and about what you will, but obey!" Everywhere there is restriction on freedom.
Imannuel Kant

My Darkness by Friedrich Nietzsche

I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

On darkness & Light by Friedrich Nietzsche

You say, it's dark.And in truth, I did place a cloud before your sun. But do you not see how the edges of the cloud are already glowing and turning light.
Friedrich Nietzsche

When a child gives you a gift by Dean Jackson

When a child gives you a gift, even if it is a rock they just picked up, exude gratitude. it may be the only thing they have to give, and they have chosen to give it to you.
Dean Jackson

The Wonder of the Ordinary by William Martin

Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.
William Martin

Use the first day of fall by Shauna Niequist

Use what you have, use what the world gives you. Use the first day of fall: bright flame before winter’s deadness; harvest; orange, gold, amber; cool nights and the smell of fire. Our tree-lined streets are set ablaze, our kitchens filled with the smells of nostalgia: apples bubbling into sauce, roasting squash, cinnamon, nutmeg, cider, warmth itself. The leaves as they spark into wild color just before they die are the world’s oldest performance art, and everything we see is celebrating one last violently hued hurrah before the black and white silence of winter.
Shauna Niequist

Jo Blankenburg - Planet Earth Forever

Artist: Jo Blankenburg
Album: Feather Dance
Track: Planet Earth Forever

Inspirational & motivational Poems & Quotes on Spirituality & Love by Hafiz/What is laughter? *Every city is a dulcimer*You Don’t Have to Act Crazy Anymore *

Music:
Yanni-Reflections of Passion

What is laughter?
Hafiz
From:"I Heard God Laughing: Renderings of Hafiz"
by Daniel Ladinsky

What is laughter? What is laughter?
It is God waking up! O it is God waking up!

It is the sun poking its sweet head out
From behind a cloud
You have been carrying too long,
Veiling your eyes and heart.

It is Light breaking ground for a great Structure
That is your Real body - called Truth.

It is happiness applauding itself and then taking flight
To embrace everyone and everything in this world.

Laughter is the polestar
Held in the sky by our Beloved,
Who eternally says,

"Yes, dear ones, come this way,
Come this way towards Me and Love!

Come with your tender mouths moving
And your beautiful tongues conducting songs
And with your movements - your magic movements
Of hands and feet and glands and cells - Dancing!

Know that to God's Eye,
All movement is a Wondrous Language,
And Music - such exquisite, wild Music!"

O what is laughter, Hafiz?
What is this precious love and laughter
Budding in our hearts?

It is the glorious sound
Of a soul waking up.....!

Every city is a dulcimer
Hafiz

There is
The rising up
From light's embrace

You can see in a summer field or
In a child's dancing.

Every city is a dulcimer
That plays it's chorus against
Our ears.

The lid of a pot starts jumping
When water gets ecstatic from fire.

If I ever don't complete a sentence
While we are together
Accept my apologies and try to understand
This sweet drunk thought.

Birds initially had no desire to fly,
What really happened was this:

God once sat close to them
playing Music.
When He left
They missed him so much

Their great longing sprouted wings,
Needing to search the Sky.

Nothing evolves us like Love.

You Don’t Have to Act Crazy Anymore
Hafez

You Don’t Have to Act Crazy Anymore –
We all know you were good at that.

Now retire, my dear,
From all that hard work you do

Of bringing pain to your sweet eyes and heart.

Look in a clear mountain mirror –
See the Beautiful Ancient Warrior
And the Divine elements
You always carry inside

That infused this Universe with sacred Life
So long ago

And join you Eternally
With all Existence – with God!

Awake, my dear.

Be kind
to your sleeping heart.

Take it out
into the vast fields
of Light

And let it
breathe.
Hafiz

When all your desires are distilled you will cast
just two votes: To love more and be happy.
Hafiz

Where have you taken your sweet song?
Come back and play me a tune.

I never really cared for the things of this world.
It was the glow of your presence
that filled it with beauty.
Hafiz

Come in, my dear
From that harsh world
That has rained elements of stone
Upon your tender face.

Every soul
Should receive a toast from us
For bravery!
Hafiz

Les Feuilles Mortes- Charles Aznavour/Yves Montand

Chanson:Les Feuilles Mortes
Charles Aznavour
Music de Joseph Kosma
paroles de Jacques Prévert

C'est une chanson qui nous ressemble.
Toi, tu m'aimais et je t'aimais
Et nous vivions tous deux ensemble,
Toi qui m'aimais, moi qui t'aimais.
Mais la vie sépare ceux qui s'aiment,
Tout doucement, sans faire de bruit
Et la mer efface sur le sable
Les pas des amants désunis.

Oh ! je voudrais tant que tu te souviennes
Des jours heureux où nous étions amis.
En ce temps-là la vie était plus belle,
Et le soleil plus brûlant qu'aujourd'hui.
Les feuilles mortes se ramassent à la pelle.
Tu vois, je n'ai pas oublié...
Les feuilles mortes se ramassent à la pelle,
Les souvenirs et les regrets aussi
Et le vent du nord les emporte
Dans la nuit froide de l'oubli.
Tu vois, je n'ai pas oublié
La chanson que tu me chantais.

Les feuilles mortes se ramassent à la pelle,
Les souvenirs et les regrets aussi
Mais mon amour silencieux et fidèle
Sourit toujours et remercie la vie.
Je t'aimais tant, tu étais si jolie.
Comment veux-tu que je t'oublie ?
En ce temps-là, la vie était plus belle
Et le soleil plus brûlant qu'aujourd'hui.
Tu étais ma plus douce amie
Mais je n'ai que faire des regrets
Et la chanson que tu chantais,
Toujours, toujours je l'entendrai !

Chanson:LES FEUILLES MORTES
Artiste : Yves Montand

Lightly, Child by Aldous Huxley

Lightly, Child
Aldous Huxley

It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them…. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.

All living is relationship by Aldous Huxley

Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. Rub it in.
Aldous Huxley

Colors Of The Rainbow - Leo Rojas (Pan flute music)

The gift by L.O. Baird

May no gift be too small to give,
nor too simple to receive,
which is wrapped in thoughtfulness
and tied with love.
L.O. Baird

On love by Felix Adler

Love is the expansion of two natures in such fashion that each include the other,each is enriched by the other.

Love is an echo in the feelings of a unity subsisting between two persons which is founded both on likeness and on complementary differences.

Without the likeness there would be no attraction; without the challenge of the complementary differences there could not be the closer interweaving and the inextinguishable mutual interest which is the characteristic of all deeper relationships.
Felix Adler

Love & power by Martin Buber

Every morning
I shall concern myself anew about the boundary
Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No
And pressing forward honor reality.
We cannot avoid
Using power,
Cannot escape the compulsion
To afflict the world,
So let us, cautious in diction
And mighty in contradiction,
Love powerfully.
Martin Buber, in "Power and Love"

Autumn Walk by Jane Austen

Jane ward Art

Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn--that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness--that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.
Jane Austen, Persuasion

Glow of Autumn & Giovanni Marradi Music

Enjoy The glow of Autumn accompanied with the music of
Giovanni Marradi - Descending Angels

Inspiring Reflections on Silence & Talking :Silence by Elaine Maria Upton*On Talking by Khalil Gibran*Silence by Hafiz

Music:
Omar Khairat-Alirhabi

SILENCE ll
Elaine Maria Upton

Silence is not a lack of words.
Silence is not a lack of music.
Silence is not a lack of curses.
Silence is not a lack of screams.
Silence is not a lack of colors
or voices or bodies or whistling wind.
Silence is not a lack of anything.

Silence is resting, nestling
in every leaf of every tree,
in every root and branch.
Silence is the flower sprouting
upon the branch.

Silence is the mother singing
to her newborn babe.
Silence is the mother crying
for her stillborn babe.
Silence is the life of all
these babes, whose breath
is a breath of God.

Silence is seeing and singing praises.
Silence is the roar of ocean waves.
Silence is the sandpiper dancing
on the shore.
Silence is the vastness of a whale.
Silence is a blade of grass.

Silence is sound
And silence is silence.
Silence is love, even
the love that hides in hate.

Silence is the pompous queen
and the harlot and the pimp
hugging his purse on a crowded street.

Silence is the healer dreaming
the plant, the drummer drumming
the dream. It is the lover's
exhausted fall into sleep.
It is the call of morning birds.

Silence is God's beat tapping all hearts.

Silence is the star kissing a flower.

Silence is a word, a hope, a candle
lighting the window of home.

Silence is everything --the renewing sleep
of Earth, the purifying dream of Water,
the purifying rage of Fire, the soaring
and spiraling flight of Air. It is all
things dissolved into no-thing--Silence
is with you always.....the Presence
of I AM

On Talking
Kahlil Gibran

You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts;
And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime.

And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.
For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.

There are those among you who seek the talkative through fear of being alone. The silence of aloneness reveals to their eyes their naked selves and they would escape.

And there are those who talk, and without knowledge
or forethought reveal a truth which they themselves
do not understand.

And there are those who have the truth within them, but they tell it not in words. In the bosom of such as these the spirit dwells in rhythmic silence.

When you meet your friend on the roadside or in the market place,
let the spirit in you move your lips and direct your tongue. Let the voice within your voice speak to the ear of his ear;
For his soul will keep the truth of your heart as the taste of the wine is remembered when the colour is forgotten and the vessel is no more.

Silence
Hafiz

A day of Silence
Can be a pilgrimage in itself.
A day of Silence
Can help you listen
To the Soul play
Its marvellous lute and drum.
Is not most talking
A crazed defence of a crumbling fort?
I thought we came here
To surrender in Silence,
To yield to Light and Happiness,
To Dance within
In celebration of Love’s Victory!

If you knew what was going to happen by Margaret Atwood

How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed...You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.
Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

How can you come to know yourself?by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

All ages have said and repeated that one should strive to know one's self. This is a strange demand which no one up to now has measured up to and, strictly considered, no one should.

With all their study and effort, people are directed to what is outside, to the world about them, and they are kept busy coming to know this and to master it to the extent that their purposes require. . . .

How can you come to know yourself? Never by thinking, always by doing. Try to do your duty, and you'll know right away what you amount to. And what is your duty? Whatever the day calls for.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A Fixed Idea by Amy Lowell

A Fixed Idea
Amy Lowell

What torture lurks within a single thought
When grown too constant; and however kind,
However welcome still, the weary mind
Aches with its presence. Dull remembrance taught
Remembers on unceasingly; unsought
The old delight is with us but to find
That all recurring joy is pain refined,
Become a habit, and we struggle, caught.
You lie upon my heart as on a nest,
Folded in peace, for you can never know
How crushed I am with having you at rest
Heavy upon my life. I love you so
You bind my freedom from its rightful quest.
In mercy lift your drooping wings and go.

Fate by Joseph Campbell

Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called "the love of your fate." Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, "This is what I need." It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment — not discouragement — you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.
Joseph Campbell

On Habits by Carl Jung

We seldom get rid of an evil merely by understanding its causes. . . and for all our insight, obstinate habits do not disappear until replaced by other habits. No amount of confession and no amount of explaining can make the crooked plant grow straight; it must be trained upon the trellis by the gardener's art.
Carl Jung