“Must the moon

be full in order to be loved?

And what of the heart?”

Pavana पवन 

(via a-quiet-life)

"What is important is to keep our mind high in the world of true understanding, and returning to the world of our daily experience to seek therein the truth of beauty. No matter what we may be doing at a given moment, we must not forget that it has a bearing upon our everlasting self which is poetry."

 - Matsuo Bashō

You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one does still know.

— René Daumal

Tumblr Page for Beachprophet

“I want to love 

One woman for
The longest that any man
Has ever loved one woman


But I will fail hopelessly
[…] 

So I want to be
The man who fails
Most frequently
And most beautifully


At everything
I do”

Matthew Lippman, from “The Man Who Fails Most Frequently and Beautifully,”

I have to tell you what I've learned, that I know now

what happens to the dreamers.

They don't feel it when they change. One day

they wake, they dress, they are old.

 - Louise Glück

 

“If I were fire, I would burn; if I were a woodcutter, I would strike. But I am a heart, and I love.” 

― Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ

Good Bye 2016.  Never forget.  Dream on.

For broken dreams, the cure is, dream again and deeper. 

C.S. Lewis // Dymer, Canto 6.24 

Be careful who you make memories with. Those things can last a lifetime. 

Ugo Eze 

By Your Side

 

it is a serious thing

just to be alive
    on this fresh morning
                                      in this broken world.
 Mary Oliver, from “Invitation,” Red Bird: Poems

When I die, I will see the lining of the world.

The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.

The true meaning, ready to be decoded.

What never added up will add Up, 

What was incomprehensible will be comprehended.

 - And if there is no lining to the world? 

If a thrush on a branch is not a sign, 

But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day

Make no sense following each other? 

And on this earth there is nothing except this earth? 

 - Even if that is so, there will remain

A word wakened by lips that perish, 

A tireless messenger who runs and runs

Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,

And calls out, protests, screams. 

 - Czesław Miłosz

“There was a critic a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was.”

– Jackson Pollock –

Allegro 

 from The Half-Finished Heaven
 written in 1962:

“I play Haydn after a black day
and feel a simple warmth in my hands.

The keys are willing. Soft hammers strike.
The resonance green, lively and calm.

The music says freedom exists
and someone doesn't pay the emperor tax.

I push down my hands in my Haydnpockets
and imitate a person looking on the world calmly.

I hoist the Haydnflag - it signifies:
“We don't give in. But want peace.”

The music is a glass-house on the slope
where the stones fly, the stones roll.

And the stones roll right through
but each pane stays whole."

Translated by Robin Fulton, New Collected Poems, Bloodaxe Books, 1997/2011)

“What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.” 

― Vincent van Gogh