Knowledge

"The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone." ~ George Eliot

The Word - LOVE

"The Word" by the Beatles (Rubber Soul)

Say the WORD - and you'll be free
Say the WORD - and be like me
Say the WORD - I'm thinking of
Have you heard? - the word is LOVE
It's so fine
It's sunshine
It's the WORD - LOVE

In the beginning I misunderstood
But now I've got it, the word is good

Spread the WORD - and you'll be free
Spread the WORD - and be like be
Spread the WORD - I'm thinking of
Have you heard? - the word is LOVE
It's so fine
It's sunshine
It's the WORD - LOVE

Everywhere I go I hear it said
In the good and bad books that I have read

Give the WORD - a chance to say
That the WORD - is just the way
It's the WORD - I'm thinking of
And the ONLY word is LOVE
It's so fine
It's sunshine
It's the WORD - LOVE

Now that I know what I feel must be right
I'm here to show everybody the light

Say the WORD - and you'll be free
Say the WORD - and be like me
Say the WORD - I'm thinking of
Have you heard? - the word is LOVE
It's so fine
It's sunshine
It's the WORD - LOVE

Sadness - Those Were the Days, My Friend

Those Were the Days - Mary Hopkin

Once upon a time there was a tavern
Where we used to raise a glass or two
Remember how we laughed away the hours
And dreamed of all the great things we would do

Those were the days my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way

La la la la la la
La la la la la la
La la la la, la la la la la la la

Then the busy years went rushing by us
We lost our starry notions on the way
If by chance I´d see you in the tavern
We'd smile at one another and we'd say

Those were the days my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose

La la la la la la
La la la la la la
La la la la, la la la la la la la

Just tonight I stood before the tavern
Nothing seemed the way it used to be
In the glass I saw a strange reflection
Was that lonely woman really me

Those were the days my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose
Those were the days, oh yes those were the days

La la la la la la
La la la la la la
La la la la, la la la la la la la

La la la la la la
La la la la la la
La la la la, la la la la la la la

Through the door there came familiar laughter
I saw your face and heard you call my name
Oh my friend we're older but no wiser
For in our hearts the dreams are still the same

Those were the days my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose
Those were the days, oh yes those were the days

La la la la la la
La la la la la la
La la la la, la la la la la la la

You're the Top!

At words poetic, I'm so pathetic
That I always have found it best,
Instead of getting 'em off my chest,
To let 'em rest - unexpressed,
I hate parading my serenading
As I'll probably miss a bar,
But if this ditty is not so pretty
At least it'll tell you how great you are.

You're the top, you're the Colosseum,
You're the top, you're the Louvre Museum,
You're a melody from a symphony by Strauss,
You're a Bendel bonnet, a Shakespeare sonnet, you're Mickey Mouse!

You're the Nile, you're the Tower of Pisa,
You're the smile on the Mona Lisa,
I'm a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop,
But if baby I'm the bottom, you're the top.



Your words poetic are not pathetic.
On the other hand, babe, you shine,
And I can feel after every line
A thrill divine down my spine.
Now gifted humans like Vincent Youmans
Might think that your song is bad,
But I got a notion I'll second the motion
And this is what I'm going to add

You're the top, you're Mahatma Gandhi,
You're the top, you're Napoleon Brandy,
You're the purple light Of a summer night in Spain,
You're the National Gallery, you're Garbo's salary,
You're cellophane!

You're sublime, you're turkey dinner,
You're the time, the time of a Derby winner
I'm a toy balloon that’s fated soon to pop
But if, baby, I'm the bottom, you're the top!

You're the top, you're an Arrow collar.
You're the top, you're a Coolidge dollar.
You're the nimble tread of the feet of Fred Astaire.
You're an O'Neill drama, you're Whistler's mama, you're Camembert!

You're a rose; you're Inferno's Dante,
You're the nose of the great Durante.
I'm just in the way, as the French would say 'de trop'
But if, baby, I'm the bottom,
You're the top.

You're the top, you're a dance in Bali.
You're the top, you're a hot tamale.
You're an angel, you, simply too, too, too diveen,
You're a Boticcelli, you're Keats, you're Shelly, You're Ovaltine!

You're a boom, you're the dam at Boulder,
You're the moon, over Mae West's shoulder,
I'm the nominee of the G.O.P. - or GOP!
But if, baby, I'm the bottom, you're the top!

You're the top, you're a Waldorf salad.
You're the top, you're a Berlin ballad.
You're the boats that glide on the sleepy Zuider Zee,
You're an old Dutch master, you're Lady Astor, you're Pepsodent!

You're romance, you're the steppes of Russia,
You're the pants on a Roxy usher.
I'm a lazy lout, that's just about to stop,
But if baby, I'm the bottom, you're the top.

I forgot how funny this is.

Anaïs Nin

Anaïs Nin - 1903–1977

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."

"I only believe in fire. Life. Fire. Being myself on fire I set others on fire. Never death. Fire and life. Les Jeux."

"I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman."

"It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it."

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."

"We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations."

"I looked with chameleon eyes upon the changing face of the world, looked with anonymous vision upon my uncompleted self."

"It takes courage to push yourself to places you have never been before... to test yout limits... to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

"No life, no history, no human being, no event is without meaning. But it takes a certain training to penetrate the surface and we mistake superficiality for realism."

"The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy."

"Action without meaning becomes animal. The dream without action is equally destructive."

"Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living."

"Permit yourself to flow and overflow. Allow for the rise in temperature and all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess."

"Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them."

"The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility."

"The important thing is to set the passions free."

"The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery. I have no fear of clarity."

"I prefer by far the warmth and softness to mere brilliancy and coldness. Some people remind me of sharp dazzling diamonds. Valuable but lifeless and loveless. Others, of the simplest field flowers, with hearts full of dew and with all the tints of celestial beauty reflected in their modest petals."

"Three or four threads may be agitated, like telegraph wires, at the same time, and if I were to tap them all I would reveal such a mixture of innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculation, fear and courage, I cannot tell the whole truth simply because I would have to write four journals at once."

"Every difficult situation into which you are sometimes thrown has some kind of opening somewhere, even if it is only by way of the dream."

"I cannot live without seeing him. It is a hunger, an unbearable hunger. I rushed to him today. It is like touching fire. He makes me terribly happy."

"...she lived now with all herself, this body so long ignored. She burned at last completely and living was revealed to her in a thousand ways. She melted into the world, into dreams, into flesh, into moist desires. Before she gave only the cold radiation of her thought-now she gave her burning flesh. She was woman."

"And to walk into chaos with a passion for crystallization does not imply to dispel the chaos. It means to discover more and more chaos, to descend further, to discover one cave underneath another, to become aware of the impossibility to seize."

"The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest."

"Stories do not end."

"To think of him in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living."

"I am like a winged creature who is too rarely allowed to use its wings. Ecstasies do not occur often enough."

"For indeed my life is a perpetual question mark -- my thirst for books, my observations of people, all tend to satisfy a great, overwhelming desire to know, to understand, to find an answer to a million questions. And gradually the answers are revealed, many things are explained, and above all, many things are given names and described, and my restlessness is subdued. Then I become an exclamatory person, clapping my hands to the immense surprises the world holds for me, and falling from one ecstasy into another. I have the habit of peeping and prying and listening and seeking -- passionate curiosity and expectation. But I have also the habit of being surprised, the habit of being filled with wonder and satisfaction each time I stumble on some wondrous thing. The first habit could make me a philosopher or a cynic or perhaps a humorist. But the other habit destroys all the delicate foundations, and I find each day that I am still... only a Woman!"

"All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished."

"Coming near him like a ballet dancer she took a leap towards him, and he, frightened by her vehemence, and fearing that she would crash against him, instinctively became absolutely rigid, and she felt herself embracing a statue."

"For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds, and you and I both lose it in the same way, through love."

"Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy."

"The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself."

"In the infinite there is no impasse."

"Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions."

Choice

Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action? ~ Arthur Miller

Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. ~ Theodor Adorno

From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen. ~ Robert Nozick

I'll walk where my own nature would be leading: It vexes me to choose another guide. ~ Emily Bronte

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them. ~ Khalil Gibran

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

Guess, if you can, and choose, if you dare. ~ Pierre Corneille

Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have - life itself. ~ Walter Anderson

I've never thought of my characters as being sad. On the contrary, they are full of life. They didn't choose tragedy. Tragedy chose them. ~ Juliette Binoche

No matter how sad we might be, the universe is still planning our happiness. We can choose happiness in any moment we wish. ~ Marianne Williamson

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who'll decide where to go. ~ Dr. Seuss

We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours. ~ Dag Hammarskjold

Every human has four endowments - self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... The power to choose, to respond, to change. ~ Stephen Covey

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman. ~ Anais Nin

Love Measures

"Then do we still need our soul mate? Oh, yes, I say, because this is the bed through which the river of our life flows from another transcendental reality, this is the infinite on which the horizon of our heart rests in other dreams or transcendental realities." ~ Sorin Cerin

"The measure of love is love without measure." ~ Saint Bernard of Clairvaux

"In dreams and in love there are no impossibilities." ~ Janos Arnay

"Each moment of a happy lover's hour is worth an age of dull and common life." ~ Aphra Behn

"Make me immortal with a kiss." ~ Christopher Marlowe

"Sometimes your nearness takes my breath away; and all the things I want to say can find no voice. Then, in silence, I can only hope my eyes will speak my heart." ~ Robert Sexton

"Acting on your heart's instructions means abandoning all those careful strategies for avoiding rejection and bolting toward the fertile, gorgeous jungle of human imagination and possibility." ~ Martha Beck

"Any real ecstasy is a sign you are moving in the right direction." ~ St. Teresa of Avila

"Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly." ~ Rose Franken

"The new moon stirs pangs of love." ~ Vidyapati

"The lips of the one I love are my perpetual pleasure..." ~ Hafiz

"Eros seizes and shakes my very soul
like the wind on the mountain
shaking ancient oaks." ~ Sappho

"Over the sky's hot rim,
The day's last breath in our sails.
Pinned by the sun between solstice
and equinox, drowsy and tangled together." ~ Pablo Neruda

"The deeper that sorrow carves
into your being, the more joy
you can contain." ~ Kahlil Gibran

"How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn't touch your soul?
How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote lost objects,
in some dark and silent place that doesn't resonate
when our depths resound." ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Love is an infinite sky! ~ Osho

STRAWBERRIES

There were never strawberries
like the ones we had
that sultry afternoon
sitting on the step
of the open French window
facing each other
your knees held in mine
the blue plates in our laps
the strawberries glistening
in the hot sunlight
we dipped them in sugar
looking at each other
not hurrying the feast
for one to come
the empty plates
laid on the stone together
with the two forks crossed
and I bent towards you
sweet in that air
in my arms
abandoned like a child
from your eager mouth
the taste of strawberries
in my memory
lean back again
let me love you
let the sun beat
on our forgetfulness
one hour of all
the heat intense

and summer lightning
on the Kilpatrick hills

let the storm wash the plates

~ Edwin Morgan

Long hot soak

Here's one of my favorites, but I do this so seldom. It's easy to forget, but tonight was a wonderful reminder.

A 30-minute bath, with epsom salts imbued with lavender oil. The salts ease my tired body, and the aroma of the lavender relaxes and calms. Condition the hair at the same time, and get a longer-than-usual beauty treatment.

What a fantastic soak! All my muscles are relaxed. I'm all warm and clean and, embraced by my softest pjs, I feel so deliciously comfty now.

Sweet, sweet, sweet dreams.