Long Live Your Love and Joy

Keep two pieces of paper in your pockets at all times. One says "I am a speck of dust," and the other, "The world was created for me."

—Rabbi Bunim of P’shiskha





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WHAT YOU NEED

You need regular doses of unreasonable beauty, sublime anomalies, beguiling ephemera, and inexplicable joys.





YOUR SYMPTOMS?

Congratulations if you've been having any of the following symptoms:

• spontaneous eruptions of gratitude

• a declining fascination with conflict

• seemingly irrational urges that lead to interesting discoveries

• yearnings to peer more deeply into the eyes of people you care about

• a mounting inability to tolerate boring influences that resist transformation

• an increasing knack for recognizing and receiving the love that's available to you





FREE THE WHOLE WORLD

If you'd like to read a succinct summary of my philosophy of life — which can't be published here because it has forbidden words — go here.





LONG LIVE YOU AND ME

Long live the beauty that comes down and through and onto all of us.

—singer-songwriter Laurie Anderson

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Long live impudence! It's my guardian angel in this world.

—Albert Einstein

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LONG LIVE THE WEEDS

Long live the weeds that overwhelm
My narrow vegetable realm !—
The bitter rock, the barren soil
That force the son of man to toil;
All things unholy, marked by curse,
The ugly of the universe.
The rough, the wicked, and the wild
That keep the spirit undefiled.
With these I match my little wit
And earn the right to stand or sit.
Hope, look, create, or drink and die:
These shape the creature that is I.

—Theodore Roethke

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Long live freedom and damn the ideologies.

—Robinson Jeffers

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Long live also the forward march of the common people in all the lands towards their just and true inheritance, and towards the broader and fuller age.

—Winston Churchill

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Long live all the magic we made.

—Taylor Swift

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Long live diversity, long live the earth!

—Edward Abbey

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Long live the rose that grew from concrete.

—Tupac Shakur

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Long live the pioneers, rebels and mutineers.

—X Ambassadors

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Long live your soul and may i see you do great in life.

—birthday card

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Long live “fact journalism.”

—David Leonhardt

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Vive la différence!

—French proverb


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Live long and prosper.

—Spock

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Love the life you live. Live the life you love.

—Bob Marley

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Long live wanting to live in this beautiful garden of life and knowing it as a beginner.

—Anah-Karelia Coates

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Long live transfinite mountains, the hollow earth, time machines, fractal writing, aliens, dada, telepathy, flying saucers, warped space, teleportation, artificial reality, robots, pod people, hylozoism, endless shrinking, intelligent goo, antigravity, surrealism, software highs, two-dimensional time, gnarly computation, the art of photo composition, pleasure zappers, nanomachines, mind viruses, hyperspace, monsters from the deep and, of course, always and forever, the attack of the giant ants!

—science fiction author Rudy Rucker

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Instead of complaining about impermanence, we should say, ‘Warm welcome and long live impermanence.’ We should be happy. When we can see the miracle of impermanence, our sadness and suffering will pass.

—Thich Nhat Hanh

Here's the whole passage of the Thich Nhat Hanh quote:
We are often sad and suffer a lot when things change, but change and impermanence have a positive side. Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible. Life itself is possible.

If a grain of corn is not impermanent, it can never be transformed into a stalk of corn. If the stalk were not impermanent, it could never provide us with the ear of corn we eat.

If your daughter is not impermanent, she cannot grow up to become a woman. Then your grandchildren would never manifest.

So instead of complaining about impermanence, we should say, "Warm welcome and long live impermanence."





TRUE AWE

Each morning is all mornings.

The oak tree's shadow is the messiah.

The elephant shrew and the supernova are equals.

The Honda Accord is as natural as the Grand Canyon.

The skin is a temporary boundary, and so is the planet's surface.

The swallowtail butterfly is a savant.

Logic is crazy love.

The bat-eared fox is a razor-backed musk turtle.

Jubilation is an ecologically sound strategy.

No one knows how to sing the end of time because there is no end of time.

The critically endangered white rhinoceros is a forgotten birthday.

The vulnerable arctic wolf is emancipated from sin.

Purity is a sacrilegious vortex of panic.

Listening is the apotheosis of arrogance.

Our serpent thoughts keep us linked to original mirth.

The bumble bee redeems our unfertilized prophecies.

—by me





DO IT NOW!

It's a favorable time to diminish the power of the past to obstruct you.

It's a favorable time to commit yourself to your high ideals and beautiful goals with such fervor and love that you render your past conditioning irrelevant.

It's a favorable time to diminish the power of any of your conditioned urges that are not in alignment with your soul's code.

It's a favorable time to commit yourself to your high ideals and beautiful goals with such fervor and love that you render your disruptive conditioned urges irrelevant.





PSYCHOLOGICAL & SPIRITUAL

Psychological work focuses more on what has gone wrong: how we have been wounded in our relations with others and how to go about addressing that.

Spiritual work focuses more on what is intrinsically right: how we have infinite resources at the core of our nature that we can cultivate in order to live more expansively. If psychological work thins the clouds, spiritual work invokes the sun.

—psychotherapist John Welwood

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To Welwood's ideas, I would add that the spirit is about rising above and seeking what's most noble, while the soul is about diving in and wrestling with exactly what is.

Both tasks are valuable. Neither realm is inherently better or more important. If you have a bias one way or the other, it's usually best to be conscientious about maintaining a balance.

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I call the high and light aspects of my being spirit and the dark and heavy aspects soul.

Soul is at home in the deep, shaded valleys. Heavy torpid flowers saturated with black grow there. The rivers flow like warm syrup.

Spirit is a land of high, white peaks and glittering jewel -­ like lakes and flowers. Life is sparse and sounds travel great distances.

—Dalai Lama





THE COMPASSION OF NO

Tsültrim Allione says: "I was at a lunch with the Dalai Lama and five Buddhist teachers at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. We were sitting in a charming room with white carpets and many windows. The food was a delightful, fragrant, vegetarian Indian meal. There were lovely flower arrangements on the table.

“We were discussing sexual misconduct among Western Buddhist teachers. A woman Buddhist from California brought up someone who was using his students for his own sexual needs. One woman said, ‘We are working with him with compassion, trying to get him to understand his motives for exploiting female students and to help him change his actions.’

“The Dalai Lama slammed his fist on the table, saying loudly, ‘Compassion is fine, but it has to stop! And those doing it should be exposed!’ All the serving plates on the table jumped, the water glasses tipped precariously, and I almost choked on the bite of saffron rice in my mouth.

“Suddenly I saw him as a fierce manifestation of compassion and realized that this clarity did not mean that the Dalai Lama had moved away from compassion. Rather, he was bringing compassion and manifesting it as decisive fierceness. His magnetism was glowing like a fire.

“I will always remember that day, because it was such a good teaching on compassion and precision. Compassion is not a wishy-washy ‘anything goes’ approach. Compassion can say a fierce no!“

—Tsültrim Allione, from her book Wisdom Rising





When you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it then becomes sacred.

—Allen Ginsberg





COMPLIMENTS

Sara Kuburic writes: Here are some compliments you can bestow that don't refer to physical characteristics:

"I constantly learn from you"

"The way you treat people is beautiful"

"Your character is strong"

"You are such a good listener. I always feel heard"

"I appreciate how authentically you show up"

"Your confidence is something I aspire to"

"You make me feel like I belong"

"Your resilience is inspiring"

"I love that you don't hesitate to apologize when you're wrong"

"I really admire your passion for self-exploration"

"I love how transparent you are"

"You bring out the best in me"

"You're dependable. I always feel safe around you"

"Your passion is contagious"

These are were written by Sara Kuburic, CCC





A THOUSAND YEARS FROM TODAY

A thousand years from today, everyone you know will be long dead and forgotten. There'll be nothing left of the life you love, no evidence that you ever walked this planet. That, at least, is what the fundamentalist materialists would have you believe.

But suppose the truth is very different? What if in fact every little thing you do subtly alters the course of world history? What if your day-to-day decisions will actually help determine how the human species navigates its way through the epic turning point we're living through?

And finally, what if you will be alive in a thousand years, reincarnated into a fresh body and in possession of the memories of the person you were back in this era?

These are my hypotheses. These are my prophecies. That's why I say: Live as if your soul is eternal.

—from my book The Televisionary Oracle





MARKS OF WILDNESS

Here are some marks of wildness:

a passion to find where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet;

a determination to serve your highest purpose as you give the world your finest gifts;

a commitment to doing what you love as you express your love for all those who have given so much to you.





YOUR TRUE HOME

I invite you to dream and muse about your true home; your sweet, energizing, love-strong home, the haven where you can freely be high and deep, robust and tender, flexible and rigorous; the oasis where you are the person you promised yourself you could be.

To stimulate and enhance your thoughtful feelings about your true home, experiment with the following activities.

• Feed your roots.

• Visualize the memories that empower you.

• Celebrate and honor the experiences that imbue you with confidence and self-possession.

• Keep reinventing and reinvigorating your vital traditions.

• Cherish and foster your reliable sources of energy and inspiration.

* Refine the magic that liberates you.

• Identify all the influences that nurture you, and treasure your relationship with them.

Can you handle one more set of tasks designed to enhance your serene authority and relaxed aplomb?

• Tend to your web of close allies.

• Take care of what takes care of you.

• Cultivate the arts of adoration and reverence and awe.