one sip of an answer / 10:40 am

Time is strange, how it passes so quickly and slowly with no warning. It slips between cracks, it hides in the floorboards as soon as I turn on the light. And there are so many ways to measure it... seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years with clocks and calendars and deadlines... always rushing it seems. I want it to flow rather than rush. My trouble, as I've written so many times before, lies in not being able to live in the present. I do things in the present and I carry out tasks in the present, but my mind is always scrambling for the past or being whisked away on the future. This isn't good, I know. I know that I need to live in the present and that's something I'd like to achieve this summer. 

Today my cousin Christopher sent me a youtube video of a poem by Rumi called "Who Says Words With My Mouth." Watch the movie fullscreen and then read the poem... then maybe reread it aloud. It's something to savor and it is one of the most beautiful and meaningful pieces of writing I've read in awhile. I italicized my favorite parts. The funny thing is that every time I go to a bookstore I see books of Rumi's poetry and I almost always buy one. I won't resist next time.

All day I think about it, then at night I say it.

Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?

I have no idea.

My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that,

and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern.

When I get back around to that place,

I'll be completely sober.  Meanwhile,

I'm like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.

The day is coming when I fly off,

but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?

Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?

I cannot stop asking.

If I could taste one sip of an answer,

I could break out of this prison for drunks.

I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way.

Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

This poetry, I never know what I'm going to say.

I don't plan it.

When I'm outside the saying of it,

I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

The video is also wonderful. I love where it takes me. I became lost in it. Thank you, Christopher, for sharing this with me.

felt rather than formulated / 12:44 pm

"We seek not resemblances but differences, choose the most accentuated differences because they're the most striking and also the most instructive. We first seek the cases in which this rule has the greatest chance of failing; by going very far away in space or very far away in time, we may find our usual rules entirely overturned, and these grand overturnings enable us the better to see the little changes that may happen nearer to us. But what we ought to aim at is less the ascertainment of resemblances and differences than the recognition of likenesses hidden under apparent divergences. Particular rules seem at first discordant, but looking more closely we see in general that they resemble each other; different as to matter, they are alike as to form, as to the order of their parts. When we look at them with this bias we shall see them enlarge and tend to embrace everything. And this it is that makes the value of certain facts that come to complete an assemblange and to show that it is the faithful image of other known assemblages." 

"If you want to build a factory, or fix a motorcycle, or set a nation right without getting stuck, then classical, structured dualistic subject-object knowledge, although necessary, isn't enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what's good. That is what carries you forward. This sense isn't something you're born with, although you are born with it. It's also something you can develop. It's not just "intuition." not just unexplainable "skill" or "talent." It's the direct result of contact with basic reality, Quality, which dualistic reason has in the past tended to conceal."

"Pretty mountains, pretty river, bumpy but pleasant tar road... old buildings, old people on a front porch... strange how old, obsolete buildings and plants and mills, the technology of fifty and a hundred years ago, always seems to look so much better than the new stuff. Weeds and grass and wild flowers grow where the concrete has cracked and broken. Neat, squared, upright lines acquire a random sag. The uniform masses of the unbroken color of fresh paint modify to a mottled, weathered softness."

"We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives."

- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance