Increasingly, though, I do feel bad, in a more general sense, and hate myself for pretending that everything is fine. At home, in my work, I’ve made a habit of looking away, as if a direct sight of life as it is might shatter me like glass. I create distractions by keeping busy, by writing fictions. The drowning set the pattern, an unwelcome reality I’ve chosen ever since to avoid.
~ Richard Beard, The Day That Went Missing (Little, Brown and Company. November 5, 2018)
But all of us are struggling to be here. One of the great theological questions is around incarnation, which simply means being here in your body — not anywhere else, just here with life’s fierce need to change you — the fact that the more you’re here and the more you’re alive, the more you realize you’re a mortal human being and that you’ll pass from this place. And will you actually turn up? Will you actually have the conversation? Will you become a full citizen of vulnerability, loss, and disappearance, which you have no choice about?
~ David Whyte, The Conversational Nature of Reality - Interview with Krista Tippett (Onbeing, December 27, 2018)
Being preoccupied with ourselves is like being deaf and blind. It’s like standing in the middle of a vast field of wildflowers with black hood over our heads. It’s like coming upon a tree of singing birds while wearing earplugs.
~Pema Chodron, from “It’s Never Too Late” in When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (Shambhala Publications, Jan 11, 2005)
I escape to the same places and same words.
Cold breeze from the sea, the ice-dragon’s licking
the back of my neck while the sun glares.
- Tomas Tranströmer, from "Alcaic“ in Bright Scythe. (Sarabande Books, Inc., 2015)
Put your day down.
Come to the bank in the snow
wearing grace and pain,
the silence at the end of sentences.
- Terrance Keenan, from “Lullaby of Crossing the River” in St. Nadie in Winter: Zen Encounters with Loneliness (Tuttle Publishing, Nov 10, 2015)
Katya Apekina, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish (Two Dollar Radio. September 17, 2018)
I should be satisfied with being famous to three or four of my friends. And yet it’s an illusion. They like me for who I am, and I would rather be liked for who I appear to be, and for who I appear to be, to be who I am. We are all specks of dirt, all on this earth at the same time.
~ Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?: A Novel (Picador, June 25, 2013)
Richard Beard, The Day That Went Missing (Little, Brown and Company. November 5, 2018)
Always, having accepted that I want everything to change, I suddenly realise I do not. I want the dream of leaving, not leaving itself. The dream of other lives, not any other life. The trick is not to trick myself with too much dreaming, but to let my dreaming take me to the uttermost edges of desire and longing, without actually advancing too far—for my fantasies to only stretch so far, before snapping me back into my life.
~ Sheila Heti, Motherhood: A Novel (Henry Holt and Co., May 1, 2018)
Sheila Heti, Motherhood: A Novel (Henry Holt and Co., May 1, 2018)
Richard Beard, The Day That Went Missing (Little, Brown and Company. November 5, 2018)
Richard Beard, The Day That Went Missing (Little, Brown and Company. November 5, 2018)
Richard Beard, The Day That Went Missing (Little, Brown and Company. November 5, 2018)
Psychologists usually try to help people use insight and understanding to manage their behaviour. However, neuroscience research shows that very few psychological problems are the result of defects in understanding; most originate in pressures from deeper regions in the brain that drive our perception and attention. When the alarm bell of the emotional brain keeps signaling that you are in danger, no amount of insight will silence it.
— Bessel Van Der Kolk M.D., The Body Keeps The Score (Viking; September 25, 2014)