foldedandunfolding

Thoughts and Quotes

• The waves come - the large fourth wave Looming up, thinking, crashing down - all Roll in so prominently that I become small And write this in a cramped script, hard to read. Well, all this fury, prominent or not Is also hard to read, and the ducks don't help, Settling down in furry water, shaking Themselves, and then forgetting it within a minute. Remembering the fury, it is up to us, even Though we feel small compared to the loose Ocean, to keep sailing and not land, And figure out what to say to our children. On the Oregon Coast by Robert Bly
• “Dance, when you're broken open. Dance, if you've torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you're perfectly free.”  - Mawlana Jalalad-Din Muhammad Rumi (of course)
• "Go with your love to the fields. Lie down in the shade. Rest your head in her lap. Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts. As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn't go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection."    - Wendell Barry from Manifesto: The Mad Farmer's Liberation Front
• "You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand."  - Jesus of Nazareth according to John (13:7b)
• “Religious fundamentalism is dangerous because it cannot accept ambiguity and diversity and is therefore inherently intolerant.  Such intolerance, in the name of virtue, is ruthless and uses political power to destroy what it cannot convert.”... The Rev. Peter J. Gomes
• Our blight is ideologies — they are the long-expected Antichrist!    - Carl Jung from The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation (1954)
• the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters. - from Diving into the Wreck, Adrienne Rich
• "It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." Teddy Roosevelt "Citizenship in a Republic," Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910
• “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”    ―      Martin Luther King Jr.