“The effect of life in society is to complicate and confuse our existence,
making us forget who we really are by causing us to become obsessed with what we
are not.”

--Chuang Tzu

The great Wendell Berry died yesterday. This one stings. He’s always been one of
my favorite writers.

“Though the body grows old and bears
the ache and weight of many days,
the life by which it lives is young,
for life is young or it does not
exist, is not even dead. And so
as I walk in the land’s holy Sabbath
Under the tall trees, I come
at once into the old young joy
that has moved me all my life to be
here in the early morning light.”

—Wendell Berry

"Breathe with unconditional breath  
the unconditioned air.  
Shun electric wire.  
Communicate slowly. Live  
a three-dimensioned life;  
stay away from screens.  
Stay away from anything  
that obscures the place it is in.  
There are no unsacred places;  
there are only sacred places  
and desecrated places."

-- Wendell Berry

“True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human
obligation. One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s
most intimate sources. In consequence, one responds more clearly to other
lives.”

~ Wendell Berry

"As Thoreau so well knew, and so painstakingly tried to show us, what a man most
needs is not a knowledge of how to get more, but a knowledge of the most he can
do without, and of how to get along without it."

~ Wendell Berry

"The human soul is an abyss of viscous darkness, a well whose depths are rarely
plumbed from the surface of the world. No one would love themselves if they
really knew themselves and thus, without vanity, which is the life blood of the
spirit, our soul would die of anaemia."

-- Fernando Pessoa

"Jack London drinking his life away while
writing of strange and heroic men.
Eugene O’Neill drinking himself oblivious
while writing his dark and poetic
works.

now our moderns
lecture at universities
in tie and suit,
the little boys soberly studious,
the little girls with glazed eyes
looking
up,
the lawns so green, the books so dull,
the life so dying of
thirst."

~ Charles Bukowski

I started out with nothing
and I still got most
of it left.

~ Tom Waits

those who escape hell
however
never talk about
it
and nothing much
bothers them
after
that.

—Charles Bukowski

"Throughout all his writings, Berry simply asked: How should human beings live
well in a place? In the global mayhem of a corporatized world, Berry remained a
fierce defender of local communities and an advocate for returning economic
self-determination to the people.

'You can best serve civilization,' he writes, 'by being against what usually
passes for it.'"

Ernest Becker: "Adler was right to say that the mentally ill all have a basic
problem of courage. They cannot assume responsibility for their own independent
lives; they are hyper–fearful of life and death."

Paul Tillich: “Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being.”

Carl Jung: “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.”

Sigmund Freud: “Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of
it, and when it comes to taking it away from them they will defend it like a
lioness her young.”

Life is nothing but a competition
to be the criminal rather
than the victim.

-- Bertrand Russell

It's going to be September now
for many years to come,
many hearts adjusting to
that strict September drum.

I see the ghost of culture with numbers on his wrist
salute some new conclusion that all of us have missed.

So let's drink to when it's over,
and let's drink to when we meet.
I'll be waiting on this corner
where there used to be a street.

— Leonard Cohen