Conquer thy heart

If thou canst walk on water
Thou art no better than a straw.
If thou canst fly in the air
Thou art no better than a fly.
Conquer thy heart
That thou mayest become somebody.
Ansari

“reduce the power of confusion…”

Life does not consist mainly—or even largely—of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the
 storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through 
one’s head.
Mark Twain

Maybe it is not possible to silence the voices inside your head that will not shut up for a minute but are constantly busy presenting at least forty-three sides to every story and filling you with doubt or regret. You can, however, reduce the power of confusion by remembering that every thought that fleets across the mind is merely a string of words and set of imaginary images that have no reality. That’s deep.
Michael Lutin

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Love the questions

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Perhaps dragons are princesses

But we are not prisoners. There are no traps or snares set for us, and there is nothing that should frighten or torture us…  We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us.  If it has terrors, they are our own terrors.  If it has precipices, they belong to us.  If dangers are present, we must try to love them.  And if we fashion our life according to that principle, which advises us to embrace that which is difficult, then that which appears to us to be the very strangest will become the most worthy of our trust, and the truest.

How could we be capable of forgetting the old myths that stand at the threshold of all mankind, myths of dragons transforming themselves at the last moment into princesses?  Perhaps all dragons in our lives are really princesses just waiting to see us just once being beautiful and courageous.  Perhaps everything fearful is basically helplessness that seeks our help.[1]
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

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[1] or, in another translation, “Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.”

“the bravest man who ever lived”

Happy Birthday, Harper Lee…

It was impossible to go to town without passing [Mrs. Dubose’s] house unless we wished to walk a mile out of the way…  Jem and I hated her.  If she was on the porch when we passed, we would be raked by her wrathful gaze, subjected to ruthless interrogation regarding our behavior, and given a melancholy prediction on what we would amount to when we grew up, which was always nothing….

Countless evenings Atticus would find Jem furious at something Mrs. Dubose had said when we went by.

“Easy does it, son,” Atticus would say, “She’s an old lady and she’s ill.  You just hold your head high and be a gentleman.  Whatever she says to you, it’s your job not to let her make you mad.”

…When the three of us came to her house, Atticus would sweep off his hat, wave gallantly to her and say, “Good evening, Mrs. Dubose!  You look like a picture this evening.”

I never heard Atticus say like a picture of what.  He would tell her the courthouse news, and would say he hoped with all his heart she’d have a good day tomorrow.  He would return his hat to his head, swing me to his shoulders in her very presence, and we would go home in the twilight.  It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Self-confidence of the warrior

The self-confidence of the warrior is not the self-confidence of the average man.  The average man seeks certainty in the eyes of the onlooker and calls that self-confidence.  The warrior seeks impeccability in his own eyes and calls that humbleness.  The average man is hooked to his fellow men, while the warrior is hooked only to infinity.
Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power

Throwing the burden down

The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of the personal center of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down.
William James

Believing

Believing means to walk, talk, think, speak and act as the person you know you are.  Believe in the power of God to heal in an instant and you are that healing channel through which God’s healing energy is flowing.

Believe with all your heart, soul and mind that you are the person you desire to be, that you’re being given all you need, that you have already received whatever it is you want.
Terry Cole Whittaker

Leaves of Grass

This is what you shall do:
Love the earth and sun and animals,
despise riches, give alms to every one that asks,
stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others,
hate tyrants, argue not concerning to God,
have patience and indulgence toward the people,
take off your hat to nothing known or unknown
or to any man or number of men,
go freely with powerful uneducated persons
and with the mothers of families,
read these leaves in the open air
every season of every year of your life,
re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book,
dismiss whatever insults your own soul,
and your very flesh shall be a great poem
and have the richest fluency not only in its words
but in the silent lines of its lips and face
and between the lashes of your eyes
and in every motion and joint of your body.
Walt Whitman, from the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass

Enthusiastic Attention

As soon as we do anything with enthusiasm, with conviction, with total attention, life takes on a ‘real’ quality.  Our greatest human mistake is to feel that certain things do not deserve enthusiastic attention.  We have to learn that anything done with enthusiastic attention exalts us and increases our strength.
Colin Wilson, The Strange Life of P.D. Ouspensky

Free will: the sustaining of thoughts because I choose to when I might have other thoughts.
Charles Renouvier, Essais

Maya Angelou

The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.

If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform a million realities.

You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.

Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it.

I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass.

Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.

We Are the Possible

When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible…
We are the miraculous, the true wonders of this world
Free to choose our ends, and our new beginnings
That is when, and only when…
We come to it
Maya Angelou, from her poem, ‘A Brave And Startling Truth’

Happy Birthday, Jane Austen

Interesting, to me, that Jane Austen wrote such empowered female characters 200 years ago, more empowered than some authors writing today—even/especially woman authors.  In the following excerpt from Pride and Prejudice (1813), Elizabeth stands up to the wealthy and powerful Lady Catherine so bravely speaking her truth, insisting on her right to independent judgement and happiness, without a minced word spoken.

“Unfeeling, selfish girl!  Do you not consider that a connection with you, must disgrace him in the eyes of everybody?”

“Lady Catherine, I have nothing farther to say.  You know my sentiments.”

“You are then resolved to have him?”

” I have said no such thing.  I am only resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me.”

“It is well.  You refuse, then, to oblige me.  You refuse to obey the claims of duty, honour, and gratitude.  You are determined to ruin him in the opinion of all his friends, and make him the contempt of the world.”

“Neither duty, nor honour, nor gratitude,” replied Elizabeth, “have any possible claim on me, in the present instance.  No principle of either, would be violated by my marriage with Mr. Darcy.  And with regard to the resentment of his family, or the indignation of the world, if the former were excited by his marrying me, it would not give me one moment’s concern – and the world in general would have too much sense to join in the scorn.”

Imagine It

You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of  focus.
Mark Twain

Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Albert Einstein

Don’t mistake a clear view for a short distance.
Paul Saffo

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost;  that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Henry David Thoreau

Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children  of your soul; the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.
Napoleon  Hill

Don’t be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated; you can’t  cross a chasm in two small jumps.
William Lloyd George

Begin It

W.H. Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.

I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

It’s all attitude, and intention about attitude

To the greatest extent possible, I should be able to say at any given moment of my life that that moment is the most beautiful that I have ever experienced. Is this asking too much or aiming too high?  I don’t think so.  Because experience is in consciousness, my awareness is an accumulation of all the good I have ever known.  Unless I persist in being morbid and stubborn about whatever hardships I have suffered, my memories of suffering fall away of their own weight, leaving me standing in the light of true self-knowledge. To be able to say to each passing moment, ‘this is the most beautiful moment of my life,’ not only acknowledges all past good, but welcomes in and embraces all the good to come and helps to anchor me in the now.
Alex Noble

Mind is a Myth

U.G.: …When you see all this for yourself for the first time, you explode. That explosion hits life at a point that has never been touched before. It is absolutely unique. So whatever I may be saying cannot be true for you. The moment you see it for yourself you make what I am saying obsolete and false. All that came before is negated in that fire. You can’t come into your own uniqueness unless the whole of human experience is thrown out of your system.  It cannot be done through any volition or the help of anything. Then you are on your own.
Q: It seems to me that a special sort of valor is necessary for what you are describing. Am I right?
U.G.: Yes. But it is not courage in the usual sense. It is not the courage you associate with struggle or overcoming. The valor I am talking about is the courage that is naturally there when all this authority and fear is thrown out of the system. Courage is not an instrument or quality you can use to get somewhere. The stopping of doing is courage. The ending of tradition in you is courage.
U.G., Mind is a Myth

Forget Safety…

Forget safety.
Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation.
Be notorious.
I have tried prudent planning/ long enough.
From now
on, I’ll be mad.
Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

All is Beautiful

All is beautiful
Before me
Behind me
Below me
Above me
All is beautiful
All around me.
Navaho chant

Attitude

There once was a woman who woke up one morning, looked in the mirror, and noticed she had only three hairs on her head.
“Well,” she said, “I think I’ll braid my hair today.”
So she did and she had
a
wonderful
day.

The next day she woke up,
looked in the mirror
and saw that she had only two hairs on her head.
“H-M-M,” she said, “I think I’ll part my hair down the middle today.”
So she did and she had
a
grand
day.

The next day she woke up, looked in the mirror and noticed that she had only one hair on her head.
“Well,” she said, “today I’m going to wear my hair in a pony tail.”
So she did and she had
a
fun,
fun
day.

The next day she woke up, looked in the mirror and noticed that there wasn’t a single hair on her head.
“YEA!” she exclaimed,
“I don’t have to fix my hair today!”

Author Unknown