"Now I am thirty-six and I am in Nepal and I am finally remembering what I was told I would forget.
The voice inside the mountain speaks to me, tells me again not to be afraid, tells me that there is only love in this world. Our choice is to be in love or to be in fear. But to choose to be in love means to have a mountain inside of you, means to have the heart of the world inside you, means you will feel another’s suffering inside your own body and you will weep… . You will under­stand that this pain is your own because you are not separate, from life, or from anyone or anything else. But you will fall into a forgetting. You may die before you remember. You will forget that you know this, again and again. Do not be afraid. The body remembers, it never forgets. It is your own knowing that you hide from and do not know."

- China Galland, with thanks to the Sun Magazine (via crashinglybeautiful)

(via fuckyeahhappy)

"Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer."

-

Simone Weil. On this quote, Stephen Mitchell made this comment:

“I love that. I think that could be as close as someone can get to a wonderful definition of prayer. In that sense, prayer has nothing spiritual or religious about it. A mathematician working at a problem or a little kid trying to pick out scales on the piano is a person at prayer. She’s not saying prayer is absolute unmixed attention; it’s the other way. The attention itself is the quality that she wants to call prayer. So whatever context you’re putting it in, whether it’s inside a church or inside a toy box, that’s the quality that is the sacred one.”

(Ah! Thank you, dhammanovice)

(via crashinglybeautiful)

On Turning Ten

treee:

suzywire

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

(via sadnesses)

vibesssandstufff:

occupyallstreets:

Christians protecting Muslims as they pray during the NLC rally in Abuja on 1/10/12.

(via theleafyteapot)

"That blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jesus in the Vatican ain’t right. That motherfucker was Jewish, not white. Christ was a middle-eastern rasta man who ate grapes in the company of prostitutes and he drank wine more than he drank water. Born of the spirit, the disciples loved him in the flesh."

-

Stayceyann Chin

(via onehundredrevisions)

human-voices:

You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.

— René Daumal