Scratch and Dent Dreams
____________________
The Power of Vulnerability
____________________
“And yet life is transformation: all that is good is transformation and all that is bad as well. For this reason [s]he is in the right who encounters everything as something that will not return. It does not matter whether [s]he then forgets or remembers, as long as [s]he had been fully present only for its duration and been the site, the atmosphere, the world for what happened, as long as it happened within him (her), in his (her) center, whatever is good and what is bad-then [s]he really has nothing else to fear because something else of renewed significance is always about to happen next. The possibility of intensifying things so that they reveal their essence depends so much on our own participation. When things sense our avid interest, they pull themselves together without delay and are all they can be and in everything new, the old is then whole, only different and vastly heightened”.
The Wisdom of Rilke, Part 3, Excerpted from: The Poet's Guide to Life, Rainer Rilke, http://www.enotalone.com/article/6147.html, Accessed December 2009.
____________________
"…one of the unalterable truths about our lives is that when they do not become deeper, they become more shallow. In our most serious moments of reflection, when we look upon our lives as a whole, we somehow sense that the most important experiences are the ones we did not have because whenever we got close enough to them to realize how upsetting they would be, we sealed up as quickly as we could the rupture they might have caused if we had allowed ourselves to suffer them. We prefer our lives to be ordinary because we know the only alternative is to let them become tragic".
Jerome A. Miller, The Way of Suffering: A Geography of Crisis (United States of America: Georgetown University Press, 1988), 44.
____________________
Learned a Lot - Amos Lee
____________________
Woman in Gown - Mike Mangione
____________________
The Guy That Says Goodbye To You Is Out Of His Mind - Griffin House
____________________
Fr. Mark Ravizza - The Hope of the UCA Martyrs
____________________
____________________
"Perceptions are perceptions of our body, feelings, mind, nature, and society...
The Buddha told a story about this. A young widower, who loved his five-year-old song very much, was away on business, and bandits came, burned down his whole village, and took his son away. When the man returned, he saw the ruins, and panicked. He took the charred corpse of an infant to be his own child, and he began to pull his hair and beat his chest, crying uncontrollably. He organized a cremation ceremony, collected the ashes and put them in a very beautiful velvet bag. Working, sleeping, eating, he always carried the bag of ashes with him.
One day his real son escaped from the robbers and found his way home. He arrived at his father's new cottage at midnight, and knocked at the door. You can imagine at that time, the young father was still carrying the bags of ashes, and crying. He asked, 'Who is there?' And the child answered, 'It's me, Papa. Open the door, it's your son.' In hi agitated state of mind the father thought that some mischievous boy was making fun of him, and he shouted at the child to go away, and he continued to cry. The boy knocked again and again, but the father refused to let him in. Some time passed, and finally the child left. From that time on, father and so never saw one another. After telling this story, the Buddha said, 'Sometime, somewhere you take something to be the truth. If you cling to it so much, when the truth comes in person and knocks at your door, you will not open it.' "
(Being Peace. Thich Nhat Hanh. Parallax Press: Berkeley, California. 1987, 48-49.)
____________________
