“We should never forget that it was Christ himself who taught us to make usurious use of the talents entrusted to us and not hide them in the ground.”
-Carl Jung
(From ‘Answer to Job’ – referencing ‘the Parable of the Talents‘ from the Bible in Matthew 25 : 14-30)
“A lot of the time it’s our efforts that ruin us ; it’s when we try that we screw things up.”
– Tommy Tiernan
“Can any of you, by worrying add a single hour to your life? And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labour or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Soloman in all his splendour was dressed like one of those.”
– Matthew 6:27-29
All we ever have is maybes… maybe.
TF
“It’s dark because you are trying too hard.Aldous Huxley
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and
lightly cope with them.
I was so preposterously serious in those days,
such a humorless little prig.
Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.
When it comes to dying even.
Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.
No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious
persona putting on its celebrated imitation
of Christ or Little Nell.
And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.
Just the fact of dying and the fact
of the clear light.
So throw away your baggage and go forward.
There are quicksands all about you,
sucking at your feet,
trying to suck you down into fear and
self-pity and despair.
That’s why you must walk so lightly.
Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage,
not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.”
Humans share much with other animals — the basic needs of food and drink or sleep, for example — but there are additional mental and emotional needs and desires which are perhaps unique to us. To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see overall patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or at least the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology or in states of mind which allow us to travel to other worlds, to transcend our immediate surroundings. We need detachment of this sort as much as we need engagement in our lives… transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.
Oliver Sacks ‘Hallucinations’
“Art is a lie that makes us realise truth…”
Pablo Picasso
There are pockets of heaven everywhere, if you’re open to them.
“Eternity is in love with the creations of time.”
William Blake
“The trouble with opinion is that it instantly islands us in the stream of life, cutting off its subject – and us along with it – from the interconnected totality of deep truth.”
……
“It is not enough to say that we cannot know or judge because all the information is not in. The process of gathering knowledge does not lead to knowing. A child’s world spreads only a little beyond his understanding while that of a great scientist thrusts outward immeasurably. An answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions. So we draw worlds and fit them like tracings against the world about us, and crumple them when they do not fit and draw new ones.”
John Steinbeck
I’d like to paint with words grand vistas of vowels drawing consonants with canvases rough drafts depicting sketchy underworlds sheltering fractured souls still life’s surreal for those trapped below the acrylics of society high from huffing an oil economy auctioned off to the richest bidder Christ eases and art pops expressionistic narratives for the impressionable propagandised with daily print and wondering how to abstract what’s real
TF
Some Words Left Behind 