10 Quotes You Must Read Before 2013 (or at least early into it).

We are leaping over a random chasm.

Let’s look before that. Let’s look at time, love, the human condition and God. But quickly, no fluff.

  Time is not a straight line, but more like a labyrinth.

~ Tomas Transtromer

Yet, we will persist in looking at the rascal as a straight line. Love with each other, with any given situation, sometimes starts with simply accepting this premise, with dropping our expectations for what’s next and being available to the flood of life force in the present moment. Infinity is here, but I tend to look away toward one minute from now.

Life happens too fast for you to ever think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.

~ Kurt Vonnegut

Heresy! What about the unexamined life? Yeah yeah, but what about a freedom inside the idea that we will never figure it out? Vonnegut is no stranger to the breakthrough idea. In Slaughterhouse Five, he kindly offers us a view of human beings from fourth-dimensional life forms. He claims they see us as a long thin thing, with an infant at one end, and an old crone at the other. How do you like that one?

Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in.
~ Thoreau

I see in this a note to take it easy, go lightly and enjoy. It reminds me to stay on the lookout for moments that really shine, but to look with ease, like going fishing (before that became an act of cruelty) or seeing an evening sky with my woman. The moments that might mean nada to my agenda-driven pattern brain today might be the moments I wind up writing to you about tomorrow.

Love knows not what time is.
~ Source Unknown

I love that, it makes me want to not know. Sometimes I’m over-enslaved, if that’s the word I’m after, to this brain, to thinking, to forming opinions. Meditation helps that, maybe I need to sit more.

Just because I’m so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else’s values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn’t make it right. I’m ashamed of it. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.
~ J.D. Salinger, “Franny and Zooey”

I was listening to Esther Hicks this morning and she was talking about letting the opinions of others drive us. It is really the water I swim in sometimes. I want to be free of that, free from the tyranny of the peanut gallery, this coming year. If you never read another book, read Franny and Zooey. In fact, even if you do read other books. I’m serious.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
~J.R.R. Tolkien

This seems so appropriate right now: we have these choices. We have our intersections of available actions. What more could we ask of life? It is ours to choose, and every action defines us, right? Tolkein created one of the finest pieces of writing out there, and even as he gave each of his characters the gift of their individual choices, to us he bestowed the joy and sorrow of watching, and learning, from the consequences.

Now is the time to know that all that you do is sacred… Now is the time for you to deeply compute the impossibility that there is anything but grace.
~ Hafiz

God I love Hafiz.  If his life’s work were condensed in this quote, nothing would be lost. Hafiz is truly a distiller of divine energy, and there is no comment from me that could improve this sentiment. All we need do is bask in the grace. Hafiz will heal you. The Gift is the best poetry book ever for people like me, who hurt with wanting a life closer to the divine.

Not a month went by without the building of a new bowling alley; they were building them on every vacant lot, so many bowling alleys that it was horrible to ponder the meaning of it.
~Hunter S Thompson, “The Rum Diary“

No justification exists for including this except that this happens to be the book I’m reading right now, and it simply made me laugh out loud. Maybe this: read. Read and then read another one. There’s something magic that happens when we stop and read—and it heals, really. Comment on this one if you read it, it is such a gem. Don’t worry, I know you won’t comment.

There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life.
~ Federico Fellini

That is the crux of it, isn’t it? We either love and rush into what life offers at any given moment, or we quake in fear, and cower. Passion, when applied, obfuscates all error. (That one is mine! I like it!)

Passion, when applied, obfuscates all error.
~ Karl Saliter

What I think Saliter is trying to say here is that all is forgiven, you are so beautiful, this incarnation is an unthinkably vast gift, and there is nothing wrong.  Let’s wear it like a loose cozy shirt this year, and throw that love all over the place.
Ed: Lynn H.