Category: Quotes
“In wildness is the preservation of the world.”
Henry David Thoreau
The rabbit hole widens
as I careen through many halls
Bouncing from chamber to chamber
Most shine with strange energies
Some glow with white mist
that fills the heart
and overflows
Some glow red inflaming the loins
and sparking animal passion.
When the light shines black
the shadows come out to play
with their gifts of knowledge
and their terror of the self.
Still I leap down
through rabbit’s caution
to gain the wisdom there
for every journey
leads to understanding
and no path stands alone.
Blessings, G
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Goat Sketchiness by G A Rosenberg
Fiery Crossroads by G A Rosenberg
The Necessity of Wilderness
“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity…”
― John Muir
Back in Washington State for the first camping trip of the year. The rain is coming down and yet we’re staying relatively warm and enjoying family time and nature. I’m looking forward to some quality communing and meditation tho my posts for the next few days might be a bit sparse. Still this quiet time is for recharging and contemplation so I can bring back the good stuff.
Blessings, G
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Real Characters
“If you will practice being fictional for awhile, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats”
— Richard Bach
There are times when I lie awake at night and have conversations in my head with characters from books. Malachi in Edgar Pangborn’s Still I Persist in Wondering, never bored and asking the question Why do we love when we know it will end up hurting us. Sometimes in my mind I find myself trading bad puns with the denizens of the Callahan stories by Spider Robinson and sometimes I find myself sharing some of the rougher problems I’ve had with them and thereby lessening the pain. When my mother passed away I found myself receiving solace from the personification of Death as written by Neil Gaiman. THere are so many characters I’ve read over the years that they have taken on a life of their own at least in my mind.
Does that seem far fetched? Do you have friends who you’ve only spoken to on the internet? How about casual acquaintances and distant relatives who most of what you know about each other is myth that you’ve used to fill in the blanks. How real are they to you? How real is the clerk at your local grocery store whom you smile and joke with? Do you even know their name?
At best, the amount of matter we give to a person or thing in our lives whether fictional or corporeal varies based on our mindfulness and our interest. Yes I have loved fictional characters and given them more life than I have the casual strangers I meet each day. Doing this has allowed me to have more appreciation for other beings in general and a keener appreciation for the real.
Blessings, G
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Dream Journey Mandala by G A Rosenberg
Exploding Maze by G A Rosenberg
I’d Love to Change the World…..
“If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.”
― Joseph Campbell
How do we see the world?
Is it a battleground each day a new chance to emerge victorious or to flame out in defeat?
Is it a classroom with each day providing a new lesson which we look forward to lunch and recess?
Is it a comedy or a tragedy, each actor on a stage and who writes this stuff anyway?
Is it a cesspool in which we are mired until we can hope for freedom?
Is it a delicious orb where wonder happens all the time with no end to the potential for magic?
I believe that the answer to all the above questions is yes and by moving our view between these and many other possible true definitions of the world we can find ourselves opening up more and more to possibility and growth.
Is life a series of curses and blessings or is it a series of challenges to be met?
Blessings, G
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Rooted Journey by G A Rosenberg
Blue Centre Star by G A Rosenberg
Attack of the Living – Dead Faith
“Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.”
~Andre Gide
“I Slept With Faith And Found A Corpse In My Arms Upon Awakening; I Drank And Danced All Night With Doubt And Found Her A Virgin In The Morning”
–Aleister Crowley
Is it easier to doubt or to believe? It seems that many people have a fear of doubting that manifests in them adopting either an early choice of belief that of their ancestors. Once they decide they believe something they will fight for it against any comers, doubters or those who hold different beliefs, they will honour their beliefs, raise statues and hold feasts to it and do everything but examine it. In my experience an unexamined belief or faith all too quickly becomes like Aleister Crowley says a corpse or worst yet, a zombie like thing that apes life while missing some vital spark.
Only by constantly examining our beliefs and trying them against new ideas in a cage match no holds barred vigorous debate can our concept of truth grow, change, evolve and remain alive, not through blind belief but through a hunger to seek what’s true, no matter how shaky our footing may be.
Blessings, G
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Compassionate eyes by G A Rosenberg
Tunnel Vision by G A Rosenberg
Strange Child Dreams
“Don’t start brooding about that, too,” she says. “Everybody’s got a piece of stranger inside them. It’s what lets us surprise ourselves and keeps things interesting.”
— Charles de Lint
Stranger Self
Shadow self
Part of me left on the shelf
hidden back on the rack
behind that old paper stack
The part of me I never knew
the part of me I outgrew
so I had thought
so I was taught
tho the Dreamer has come through
When I was a kid, there were very few things I was closed off to. At night I would have visions and dreams and speak to all manner of beings. Was it in my imagination? Perhaps tho quite often the dreams would end up coming true in ways that were to surprise me.
Not all the visions were comforting ones. I dreamed my parents divorce way before it happened. Some of the dream beings I would talk to were a bit intimidating. As kids we take it all in and don’t look so much at good and bad, positive and negative as much perhaps as calming and frightening.
Still, at a certain point those visitations went away. Oh I still get some interesting answers tho the channels are not quite as clear as they once were tho clearer than they’ve been in years. Imagine tho how great it would be to open up the way we did when we were kids while keeping the experience, knowledge and wisdom we’ve gained since…
Blessings, G
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Shadow Pool by G A Rosenberg
Yes One Nears Infinity by G A Rosenberg
Curling Words of Smoke
“When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.”
― Virginia Woolf
It’s fascinating searching through quotes about language and discovering example after example of brilliant wordsmiths who mistrusted the tools of their trade. Perhaps mistrust is not the correct word. Perhaps its that they realized the inherent limitations of language that so often can become arbitrary and what good craftsman does not? Then once we realize the limitations of the tool we see just how far we can stretch to transcend those limitations.
Virginia Woolf in the above quotes feels that without her words she is nothing and yet isn’t that nothingness, that space between words where true creativity comes from? Tho it does sound like a pretty awesome meditation, visualizing our words and thoughts curling like rings of smoke and then dissipating leaving us in stillness..
Blessings, G
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Mindfield by G A Rosenberg
Flowers and Flames by G A Rosenberg
Having words
All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.”
― Ernest Hemingway
It seems I’ve been writing quite a bit lately on the subject of map making. What is a map after all but a symbolic representation that tells us where we are. What then are words? Don’t we use words as a symbolic representation to describe where we are as well?
We abuse words even more than we abuse other mapping tools. One of the largest ways in which we abuse words is by assuming that everybody who we speak to uses the same meaning for each word that we do even when the evidence starts racking up that this is simply not the case. I have seen so many arguments that derived from people using the same word or words yet they both seemed to come from separate dictionaries. At least a few times when I’ve pointed this out to people rather than focus on establishing a common meaning for the term so that debate or discourse was even possible, the people involved focused on who was using the word ‘more correctly’ Being right had become more important than communication.
Still despite this problem, many people do communicate. Sometimes it is just with a hand offered or a smile exchanged but nothing is more beautiful than the sound of two people conversing in harmony.
Blessings, G
Like me on Face Book : https://www.facebook.com/WakingSpirals
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Guarded Idyll by G A Rosenberg
Spiked by G A Rosenberg
Beyond Opposites
“Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.”
― Hermann Hesse
Where are your lines? Where are your boundaries? Where is it that you demarcate between what is something you believe in and what is not? What defines you? Have you ever blurred the line, even for a moment and pretended you believed something else, that you are someone else as so many of us define ourselves by what we believe.
I enjoy stretching myself. I talk to someone new and I try to imagine what its like to see the universe as they see it. I ask questions and learn and I find myself falling into their reality. Oh quite often I’ll find it to be a garment that doesn’t quite fit but the wearing of it has given me something precious and I can now remember what it was like. It has made a permanent impression on how I will see things from now on and when I talk to my friend from that point on (and when you have shared something as intimate as a reality, how can you not be friends?) it will be with a greater understanding of where they are coming from. Of course they may be evolving also so perhaps once again I’ll dive in and learn.
Blessings, G
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That Was Just a Dream by G A Rosenberg
