Life is a beautiful thing.
Just take it all in and breathe,
breathe, breathe.

~ Creola Johnson

“Linguists say that language comes after music
and we sang nonsense syllables

before we invented a rational speech
to order our days.”

~ Jim Harrison

“Can we tell ourselves when we need to walk away from chatter, turn it off entirely for half a day, or a full day, or a whole weekend, ease into a realm of something slower, but more tangible? 

Can we go outside and listen?"

~ Naomi Shihab Nye

I've shared strategies for using movies to strengthen attention. Just as in ordinary life, what makes tending to the sensory components of a film so challenging is the pull of the narrative. But what would it be like to focus on the changing sights and sounds without having to resist the gravitational pull of story elements? 

Starting today, you can find out. 

"Half of what’s about to occur is unknown, both inside you and outside you."

~ David Whyte

"In some of my research on cochlear implants, I learned that when they are turned on for the first time, patients often say the sound is kind of 'digital' or 'mechanical' sounding, which is entirely normal. I guess the ears and brain eventually normalize the signal and things begin to sound more natural. I thought that was entirely fascinating, so I made it a part of my song."

~ Ryan O'Neal, from "HearingI & How It Was Made"

"The idea that reality is not real or what you sense and feel is not authentic is something I’m very skeptical of."

~ Bill Nye

"It felt like my senses were being used in a way that I ignore them a lot."

The human voice can sing a vowel to break your heart.

Forget everything you've ever done.
Make no comparisons. Simply listen.

"This is something you do find in Quaker meetings, actually, and in Buddhist meetings as well. The whole herd, and that may be 50 animals, will suddenly be still, completely still. And it's not just a stillness of voice, it's a stillness of body."

~ Katy Payne

But do not ask me where I am going,
As I travel in this limitless world,
Where every step I take is my home.

~ Dogen Zenji

What is it like up there
above the shut-off level
of our simple ears?

~ Lisel Mueller

When I first started practicing mindfulness, I saw internal words — aka verbal thoughts — as my opponents. Like most people, I thought the point was to not think. When verbal thoughts were present, I was obviously not. Start over. Try harder.

There's just one problem with this approach. It is normal for the mind to think in words.

yù yī - 玉衣 

n. the desire to see with fresh eyes, and feel things just as intensely as you did when you were younger—before expectations, before memory, before words.

Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination.

~ Leslie Jamison

"Creation seems to come out of imperfection. It seems to come out of a striving and a frustration. And this is where I think language came from."

"What I find very strange is this. That I think what's magnificent about Bach is that when you listen to this music, and it moves you so much, I mean, it's just a bunch of sound waves crashing into your ear, and you have to contain — you see this emotion bubbling up, you start seeing, like, tearing up, and saying, well, what's going on? These are just sounds crashing into my — what's going on in here?"

~ Bernard Chazelle 

"The serene isolation that can be felt in a crowded and often chaotic world." ~ Genevieve