"Whatever is newly born needs a name and when we are more and more  welcomed by the silence, naming becomes our job. We have to notice, to bless with attention the beasts before us, both the rough and the smooth."

~ John Tarrant

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

"We have this strong idea, in the culture and in the language, that emotion and touch are deeply linked, and I think the neuroanatomy bears this out."

~ David Linden

Let it come closer, let it engulf you if it must.
Until there is no division between self and sadness.
Until you cannot call it sadness at all. 
Until there is only intimacy. 

~ Jeff Foster

"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."

"A new study finds that deeply held beliefs can undermine rationality: When confronted with solutions that challenge deeply held values, people may be inclined to disbelieve the problem."

~ Brandon Keim

What happens when, just for a moment, we stay with our pain, our fear, our doubt, our discomfort, our grief, our broken heart, even our numbness, without trying to change it, or fix it, or numb ourselves to it, or get rid of it in any way? What happens when, even when we feel like leaving, abandoning the moment for the promise of a future salvation, we stay, sitting with the raw, unfiltered, boundlessly alive life-energy that is simply trying to express right now?

~ Jeff Foster

"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 

Transcendence isn't an escape plan, but an engagement strategy: liberation through intimacy. Transcending the self and the world begins with deeply accepting the self and the world. It grows naturally out of countless direct experiences of life as it is being lived and an intimate familiarity with how its composition constantly fluctuates.

A son and his father, I knew
from their looks, the son with his
right hand on the handrail,
the father, left hand on the left,
and in the middle they were
holding hands

~ Ted Kooser

Everyone is doing their best, even when it seems like they are doing their worst.
Everyone is dreaming or having a nightmare, battling with pain you may never understand.
You don't have to condone their actions.
You may not be able to wake them up.
You don't have to like what happened.
Simply let go of the illusion
that it could have been any different.

~ Jeff Foster

"Because I write poetry, I can sit down and write things that I don’t have proof of, or even know the end of the sentence. I can feel around and nobody gets hurt, right? It’s a poem. And so I wrote this poem out of grief and an attempt to make it very plain to myself, the argument that I’d come up with." 
 

~ Jennifer Michael Hecht

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

"Truth clears away / So many souvenirs. The shelves come clean." ~ Clive James

"The quite cynical response would be to say, Why we love nihilism in pop culture is that it saves us having to be burdened with it. It saves us from feeling it. We can enjoy it in our rooms. We can get off on it. And then we let it go and we go back to work." ~ Simon Critchley 

"We do still believe in the gut feeling." ~ HERAKUT

It’s okay to feel, deeply.
It’s okay to not know. 
It’s okay to play 
on the raw edge of life.

Mindfulness practice leads to better decision making due to the skills it develops over time.  It’s about paying attention to ordinary experience differently.

Whether we are giving or receiving care, we come face-to-face with time’s elasticity – how it seems to speed up and slow down.