This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
When I sit in my silence and look at my mind, it is only questions of longing and control that emerge to agitate me, and this agitation is what keeps me from evolving forward.
There is an art to grieving. To grieve well the loss of anyone or anything — a parent, a love, a child, an era, a home, a job — is a creative act. It takes attention and patience and courage. But many of us do not know how to grieve. We were never taught, and we don't see examples of full-bodied grieving around us. Our culture favors the fast-food model of mourning — get over it quick and get back to work; affix the bandage of 'closure' and move on.
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Measure not the work until the day's out and the labour done, then bring your gauges.
To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business—not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything is flaking away into… rhetoric and plot.
If we can stay awake when our lives are changing, secrets will be revealed to us--secrets about ourselves, about the nature of life, and about the eternal source of happiness and peace that is always available, always renewable, already within us.
Cynicism | Life | Life | Nothing | Religion | Search | Spirituality | Truth |
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
And wilt thou have me fashion into speech the love I bear thee, finding words enough, and hold the torch out, while the winds are rough, between our faces, to cast light on each? -I dropt it at thy feet. I cannot teach my hand to hold my spirits so far off from myself--me--that I should bring thee proof in words, of love hid in me out of reach. Nay, let the silence of my womanhood commend my woman-love to thy belief, - seeing that I stand unwon, however wooed, and rend the garment of my life, in brief, by a most dauntless, voiceless fortitude, lest one touch of this heart convey its grief.
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
He lives most life whoever breathes most air.
World |
The patron god of children born on Thursdays is Shiva the Destroyer, and that the day has two guiding animal spirits--the lion and the tiger. The official tree of children born on Thursday is the banyan. The official bird is the peacock. A person born on Thursday is always talking first, interrupting everyone else, can be a little aggressive, tends to be handsome (a playboy or playgirl, in Ketut's words) but has a decent overall character, with an excellent memory and a desire to help other people.
There's a wonderful old Italian joke about a poor man who goes to church every day and prays before the statue of a great saint, begging, Dear saint-please, please, please...give me the grace to win the lottery. This lament goes on for months. Finally the exasperated staue comes to life, looks down at the begging man and says in weary disgust, My son-please, please, please...buy a ticket. Prayer is a realtionship; half the job is mine. If I want transformation, but can't even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I'm ainming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention. If you don't have this, all your pleas and desires are boneless, floppy, inert; they swirl at your feet in a cold fog and never lift.
Belief | Books | Care | Decision | Destiny | Divinity | Faith | God | Life | Life | Meaning | Nature | Reason | Religion | Scripture | Will | God |
Elizabeth Janeway, born Elizabeth Ames Hall
The Goddamn human race deserves itself, and as far as I'm concerned it can have it.
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Nor myrtle--which means chiefly love: and love is something awful which one dare not touch so early o' mornings.
God | Good | Man | Companionship | God |
Elizabeth Janeway, born Elizabeth Ames Hall
I admire people who are suited to the contemplative life. They can sit inside themselves like honey in a jar and just be. It's wonderful to have someone like that around, you always feel you can count on them. You can go away and come back, you can change your mind and your hairdo and your politics, and when you get through doing all these upsetting things, you look around and there they are, just the way they were, just being.
The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I'm a failure... I'm lonely... I'm a failure... I'm lonely...) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.
Then again, you cannot stop the flood of desire as it moves through the world, inappropriate though it may sometimes be. It is the prerogative of all humans to make ludicrous choices, to fall in love with the most unlikely of partners, and to set themselves up for the most predictable of calamities.
You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That's the only thing you should be trying to control.