“Written words can also sing.” ~ Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
“It is through stories that we weave reality.” – Paul Kingsnorth, The Dark Mountain Project
“It is hard, today, to imagine that the word of a poet was once feared by a king.” – The Dark Mountain Project
“But there is no Plan B and the bubble, it turns out, is where we have been living all the while. The bubble is that delusion of isolation under which we have laboured for so long. The bubble has cut us off from life on the only planet we have, or are ever likely to have. The bubble is civilisation.” – The Dark Mountain Project
“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” ~ Muriel Rukeyser
“Don’t ompromise yourself, you’re all you’ve got.” – Janis Joplin
“What a curious power words have.” ~ Tadeusz Borowski
I’m always pleased when somebody sings a song of mine. In fact, I never get over that initial rush of happiness when someone says they are going to sing a song of mine. I always like it.
[…]
That song enters the world and it gets changed, like everything else — that’s OK as long as there are more authentic versions. But a good song, I think, will get changed. – Leonard Cohen
“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” – James Baldwin
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. ~ Elmore Leonard
You’ve already got a younger generation that’s like “bring on the singularity.” The idea of it used to be a dystopian nightmare. But the trauma has already been erased. I think we have to kick back against it but I don’t even know how to. We all just suck it up and try to “swim with the tide but faster.” – Anohni
“I teach self-reliance, the world’s most subversive practice. I teach people how to grow their own food, which is shockingly subversive. So, yes, it’s seditious. But it’s peaceful sedition.” – Bill Mollison
“I don’t think there is any truth. There are only points of view.” – Allen Ginsberg
“The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.” ~ Ben Okri
“There are always meaningful songs for somebody. People are doing their courting, people are finding their wives, people are making babies, people are washing their dishes, people are getting through the day, with songs that we may find insignificant. But their significance is affirmed by others. There’s always someone affirming the significance of a song by taking a woman into his arms or by getting through the night. That’s what dignifies the song. Songs don’t dignify human activity. Human activity dignifies the song.” – Leonard Cohen
“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” ― Jack Kerouac
“Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.” ~ Edward Abbey
“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
“The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.” ~ V.S. Naipaul
“None of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked petal on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.” – from Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert
“To live and let live, without clamor for distinction or recognition . . . to write truth first on the tablet of one’s own heart – this is the sanity and perfection of living, and my human ideal.” ~ Mary Baker Eddy
“I do not know the truth, or I do not know how to tell the truth. All I have are stories, night thoughts, the sudden convictions that uncertainty spawns.” – Anne Enright, The Gathering
“You are song, a wished-for song.”- Rumi
“Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.”
— Albert Einstein
“Puritanism hangs heavily on American literature . . . The French were able to produce very beautiful erotic writing because there was no puritan taboo, and the best writers would turn to erotic writing without the feeling that sensuality was something to be ashamed of and treated with contempt.” (2nd chakra and the 5th chakra) Anias Nin from
Eroticism in Women, Playgirl, April 1974.
“Power lies in reason, resolution, and truth. No matter how long the tyrant endures, he will be the loser at the end.” ― Khalil Gibran
“And now let us play our reeds together…” ― Khalil Gibran
“Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.” ― Khalil Gibran
“My Soul gave me good counsel, teaching me that the lamp which I carry does not belong to me, and the song that I sing was not generated from within me.” ― Khalil Gibran
“The Reality of The Other Person Lies Not In What He Reveals To You, But What He Cannot Reveal To You.
Therefore, If You Would Understand Him, Listen Not To What He Says, But Rather To What He Does Not Say.” ― Khalil Gibran
“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.” ― Khalil Gibran
“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” —Voltaire
“I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe–but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn’t be surprised if poetry–poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs–is how the world works. The world isn’t logical, it’s a song.” David Byrne
“[What I want to communicate] doesn’t have a language with which I can communicate it. The things that I want to communicate are simply self-evident, emotional things. And the gifts of those things are that they bring both intellectual and emotional gifts — understanding. But I don’t really have a major message that I want to bring to the world through my music. The music can tell people everything they need to know about being human beings. It’s not my information, it’s not mine. I didn’t make it. I just discovered it.” — Jeff Buckley
“We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.’ And then you’re a player, you don’t want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.” ― Terence McKenna
“To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.” ― Winston Churchill
“When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.” ~Louise Erdrich
“If you have the words, there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.” ~ Seamus Heaney
“What is a poet? An unhappy man who in his breast harbors a deep anguish, but whose lips are so fashioned that the moans and cries passing over them are transformed into relishing music.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
“Dance is the fastest, most direct route to the truth.” – Gabrielle Roth
“The reason we don’t want to judge someone is because it invites the least evolved part of them to play with the least evolved part of us, and it is just never pretty.” ~ Caroline Casey
“Choosing from fear transgresses our trust in Divine guidance.” Caroline Myss
“There’s nothing more advanced than relating with others. There’s nothing more advanced than communication—compassionate communication.” – Pena Chodron
Only in an open, nonjudgmental space can we acknowledge what we are feeling. Only in an open space where we’re not caught up in our own version of reality can we see and feel and hear and feel who others really are, which allows us to be with them and communicate with them properly. – Pema Chodron
“Honesty without kindness, humor, and goodheartedness can be just mean.” – Pema Chodron
“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break.” – William Shakespeare
“I was talking to somebody the other day, after 9/11, about getting back to normal. Odd. What is normal? And why would I want to get back to it? Maybe we have to change. Sometimes we have to destroy what we had.” ~ Phillip Seymour Hoffman
“My job is to show folks there’s a lot of good music in this world, and if used right it may help to save the planet.” – Pete Seeger
“It ain’t what they call you, it’s what you answer to.” ~ W.C. Fields
“The key to the future of the world is finding optimistic stories and letting them be known.” –Pete Seeger, 1919 – 2014
“When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.” ~ Anais Nin
“Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.” ~ Anais Nin
“When one is pretending the entire body revolts.” ~ Anais Nin
“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.” ~ Anais Nin
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter.” ~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
“I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.” – E. B. White
“What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us.” – Gaston Bachelard
“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.” ~John F. Kennedy
“Singing teaches two skills that are essential for any creative process, the ability to listen and the ability to be flexible and spontaneous.” ~ Rachel Bagby
“Once you listen to that still, small voice inside, and act upon the fluttering ideas/feelings/gut punches it sends your way, you will realize you have always been a part of that conversation about living. You know, the one about creating yourself; about polishing your inner life. The one about how love infuses every aspect of our lives with more and more light.” ~Shavawn M. Berry
“The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.” – George Orwell
“Be a lamp to yourself. Be your own confidence. Hold on to the truth within yourself as to the only truth.” ~ Buddha
“Every waking moment we talk to ourselves about the things we experience. Our self-talk, the thoughts we communicate to ourselves, in turn control the way we feel and act.” ~ John Lembo
“I have been a seeker and I still am, but I stopped asking the books and the stars. I started listening to the teaching of my Soul.” ~ by Rumi
“Have good trust in yourself, not in the one that you think you should be, but in the One that you are.” ~ Taizan Maezumi
“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” ~Anne Frank
“The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.” — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
“But to live forever all you gotta do is learn to sing” – Eyedea
“Writing is a struggle against silence.” – Carlos Fuentes
“You don’t have anything
if you don’t have the stories.” – Leslie Marmon Silko
“Writers, artists, musicians… They are the shamans of the modern world.” —Peruvian shaman Arcani, from The Shaman in Stilettos by Anna Hunt
“If you want to sing out, sing out . . .” ~ Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude
“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.” ~ Alan Wilson Watts
writing the energetic body 