“You may not understand why you have to go through some experiences, but you have to trust and believe in the process. Because that process is your life, and that’s all you got.”
Brandon Novak, Dreamseller
Category Archives: UNDERSTANDING
Wolves lose their teeth, but not their memory.
We humans fear the beast within the wolf because we do not understand the beast within ourselves.
Gerald Hausman
wings of innocence place us near God – p a noushad
“I saw something I could never forget. I saw lifetimes of acknowledgement, fear, wisdom, questioning, and understanding in a child’s eye. It was the worst thing I would ever witness.”
― Shannon A. Thompson, November Snow
“I don’t think I’ve drunk enough beer to understand that.” ― Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent
Jurgis, being a man, had troubles of his own. There was another specter following him. He had never spoken of it, nor would he allow any one else to speak of it–he had never acknowledged its existence to himself. Yet the battle with it took all the manhood that he had– and once or twice, alas, a little more. Jurgis had discovered drink.
He was working in the steaming pit of hell; day after day, week after week–until now, there was not an organ of his body that did its work without pain, until the sound of ocean breakers echoed in his head day and night, and the buildings swayed and danced before him as he went down the street. And from all the unending horror of this there was a respite, a deliverance–he could drink! He could forget the pain, he could slip off the burden; he would see clearly again, he would be master of his brain, of his thoughts, of his will. His dead self would stir in him, and he would find himself laughing and cracking jokes with his companions–he would be a man again, and master of his life.
It was not an easy thing for Jurgis to take more than two or three drinks. With the first drink he could eat a meal, and he could persuade himself that that was economy; with the second he could eat another meal–but there would come a time when he could eat no more, and then to pay for a drink was an unthinkable extravagance, a defiance of the agelong instincts of his hunger-haunted class. One day, however, he took the plunge, and drank up all that he had in his pockets, and went home half “piped,” as the men phrase it. He was happier than he had been in a year; and yet, because he knew that the happiness would not last, he was savage, too with those who would wreck it, and with the world, and with his life; and then again, beneath this, he was sick with the shame of himself. Afterward, when he saw the despair of his family, and reckoned up the money he had spent, the tears came into his eyes, and he began the long battle with the specter.
THE JUNGLE – Upton Sinclair
“One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.” – Luciano Pavarotti
Menu
Tonight we will dine
on words whose meaning
we share like twins
whose understanding
of love is like the two of us
embracing.
© . All rights reserved
I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is. Terry Pratchett
“Dance, when you’re broken open. Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you’re perfectly free.”
― Rumi
“You don’t really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around – and why his parents will always wave back.” – William D. Tammeus
MERRY GO ROUND
JAMES MCCAULEY
I am become a transparent eyeball. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is illusion. Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you’ll see the way to fly.
Richard Bach in “Jonathan Livingston Seagull”
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” ― Elie Wiesel
When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Out of Solitude
Don’t even take a bath with fools, because they’ll throw away the soap. Italian
Jaya Savige: Surface to Air
To quit heroin you have to leave the country, the novelist says with a wink. I wonder what you would have made of Europe. What I’d have made of junk. I guess I’ve never truly understood the romance of those ruins of the blood. http://www.hotsdots.com/poetry/author/mduwell/
We know no mithridatum of despair as drunks
ERN MALLEY
http://www.ernmalley.com/harris_poetry.html
As we became subjects of King Alcohol, shivering denizens of his mad realm, the chilling vapour that is loneliness settled down. It thickened, ever becoming blacker. Some of us sought out sordid places, hoping to find understanding companionship and approval. Momentarily we did — then would come oblivion and the awful awakening to face the hideous Four Horsemen — Terror, Bewilderment, Frustration, Despair.
ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, The Big Book
shimmering beneath the network of grasses: a phrase like “everything’s place”
Martin Harrison > A PATCH OF GRASS
© 2002, Martin Harrison
From: Summer
The serene philosophy of the pink rose is steadying. Its fragrant, delicate petals open fully and are ready
to fall, without regret or disillusion, after only a day in the sun. It is so every summer. One can almost
hear their pink, fragrant murmur as they settle down upon the grass: ‘Summer, summer, it will always
be summer.’
Rachel Peden
“And what was the song which she sang? Ah, my little man, I am too old to sing that song, and you too young to understand it.”
― Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies
“In fact, the fairies had turned him into a water-baby.
A water-baby? You never heard of a water-baby. Perhaps not. That is the very reason why this story was written.
“But there are no such things as water-babies.”
How do you know that? Have you been there to see? And if you had been there to see, and had seen none, that would not prove that there were none. If Mr. Garth does not find a fox in Eversley Wood—as folks sometimes fear he never will—that does not prove that there are no such things as foxes. And as is Eversley Wood to all the woods in England, so are the waters we know to all the waters in the world. And no one has a right to say that no water-babies exist, till they have seen no water-babies existing; which is quite a different thing, mind, from not seeing water-babies; and a thing which nobody ever did, or perhaps ever will do.”
― Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies: A Fairy Tale For A Land Baby
everything has a past. Everything – a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future.”
― Chaim Potok, Davita’s Harp
When a man finds that he was wrong to have refused to eat, he should leave his anger and play a harp to call for harmony.
No society can understand itself without looking at its shadow side.
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster, or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He’s taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of death from being a total surprise.
Safety is as simple as ABC – Always Be Careful.
http://www.quotegarden.com/safety.html
“I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Madman
It is difficult to live without opium after having known it because it is difficult, after knowing opium, to take earth seriously. And unless one is a saint, it is difficult to live without taking earth seriously.
… Jean Cocteau
“Any way I slice reality it comes out poorly, and I feel an urge to not exist, something I have never felt before; and now here it comes with conviction, almost panic. I mentally bless and exonerate anyone who has kicked a chair out from beneath her or swallowed opium in large chunks. My mind has met their environment, here in the void. I understand perfectly.”
― Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce
The eyes see only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.” Davies, Robertson
Davies, Robertson
“The heart lies and the head plays tricks with us, but the eyes see true”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
Talk about it only enough to do it. Dream about it only enough to feel it. Think about it only enough to understand it. Contemplate it only enough to be it.”
― Jean Toomer
There is nothing more depressing,
than having everything,
and still feeling sad.
– Janet Jackson
In order to see birds it is necessary to become part of the silence
– Robert Lynd
“Que diga amor? Love? Hate? Speak to me of things the world has yet to truly understand, of the instant meaning of each bird’s call, of a child’s secret thoughts in her mother’s womb, of the measured rhythmical time of every man and woman’s breath, of the true colors of the inside of the moon, of the larger miracles in small things, the deeper mysteries.”
― Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones
Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion.
THOMAS JEFFERSON, letter to Peter Carr, Aug. 10, 1787
“All we have to do is understand that we’re all here for a reason and to commit ourselves to that. Then we can laugh at our sufferings, large and small and walk fearlessly, aware that each step has meaning”
― Paulo Coelho, The Witch Of Portobello
As empty vessels make the loudest sound, so they that have least with are the greatest babblers.
-Plato
“There comes a time in every life when the world gets quiet and the only thing left is your own heart. So you’d better learn to know the sound of it. Otherwise you’ll never understand what it’s saying.”
― Sarah Dessen, Just Listen
Pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.”
― Khalil Gibran Muhammad
Sea Shell by Amy Lowell
Sea Shell, Sea Shell,
Sing me a song, O Please!
A song of ships, and sailor men,
And parrots, and tropical trees,
Of islands lost in the Spanish Main
Which no man ever may find again,
Of fishes and corals under the waves,
And seahorses stabled in great green caves.
Sea Shell, Sea Shell,
Sing of the things you know so well.
Sing me a song, O Please!
A song of ships, and sailor men,
And parrots, and tropical trees,
Of islands lost in the Spanish Main
Which no man ever may find again,
Of fishes and corals under the waves,
And seahorses stabled in great green caves.
Sea Shell, Sea Shell,
Sing of the things you know so well.
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You too? I thought I was the only one.”
― C.S. Lewis
“If there was no on in onion, it would be ion.”
Slovene.
The swan, like the soul of the poet, By the dull world is ill understood.
Heinrich Heine
There is nothing wrong with ducks, I assure them, or with swans. But ducks are ducks and swans are swans. Sometimes to make the point I have to move to other animal metaphors. I like to use mice. What if you were raised by the mice people? But what if you’re, say, a swan. Swans and mice hate each other’s food for the most part. They each think the other smells funny. They are not interested in spending time together, and if they did, one would be constantly harassing the other.
But what if you, being a swan, had to pretend you were a mouse? What if you had to pretend to be gray and furry and tiny? What you had no long snaky tail to carry in the air on tail-carrying day? What if wherever you went you tried to walk like a mouse, but you waddled instead? What if you tried to talk like a mouse, but insteade out came a honk every time? Wouldn’t you be the most miserable creature in the world?
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
THE OLD PROVERBIAL RECOVERY 