The stronger the soul and the flesh, the more fruitful the struggle and the richer the final harmony. God does not love weak souls & flabby flesh. The Spirit is a carnivorous bird which is incessantly hungry; it eats flesh and, by assimilating it, makes it disappear.
Kazantzakis
FIVE STAR DAY! Create something. that makes you feel good about yourself. It will prompt you to do the work necessary to reach your goal.
The timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness. And knows that yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream.
Kahlil Gibran
… days of silence there in the desert were wearisome. –The Alchemist
Where it went:
The doorway is passable, but few are ready yet to cross the threshold and enter the hallway beyond.
Doomed to do it again & again, no choice but to play a Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise & fall.
Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome: ground to dust; plowed with salt.
Spain, France, Britain, America – burned into the oblivion of centuries.
A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959)
In a dark sea of centuries wherein nothing seemed to flow, a lifetime was only a brief eddy, even for the man who lived it. There was a tedium of repeated days and repeated seasons; then there were aches and pains, and finally Extreme Unction.
And a moment of blackness at the end – or at the beginning, rather.
For then the small shivering soul who had endured the tedium, endured it badly or well, would find itself in a place of light, find itself absorbed in the burning gaze of infinitely compassionate eyes as it stood before the Just One. It would be hard to believe differently.
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) by Walter Miller
What else should our lives be but a series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become.
David Malouf
Singularity: The expected moment in history when the amplification of human intelligence begins to accelerate exponentially by the application of advanced technologies to augment the brain. –Raymond Kurzweil
All is lightness & bright;
While the forces of nature
Show us the height
Of the Universe’s favor.
fortnight = 14 days; stone = 14 pounds