I check my heart now, and I find that there is still a feeling there, of something hot & struggling.
I roll my eyes back under my closed lids, and there is the sense of opening in the middle of my forehead.
The chest thing is like fighting for words and the forehead thing is pure & empty, like after all the words have been said.
There now. Belief.
I have the biology of it. All I need is the stuff to put in there. All I need are the words.
The Gathering by Anne Enright (2007)
Be the architect of your life. Know how to arrange it with intelligence. Plant its foundation firmly and develop it with foresight. Life’s a difficult, fatiguing expedition. Intellectual stimulation mixes well with the dust & stones of the long road to eternity.
-Baltasar Gracian
What society thinks of as reality today is the hypnosis of social conditioning, an induced fiction in which we are all collectively participating.
It is the melodrama of existence, filled with obsessions & pursuits, wherein our only fate is to be born and grow old.
–Deepak Chopra
One hour drive freeway north; winding backroad south home.
Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal.
As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change.
Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation – the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs & peaks.
If you watch carefully, you will see this undulation in every department of his life – his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up & down.
As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness & poverty.
Fun is closely related to Joy – a sort of emotional froth arising from the play instinct; it promotes charity, courage, contentment, and many other evils.
THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS by C.S.LEWIS
No telling what he’s thinking. He could be counting down to leap.
