Change

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” – Socrates

Bertrand Russell

"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy – ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness – that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what – at last – I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me." (1967, 3–4)

Bathe your brain in beauty

A while back, I heard an interview with one of the mothers of a child who was killed in the Newtown shootings, and while the majority of the interview just made me ache with pain at the unfathomable loss she has experienced, one thing she said really resonated with me was that she tries as much as she can to just bathe her brain with beauty.  I can so relate to doing that.  Sometimes when things just feel overwhelming, sad, frustrating, etc., sometimes I feel like I can (sort of) wash it away by taking in a beautiful scene, a lovely moment, an uplifting smell or song.  And so here I'm am... posting some shots to use for both present and future bathing needs.

Over

I heard this song on Pandora and it resonated hard with me today... hanging on for a little more but...

Kind of feel like the mood of this picture... is it gloomy and getting darker, or clearing up and about to be sunny?

Cramped loneliness

Can we yearn for solitude and yet feel lonely at the same time? Can we long for escape and yet seek an inner sanctuary? Can we feel overwhelmed by our world and yet fear how minuscule it is in the scope of the universe?

Soul wakening

This song has inspired me lately as my soul tumults and my heart trembles for people I love.

In these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die
And where you invest your love, you invest your life

Thoreau

 "Every child begins the world again." 

- Henry David Thoreau