I’m basically very interested in the experience of seeing something for the first time and not knowing at all what it is. I’m fascinated by first contact stories between civilisations, by how toddlers or any other young animals engage with new sights, sounds and experiences, and how they must do so without language. I also like to see what a reader will make of things, such as in the ‘Dog’ story in Tales from the Inner City, when you remove much of the narrative and just show the same landscape changing over aeons. It’s probably what also attracts me to children’s literature as a genre that I find myself in, that it’s all about elemental experiences, pretty raw, undescribed experiences that have yet to be processed and named. Sometimes they can’t be named, but you can still draw and paint them very precisely. Anything from migrant stories to the inner worlds of animals.

Shaun Tan

Like life, like a smile

Like the fall of a leaf

How sad, how lovely

How brief

Connie Converse

The truth is no writer comes “out of nowhere” and wunderkinds are only as real as our aversion to a more sobering—albeit less glamorous—reality: that a writer’s growth is often a slog, the slow burn of reading and trying and failing when, finally, by some luck or mercy, the book you’re reading turns into a torch in your hands. And with it you make a sentence so new and exacting to your desire that it startles you into a new vision, a new life, one that exists through the presence of elders before you, both here and gone and some nearly forgotten but never lost.

Ocean Vuong

I really don’t want to romanticise the difficulties, because there are other difficult things: working in a nail salon, working in factories. But would I want my child, if I had one, to be a writer? No. I would want them to just have a job and live a rich life of examination without having the pressure to make anything out of examination. I think the pressure of making sometimes ruins the endeavour of understanding. To examine life simply to enrich one’s livelihood or one’s personhood for no other end: that’s actually the harder endeavour. It’s perhaps the more holy endeavour. There’s always something that haunts the writer, in that they’re trying to see what can come out of this. Something happens to you when you look at the world not so much for what it could be, or how perfect it is as it is, but for what it could potentially be turned into. I think ultimately it might be better not to be a poet. My career might be just as a teacher. That I can do again and again. I go by this Zen idea that what is not constructed, can’t be deconstructed. To me, the notion of a writer is a construction that I’ve never really embodied. People can call me what they want, but I’ve never really lived in that construction. I am someone who has written and that’s it. Right now, I’m nothing until I can go into another project. If there’s nothing else, if there’s no other books from here on out, that’s okay.

Ocean Vuong

How do you tell a man in the Congo that he shouldn’t be mining or cutting down forests? Sure, you can tell him that it will destroy the planet and in 80 years we will all die. But he will say: ‘My child is starving today.’

Adam Habib

“You have an appalling nature,” she began. “You puff yourself up like a bullfrog, and one day you’ll explode. The only thing you’re good for is getting your friend in the helicopter to make trees dance by trickery. You never grasp what is simple. You always go round the back when the entrance is at the front.”

Once again her face changed. She was like someone standing in strong sunlight on a mountain top, looking back down the valley from which she had emerged and trembling with the memory still in her bones of the length and nature of the road she had travelled, the glaciers and forded rivers, the weariness and danger, and conscious of how far she still had to go. There was also compassion in that face, a feeling of pity for all the poor people below, who knew only that the peaks were rosy in the twilight, but not the real meaning of the road itself.

“Your ideas about everything are very different from mine. You were taught how to do a thousand things, but not to be aware of what really matters. Can’t you see that there’s no point in trying to dazzle me? I don’t want anyone unless they are completely mine. You like to put everyone in a box, and then produce them whenever they’re needed: this is my girlfriend, this my cousin, and this my elderly godmother. This is my love, this is my doctor, and this pressed flower is from the island of Rhodes. Just let me be.

'Emerence', The Door by Magda Szabo

On Jeju, we had a saying: If there is happiness at age three, it will last until you reach eighty. 

The Jeju dialect is heavily nasal, and many words end abruptly, so they won’t disappear into the island’s rough breezes.

The Island of Sea Women (Lisa See)

Grandma never told us what happened to the women. The Apaches were at war but had no warriors, so perhaps she thought the ending too bleak to say aloud. The word “slaughter” came to mind, because slaughter is the word for it, for a battle when one side mounts no defense. It’s the word we used on the farm. We slaughtered chickens, we didn’t fight them. A slaughter was the likely outcome of the warriors’ bravery. They died as heroes, their wives as slaves. As we drove to the trailer, the sun dipping in the sky, its last rays reaching across the highway, I thought about the Apache women. Like the sandstone altar on which they had died, the shape of their lives had been determined years before—before the horses began their gallop, their sorrel bodies arching for that final collision. Long before the warriors’ leap it was decided how the women would live and how they would die. By the warriors, by the women themselves. Decided. Choices, numberless as grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalescing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone. 

Tara Westover (Educated)

Human beings have many shields against the darkness. A woman is raped, or murdered, and the old cry goes up. What was she doing out on the street alone in the middle of the night? Women shouldn’t take short cuts through parks on their way to work, or go running along the riverbank with headphones on. These official warnings drive women crazy because they seem to proceed from an enraging assumption that the public space belongs to men, and that women have no claim on it: we broach it at our peril. But I’ve come to think that the subtext of what the politicians and police chiefs are saying, in their clumsy, poker-faced way, is this: no matter what the political rhetoric is, please do not assume that because you should be safe in public spaces you will be safe. There is no way that we can police the world and guarantee your safety. We are as helpless as you against the darkness. Why are we ever surprised by the scorched earth around a broken family? Our laws and strictures and conventions have no purchase on the dark regions of the soul into which we venture when we love. In the Farquharson trials, people would passionately protest, ‘But he loved those boys!’ Again and again it surfaced, the sentimental fantasy that love is a condition of simple benevolence, a tranquil, sunlit region in which we are safe from our own destructive urges. But everybody knows that love is brutal. A thousand songs tell the story. Love tears right through to the centre of us, into our secret self, and lays it wide open. Surely Sigmund Freud was right when he said, ‘We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love.’ 

Helen Garner

I was not born with an opinion of the world but it clearly seemed that the world had an opinion of people like me. I did not know what race and class supposedly were but the world taught me very quickly, and the irrational manifestations of its prejudices forced me to search for answers. 

Akala

Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. 

Nora Ephron

Sometimes various cultural overlays disarray the bones of stories. For instance, in the case of the brothers Grimm (among other fairy-tale collectors of the past few centuries), there is strong suspicion that the informants (storytellers) of that time sometimes “purified” their stories for the religious brothers' sakes. Over the course of time, old pagan symbols were overlaid with Christian ones, so that an old healer in a tale became an evil witch, a spirit became an angel, an initiation veil or caul became a handkerchief, or a child named Beautiful (the customary name for a child born during Solstice festival) was renamed Schmerzenreich, Sorrowful. Sexual elements were omitted. Helping creatures and animals were often changed into demons and boogeys. This is how many women's teaching tales about sex, love, money, marriage, birthing, death, and transformation were lost. It is how fairy tales and myths that explicate ancient women's mysteries have been covered over too. Most old collections of fairy tales and mythos existent today have been scoured clean of the scatological, the sexual, the perverse (as in warnings against), the pre-Christian, the feminine, the Goddesses, the initiatory, the medicines for various psychological malaises, and the directions for spiritual raptures.

Clarissa Pincola Estes - Women Who Run With The Wolves

Whether you’ve never picked up a knife or you’re an accomplished chef, there are only four basic factors that determine how good your food will taste: salt, which enhances flavor; fat, which amplifies flavor and makes appealing textures possible; acid, which brightens and balances; and heat, which ultimately determines the texture of food.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking (Nosrat, Samin)

When the body functions spontaneously, that is called instinct. When the soul functions spontaneously, that is called intuition. They are alike and yet far away from each other. Instinct is of the body—the gross; and intuition is of the soul—the subtle. And between the two is the mind, the expert, which never functions spontaneously. Mind means knowledge. Knowledge can never be spontaneous. Instinct is deeper than intellect and intuition is higher than intellect. Both are beyond the intellect, and both are good.

Intuition is existential. Instinct is natural. Intellect is just groping in the dark. The faster you move beyond intellect, the better; intellect can be a barrier to those who think nothing is beyond it. Intellect can be a beautiful passage for those who understand that there is certainly something beyond it.

Intellect makes everything a problem and knows no solution at all. Instinct never creates any problem and does not need any solution; it simply functions naturally. Intuition is pure solution, it has no problems. Intellect is only problems, it has no solution. If you rightly see the division, it is simple to understand: unless instinct is available, you will be dead. And unless intuition is available, your life has no meaning—you just drag on. It is a kind of vegetation. Intuition brings meaning, splendor, joy, blessings. Intuition gives you the secrets of existence, brings a tremendous silence, serenity, which cannot be disturbed and which cannot be taken away from you. With instinct and intuition functioning together, you can also use your intellect for right purposes. Otherwise you have only means but no ends. Intellect has no idea of any ends. 

The very word intuition has to be understood. You know the word tuition—tuition comes from outside, somebody teaches you, the tutor. Intuition means something that arises within your being; it is your potential, that’s why it is called intuition. Wisdom is never borrowed, and that which is borrowed is never wisdom. Unless you have your own wisdom, your own vision, your own clarity, your own eyes to see, you will not be able to understand the mystery of existence.

I am in favor of the instinct. And this is one of the secrets I want to reveal to you: if you are in total favor of instinct, it will be easy to find the way toward intuition. Because they are both the same, even though functioning on different levels—one functions on the material level, another functions on the spiritual level. To accept your instinctive life with absolute joy, without any guilt, will help you to open the doors of intuition—because they are not different, just their planes are different. And just as instinct functions beautifully, silently, without any noise, so does intuition function—and even more silently, far more beautifully.

Intuition: Knowing Beyond Logic (Osho)

The modern woman is a blur of activity. She is pressured to be all things to all people. The old knowing is long overdue.

Clarissa Pincola Estes - Women Who Run With The Wolves 

My anger is Sandra’s Scotch. It is her wine, her sleeping pills, her years of speed and ‘mandies make you randy’, her denial, her forgetting. These are the ways we numb the pain of vulnerability, but emotion cannot be selectively numbed. If we are too good at it for too long we will numb our ability to form true connections, with ourselves and with others, which is the only thing we are here for—if we are here, glued to the same crumb busily suspended in infinity, for anything at all.

The Trauma Cleaner (Sarah Krasnostein)

She makes almost nothing, but life requires little. Her budget is blessedly free of those two core expenses, entertainment and status. And the woods teem with free food. 

Patricia Westerford, The Overstory (Richard Powers)

But farmers are patient men tried by brutal seasons, and if they weren’t plagued by dreams of generation, few would keep plowing, spring after spring.

The Overstory (Richard Powers)

if there is no idea of achievement but only the continual movement of thought as understanding, as intelligence, then that movement of thought is creative. That is, creative thinking ceases when mind is crippled by adjustment through influence, or when it functions with the background of a tradition which it has not understood, or from a fixed point, like an animal tied to a post. So long as this limitation, this adjustment, exists, there cannot be creative thinking, intelligence, which alone is freedom.

Krishnamurti

This brings in the idea of karma. You know what it means, that you have a burden in the present, the burden of the past in the present. That is, you bring with you the environment of the past into the present, and because of that burden, you control the future, you shape the future. If you come to think of it, it must be so, that if your mind is perverted by the past, naturally the future must also be twisted, because if you have not understood the environment of yesterday it must be continued today and, therefore, as you don’t understand today, naturally you will not understand tomorrow either. That is, if you have not seen the full significance of an environment or of an action, this perverts your judgment of today’s environment, of today’s action born of environment, which will again pervert you tomorrow. So one is caught up in this vicious circle, and hence the idea of continual rebirth, rebirth of memory, or rebirth of the mind continued by environment.

Krishnamurti

James Baldwin: Yea, but there’s a real difference between the way a man looks at the world…

Audre Lorde: Yes, yes…

JB: And the way a woman looks at the world. A woman does know much more than a man.

AL: And why? For the same reason Black people know what white people are thinking: because we had to do it for our survival…

JB: All right, all right…

There's really no such things as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.

Arundhati Roy

The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.

Carl Jung

It is our brush with the wild nature that drives us not to limit our conversations to humans, not to limit our most splendid movements to dance floors, nor our ears only to music made by human- made instruments, nor our eyes to “taught” beauty, nor our bodies to approved sensations, nor our minds to those things we all agree upon already.

Clarissa Pincola Estes

Articles have to be about something. Mine, I seem to remember, was about a novel by a famous man. And while I was writing this review, I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famous poem, The Angel in the House. It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. You who come of a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her--you may not know what I mean by the Angel in the House. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it--in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all--I need not say it---she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty--her blushes, her great grace. In those days--the last of Queen Victoria--every house had its Angel. And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room. Directly, that is to say, I took my pen in my hand to review that novel by a famous man, she slipped behind me and whispered: "My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure." And she made as if to guide my pen. I now record the one act for which I take some credit to myself, though the credit rightly belongs to some excellent ancestors of mine who left me a certain sum of money--shall we say five hundred pounds a year?--so that it was not necessary for me to depend solely on charm for my living. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must--to put it bluntly--tell lies if they are to succeed. Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had despatched  her. Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe; it took much time that had better have been spent upon learning Greek grammar; or in roaming the world in search of adventures. But it was a real experience; it was an experience that was bound to befall all women writers at that time.
Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.

Virginia Woolf

And for love, mind has created substitutes which are not love. Sometimes you call your  possessiveness your love; sometimes you call your attachment your love; sometimes you call your domination your love -- these are ego games. Love has nothing to do with them.

Osho

Years ago I discovered in the writings of the British naturalist Richard Jefferies a few lines that so impressed themselves upon my mind that I have never forgotten them. May I quote them for you now? The exceeding beauty of the earth, in her splendor of life, yields a new thought with every petal. The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live. All else is illusion, or mere endurance.

In contemplating “the exceeding beauty of the earth” these people have found calmness and courage. For there is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of birds; in the ebb and flow of the tides; in the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in these repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter. Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, with steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water. Perhaps he is intoxicated with his own power, as he goes farther and farther into experiments for the destruction of himself and his world. For this unhappy trend there is no single remedy – no panacea. But I believe that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.

We have looked first at man with his vanities and greed and his problems of a day or a year; and then only, and from this biased point of view, we have looked outward at the earth he has inhabited so briefly and at the universe in which our earth is so minute a part. Yet these are the great realities, and against them we see our human problems in a different perspective. Perhaps if we reversed the telescope and looked at man down these long vistas, we should find less time and inclination to plan for our own destruction.

Rachel Carson

We have all already left behind the narrow window of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place, but not just evolve—that window has enclosed everything we remember as history, and value as progress, and study as politics. What will it mean to live outside that window, probably quite far outside it?

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (David Wallace-Wells)

the climate calculus is such that individual lifestyle choices do not add up to much, unless they are scaled by politics.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (David Wallace-Wells)

All knowing becomes knowledge. The moment it becomes knowledge, drop it. It is just like dust gathers on the mirror; every day you have to clean it. On the mirror of your mind dust gathers, dust of experience: it becomes knowledge. Clean it. That's why every day meditation is needed. Meditation is nothing but cleaning the mirror of your mind. Clean it continuously! If you can clean it every moment of your life, then there is no need  to sit separately for meditation.

When people use the word 'maturity' they mean more knowledge; when I  use the word 'maturity' I mean the capacity to learn.

So the first thing is that you should be capable of learning and your learning capacity should never be burdened by knowledge, never be covered by dust. The mirror of  learning should remain clean and fresh so it can go on reflecting.

Even if you feel, or you think you feel, or you pretend that you feel, compassion, just go deep and analyze it and you will always find some other motivation in it. It cannot be  pure compassion and if it is not pure it is not compassion. Purity is a basic ingredient in  compassion, otherwise it is something else -- it is more or less a formality. We have  learned how to be formal: how to behave with your wife, how to behave with your  husband, how to behave with your children, with friends, with your family. We have  learned everything. Compassion is not something which can be learned; when you have  unlearned ail formalities, all etiquette and manners, it arises in you. It is very wild; it  doesn't taste of etiquette, of formality, they are all dead things compared to it. It is very alive, it is a flame of love.

Osho

từ lúc đặt chân vào cuộc đời
đến khi sức sống kia dần lụi
mấy ai hiểu hết được chính mình
một cách giản đơn và trần trụi
nên đừng nhìn nhau bằng mắt trần
phán xét bằng miệng lưỡi quỷ ma
ngồi lại gần nhau nói lời thật
chứ đừng nhìn mây gió rồi nghĩ xa

Đen Vâu

“Please do not build a stupa for me. Please do not put my ashes in a vase, lock me inside and limit who I am. I know this will be difficult for some of you. If you must build a stupa though, please make sure that you put a sign on it that says, ‘I am not in here.’ In addition, you can also put another sign that says, ‘I am not out there either,’ and a third sign that says, ‘If I am anywhere, it is in your mindful breathing and in your peaceful steps.’”

Thich Nhat Hanh

There is dying in the sense of letting this body go, letting go of feelings, emotions, these things we call our identity, and practicing to let those go.

The trouble is, we don’t let ourselves die day by day. Instead, we carry ideas about each other and ourselves. Sometimes it’s good, but sometimes it’s detrimental to our growth. We brand ourselves and imprison ourselves to an idea.

Letting go is a practice not only when you reach 90. It’s one of the highest practices. This can move you toward equanimity, a state of freedom, a form of peace. Waking up each day as a rebirth, now that is a practice.

Phap Dung https://plumvillage.org/news/thich-nhat-hanhs-final-mindfulness-lesson-how-to-die-peacefully/

The problem is never of a choice between the untrue and the true. The problem is always between a lower truth and a higher truth.

Osho

Then what is love? Love is luxury. It comes out of aloneness, when you are tremendously alone and happy and joyous and celebrating, and great energy goes on storing in you. You don’t need anybody. In that moment the energy is so much, you would like it to be shared. Then you give, you give because you have so much, you give without asking anything in return – that is love... And when you are alone, meditation is natural, simple, spontaneous. Then just sitting silently, doing nothing, you are in meditation. You need not repeat a mantra, you need not chant any stupid sound. You simply sit, or you walk, or you do your things, and meditation is there like a climate surrounding you, like a white cloud surrounding you – you are suffused with the light. You are immersed in it, bathed in it, and that freshness goes on welling up in you. NOW YOU start sharing. What else can you do? When a song is born in your heart you have to sing it. And when love is born in your heart – love is a by-product of aloneness – you have to shower it. When the cloud is full of rain, it showers, and when the flower is full of fragrance, it releases its fragrance to the winds. Unaddressed, the fragrance is released. And the flower does not wait to ask ”What is coming back to me in return?” The flower is happy that the winds have been kind enough to relieve him of a burden.

Osho

Life is a pilgrimage. In life, nouns are false, only verbs are true. In language we have created nouns. Those nouns give a very false impression about life; they are not right. Some day, in future, when language will become more existential, nouns will disappear and will be replaced – ALL nouns will be replaced – by verbs. There is nothing like river, but rivering; there is nothing like a tree, but treeing – because never for a moment is the tree static. It is never in a state of is-ness. It is always becoming, flowing, going somewhere.

Osho

And then in the office, do whatsoever is needed. In the factory do whatsoever is needed, but even while you are doing remain a witness: deep down, in deep rest, utterly centered, the periphery moving like a wheel, but the center is the center of the cyclone. Nothing is moving at the center.

Osho

The whole humanity is schizophrenic unless one comes to this point where words and deeds are no more separate, but two aspects of the same phenomenon. You say what you feel, you feel what you say, you do what you say, you say what you do. One can simply watch you and will see the authenticity of your being.

Osho

I had mentioned that, just two days before, I had finished my talk at nine forty-five, and he wrote a letter at nine fifty-five, after just ten minutes. Yesterday he went even further: while I was talking he was writing the letter! While I was discussing him, he could not wait even ten minutes. And that’s what I was saying: ”Wait a little, be a little patient, meditate over it. You cannot understand these things immediately; you are not in that state of understanding, of clarity, of perception.” But while I was talking he started writing the letter. At exactly the same time, while I was talking, he was writing the letter. Now what could he write? I had not even talked, I had not even spoken. He must have heard, he must have taken the clue from his own mind. He could not understand a single word. His dream seems to be too strong; he is burdened by his knowledge. And I was saying ”Let your Jungian ego drop.”

What happened? Could he not see the point?Who prevented him from seeing the point? His mind must have become too crowded. All that he has been reading, accumulating – he has become too attached to it. He had come here to seek and search. What kind of search is this if you are not ready to leave anything of your ego? What kind of inquiry is this? People usually think they are spiritual seekers if they can add something more to their egos. Your so-called spiritual trips are nothing but subtle trips of the ego. People want more gratification for the ego, more strength for the ego, more vitality for the ego. They want a holy aura around the ego, and the holy aura arises only when the ego is gone; they cannot co-exist.

A fiction is a framed part of the sky. Howsoever strange, mysterious, unbelievable the fiction may be, it is very pale compared to real life. Real life is the mystery of mysteries... never possible to explain it. And the fiction arises out of the human mind. The mind is a mirror: it reflects a few things. If you have a good mirror, a creative mirror, you can create poetry, you can create music, you can create fiction, you can write, you can paint; but all that you will paint and all that you will create and all that you will write will remain a very tiny atomic part of reality – and not really a part but a REFLECTION of the part in your mind. To see life as it is is mind-blowing. To see life as it is is psychedelic. To see life as it is is to become expanded in consciousness.

Osho

Freedom and responsibility are two aspects of the same coin. If you are not ready to feel responsible, you will never be free. You will remain in bondage, in the bondage of others. Psychoanalysis makes you feel in bondage; it can’t really help. Prayer makes you free. Prayer means religion. Prayer means: you are responsible, you have chosen a certain way of life. Now there is no need to make much fuss about it. If you don’t like it, drop it! It is up to you, it is ABSOLUTELY up to you. And you can drop it in a single moment of awareness. That’s what SATORI is, SAMADHI is: dropping the whole nonsense in a single moment of understanding. Seeing the point that ”I am carrying it, and if I don’t want, there is no need to carry it; nobody can force it on me – no fate, no society, no church”, it can be dropped. Your inner essence remains free of your personality. Personality is just like clothing: you can drop it, you can be naked any moment. Your essence can be naked any moment. And when the essence is naked, you are healed – because the essence knows no illness. The essence is always in the state of health, in the state of wholeness.

Osho

The really religious person is one who can dance with the wind and the rains, who can smile and giggle with children, who can feel at ease with all kinds of situations in life. That is freedom, that is freedom from the ego. Ego makes one serious.

Osho

Đi với anh đến cùng trời cuối đất
Để nếm уêu thương không dùng lời muối mật
Mình sống chẳng tự cao, haу việc gì phải cúi mặt
Đi đi em, do dự trời tối mất
Anh đưa em đi đến nơi ít người qua
Ɲơi vầng trăng mỏng cong veo tít trời xa
Ɲơi những vì sao chẳng phải nép sau nóc nhà
Ɲơi đặt lưng xuống đầu chẳng nặng chuуện ngàу qua

Đen Vâu

Như chưa bao giờ phải thất vọng, tự cô lập
Như chưa bao giờ mất lòng tin, phải cố chấp
Sống như chưa bao giờ phải đặt câu hỏi về nghĩa lý
Hồn nhiên và ngây thơ như chưa bao giờ có giây phút chia ly

DSK

When the ego is not, you are for the first time encountering your being.
Osho

Một khi biết mình nhỏ bé thì tâm hồn bắt đầu sẽ lớn.
DSK

Tự do như làn khói, như điếu thuốc chưa từng cháy
Thả mình về đại dương như dòng sông chưa từng chảy
Vùi mình trong bóng đêm như chưa từng có ánh trăng
Đôi bờ vai lại buông lơi như chưa từng có gánh nặng

DSK 

People who are stubborn are bound to be stupid. A man who is alive moves into uncertainties, moves into the unknown. He cannot live in a dead certainty.

Lean on the possibilities, don’t ask for certainties. Because you ask for certainties, you create authorities. Out of your need to be certain you become victims of people who are stubborn, ignorant, but certain.

The scriptures in the hands of people who don’t know what meditation is are just like a lantern in the hands of a blind man – utterly useless. And the blind man cannot know whether the lantern is still lit or not. He will simply be carrying an unnecessary weight. In fact, not helpful at all – on the contrary, it can be a hindrance. If the blind man had been moving without the lantern he would have been more careful, more cautious. Because of the lantern in his hand, he must have been walking as if he had eyes, he must have put all caution aside. That’s what has happened to humanity at large. People have the Bible, the Koran, the Gita – these are lamps of immense beauty and light, but your eyes are blind. And the Gita is five thousand years old – the light went out long long ago. When Krishna died the light went out. So is the case with the Bible and the Koran and all the other holy scriptures of the world. When the Master dies, the light goes out. But people go on carrying the scriptures, believing the scriptures, hoping that their life will remain full of light because they are carrying a message from a great Master. That message is nothing more than words; it is an unnecessary burden. If all the scriptures of the world disappear, man may become more cautious, may become more alert, may start looking for the source of light on his own. Because there will be nothing to lean on, he will have to learn to stand on his own feet.

In a better world, with more freedom, with more understanding, a child will not be taught to say yes when he feels like saying no, he will be taught courage. Whenever he feels like saying no, he will HAVE to say no. And then his yes will have meaning.

Every child should be taught inquiry, doubt, logic, reason.

If a child reasons to the very end, he will come to the point where he will be able to see that now reasoning has come to an end but existence goes on and on. Existence is something beyond reasoning. But let every child feel it in his own guts!

Let the child think as much as he can, to his full capacity; let him burn with doubt, logic, reasoning, to the maximum, and he will see the limitations of the intellect. It is bound to happen. And when the limitations of the intellect have been seen, experienced, by yourself, you start moving into the beyond; you start surpassing the mind.

The mind always turns simple things into complexities. Beware of that, because the mind cannot exist with the simple; it is not needed. If things are really simple, what is the need of the mind? The mind is needed only when things are complex. Then you have to depend on the mind because then the mind will find the way out of the riddle. But if there is no riddle, the mind is utterly useless; you can discard it. So the investment of the mind is in complexity. Remember it – these sutras are very simple. Truth is always simple, utterly simple.

Osho

And remember, the Master says, understanding, not knowledge. The Master says, clarity, not answers. One simply becomes so clear that the questions disappear. Not that you attain to some answers, only you are so clear that the confusion is no more there, that’s all. It is absence of questions not presence of answers, hence it is called understanding, not knowledge. Just the other day, Aniruddha also asked, ’What is the difference between our knowledge and your knowledge? I don’t see any difference,’ he says. The difference is not in knowledge. He must have been thinking that I know more than he knows. Just the contrary is the case. I don’t know more than you know; in fact, you know and I have no knowledge. I am only clear – a clarity, an understanding, not knowledge. Here are many people who know more than me, and that is their problem. They will have to drop that knowledge. I don’t know anything, there is only clarity. When you ask me a question, it is not that I have an answer for it, but I just focus my clarity on it – try to understand – and whatsoever response comes out of the clarity I give to you. It is not knowledge, it is just a capacity to see. Knowledge makes people blind. Their eyes become so full of knowledge they cannot see. Even before you have asked the question they have the ready-made answer there. They are ready to answer it. They don’t listen to your question, they don’t listen to the questioner, they don’t listen to his being, they don’t look into him to see what he means, they have a ready-made answer. They are in a hurry to answer you – and they must prove the answer with arguments and scriptures, and they must give all kinds of support to it.

Osho

Poetry may not be religion proper but it points in the right direction. When a poet is really in a creative state, he knows something of religion – a faraway distant music, because when he is in a creative state, he is no more himself. He participates – although in a very small measure, but he participates in God. Just a drop of divinity enters into him. That’s why great poets have always said, ’When we write poetry, we are not the creators of it. We become possessed. Some unknown energy enters, sings, dances in us. We don’t know what it is.’ When a painter is lost into his painting, he is utterly lost into his painting, his ego disappears. Maybe only for moments, but in those egoless moments God paints through him. If you participate in God, God participates in you. Art is an unconscious form of religion. Religion is conscious art. Art is as if you are religious in a dream, but it is pointing in the right direction. The artist is the nearest to the religious.

Osho

Lớn để mà còn biết cái sự khác biệt giữa mình và “cái tôi”.

DSK

Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of people who were oppressing them.

Assata Shakur

People search for Masters in order to become special. People search for Masters out of their ego desires. The very search is an ego trip. Then, naturally, one day you will be disillusioned. That was your illusion; I have nothing to do with it. If you project something on me, how am I supposed to be responsible for it? You project; sooner or later your projection will fall down. In fact, I will help in every way so that it is broken, shattered, so that you can see me as I am, so that one day you can see yourself too as you are.

Osho

That is the vision of Tao: inquire, experiment, and wait for the conclusion to come on its own.

Osho

I say remain in the world and don’t be of it, otherwise you will become attached to a polarity.

And I know people who have lived in the Himalayas. Then they become afraid. Then they don’t want to come to the world because whatsoever they have been experiencing in the Himalayas disappears when they come to the market-place. If it disappears in the market-place it is no attainment. It may have been just the silence of the Himalayas that you mistook for your silence. It was borrowed.

Certainly, the Himalayas are silent, and if you live in that silence, slowly slowly that silence starts permeating you. But it is not your music; it is borrowed. Go away from the Himalayas and it will disappear. This is creating a fallacy. This is enjoying a reflected glory. This is not your own glory. Live in the market-place and create a Himalaya in the heart. Become silent in the noise. Remain a householder and yet be a sannyasin. That’s why I emphasize so much that I don’t want my sannyasins to renounce. Nothing has to be renounced. The way of renunciation is the way of the escapist, and the way of renunciation will make you attached to a polar phenomenon. That will not give you freedom. Freedom is in transcendence, and transcendence comes only when you live in the polar opposites simultaneously, together. So be in the world, but don’t let the world be in you. Love, and yet don’t be lost in it. Relate, and yet be alone, utterly alone. Know perfectly well that all relationship is a game. Play the game and play it as beautifully as possible and as skilfully as possible. A game is after all a game and has to be played beautifully. And follow all the rules of the game, because a game cannot exist without rules. But remember always that it is just a game. Don’t become attached to it. Don’t become serious in it. Always allow the sense of humour to remain alive. Remain sincere but non-serious. And then, slowly slowly, you will see that the polarities are disappearing. Who is worldly, and who is other-worldly? You are both or neither.

The Secret of Secrets, Vol 1 48 Osho CHAPTER 3. THE ATOMIC MOMENT in you.

But trust is not afraid of doubt because trust is not against doubt. Trust uses doubt, trust knows how to use the energy contained in doubt itself. That’s the difference between faith and trust. Faith is false; it creates a pseudo kind of religion, it creates hypocrites. Trust has a sublime beauty and truth about it. It grows through doubt, it uses doubt as manure, it transforms doubt. Doubt is a friend, doubt is not the enemy.

The soul is arrived at through doubt, not through believing. Belief is just a mask: you are hiding your original face. Trust is a transformation: you are becoming more illumined. And because you are using doubt as a challenge, as an opportunity, there is never any repression. Slowly slowly doubt disappears, because its energy has been taken by trust. Doubt, in fact, is nothing but trust growing. Doubt is trust on the way. Always think of doubt in such a way: that doubt is trust on the way. Doubt is inquiry and trust is the fulfillment of the inquiry. Doubt is the question and trust is the answer. The answer is not against the question – there will be no possibility of any answer if there is no question – the question has created the occasion for the answer to happen.

And unless your trust has moved through many doubts it will remain impotent. From where will it gather strength, from where will it gather integration? If there is no challenge it is bound to remain weak. Doubt is a challenge. If your trust can respond to the challenge, can befriend your doubt, it will grow through it. And you will not be a split person – deep down doubting and just on the surface faithful, believing – you will have a kind of unity, you will be an individual, undivided. And that individuality is what is called ’soul’ in the old religions.

Use doubt – doubt is beautiful – because it is only through doubt that the trust attains to maturity.

It is only through doubt that the trust flowers, blooms. It is the dark night of doubt that brings the golden morning closer to you. The dark night is not against the dawn, the dark night is the womb for the dawn. The dawn is getting ready in the very being of the dark night. Think of doubt and trust as complementary: just as man and woman are, just as night and day, summer and winter, life and death. Always think of those pairs in terms of inevitable complementariness, never think in terms of opposition.

Once you start seeing doubt as a friend, as an occasion, not against trust but pushing you towards it, suddenly, guilt disappears. There is great joy. Even when you doubt, you doubt joyously, you doubt consciously, and you use doubt to find trust. It is absolutely normal.

The Secret of Secrets Volume 1 (Osho)

Before the Buddha left the three bhikkhus, he spoke to them, “Bhikkhus, the very nature of a sangha is harmony. I believe harmony can be realized by following these principles: “1. Sharing a common space such as a forest or home. “2. Sharing the essentials of daily life together. “3. Observing the precepts together. “4. Using only words that contribute to harmony, avoiding all words that can cause the community to break. “5. Sharing insights and understanding together. “6. Respecting others’ viewpoints and not forcing another to follow your own viewpoint. “A sangha that follows these principles will have happiness and harmony. Bhikkhus, let us always observe these six principles.” The bhikkhus were happy to receive this teaching from the Buddha. The Buddha bid them farewell and walked until he reached Rakkhita Forest, near Parileyyaka. After sitting in meditation beneath a lush sal tree, he decided to spend the approaching rainy season alone in the forest.

Thich Nhat Hanh, Old Path White Clouds

If you don’t go out in the woods, nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin.
“Don’t go out in the woods, don’t go out,” they said.
“Why not? Why should I not go out in the woods tonight?” she asked.
“A big wolf lives there who eats humans such as you. Don’t go out in the woods, don’t go out. We mean it.”
Naturally she went out.
She went out in the woods anyway, and of course she met the wolf, just as they had warned her.
“See, we told you,” they crowed.
“This is my life, not a fairy tale, you dolts,” she said. “I have to go to the woods, and I have to meet the wolf, or else my life will never begin.”
But the wolf she encountered was in a trap, in a trap this wolf’s leg was in.
“Help me, oh help me! Aieeeee, aieeee, aieeee!” cried the wolf. “Help me, oh help me!” he cried, “and I shall reward you justly.” For this is the way of wolves in tales of this kind.
“How do I know you won’t harm me?” she asked–it was her job to ask questions. “How do I know you will not kill me and leave me lying in my bones?”
“Wrong question,” said this wolf.
“You’ll just have to take my word for it.” And the wolf began to cry and wail once again and more.
“Oh, aieee! Aieeee! Aieeee!
There’s only one question
worthy asking fair maiden,
wooooooooor
aieeeee th’
soooooooool?”
“Oh you wolf, I will take a chance. Alright, here!” And she sprang the trap and the wolf drew out its paw and this she bound with herbs and grasses.
“Ah, thank you kind maiden, thank you,” sighed the wolf. And because she had read too many of the wrong kind of tales, she cried, “Go ahead and kill me now, and let us get this over with.”
But no, this did not come to pass. Instead this wolf put his paw upon her arm.
“I’m a wolf from another time and place,” said he. And plucking a lash from his eye, he gave it to her and said, “Use this, and be wise. From now on you will know who is good and not so good; just look through my eyes and you will see clearly.
For letting me live,
I bid you live
in a manner as never before.
Remember, there’s only one question
worthy asking fair maiden,
wooooooooor
aieeeee th’
soooooooool?”
And so she went back to her village,
happy to still have her life.
And this time as they said,
“Just stay here and be my bride,”
or “Do as I tell you,”
or “Say as I want you to say,
and remain as unwritten upon
as the day you came,”
she held up the wolf’s eyelash
and peered through
and saw their motives
as she had not seen them before.
And the next time
the butcher weighed the meat,
she looked through her wolf’s eyelash
and saw that he weighed his thumb too.
And she looked at her suitor
who said “I am so good for you,”
and she saw that her suitor
was so good for exactly nothing.
And in this way and more,
she was saved,
from not all,
but from many
misfortunes.
But more so, in this new seeing, not only did she see the sly and cruel, she began to grow immense in heart, for she looked at each person and weighed them anew through this gift from the wolf she had rescued.
And she saw those who were truly kind
and went near to them,
and found her mate
and stayed all the days of her life,
she discerned the brave
and came close to them,
she apprehended the faithful
and joined with them,
she saw bewilderment under anger
and hastened to soothe it,
she saw love in the eyes of the shy
and reached out to them,
she saw suffering in the stiff-lipped
and courted their laughter,
she saw need in the man with no words
and spoke for him,
she saw faith deep in the woman,
who said she had none,
and rekindled hers from her own.
She saw all things
with her lash of wolf
all things true,
and all things false,
all things turning against life
and all things turning toward life,
all things seen only
through the eyes of that
which weighs the heart with heart,
and not with mind alone.
This is how she learned that it is true what they say, that the wolf is the wisest of all. If you listen closely, the wolf in its howling is always asking the most important question–not where is the next food, not where is the next fight, not where is the next dance?—
but the most important question
in order to see into and behind,
to weigh the value of all that lives,
wooooooooor
aieeeee th’
soooooooool?”
wooooooooor
aieeeee th’
soooooooool?”
Where is the soul?
Where is the soul?
Go out in the woods, go out. If you don’t go out in the woods, nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin.
Go out in the woods,
go out.
Go out in the woods,
go out,
Go out in the woods,
go out.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés

[Excerpted from “The Wolf’s Eyelash,” original prose poem by Clarissa Pinkola Estés]

What we need today, for the sake of the survival of this planet, is long-term vision. Can governments whose very survival depends on immediate, extractive, short-term gain provide this? Could it be that democracy, the sacred answer to our short-term hopes and prayers, the protector of our individual freedoms and nurturer of our avaricious dreams, will turn out to be the endgame for the human race? Could it be that democracy is such a hit with modern humans precisely because it mirrors our greatest folly—our nearsightedness? Our inability to live entirely in the present (like most animals do), combined with our inability to see very far into the future, makes us strange in-between creatures, neither beast nor prophet. Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival. We plunder the earth hoping that accumulating material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable thing that we have lost.

...

Two decades of this kind of “Progress” in India has created a vast middle class punch-drunk on sudden wealth and the sudden respect that comes with it—and a much, much vaster, desperate, underclass. Tens of millions of people have been dispossessed and displaced from their land by floods, droughts, and desertification caused by indiscriminate environmental engineering and massive infrastructural projects, dams, mines, and Special Economic Zones. All developed in the name of the poor, but really meant to service the rising demands of the new aristocracy.

Already forests, mountains, and water systems are being ravaged by marauding multinational corporations, backed by a state that has lost its moorings and is committing what can only be called ecocide. In eastern India bauxite and iron ore mining is destroying whole ecosystems, turning fertile land into desert. In the Himalayas hundreds of high dams are being planned, the consequences of which can only be catastrophic. In the plains, embankments built along rivers, ostensibly to control floods, have led to rising riverbeds, causing even more flooding, more waterlogging, more salinization of agricultural land, and the destruction of livelihoods of millions of people. Most of India’s holy rivers, including the Ganga, have been turned into unholy drains that carry more sewage and industrial effluent than water. Hardly a single river runs its course and meets the ocean.

For the sake of argument, let’s for a moment contemplate the absurd and accept that India Inc. and the captains of industry are right and that India’s millions did in fact vote for the speeding up of market “reforms.” Is that good news or bad news? Should we be celebrating the fact that millions of people who have something to teach the world, who have another imagination, another worldview, and a more sustainable way of life, have decided to embrace a discredited ideology, one that has pushed this planet into a crisis from which it may never recover?

What good will forest rights be when there are no forests? What good will the right to information be if there is no redress for our grievances? What good are rivers without water? What good are plains without mountains to water and sustain them? It’s as though we’re hurtling down a cliff in a bus without brakes and fighting over what songs to sing.

Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (Roy, Arundhati)

As a writer, a fiction writer, I have often wondered whether the attempt to always be precise, to try and get it all factually right somehow reduces the epic scale of what is really going on. Does it eventually mask a larger truth? I worry that I am allowing myself to be railroaded into offering prosaic, factual precision when maybe what we need is a feral howl, or the transformative power and real precision of poetry. Something about the cunning, Brahmanical, intricate, bureaucratic, file-bound, “apply-through-proper-channels” nature of governance and subjugation in India seems to have made a clerk out of me. My only excuse is to say that it takes odd tools to uncover the maze of subterfuge and hypocrisy that cloaks the callousness and the cold, calculated violence of the world’s favorite new superpower. Repression “through proper channels” sometimes engenders resistance “through proper channels.” As resistance goes this isn’t enough, I know. But for now, it’s all I have. Perhaps someday it will become the underpinning for poetry and for the feral howl.

Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (Roy, Arundhati)

One day Mahapajapati Gotami visited him at Nigrodha Park. She offered a number of robes and also requested to be ordained as a nun. She said, “If you will allow women to be ordained, many will benefit. Among our clan, many princes have left home to become your disciples. Many of them had wives. Now their wives desire to study the Dharma as nuns. I want to be ordained myself. It would bring me great joy. This has been my sole desire since the king died.” The Buddha was silent for a long moment before he said, “It is not possible.” Lady Pajapati pleaded, “I know this is a difficult issue for you. If you accept women into the sangha you will be met with protest and resistance from society. But I do not believe you are afraid of such reactions.” Again the Buddha was silent. He said, “In Rajagaha, there are also a number of women who want to be ordained, but I don’t believe it is the right time yet. Conditions are not yet ripe to accept women in the sangha.” Gotami pleaded three times with him, but his answer remained the same. Deeply disappointed, she departed. When she returned to the palace she told Yasodhara of the Buddha’s response. A few days later, the Buddha returned to Vesali. After his departure, Gotami gathered all the women who wished to be ordained. They included a number of young women who had never been married. All the women belonged to the Sakya clan. She told them, “I know beyond a doubt that in the Way of Awakening, all people are equal. Everyone has the capacity to be enlightened and liberated. The Buddha has said so himself. He has accepted untouchables into the sangha. There is no reason he should not accept women. We are full persons too. We can attain enlightenment and liberation. There is no reason to regard women as inferior. “I suggest we shave our heads, get rid of our fine clothes and jewels, put on the yellow robes of bhikkhus, and walk barefoot to Vesali where we will ask to be ordained. In this way we will prove to the Buddha and everyone else that we are capable of living simply and practicing the Way. We will walk hundreds of miles and beg for our food. This is the only hope we have to be accepted into the sangha.” All the women agreed with Gotami. They saw in her a true leader. Yasodhara smiled. She had long appreciated Gotami’s strong will. Gotami was not one to be stopped by any obstacle, as proved by her years of working on behalf of the poor with Yasodhara. The women agreed on a day to put their plan into action.

...

The Buddha was silent for a long moment. He then asked Nagita to summon Venerables Sariputta, Moggallana, Anuruddha, Bhaddiya, Kimbila, and Mahakassapa. When they arrived, he discussed the situation with them at length. He explained that it was not discrimination against women which made him hesitant to ordain them. He was unsure how to open the sangha to women without creating harmful conflict both within and outside of the sangha.

Old Path White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha (Thich Nhat Hanh)

Sunita had veered off the path because he was afraid he would pollute the bhikkhus. He could not have guessed the Buddha would follow him. Sunita knew that the sangha included many men from noble castes. He was sure that polluting a bhikkhu was an unforgivable act. He hoped the Buddha and bhikkhus would leave him and return to the road. But the Buddha did not leave. He walked right up to the water’s edge and said, “My friend, please come closer so we may talk.” Sunita, his palms still joined, protested, “Lord, I don’t dare!” “Why not?” asked the Buddha. “I am an untouchable. I don’t want to pollute you and your monks.” The Buddha replied, “On our path, we no longer distinguish between castes. You are a human being like the rest of us. We are not afraid we will be polluted. Only greed, hatred, and delusion can pollute us. A person as pleasant as yourself brings us nothing but happiness. What is your name?” “Lord, my name is Sunita.”

...

"Majesty, in the Way of Liberation, there is no caste. To the eyes of an enlightened person, all people are equal. Every person’s blood is red. Every person’s tears are salty. We are all human beings. We must find a way for all people to be able to realize their full dignity and potential. That is why I welcomed Sunita into the sangha of bhikkhus.”

Old Path White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha (Thich Nhat Hanh)

“Look lak we ain’ cry enough. We ain’ through cryin. In de November our Jimmy come home and set round lak he doan feel good so I astee him, ‘Son, you gittee sick? I doan want you runnin’ to work when you doan feel good.’ He say, ‘Papa, tain nothin’ wrong wid me. I doan feel so good.’ But de nexy day, he come home sick and we putee him in de bed. I do all I kin and his mama stay up wid him all night long. We gittee de doctor and do whut he say, but our boy die. Oh Lor’! I good to my chillun! I want dey comp’ny, but looky lak dey lonesome for one ’nother. So dey hurry go sleep together in de graveyard. He die holdin’ my hand. “When we gittee back from de funeral, tain nobody in de house but me and Seely. De house was full, but now it empty. We old folks now and we know we ain’ going have no mo’ chillun. We so lonesome, but we know we cain gittee back de dead. When de spit goes from de mouf, it doan come back. When de earth eats, it doan give back. So we try to keep one ’nother comp’ny and be happy.

“De nexy week my wife lef’ me. Cudjo doan know. She ain’ been sick, but she die. She doan want to leave me. She cry ’cause she doan want me be lonesome. But she leave me and go where her chillun. Oh Lor’! Lor’! De wife she de eyes to de man’s soul. How kin I see now, when I ain’ gottee de eyes no mo’?

Barracoon (Zora Neale Hurston)

“All de time de chillun growin’ de American folks dey picks at dem and tell de Afficky people dey kill folks and eatee de meat. Dey callee my chillun ig’nant savage and make out dey kin to monkey. “Derefo’, you unnerstand me, my boys dey fight. Dey got to fight all de time. Me and dey mama doan lak to hear our chillun call savage. It hurtee dey feelings. Derefo’ dey fight. Dey fight hard. When dey whip de other boys, dey folks come to our house and tellee us, ‘Yo’ boys mighty bad, Cudjo. We ’fraid they goin’ kill somebody.’

“Cudjo meetee de people at de gate and tellee dem, ‘You see de rattlesnake in de woods?’ Dey say, ‘Yeah.’ I say ‘If you bother wid him, he bite you. If you know de snake killee you, why you bother wid him? Same way wid my boys, you unnerstand me. If you leavee my boys alone, dey not bother nobody!’ “But dey keep on. All de time, ‘Aleck dis, Jimmy dat, Poe-lee dis an’ t’other. David a bad boy. Cudjo fightee my son.’ Nobody never say whut dey do to de Afficky savages. Dey say he ain’ no Christian. Dey tell whut de savages do to dem, just lakee we ain’ gottee no feelings to git hurtee. “We Afficans try raise our chillun right. When dey say we ign’nant we go together and build de school house. Den de county send us a teacher. We Afficky men doan wait lak de other colored people till de white folks gittee ready to build us a school. We build one for ourself den astee de county to send us de teacher.

Barracoon (Zora Neale Hurston)


==========

“When we ready to leave de Kroo boat and go in de ship, de Many-costs snatch our country cloth off us. We try save our clothes, we ain’ used to be without no clothes on. But dey snatch all off us. Dey say, ‘You get plenty clothes where you goin’.’ Oh Lor’, I so shame! We come in de ’Merica soil naked and de people say we naked savage. Dey say we doan wear no clothes. Dey doan know de Many-costs snatch our clothes ’way from us.

“Cap’n Tim Meaher, he tookee thirty-two of us. Cap’n Burns Meaher he tookee ten couples. Some dey sell up de river in de Bogue Chitto. Cap’n Bill Foster he tookee de eight couples and Cap’n Jim Meaher he gittee de rest. “We very sorry to be parted from one ’nother. We cry for home. We took away from our people. We seventy days cross de water from de Affica soil, and now dey part us from one ’nother. Derefore we cry. We cain help but cry. So we sing: “‘Eh, yea ai yeah, La nah say wu Ray ray ai yea, nah nah saho ru.’ “Our grief so heavy look lak we cain stand it. I think maybe I die in my sleep when I dream about my mama. Oh Lor’!”

Barracoon (Zora Neale Hurston)

For us I brought a huge watermelon, right off the ice, so we cut it in half and we just ate from heart to rind as far as we were able. Then it was necessary to walk it down so he showed me over the Old Landmark Baptist Church, at his very gate, where he is the sexton. Watermelon, like too many other gorgeous things in life, is much too fleeting. We lightened our ballast and returned to the porch.

Barracoon

Here is the medicine: That though the heart is breaking, happiness can exist in a moment, also. And because the moment in which we live is all the time there really is, we can keep going. It may be true, and often is, that every person we hold dear is taken from us. Still. From moment to moment, we watch our beans and our watermelons grow. We plant. We hoe. We harvest. We share with neighbors. If a young anthropologist appears with two hams and gives us one, we look forward to enjoying it. Life, inexhaustible, goes on. And we do too. Carrying our wounds and our medicines as we go. Ours is an amazing, a spectacular, journey in the Americas. It is so remarkable one can only be thankful for it, bizarre as that may sound. Perhaps our planet is for learning to appreciate the extraordinary wonder of life that surrounds even our suffering, and to say Yes, if through the thickest of tears.

Alice Walker, preface to Barracoon

No sentient being in this world is allowed to remain innocent forever. In order for us to thrive, our own instinctive nature drives us to face the fact that things are not as they first seem. The wild creative function pushes us to learn about the many states of being, perception, and knowing. These are the many conduits through which the Wild Woman speaks to us. Loss and betrayal are the first slippery steps of a long initiatory process that pitches us into la selva subterránea, the underground forest. There, sometimes times for the first time in our lives, we have a chance to cease walking into walls of our own making and learn to pass through them instead.

Clarissa Pincola Estes - Women Who Run With The Wolves - Myths And Storie by the Wild Woman Archetype

1. Attachment to views is the greatest impediment to the spiritual path. Bound to narrow views, one becomes so entangled that it is no longer possible to let the door of truth open.

... when one was liberated from ignorance, mental obstructions would vanish on their own, like shadows fleeing before the rising sun.

2. The king looked long and hard at the Buddha before saying, “I thought surely you would come to the palace to see your family first. Who could have guessed you would instead go begging in the city? Why didn’t you come to eat at the palace?” The Buddha smiled at his father. “Father, I am not alone. I have traveled with a large community, the community of bhikkhus. I, too, am a bhikkhu, and like all other bhikkhus, beg for my food.” “But must you beg for food at such poor dwellings as these around here? No one in the history of the Sakya clan has ever done such a thing.” Again the Buddha smiled. “Perhaps no Sakya has ever done so before, but all bhikkhus have. Father, begging is a spiritual practice which helps a bhikkhu develop humility and see that all persons are equal. When I receive a small potato from a poor family, it is no different than when I receive an elegant dish served by a king. A bhikkhu can transcend barriers that discriminate between rich and poor. On my path, all are considered equal. Everyone, no matter how poor he is, can attain liberation and enlightenment. Begging does not demean my own dignity. It recognizes the inherent dignity of all persons.”

3. The Buddha’s voice was warm and affectionate. He did not dwell on details and he spoke only sparingly of his period of self-mortification. He used his words to sow helpful seeds of awakening in the hearts of those closest to him.

4. The Buddha taught the Four Noble Truths: the existence of suffering, the causes of suffering, the cessation of suffering, and the path that leads to the cessation of suffering. He said, “In addition to the sufferings of birth, old age, sickness, and death, human beings endure other sufferings which they themselves create. Out of ignorance and false views, people say and do things that create suffering for themselves and others. Anger, hatred, suspicion, jealousy, and frustration cause suffering. All these arise from lack of awareness. People are caught in their suffering as if they were caught in a house on fire, and most of our suffering we create ourselves. You cannot find freedom by praying to some god. You must look deeply into your own mind and situation in order to uproot the false views which are the root of suffering. You must find the source of your suffering in order to understand the nature of suffering. Once you understand the nature of suffering, it can no longer bind you.

5. “If someone is angry at you, you can get angry back at him, but that only creates more suffering. If you follow the Way of Awareness, you will not react with anger. Instead, you will quiet your mind in order to discover why that person is angry at you. By looking deeply, you can uncover the causes that led to the person’s anger. If you see that you bear responsibility for angering the person, you will not become angry, but you will accept that your own misconduct has contributed towards creating his anger. If you are without blame, you can try to see why the person has misunderstood you. Then you can find a way to help him understand your true intentions. In this way, you will avoid causing more suffering to both yourself and the other person.

Old Path White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha (Thich Nhat Hanh)

Only a novel can tell you how caste, communalisation, sexism, love, music, poetry, the rise of the right all combine in a society. And the depths in which they combine. We have been trained to “silo-ise”: our brains specialise in one thing. But the radical understanding is if you can understand it all, and I think only a novel can.

Arundhati Roy

Love, as my son Pascal knows it, is defined by the number of hearts drawn on a card or by how many stories about dragons are told by flashlight under a down-filled comforter. I have to wait a few more years till I can report to him that in other times, other places, parents showed their love by willingly abandoning their children, like the parents of Tom Thumb. Similarly, the mother who made me glide on the water with the help of her long stick, surrounded by the high mountain peaks of Hoa L, wanted to give up her daughter, pass her to me. That mother wanted me to replace her. She preferred to cry over her child’s absence rather than watch her running after tourists to sell them the tablecloths she had embroidered. I was a young girl then. In the midst of those rocky mountains, I saw only a majestic landscape in place of that mother’s infinite love. There are nights when I run along the long strips of earth next to the buffalo to call her back, to take her daughter’s hand in mine.

Ru (Kim Thúy)

The town of Granby was the warm belly that sheltered us during our first year in Canada. The locals cosseted us one by one. The pupils in my grade school lined up to invite us home for lunch so that each of our noon hours was reserved by a family. And every time, we went back to school with nearly empty stomachs because we didn’t know how to use a fork to eat rice that wasn’t sticky. We didn’t know how to tell them that this food was strange to us, that they really didn’t have to go to every grocery store in search of the last box of Minute Rice. We could neither talk to nor understand them. But that wasn’t the main thing. There was generosity and gratitude in every grain of the rice left on our plates. To this day I still wonder whether words might have tainted those moments of grace. And whether feelings are sometimes understood better in silence, like the one that existed between Claudette and Monsieur Kiet. Their first moments together were wordless, yet Monsieur Kiet agreed to put his baby into Claudette’s arms without questioning: a baby, his baby, whom he’d found on the shore after his boat had capsized in an especially greedy wave. He had not found his wife, only his son, who was experiencing a second birth without his mother. Claudette stretched out her arms to them and kept them with her for days, for months, for years.

I have a photo of my father being embraced by our sponsors, a family of volunteers to whom we’d been assigned. They spent their Sundays taking us to flea markets. They negotiated fiercely on our behalf so we could buy mattresses, dishes, beds, sofas—in short, the basics—with our three-hundred-dollar government allowance meant to furnish our first home in Quebec. One of the vendors threw in a red cowl-necked sweater for my father. He wore it proudly every day of our first spring in Quebec. Today, his broad smile in the photo from that time manages to make us forget that it was a woman’s sweater, nipped in at the waist. Sometimes it’s best not to know everything.

For a whole year, Granby represented heaven on earth. I couldn’t imagine a better place in the world, even if we were being eaten alive by flies, just as in the refugee camp. A local botanist took us children to swamps where cattails grew in the thousands, to show us the insects. He didn’t know that we’d rubbed shoulders with flies in the refugee camps for months. They clung to the branches of a dead tree near the septic tanks, next to our cabin. They positioned themselves around the branches like the berries of a pepper plant or currants. They were so numerous, so enormous, that they didn’t need to fly to be in front of our eyes, in our lives. We didn’t need to be silent to hear them. Now our botanist guide whispered to us to listen to their droning, to try to understand them.

Ru (Kim Thúy)

“I used to want tomorrow’s flying cars and jet packs. Now, all I want is yesterday’s climate.”

Dr Peter Gleick

He held her as though she was a gift. Given to him in love. Something still and small. Unbearably precious. But when they made love he was offended by her eyes. They behaved as though they belonged to someone else. Someone watching. Looking out of the window at the sea. At a boat in the river. Or a passerby in the mist in a hat. He was exasperated because he didn’t know what that look meant. He put it somewhere between indifference and despair. He didn’t know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation. That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cozy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and truly indifferent Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening. So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully. Like a rich boy in shorts. He whistled, kicked stones. The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his misfortune. He climbed into people’s eyes and became an exasperating expression.

The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy)

On Receiving One of the Dayton Literary Peace Prizes [ 2013] (Wendell Berry)

I am of course grateful for this award and all that it means. And I am of course necessarily humbled and somewhat troubled by it. There is something a little odd, after all, in giving an award associated with peace to any member of an industrial society, for the industrial economy, from agriculture to war, is by far the most violent the world has ever known, and we all are complicit in its violence. Our prevalent ways of using our land—land use plus industrial technology, minus care—produce commodities highly profitable to corporations at the unaccounted cost of massive waste and destruction. Our ways of war—politics minus neighborly love, plus industrial technology—are ever more profitable to corporations and ever more massively wasteful and destructive. Because these ways are so immensely profitable, their political and scientific defenders are accredited by wealth and power, hence by respectful listeners. Advocates for kinder ways are mostly unheard.

In fact, mountaintop removal and climate change are not the sort of simple problems that can be solved by what we call problem-solving. They are summary evils gathered up from innumerable causes in the bad economy that we all depend upon and serve.

The long-term or permanent damage inflicted upon all life, by the extraction, transportation, and use of fossil fuels is certainly one of the most urgent public issues of our time, and of course it must be addressed politically. But responsibility for the better economy, the better life, belongs to us individually and to our communities. The necessary changes cannot be made on the terms prescribed to us by the industrial economy and its so-called free market. They can be made only on the terms imposed upon us by the nature and the limits of local ecosystems. If we are serious about these big problems, we have got to see that the solutions begin and end with ourselves. Thus we put an end to our habit of oversimplification. If we want to stop the impoverishment of land and people, we ourselves must be prepared to become poorer.

If we are to continue to respect ourselves as human beings, we have got to do all we can to slow and then stop the fossil fuel economy. But we must do this fully realizing that our success, if it happens, will change our world and our lives more radically than we can now imagine. Without that realization we cannot hope to succeed. To succeed we will have to give up the mechanical ways of thought that have dominated the world increasingly for the last two hundred years, and we must begin now to make that change in ourselves. For the necessary political changes will be made only in response to changed people. We must understand that fossil fuel energy must be replaced, not just by “clean” energy, but also by less energy.

If we are not in favor of limiting the use of energy, starting with our own use of it, we are not serious.

If, on the contrary, we become determined to keep the industries of poison, explosion, and fire from determining our lives and the world’s fate, then we will steadfastly reduce our dependence on them and our payments of money to them. We will cease to invest our health, our lives, and our money in them. Then finally we will be serious enough, our effort complex and practical enough. By so improving our lives, we will improve the possibility of life.

Wendell Berry

If we want to save the land, we must save the people who belong to the land. If we want to save the people, we must save the land the people belong to.

Wendell Berry

I am absolutely in sympathy with those who suffered the bombing in Boston and with their loved ones.

What I am less and less in sympathy with is the rhetoric and the tone of official indignation. Public officials cry out for justice against the perpetrators. I too wish them caught and punished. But I am unwilling to have my wish spoken for me in a tone of surprise and outraged innocence. The event in Boston is not unique or rare or surprising or in any way new. It is only another transaction in the commerce of violence: the unending, the not foreseeably endable, exchange of an eye for an eye, with customary justifications on every side, in which we fully participate; and beyond that, it is our willingness to destroy anything, any place, or anybody standing between us and whatever we are “manifestly destined” to have.

Nobody who knows our history, from the “Indian wars” to our contemporary foreign wars of “homeland defense,” should find anything unusual in the massacre of civilians and their children.

We forget also that violence is so securely founded among us—in war, in forms of land use, in various methods of economic “growth” and “development”—because it is immensely profitable.

The solution, many times more complex and difficult, would be to go beyond our ideas, obviously insane, of war as the way to peace and of permanent damage to the ecosphere as the way to wealth. Actually to help our suffering of one man-made horror after another, we would have to revise radically our understanding of economic life, of community life, of work, and of pleasure.

To learn to meet our needs without continuous violence against one another and our only world would require an immense intellectual and practical effort, requiring the help of every human being perhaps to the end of human time. This would be work worthy of the name “human.” It would be fascinating and lovely.

Wendell Berry

To the extent that we have learned about machines, we have forgotten about plants and animals.

Wendell Berry

When the man cries the tear, he has come upon his pain, and he knows it when he touches it. He sees how his life has been lived protectively because of the wound. He sees what of life he has missed because of it. He sees how he hamstrings his love for life, for himself, and for another.

Only a hardness of heart inhibits weeping and union. There is a saying I translated from the Sufi long ago, a prayer really, asking God to break one’s heart: “Shatter my heart so a new room can be created for a Limitless Love.”

The psychological and physiological center is the heart. In Hindu Lauras, which are instructions from the Gods to humans, the heart is the Anãhata chakra, the nerve center that encompasses feeling for another human, feeling for oneself, feeling for the earth, and feeling for God. It is the heart that enables us to love as a child loves: fully, without reservation, and with no hull of sarcasm. depreciation, or protectionism.

Clarissa Pinkola Este

To love another is not enough, to be “not an impediment” in the life of file other is not enough. It is not enough to be “supportive” and “there for them,” and all the rest. The goal is to be knowledgeable about the ways of life and death, in one’s own life and in panorama. And the only way to be a knowing man is to go to school in the bones of Skeleton Woman. She is waiting for the signal of deep feeling, that one tear that says, “I admit the wound.” This admission feeds the Life/Death/Life nature, causes the bond to be made and the deep knowing in a man to begin. We all have made the mistake of thinking someone else can be our healer, our thriller, our filling. It takes a long time to find it is not so, mostly because we project the wound outside ourselves instead of ministering to it within. There is probably nothing a woman wants more from a man than for him to dissolve his projections and face his own wound. When a man faces his wound, the tear comes naturally, and his loyalties within and without are made clearer and stronger. He becomes his own healer; he is no longer lonely for the deeper Self. He no longer applies to the woman to be his analgesic.

Clarissa Pinkola Este

If we focus exclusively on pursuing happiness, we may regard suffering as something to be ignored or resisted. We think of it as something that gets in the way of happiness. But the art of happiness is also and at the same time the art of knowing how to suffer well. If we know how to use our suffering, we can transform it and suffer much less. Knowing how to suffer well is essential to realizing true happiness.

The Buddha wasn’t a stone. He was a human being. But because he had a lot of insight, wisdom, and compassion, he knew how to suffer and so he suffered much less.

Nonhuman animals instinctively know that stopping is the best way to get healed. They don’t need a doctor, a drugstore, or a pharmacist. We human beings used to have this kind of wisdom. But we have lost touch with it. We don’t know how to rest anymore. We don’t allow the body to rest, to release the tension, and heal.

The main affliction of our modern civilization is that we don’t know how to handle the suffering inside us and we try to cover it up with all kinds of consumption.

Electronic distractions not only fail to help heal the underlying suffering, they may contain stories or images that feed our craving, jealousy, anger, or despair. Instead of making us feel better, they numb us only briefly, then make us feel worse. To consume in order to cover up our suffering doesn’t work. We need a spiritual practice to have the strength and skill to look deeply into our suffering, to get insight into it and make a breakthrough.

When we stop the busyness of the mind and come back to ourselves, the enormity and rawness of our suffering can seem very intense because we are so used to ignoring it and distracting ourselves.

We run away from ourselves because we don’t want to be with ourselves. Our pain is a kind of energy that is not pleasant. We fear that if we release our diversions and come back to ourselves, we’ll be overwhelmed by the suffering, despair, anger, and loneliness inside. So we continue to run away. But if we don’t have the time and the willingness to take care of ourselves, how can we offer any genuine care to the people we love?

If we take care of the suffering inside us, we have more clarity, energy, and strength to help address the suffering violence, poverty, and inequity of our loved ones as well as the suffering in our community and the world. If, however, we are preoccupied with the fear and despair in us, we can’t help remove the suffering of others. There is an art to suffering well. If we know how to take care of our suffering, we not only suffer much, much less, we also create more happiness around us and in the world.

No mud, no lotus: The art of transforming suffering (Thich Nhat Hanh)

Aspiration bodhichitta is the vow to generate the same intention as the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas of the past. Application is the vow to accomplish, as they did, all the activities of the path to enlightenment, for the sake of all beings. Today we shall only take the vow of aspiration. To do this, we shall read through the second and third chapters of the Bodhicharyāvatāra up until the second line of verse 23. Try to concentrate on the meaning and afterward rejoice in what we have done. In order to take this vow, we should imagine that in front of us are the Buddha and his eight close disciples;23 the six ornaments,24 and the two supreme teachers,25 including Shāntideva; and all the realized masters of the Buddhist tradition, in particular the holders of the Sakya, Gelug, Kagyu, and Nyingma schools of Tibet—in fact, all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Consider also that we are surrounded by all the beings in the universe. With this visualization, we shall now read the Seven Branch Prayer. 18. May I be a guard for those who are protectorless, A guide for those who journey on the road. For those who wish to cross the water, May I be a boat, a raft, a bridge. 19. May I be an isle for those who yearn for land, A lamp for those who long for light; For all who need a resting place, a bed; For those who need a servant, may I be their slave. 20. May I be the wishing jewel, the vase of wealth, A word of power and the supreme healing, May I be the tree of miracles, For every being the abundant cow. 21. Just like the earth and space itself And all the other mighty elements, For boundless multitudes of beings May I always be the ground of life, the source of varied sustenance. 22. Thus for everything that lives, As far as are the limits of the sky, May I be constantly their source of livelihood Until they pass beyond all sorrow.

For the Benefit of All Beings: A Commentary on the Way of the Bodhisattva (H.H. the Dalai Lama)

When we examine a teaching we should analyze the principal points. If these stand up to analysis and prove correct, then any apparent contradictions in minor details are of secondary importance. As it is said in the Treatise on Logic: If the principal point is reliable, The rest is secondary. And the Buddha himself said: O monks, just like examining gold in order to know its quality, You should put my words to the test. A wise person does not accept them merely out of respect. Do not take the Buddha’s words literally simply out of reverence. Examine them and respect them only when you have seen a good reason for doing so. Of course, faith is very important for spiritual practice, but blind devotion to the Buddha is not enough. We must have valid reasons for respecting his teachings.

For the Benefit of All Beings: A Commentary on the Way of the Bodhisattva (H.H. the Dalai Lama)

108. Examining again and yet again The state and actions of your body and your mind— This alone defines in brief The maintenance of watchful introspection. 109. But all this must be acted out in truth, For what is to be gained by mouthing syllables? What invalid was ever helped By merely reading in the doctor’s treatises?

For the Benefit of All Beings: A Commentary on the Way of the Bodhisattva (H.H. the Dalai Lama)

The word innocent is often used to mean a person of no knowing, or a simpleton. But the roots of the word mean to be free of injury or hurt. In Spanish, the word inocente is understood to mean a person who tries not to harm another, but who also is able to heal any injury or harm to herself.

La inocente is the name often given to a curandera healer, one who heals others of injury or harm. To be an innocent means to be able to see clearly what is the matter and to mend it. These are the powerful ideas behind innocence. It is considered not only an attitude about avoiding harm to others or self but also an ability to mend and restore oneself (and others). Think of it. What a boon to all the cycles of loving.

Clarissa Pincola Estes

love does not mean a flirtation or a pursuit for simple ego-pleasure, but a visible bond composed of the psychic sinew of endurance, a union which prevails through bounty and austerity, through the most complicated and most simple days and nights. The union of two beings is seen as angakok magic in itself, as a relationship through which “the powers that be” become known to both individuals.

While the Skeleton Woman could be interpreted as representing the movements within a single psyche, I find this tale most valuable when understood as a series of seven tasks that teach one soul to love another deeply and well. These are: discovering another person as a kind of spiritual treasure, even though one may not at first realize what one has found. Next in most love relationships comes the chase and the hiding, a time of hopes and fears for both. Then comes the untangling and understanding of the Life/Death/Life aspects of the relationship and the development of compassion for the task. Next come the relaxing into trust, the ability to rest in the presence and goodwill of the other, and after that, a time of sharing both future dreams and past sadness, these being the beginning of healing archaic wounds with regard to love. Then, the use of the heart to sing up new life, and finally, the intermingling of body and soul.


Three things differentiate living from the soul versus living from ego only. They are: the ability to sense and learn new ways, the tenacity to ride a rough road, and the patience to learn deep love over time. The ego, however, has a penchant and a proclivity to avoid learning. Patience is not ego’s strong suit. Enduring in relationship is not Raven’s forte. So it is not from the ever- changing ego that we love another, but rather from the wild soul.

It takes a heart that is willing to die and be born and die and be born again and again.

Clarissa Pinkola Este

The first Christian to write in Latin, Quintus Septimius Florens Tertul- lianus (known today simply as Tertullian), lived in Carthage around AD 200. In describing the end of the Roman frontier in North Africa he warned of overtaxing the environment. "All places are now accessible, well known, open to commerce. Delightful farms have now blotted out every trace of the dreadful wastes; cultivated fields have overcome woods.... We overcrowd the world. The elements can hardly support us. Our wants increase and our demands are keener, while Nature cannot bear US."

...

Remnants of hillslope soils and archaeological evidence show that since the Bronze Age there have been centuries-long periods with high settlement density, intensive farming, and accelerated soil erosion separated by millennia-long periods of low population density and soil formation... Regional climate changes cannot explain the boom-and-bust pattern of human occupation in ancient Greece because the timing of land settlement and soil erosion differed around the region. Instead, modern geoarchaeological surveys show that soil erosion episodically disrupted local cultures, forced settlements to relocate, led to changes in agricultural practices, and caused periodic abandonment of entire areas.

...

Lowdermilk estimated than a foot of topsoil had been lost from hundreds of millions of acres of northern China. He found exceptions where Buddhist temples protected forests from clearing and cultivation; there the exceptionally fertile forest soil was deep black, rich in humus. Lowdermilk described how farmers were clearing the remaining unprotected forest to farm this rich dirt, breaking up sloping ground with mattocks to disrupt tree roots and allow plowing. At first, plowing smoothed over new rills and gullies, but every few years erosion pushed farmers farther into the forest in search of fresh soil. Seeing how colonizing herbs and shrubs shielded the ground as soon as fields were abandoned, Lowdermilk blamed the loss of the soil on intensive plowing followed by overgrazing. He concluded that the region's inhabitants were responsible for impoverishing themselvesjust too slowly for them to notice.

...

Comparison of ancient agricultural soils and uncultivated soils in New Mexico and Peru shows that agricultural practices need not undermine societies. Soils at a site in the Gila National Forest, typical of prehistoric agricultural sites in the American Southwest, were cultivated between AD 1100 and 1150, at the peak of Pueblo culture, and subsequently abandoned. Soils of sites cultivated by the Pueblo culture are lighter colored, with a third to a half of the carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus content of neighboring uncultivated soils. In addition, cultivated plots had gullies-some more than three feet deep-that began during cultivation. Even today, little grass grows on the ancient farm plots. Native vegetation cannot recolonize the degraded soil even eight centuries after cultivation ceased. In contrast, modern farmers in Peru's Colca Valley still use ancient terraces cultivated for more than fifteen centuries. Like their ancestors, they maintain soil fertility through intercropping, crop rotations that include legumes, fallowing, and the use of both manure and ash to maintain soil fertility. They have an extensive homegrown system of soil classification and do not till the soil before planting; instead they insert seeds into the ground using a chisel-like device that minimally disturbs the soil. These long-cultivated soils have A horizons that are typically one to four feet thicker than those of neighboring uncultivated soils. The cultivated Peruvian soils are full of earthworms and have higher concentrations of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus than native soils. In contrast to the New Mexican example, under traditional soil management these Peruvian soils have fed people for more than fifteen hundred years. The contrast between how the Pueblos and the Incas treated their dirt is but another chapter in the broader story of how the rise of agriculture set off a perpetual race to figure out how to feed growing populations by continuously increasing crop yields. Sometimes cultures figured out a way to muddle through without depleting soil productivity, often they did not.

...

The valley of the Nile provides a notable exception to the generality that civilizations prosper for only a few dozen generations... The floodplain of the Nile proved ideal for sustained agriculture. In contrast to Sumerian agriculture's vulnerability to salinization, Egyptian agriculture fed a succession of civilizations for seven thousand years, from the ancient pharaohs through the Roman Empire and into the Arab era. The difference was that the Nile's life-giving flood reliably brought little salt and a lot of fresh silt to fields along the river each year... The longevity of Egyptian agriculture reflects a system that took advantage of the natural flood regime with minimal modification... Egyptian agriculture remained remarkably productive for thousands of years until people adopted new approaches out of tune with the river's natural rhythm. Desire to grow cotton for export to Europe brought aggressive year-round irrigation to the Nile in the early nineteenth century. Just as in the scenario that unfolded thousands of years earlier in Mesopotamia, salt began to build up in the soil as the water table rose below overly irrigated fields.In the past half century, civilization finally acquired the engineering skill to cripple an almost indestructible land. After four years of work, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev watched Soviet engineers divert the Nile in May 1964 to build the Aswan High Dam... After advancing for thousands of years since sea level stabilized, the Nile delta is now eroding, cut off from a supply of silt. Although the dam allows farmers to grow two or three crops a year using artificial irrigation, the water now delivers salt instead of silt. A decade ago salinization had already reduced crop yields from a tenth of the fields on the Nile delta. Taming the Nile disrupted the most stable agricultural environment on Earth... As the renowned fertility of the Nile valley began to fall, agricultural output was sustained with chemical fertilizers that peasant farmers could not afford. Modern farmers along the Nile are some of the world's foremost users of chemical fertilizers-conveniently produced in new factories that are among the largest users of power generated by Nasser's dam. Now, for the first time in seven thousand years, Egypt-home of humanity's most durable garden-imports most of its food.

Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (David R. Montgomery)