It has just always seemed so odd to me that I’m on the inside of a person whose outside you’re seeing, and that I’m not really her.
Ottessa Moshfegh
When the great Way is abandoned
we’re faced with Humanity and Duty.
When clever wisdom appears
we’re faced with duplicity.
When familial harmony ends
we’re faced with obedience and kindness.
And when chaos engulfs the nation
we’re faced with trustworthy ministers.
If you give up sagehood and abandon wisdom
people will profit a hundred times over.
If you give up Humanity and abandon Duty
people will return to obedience and kindness.
If you give up ingenuity and abandon profit
bandits and thieves will roam no more.
But these three
are mere refinements, nowhere near enough.
They depend on something more:
observe origin’s weave, embrace uncarved simplicity,
self nearly forgotten, desires rare.
Tao Te Ching
Your sadness actually is nothing to do with me. Your stress is not really from me. It is from your masculine world, because you don’t feel satisfied with your life as a man. And you might think I am an obstacle in your life. You think your sadness caused by our relationship, by love prison. It is not true. Your happiness and your sadness is from the world that you fight with yourself.
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, Xiaolu Guo
The gaze, human or animal, is a powerful thing. When we look at something, we decide to fill our entire existence, however briefly, with that very thing. To fill your whole world with a person, if only for a few seconds, is a potent act. And it can be a dangerous one. Sometimes we are not seen enough, and other times we are seen too thoroughly, we can be exposed, seen through, even devoured. Hunters examine their prey obsessively in order to kill it. The line between desire and elimination, to me, can be so small. But that is who we are. There must be some beauty—and if not beauty, meaning—in that brutal power. I am still trying, and mostly failing, to find it.
Ocean Vuong
Greeting with a Smile
Ishigaki Rin
I begin to take myself apart.
With the care of boning a cooked fish
for an infant child
with the strength of plowing the earth for sowing
in the direction of a cloud, thinning, flowing in the wind
with the timeliness of a green apple
welcoming its season for ripening
with the love for old tiny forms
unraveling my late mother’s hand-knit sweater
With a smile I greet the person
who never tired of telling me what to do
after the moon became full
I begin to take myself apart.
Sinh Lão Bệnh Tử
Buddhist Nun DIỆU NHÂN
Sinh, Lão, Bệnh, Tử,
Lẽ thường tự nhiên.
Muốn cầu siêu thoát,
Càng trói buộc thêm.
Mê, phải cầu Phật,
Hoặc, phải cầu Thiền.
Chẳng cầu Thiền, Phật,
Mím miệng ngồi yên.
Birth, Old Age, Sickness, Death
Birth, old age, sickness, death
Are commonplace and natural.
Should we seek relief from one,
Another will surely consume us.
Blind are those praying to Buddha,
Duped are those praying in Zen.
Pray not in Zen or to Buddha,
Speak not. Linger with silence.
Translated by Hữu Ngọc and Lady Borton
Don't Bundle Me
Shinkawa Kazue
Don't bundle me
like gillyflowers
like white scallions.
Please do not bundle me. I am ears of rice,
the golden ears of rice that scorch the chest of the great earth
in the fall, as far as the eye can see.
Don't pin me down
like an insect in a specimen box
like a postcard arrived from the highlands.
Please do not pin me down. I am flapping my wings,
am the sound of invisible wings
ceaselessly touching, feeling the expanse of the sky.
Don't pour me
like milk diluted by dailiness
like lukewarm sake.
Please do not pour me. I am the sea,
the bitter tides the rimless water
that rises vastly at night.
Don't name me
daughter wife.
Please do not keep me sitting
in the seat set up in the ponderous name of mother. I am a wind,
a wind that knows the apple tree
and where the fountain is.
Don't partition me off
with commas and periods into several sections.
And please do not fussily write me off
like a letter that comes with "Good-bye" at the end. I am a sentence with no end,
a line of poetry that, like a river,
continues to flow and expand.
The to-and-fro movement between the written woman and the writing woman is an endless one. "The woman took a train / away away from herself, . . . and I / grow younger as I leave / my me behind," Dilys Laing wrote, "They said: You took her with you / and brought her back again. / You look sick. Welcome home." Yes, welcome home, for she has the impudence to disbelieve, to live before god. And after. She is "woman enough" to slip out of herself and go, then to return almost without self and without denying the going. Writing, in a way, is listening to the others' language and reading with the others' eyes. The more ears I am able to hear with, the farther I see the plurality of meaning and the less I lend myself to the illusion of a single message.
Trinh T. Minh-ha
Woman
Kora Rumiko
It is a being somewhat like a well.
When you drop a well bucket
you will find
restlessness deep in the well. . . .
That she is herself
is more difficult than water is water
just as it's difficult for water to go beyond water
she and I are linked in mutual love
who once betrayed each other
two mirrors who reflected each other
When I escape from her, I incessantly
am forced to be her and when I confront her
instead I become him . . .
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
“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
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
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)
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)
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