Floriography

The language of flowers, sometimes called floriography, was a Victorian era means of communication in which various flowers and floral arrangements were used to send coded messages, allowing individuals to express feelings which otherwise could not be spoken.

Search For Meaning

"Those things which seem to take meaning away from human life include not only suffering but dying as well. I never tire of saying that the only really transitory aspects of life are the potentialities; but as soon as they are actualized, they are rendered realities at that very moment; they are saved and delivered into the past, wherein they are rescued and preserved from transitoriness. For, in the past, nothing is irretrievably lost but everything irrevocably stored.
Thus, the transitoriness of our existence in no way makes it meaningless. But it does constitute our responsibleness; for everything hinges upon our realizing the essentially transitory possibilities."

Victor E. Frankl

Letters to Myself.

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day."

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Mum found this today and read it to my flustered self over the phone. I love it. I really love it, a lot. Patience has always been something that has been very difficult for me. Almost crippling. I've often felt that if I haven't been able to create it NOW, than it's my own lack as a human... and maybe I didn't deserve whatever I was busting my back for. I love Rilke because reading his words feels like I'm being given permission to lay it all down for awhile, and just enjoy my life and my current position. He's like a beautiful, much wiser friend and confidant.

Daniel Pinchbeck on Survival

'...As Wangari Matthai, winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for starting a movement that has planted 45 million trees in Kenya, notes, "The word 'craving', so implicated in the physical exploitation of our environment, indicates psychological desperation and spiritual weakness. It illustrates a want that goes beyond simply filling one's belly or satisfying one's thirst." In order to survive, our species has to graduate from insatiable consumerist craving and choose self-limitation and self-sufficiency...'

(From an essay by the writer Daniel Pinchbeck, in Dazed and Confused, January 2011.)

I was having a conversation with a good friend on Sunday about emotional self-containment and survival. We were in awe of her boyfriend who is a hero of containment and well being... we were discussing how he manages to move through life with an inordinate capacity for maintaining his own inner peace despite what's going on around him. Needless to say, he lives with a mindfulness for the environment and a willingness to censor his desires for the preservation and aid of the natural life-force. Then I found this essay by Pinchbeck and I think it's a reminder to me that I need to strive for mindfulness despite what society dictates - that more is more is more and we all want more... I think I want a lot less in my life. I feel so much freer - emotionally and certainly creatively when I'm able to maintain my integrity on every level of my life; physically, emotionally, environmentally, psychologically etc etc. And I'm also far more able to adapt to altered circumstances when I'm not trying to stuff-up the holes in the well of my (imagined) emotional needs. My naturopath has been trying to convince me for years that reality is a myth to get us detached from our true selves, and I think I'm beginning to understand...

Tenzin Palmo and the mind

This is an excerpt from Cave In The Snow by Vicki Mackenzie (the book she wrote about renowned Buddhist nun, Tenzin Palmo: the first Western woman to ascend the hierarchy of Buddhist tradition and practice in the East), lent to me by my beloved.

"When she was not doing her preliminary practices she worked on her Single Pointed Concentration - the meditative discipline which trains the mind to focus single-pointedly on one subject without interruption. Yogis were said to be able to stay in this state for days, weeks, months even, without moving, their mind totally absorbed on the wonders of their inner reality. Single Pointed Concentration, or Samadhi, was essential for penetrating the nature of reality and discovering absolute truth. It is also exceedingly difficult, the mind habitually wanting to dance all over the place flitting from one random thought to another, from fantasy to fantasy, perpetually chattering away to itself, expending vast quantities of energy in an endless stream of trivia. The mind was like a wild horse, they said, that needed to be reined in and trained. When the mind's energy was harnessed and channelled like a laser beam on a single subject, its power was said to be tremendous. Ultimately that was the high-voltage power-tool needed to dig down into the farthest reaches of the mind, unlocking the greatest treasures buried there."

Peace Project

"In Gregg Braden’s book called Spontaneous Healing of Belief, he talks about an experiment that was conducted in a war-torn geographical area between Lebanon and Israel that began in 1982. The selected people were trained using Transcendental Meditation to feel peace in their bodies. This was based off the belief that peace already existed within them and that they could access it at any time using this particular meditation practice. At appointed times, on specific days of the month, these people were positioned throughout war-torn areas of the Middle East. What is so amazing is that during the times that they felt peace in their bodies, the number of crimes decreased, incidents of traffic accidents dropped, the number of emergency-room visits declined, and terrorist activities ceased.

The study confirmed that when a percentage of the population achieve peace, it was reflected in the world around them. The experiment took into account holidays, days of the week, and even lunar cycles; the data was so consistent that the researchers were able to identify how many people in the world are needed to feel peace within so that it is reflected on earth. The number is the square root of one percent of the population. The study became known as the International Peace Project in the Middle East, and the result were published in The Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1988."

Written by my wonderful friend Tamika at Holistic Wellness Coaching.

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act"

-George Orwell.

But those ones are the easiset to love.

Love

Dropped little sis off to go to the football. Its cold here tonight and she was wearing her boots, coat and pashmina. She jumped out of the car amid a volley of verbals that she promise to catch a cab home, or get a lift from her friends, or call and wake me up to come get her. I drove round the corner and stopped at the lights; warm inside with the heater on and Neko Case blaring through the speakers, and I watched her walk away, thinking: 'You are irreplaceable to me. If you were to be taken from me, I would live on for you. But your absence would forever be a thousand knives in my heart... because I love you so'. Sisters.

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." 
T. S. Eliot

Slogan for life

via Notes on Becoming Fearless

What will be

This is from one of my favourite blogs Flux Capacitor. Go there immediately, to read the wonderful writing of Maggie; a woman alive in a world dictated by the comatose.

Quote for Today

"If a right to a secret is not maintained then we are in a totalitarian space..." Derrida.