There is a folding into the self which occurs
when the lights are small on the horizon
and no light is shining into the face.
It happens in a quiet place.
It is a quiet unfolding,
like going to sleep in
the comfortable family home.
When everyone else goes to sleep
the house folds up
The windows shut their eyes.
If you are inside you are automatically folded.
If you are outside walking by the folded house
you feel so lonesome you think you are going crazy.
You are not going crazy.
You are beginning to fold up in your own single way.
You feel your edges move toward center,
your heart like a folded blanket unfolding
and folding in with everything contained.
You feel like you do not need anyone to love you anymore
because you already feel everything.
you feel it, you fold it, and for awhile now,
it will quietly rest.
– Naomi Shihab Nye, from “Walking Down Blanco Road at Midnight” in Words Under the Words (Eighth Mountain Press, 1995)
“Walking After Midnight” covered by Cowboy Junkies
“Choosing a path meant having to miss out on others. She had a whole life to live, and she was always thinking that, in the future, she might regret the choices she made now. “I’m afraid of committing myself,” she thought to herself. She wanted to follow all possible paths and so ended up following none. Even in that most important area of her life, love, she had failed to commit herself. After her first romantic disappointment, she had never again given herself entirely. She feared pain, loss, and separation. These things were inevitable on the path to love, and the only way of avoiding them was by deciding not to take that path at all. In order not to suffer, you had to renounce love. It was like putting out your own eyes not to see the bad things in life.”
“Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That’s kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson
(from Time Magazine’s 10 Questions for Neil deGrasse Tyson)
“I don’t have a favorite song that I’ve written. But I do have a favorite song: “Always on My Mind,” the Willie Nelson version. If I could sing it like he do, I would sing it every night. I like the story it tells. It go, I may not have written you–he’s talking about a lady–when maybe I should have. Or maybe I didn’t take you to dinner, didn’t call you when I should have, or didn’t love you as I should have. But you was always on my mind. I felt that way a lot in my life. I think every person feels it. That’s one of the things about being an entertainer. What we do–it’s just sharing the thoughts that many people have. You go to see a movie, and you sit up and cry–it’s because something is happening in there that just done happen to you or somebody you know. It’s the same thing with what I do. Don’t matter if you’re gay or straight, black or white, you still have the same problem. It’s love. It’s universal.”
“Not one day in anyone’s life is an uneventful day, no day without profound meaning, no matter how dull and boring it might seem, no matter whether you are a seamstress or a queen, a shoeshine boy, or a movie star, a renowned philosopher or a Down’s-syndrome child. Because in every day of your life, there are opportunities to perform little kindnesses for others, both by conscious acts of will and unconscious example. Each smallest act of kindness—even just words of hope when they are needed, the remembrance of a birthday, a compliment that engenders a smile—reverberates across great distances and spans of time, affecting lives unknown to the one whose generous spirit was the source of this good echo, because kindness is passed on and grows each time it’s passed, until a simple courtesy becomes an act of selfless courage years later and far away. Likewise, each small meanness, each thoughtless expression of hatred, each envious and bitter act, regardless of how petty, can inspire others, and is therefore the seed that ultimately produces evil fruit, poisoning people whom you have never met and never will. All human lives are so profoundly and intricately entwined—those dead, those living, those generations yet to come—that the fate of all is the fate of each, and the hope of humanity rests in every heart and in every pair of hands. Therefore, after every failure, we are obliged to strive again for success, and when faced with the end of one thing, we must build something new and better in the ashes, just as from pain and grief, we must weave hope, for each of us is a thread critical to the strength—to the very survival of the human tapestry. Every hour in every life contains such often-unrecognized potential to affect the world that the great days and thrilling possibilities are combined always in this momentous day.”
Words ... for the Time Being 